OBJECT ECOLOGIES
Iziko South African Museum, 2018 - 2019
In this collection of mobile museums, things of many kinds are displayed. These displays refer to the complex world of images and objects: their making, their circulation, and the issues at stake when they are moved from one place and time to another. Each mobile museum is curated with differing intentions and effects. The first, Freighted, curated by Fritha Langerman details the global perambulations of the rhinoceros,presenting it as an object of spectacle, study, currency and desire. It refers to the complex history of colony, power and acquisition in relation to early collections of natural history, and the relevance of this to 21st century collections, as well as the crisis in which many species find themselves today. The second, Chest convened by Nina Liebenberg, engages the botanical ecology of a medicine chest that travelled with its owner from Cape Town to the interior, on a hunting expedition in 1913. The chest is contextualised in an array of ways, by the visualisation and materialisation of illness and its treatment. The third, Vanquished by Pippa Skotnes, expresses histories of death and sacrifice in three iterations. These present objects and images that convoke histories of colonial decimation, world war and the captivity of animals. The fourth is Object Ecologies, assembled by emerging curators. In this set of cabinets, students from the Honours in Curatorship programme at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in collaboration with Iziko, subject museum objects to contemporary scrutiny, asking of them how they may speak to issues of today as well as those that accrued to them in the past. The exhibition is presented by the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town.
This cabinet (#6) extended the ideas of fragility and fallibility represented by the broken glass laboratory bottle, displaying four ‘breath sculptures’ made by the five individual breaths of children who suffer from asthma: Thaakira Salie (aged 8), Ziyaad Small (aged 10), Blake Leppan (aged 9) and Jessie Allot (aged 11). Working in collaboration with the Allergy Foundation of South Africa and Andre de Jager, UCT’s resident glass blower in the Department of Chemistry, I facilitated a workshop in which the children were taught the practice of blowing glass and then produced their own sculptures by breathing into molten glass. The breath sculptures made by these children were far removed from the functional bespoke glassware usually produced in the workshop for chemical experiments or for those conducted for physics and chemical engineering (A. de Jager, personal communication, 20 August 2018). By using breath associated with struggle and impairment to produce an object of wonder, these sculptures acknowledge and celebrate the preciousness of a single breath – easily taken for granted by others. In the mobile exhibition, the sculptures were placed on a glass shelf with the backdrop of a eucalyptus tree (used in the treatment of respiratory problems) and trembled ever so slightly as visitors walked past throughout the day.
For Planthology (Bulbine frutescens and Lessertia frutescens) I sourced two medicinal plant specimens from Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden and x-rayed them at Groote Schuur Hospital (#10 and #13). These two local plants offer a wide variety of healing properties and address the lacuna of the chest. The fresh leaves of the Bulbine frutescens produce a jelly-like juice that can be used for burns, rashes, blisters, insect bites, cracked lips, acne, cold sores, mouth ulcers and areas of cracked skin, while an infusion of these leaves in a cup of boiling water can be taken for coughs, colds and arthritis (Harris 2003: online). The Lessertia frutescens is used as an immune booster in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, as a medicine in the treatment of chicken pox, internal cancers, colds, asthma, TB, bronchitis, rheumatism, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, liver problems, haemorrhoids, piles, bladder and uterus problems, diarrhoea, dysentery, stomach ailments, heartburn, peptic ulcers, backache, diabetes, varicose veins and inflammation (Xaba & Notten 2003: online). These works originally formed part of a series I made when I worked as a creative consultant in the PLC in 2011 and 2012. A conversation with Yeats revealed that most of the plants she introduced to the environment had mysteriously died. In response, I x-rayed a selection of indigenous plant specimens – the starting point of many diagnoses in human medicine. In subjecting the plants to this process and placing the x-ray images in a space that foregrounds the diagnosis of human disease, I intended to create a heterarchical shift in this relationship, considering a world in which the degree of care directed toward human ailments might be replicated in treating diseases manifest in the botanical world.
