Honesta Anatomia - Revealing local struggles in a peripheral art scene
Introduction
The act of not allowing the exhibition of Florencia Grisanti at Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santiago de Chile to be open for the public shows a curious, yet classic institutional fear ; a fear for the not normative. After the opening, the exhibition and its scientifically untraditional artworks could only be visited by appointment with the artist. Since, the work of Florencia Grisanti has aroused increasing attention within the young Chilean art scene, whereas the museum has confirmed the antiquated seperation of visual arts, proper science, and conventional museology. This is so, despite the fact that the museum generously welcomed the artist for a three year period and taught her the scientific discipline of taxidermia.
How much is this polemic a brilliant artist stunt, a sign of a conservatism, or a revelation of the struggles local artscenes in specific parts of the world still have to go through?
What
The exhibition, Honesta Anatomia – a title relating to the art of mummification in ancient Egypt - was installed in autumn 2009 in an abandoned attic in the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural. One had to climb the stairs of the museum, passing by dusty monkeys and lazy lions, to enter this former wild dove’s attic. Here, Florencia Grisanti had installed her work as a studio consisting of cabinets of curiosities and a messy working table. The classic museum vitrines existed of plants in pots and plants in glasses; an array of cactuses, mandragoras, artichokes, all in brown/grey colors with soft and short hairs, resembling ears, like listening plants, resonating mythologies, hallucinations, infusions, ecstasy, mystical enactments, and rituals destined for human transformation.
How
One can say that these artworks are cryptic; they do not speak a clear language, nor do they tell you what they want you think. But one can also say that in fact, these artworks are quite straightforward. Consisting of recollected materials the cabinets of curiosities echoes Chilean everyday life. The rabbit ears, that make the plants, come from a butcher in the big meat market of Santiago, the pots from the village of Pomaire, and the cabinets from Museo Nacional de Historia Natural. The other things in the vitrines are plethoric sprouts from an excessive producing society that leave many things behind without place, without function.
Museum
Being one of the oldest museums in Latin America Museo Nacional de la Historia Natural is a relic. Placed in an area constructed in mid 19th century the museum reflects the then values of world exhibitions with new ideas constructed in glass and steal. Today, it is a decayed almost abandoned testimony of a time of splendour and believe in (European) science. It was here, in these surroundings, that Florencia Grisanti worked as a taxidermist for three years, meanwhile creating the objects and the world of Honesta Anatomia. It was here, in these surroundings, that the director of the museum, the day before the opening realised what the taxidermist had spent her time on and demanded the exhibition closed for the public. It is here, in these surroundings, that one is sensing the consequences of the fact that Chile is not today reflecting the splendour of ‘high culture’; it is a post-dictatorship and neoliberalistic country, where contemporary art has not yet found its platform of survival and broad recognition.
Context
The way in which Honesta Anatomia works as a total installation brings references to the Russian couple Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, or more recently the Canadian couple Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Killing Machine from 2007. Scientifically, Honesta Anatomia is inspired by the 18th century Dutch multiscientist, Frederick Ruysch, who created anatomical dioramas consisting of animals, humans and plants. Theoretically, Honesta Anatomia is close to, if not an institutional critique, then a comment on institutions and their power in creating history, a theory that is well developed in the genealogy of Foucault in his much celebrated essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History."1 But one of the maybe most interesting references is the study of the American theorist Donna Haraway who in her book Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science2 from 1989 shows how socalled scientific representations of dead animals are influenced by then reigning ideas on gender, race, and class. She reveals that todays world can be put together in many ways and that the poetry of such new realities is not to be afraid of, rather, the limit of a supposed objectivity needs to be contested.
Conclusion
In that sense Florencia Grisanti does not obey the demand of the ‘new’ that lingers over contemporary artists. She works with an exhaustive patience, in the institituion. She works locally with a certain museum and the remains of a specific society, while placing herself in the traditions of international scientific and artistic predecessors. As such, her work oscillates between a locally grounded artistic challenge and an international language that brings about precisely the institutional limits of a specific museum. By having the exhibition censored, but by keeping it open for individual visits, she came to show, honestly, the anatomy of structures in the artscene as well as the struggle between artists and institutional conventionality. At the end of the day, artists still have to obey the institution, but there are ways in which to subvert it and simultaneously expand it. Honesta Anatomia is such an example.
Sidsel Nelund
http://sidselnelund.wordpress.com