Situated in a cabinet at the top left of the display was an artwork titled Quercus robur (#1). Conducting an object-study on the medicine chest and exploring its ties to illness and disease led me to notice an old English oak (Quercus robur) growing on Hiddingh campus. This oak was first planted sometime in the 1830s and caught my attention because of its hollow trunk and the fig tree that had taken root in one of its side branches – a strange symbiosis that I have followed over the years. To learn more about this tree, I invited UCT dendrochronologist, ecologist and botanist Edmund February back to Hiddingh campus to share his views on the tree and its condition.
According to February, English oaks were first brought into the country by early settlers and were one of the first exotic tree species to be planted in South Africa, shortly after Van Riebeek’s arrival in 1652. February explained that in South Africa these trees do not grow as old as they would in Europe. Our high temperatures cause them to grow faster than those back home, and their centres consequently rot and their hearts are hollowed out over time. On hearing this diagnosis, I set out to treat the tree through various artistic interventions acted out on a digital print of the tree: I filled the heart cavity with paint made by boiling the leaves of the Sutherlandia frutescens bush, an indigenous plant used locally for the treatment of heart disease (Van Wyk & Albrecht 2008: 626), an action which I viewed as remedying the lacunae present in both the medicine chest (with its disavowal of local botanical remedies) and the tree. In addition to filling the cavity with new tree rings, I inserted hypodermic needles into selected tree rings, marking the years in which political, cultural and social events relating to hearts or oaks occurred. These seemingly disparate and arbitrary events gain significance and synchronicity when anchored and contextualised by this specific tree and its campus. The heart attacks that Cecil John Rhodes and Jan Smuts suffered in 1872 and 1950 respectively seem, for instance, to manifest the tree’s state in the human domain, while a marker on tree ring 1936 references the year U.S. track star Jesse Owens made history and destroyed Adolf Hitler’s dream of Aryan supremacy by winning four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics – where the German Olympic Committee gave athletes an oak sapling for each gold medal they won (Saito 2011). One of Owens’s trees now towers over Rhodes High School in Cleveland, where he trained.
Markers reference ring 1967, the year Chris Barnard performed the first heart transplant at Groote Schuur hospital, and 1925, the year T.S. Eliot wrote The hollow men, which some believed he titled after reading Josph Conrad’s Heart of darkness, in which Kurtz is referred to as a ‘hollow sham’ (Conrad 1988: 67) and ‘hollow at the core’ (Conrad 1988: 58). Ring 1951 marks the year in which the National Resettlement Board issued eviction orders to Sophiatown residents, which led to two residents hanging themselves from the branches of a local English oak tree – a tree that served as a meeting place for political activists and residents over the years.
These are only a few examples. I also used charcoal made from the tree’s fallen twigs to add tree rings, circumnavigating certain objects relevant to my newly formulated botany- and cardiology-themed 'curriculum'. The new rings were generated by tracing the outlines of, for example, a 1987 and 1992 English one pound coin, which on one side depict an oak tree in a coronet; an outline of the diseased heart removed from the first heart transplant recipient, Louis Washkansky, on display in the Heart of Cape Town museum at Groote Schuur hospital; and a ring that corresponds to the circumference of the ‘Heart of oak’ (the official march of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom) track as it is positioned on a 1989 12-inch Columbia-produced record.
In performing these treatments and drawing attention to these events and occurrences, the work demonstrates the capacity of a single object – in this instance, an ill tree – to resonate and intersect with diverse fields, from history and politics to culture and science.
Made from oak, the object in this display cabinet (#4) was used to support a cadaver’s neck during post-mortem examinations at UCT’s mortuary. My first encounter with it was in Dr Yeats’s office in the PLC many years ago. Heavy in weight and invested with the traces of hundreds of individuals, it somehow seemed more representative of disease than the 3,500 specimens floating in formaldehyde displayed in the surrounding rooms. The medical insiders handle and view the formaldehyde bottles to identify the visual markers of disease on the surfaces of the specimens – signs which, to me as an outsider, remain abstruse. However, I can read and understand the multiple discolorations and the hundreds of scalpel incisions on the surface of this piece of oak, representing the wounded, traumatised and fatally ill body in a far more pronounced and affective manner than the official specimens. This affective experience facilitated by an inanimate object contrasts the clinical way medical students utilise their insider knowledge when viewing a diseased organ that once belonged to a particular individual. As the patient’s individuality and history are only ever brought into consideration when they are relevant to specific markers on the specimen, such as the lungs of a smoker, the subjective experience of disease remains absent. As a curiosity and a leftover of the department, this affective encounter with an inanimate object suggests this absence and highlights the disjuncture between clinical analysis and subjective experience and its repercussions for adequate patient care and treatment.
The marketed associations of the medicine chest with impossible feats and indestructability also provide a juxtaposition with this oak neck support that represents fragility, fallibility and the circumstantial shortcomings of medicine.
This display consisted of two botanical specimens – a twig of eucalyptus and a protea – floating in ethanol (#14). The plants were bought from the Adderley Street flower market in central Cape Town and are used by the sellers for medicinal purposes to treat chest and respiratory problems, with the leaves of the eucalyptus added to a bath and those of the protea infused in hot water and drunk as a broth. The flower sellers trading in Trafalgar Place and along Adderley Street have been doing so since at least the mid-1880s but became viewed as threats to the local flora by the European settlers at about the same time the medicine chest was first introduced to the city at the beginning of the 20th century. The settlers initially preferred to cultivate plants imported from their home countries to indigenous varieties, introducing many species to South Africa for nostalgic or practical reasons (subsequently problematic for local biodiversity) (Van Sittert 2002: 103). In the wake of the emerging nationalism of the white settlers in the 1890s, interest in indigenous plants gained momentum and was deployed to create a sense of belonging to the ‘foreign’ land (Boehi 2013: 133). A botanical discourse was mobilised to underscore ideas about identity and belonging, such as ‘roots’ and ‘ideas of rootedness’, and laws regulating flower picking (which usually occurred on the mountain) were passed in this period and were secured by the Wild Flower Protections Act in 1905 and an amendment thereto in 1908 (Boehi 2013: 133).
The cabinet also displayed a printed copy of a botanical specimen (K000225239) found in the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew that was donated to the Gardens by UCT. Described in pen in the notes section, the specimen is of the local Erica latiflora and was collected in 1908, when it was ‘bought fresh in the streets of Cape Town’. The insider details noted on this specimen reveal much to outsiders such as Boehi (2013) and Van Sittert (2010) – scholars who have written about the colonial history of botany in the Cape and the unofficial presence of the flower sellers in the provenance of many specimens from the Cape kept in international herbaria.
The cabinet (#2) next to Quercus robur displayed a selection of glass slides of the insects, ticks and worms that are the primary or intermediate hosts or carriers of human diseases. These slides also featured in the Curiosity CLXXV and Subtle thresholds exhibitions, sourced from the Pathology Learning Centre (PLC), where they were originally donated by the secretary of the Department of Microbiology. Dr Yeats identified them as glass photomicrographs and speculated that they were probably made for a special projector used for teaching many years ago.16 These slides relate to many of the bottles in the medicine chest, such as the Iron and Arsenic, the Quinine Bisulphate, and the Quinine and Cinnamon.
Diseases such as malaria, trypanosomiasis, relapse and yellow fever were a significant obstacle to European penetration of large parts of Africa (Headrick 2014). Insects such as the mosquito and the tsetse fly set the boundaries for European occupation for many years until the development of these medicines. Armed with these chests, Europeans could venture further into the interior and occupy the coastal areas that were pivotal to securing trade routes. Africans were displaced from their homes and forced into the tsetse-infested lands they had hitherto avoided – with devastating effects on their health and livelihoods (Headrick 2014).
The slides in Chest: A botanical ecology were mounted on mirror, its reflective qualities raising awareness in visitors of their potential implication in the spread of disease, particularly in terms of the history of the African continent, where the introduction of certain diseases by outsiders ravaged local populations with no resistance to these strains (Headrick 2014).
The presence of the chest in the Kirby collection activated three of the instruments as antibodies or counter-narratives. These instruments – two gourd rattles and an iodophone (#11) – undermined the chest and resonated with the first botanical viewing session to which it was subjected. The instruments were used in Venda healing rituals to exorcise evil spirits – practices disavowed by the colonial insider’s view of the objects and the insider’s view of the host department. The instruments resonate with the Department of Biological Science (Botany) because of their organic materiality, and here I saw an opportunity to apply one of the strategies I developed during my MFA research: inviting insiders to train their eyes on an object outside their discipline. I invited Edmund February to the Kirby collection to view the instruments and learn his thoughts on them from a botanical perspective.
February identified the dancing rattles as being made of the seed pods of Oncoba spinosa (Venda: mutuzwa) and the seed pod of Adansonia digitata (Venda: muvhuyu). The wood of the iodophone was, however, unrecognisable as a result of its handling. February also contacted colleagues in the Department of Zoology and the School of Mathematical & Natural Sciences at the University of Venda, who connected me to a Venda diviner, Muanalo Dyer, who uses similar baobab rattles (and other materials from that tree) in her healing practices. This interdisciplinary engagement showed that these instruments, supposedly frozen in their early 20th century understanding of being on the brink of extinction, remained very much functional in the present.
This cabinet (#5) displayed a round-bottomed flask that broke during the installation of the exhibition, and which I attempted to mend. The accompanying BWC medicine chest manual highlights the qualities the company wanted to portray as unique to the Tabloid medicine chest and that they believed would set them apart from competitors – such as the longevity of the medicines they sold and the indestructability of the chests (BWC 1925: 2–3).
Addressing the supposed indestructability of the chest by focusing specifically on the wide array of glass-stoppered bottles that form a large part of its overall contents and which, according to BWC, ensured the longevity of the medicines, this exhibit displayed a laboratory bottle of similar material, but in a state that demonstrates its fragility. As such, it subverts BWC’s grand claims of indestructability and thereby throws the rest of its claims into doubt. The broken bottle also resonates with the oak post-mortem neck support, visually alluding to the fragile state of the diseased body and to processes of care exerted by health practitioners on the ill and by curators on objects.
In this work (#8), the temperature graphs of individuals suffering from malaria, yellow fever, trypanosomiasis and tickborne-relapse fever – all viewed as ‘tropical’ and treatable by the contents of the medicine chest – were converted into a musical score. I punched the strips of paper of a hand-cranked musical box mechanism with holes that corresponded to the graphs – the vertical axis representing temperature variations and the horizontal axis representing the approximate number of days the fever is said to last. The translation of these graphs into notes seems nonsensical, as we do not listen for a temperature; we measure it by feeling a forehead or taking a reading with a thermometer. The practice of listening has, however, been part of the history of medicine since the days of Hippocrates (c.460–c.370 BC), when physicians performed auscultations of the lung and heart by placing their ear directly on the patient’s chest (Montinari & Minelli 2019: 184).
Hippocrates described the first thoracic sounds, such as the friction rub of pleuritis (‘a creak like new leather’) and a range of other medical sounds (Montinari & Minelli 2019: 184), while in his 1616 ‘visceral lectures’, Harvey compared heart sounds to ‘two clacks of a water bellows to rayse water’ (Wright in Montinari & Minelli 2019: 184). The process of using the sound from internal organs to diagnose disease was fine-tuned in the 19th century by the French physician and musician Laënnec, who, to avoid the embarrassment of placing his ear on a girl’s breasts, used a tightly rolled sheet of paper, applying one end to the woman’s chest and the other to his ear (Montinari & Minelli 2019: 185) – a procedure that led to the development of the stethoscope, still in use today and one of the first instruments acquired by any medical student in training.17 Laënnec occupied two insider (or outsider) positions, of physician and musician, and was uniquely placed to understand the subtleties of sound and its enhancement through the application of the cylindrical shape present in the makeup of many instruments he would have been familiar with. I would argue that his default fashioning of a piece of paper into this shape to save embarrassment was informed by his insider knowledge of music and sound; applied to an outsider field, this action led to discovery.
Translating fever graphs from the medical domain into a musical score suggests similar possibilities by conflating representational systems, rendering each insider set of data strange and opening them up to outsider considerations.
CHEST: A BOTANICAL ECOLOGY
Curated by Nina Liebenberg
Illness and disease affects us all. The treatment of these conditions however, has been vast and varied, depending on the historical periods and the cultural context in and during which they are practiced. Situated in the Iziko South African Museum rock art gallery, where healing power is expressed in San paintings, this mobile set of cabinets explores a rich complex of healing practices through the display of a medicine chest which was donated to the university of Cape Town in 1978.
This chest belonged to a British dentist, who practiced in Cape Town from 1904, and who bought the chest for a hunting trip he undertook in 1913 to (then) Northern Rhodesia. The idea of the chest gives rise to a variety of forms of healing: from instruments used to exorcise evil spirits and children's letters written to celebrate a heart transplant; to medicinal flowers bought at the Adderley Street flower market. The exhibition aims to visualise and materialise illness and its treatment from historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives.
Drawing on well-established historical and contemporary connections between the disciplines of Botany, Medicine and Pharmacology, the exhibits also suggest latent links which are at times political, at times whimsical.
The bottles and pipettes in Forest (#3) were originally sourced from the storage rooms of the Chemistry department, where they awaited disposal, and responded to the lacuna of indigenous material represented by the chest. I addressed this imbalance by filling the bottles with teas made from local medicinal plants. Staging the bottles and pipettes to simulate a forest references the prejudice of Burroughs, Wellcome and Co. (BWC) against these natural remedies, ‘purifying’ them through laboratory processes before they were deemed trustworthy and marketable. This process also occluded the original source of the remedies and sowed the seeds of biopiracy. The various items of glassware in this cabinet were filled with a selection of infusions made from Balotta africana, Sutherlandia frutescens, Agathosma crenulata, Melianthus major, Mentha longifolia, Petroselinum crispum, Hypoxiz villosa and Salvia officinalis.
For this display (#15), I collected leaves from the gardens around Groote Schuur Hospital and gave them to UCT dermatologist Ranks Lehloenya for analysis. Using the strategy of directing insider focus to an outsider object, Lehloenya treated these specimens as sections of skin and read them accordingly, highlighting sections that showed signs of nummular eczema, acne, ageing, miliary tuberculosis and melanoma, to name a few. He followed this session up with a request that I conduct a similar open session with the dermatology registrars, as he believed these exercises could enhance their perception of pattern recognition by exposing them to images that are not as naturalised as the textbook examples used in training.
This section (bottom example) shows characteristics which could point at various causes. The darker raised sections could be blackheads as seen in acne (note the darker central area reminiscent of an open pore); villous hair cysts (a condition in which hair follicles are trapped under the skin to form pimple-like structures with the hair giving a dark hue in the centre; syringomas (non-cancerous proliferation of sweat glands); infections such as chicken pox or miliary tuberculosis in which the infection spreads from the blood onto the skin (miliary means it looks like a millet seed). It could also be metastatic melanoma that has spread from another area onto this skin.
The nonsensical activity of reading the epidermis of a leaf for signs that correlate to dermatological markers references the nonsensical activities performed not so long ago in the broader context of the country, when an individual’s skin was read and judged according to apartheid prejudices. Sourced from Groote Schuur Hospital, well-known as the venue in which the first heart transplant was performed in 1967, these specimens, now activated in terms of their racial connotations, also spoke to more occluded histories in the space, such as the lesser-known racial politics that formed part of the first heart transplant.25 In 2017, while walking down Hospital Street, the main connecting passageway of the hospital, I investigated the object and textual displays that relay the history of the hospital. Reading the label of one of these displays – an unassuming collection of white crockery (plates, teacups, saucers and bowls) with different bands of colour around their edges – revealed a sinister past.
The cutlery was acquired during apartheid, when each coloured band corresponded to the race to whom it should be given. As such, these markings, which seem like simple circular lines on a white background, become the unsettling markers of past injustices.
The medicine chest was displayed in this cabinet (#6). Made from japanned metal with a leather strap, its contents are: a Tabloid guide listing the various medicine cases manufactured by BWC and their applicability to different journeys and destinations, as well as common ailments and their treatments; paper packages of chlorate of potash, toothstoppers and medicine droppers; a cylindrical black container labelled ‘idodoform’; smaller glass bottles filled with opium, phenacetin compound and calomel; and a selection of bigger bottles containing blaud pills, hazeline, quinine bisulphate, soda-mint, ginger essence, ammonium bromide, Dover powder, corrosive sublimate, quinine and rhubarb compound (Livingstone rouser), laxative vegetable, tonic compound, pepana, chloroform and morphine, quinine and cinnamon, iron and arsenic compound, tannin, zincsulphate and ipecacuanha.
A ‘jungle’ consisted of a selection of pathological specimens from the Pathology Learning Centre that had been affected by typhoid fever, ascaris adult worms, yellow fever, amoebic ulcerations, tuberculosis and malaria (#9). The diseases that afflicted these specimens were regarded as ‘tropical’. BWC used the jungle as a significant terrain that called for a medicine chest to combat pathogens: ‘Whether you were valiantly saving your compatriot in war, traversing a dark African jungle, navigating one of the world’s first flying machines, exploring the most desolate place on earth, ascending the highest mountain in the world, or simply enjoying the windswept British coast, the chest would be there, ready for any ailment’ (Johnson 2008b: 255). BWC promoted their chests as the ideal antidote for a tropical landscape ‘at once full of potential wealth for imperial Britain, but simultaneously rife with disease’ (Johnson 2008b: 258) and claimed that the tropical colonies were ‘by far the most dangerous regions for travellers’ (BWC 1934: 8). It was here that ‘desolating ailments’ were encountered, all ‘particularly fatal to the so-called white man who originates in temperate climates’ (BWC 1934: 8). Creating a visual link between the UCT specimens and the history of these diseases surfaces the occluded racial undertones of these understandings. I adapted the colour of the images of afflicted intestines, livers, stomachs and brains and used them as material to construct a dense jungle that referenced this aspect of the medicine chest’s history. Printed on separate glass sections that fit into the cabinet at spaced intervals to create an illusion of depth and threedimensionality, the work draws on the cross-sectional display technique used in many anatomy museums worldwide, in projects such as the Visible Human Project (1995) and in the work of artist Damien Hirst.
In this small corner cabinet, a small wooden chip from the same object collection as the medicine chest was balanced on top of one of the bottles from the chest (#12). The treatment, the Livingstone rouser, was formulated by Dr Livingstone, who, after an attack of malaria in 1853, patented this mixture of quinine and purgatives (calomel, rhubarb and jalop) mixed with opium (Barrett & Giordani 2017: 1655–1666). The chip balanced on its lid is said to be from the almond tree under which he proposed to Mary Moffat in 1844. The juxtaposition of these two objects, one representing the quantifiable and the other the poetic, draws the viewer to consider the conflation of these two realms. Livingstone, revered as a heroic explorer of the ‘Dark Continent’ well into the 20th century, occupies a somewhat more complex status locally and in 21st century post-colonial scholarship, where his geographical exploration of the African continent is viewed as preparing the way for colonial conquest (Bloch 2016: 156). His instrumental role thus coincides with that of the medicine chest, which also enabled the spread of colonialism by easing access to geographical areas previously viewed as disease-ridden and dangerous.
The chip of wood also casts an outsider view on botany and its strange relationship with colonial history, evident in the ‘robust global trade’ in differentsized pieces of wood from this particular tree conducted from about twenty years after Livingstone’s death well into the 1930s. There was demand for sections of wood associated with other areas of Livingstone’s life, too, such as the mvula tree under which his heart was buried in Ilala, Zambia in 1873, the mango tree under which Livingstone met Henry Morton Stanley in Ujiji, Tanzania, and the baobab tree under which his wife, Mary, was buried in Shupanga, on the banks of the Zambezi River, in 1871 (Bloch 2016: 154–155).