GENOME

For thousands of years, people have attempted to understand the interconnectedness of life on Earth. The comparisons of humans and animals (as seen in Lavater’s Frog to Apollo and Pieter Camper’s Ape to Apollo illustrations) were important missteps on the path towards accurately describing evolution and locating the method by which life stores the information needed to reproduce.

The hand of the artist has always been subject to unconscious mental prejudice, but even the mechanically produced image such as the photograph is not immune to preconceptions and misreading.

Lindy Lee’s three-part work Untitled (1987) utilises a photocopy and acrylic paint to explore the imperfection of the mechanical reproduction and its relationship to the portrayal of identity. The image exposes the self-portrait of a Renaissance painter to the degradations of successive layers of photocopying and repainting.

Speaking about this body of work that references her own Chinese-Australian cultural identity, Lee states: “I loved the flawed copy, because it was a representation of what I was; I felt split and divided, and it was supremely painful.”[1]

[1] Lindy Lee cited in The University of Queensland, "UQ Art Museum Showcases 30 Years of Lindy Lee," The University of Queensland, https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2014/09/uq-art-museum-showcases-30-years-of-lindy-lee.Thomas Kirk engraver, Ape to Apollo TAB I, in Petrus Camper, The Works of the Late Professor Camper, on the Connexion between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts of Drawing, Painting, Statuary, etc., trans. T. Cogan (London: Dilly, 1794). Private collection.

in the prints of Haeckel’s work (plate 51 Polycyttaria, from Kunstformen der Natur), the accurate reproduction of his observations was constantly in danger of being overtaken by his delight in the geometry of their forms and his compositions. (see page xxx)

The search for the interconnection of life using new scientific methods found expression in the Human Genome Project, which announced in 2000 that it had sequenced the first human genome.

In 2015 I had my genome sequenced as part of a PhD research project at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. One of the works created during the project, Conquest, assembles a small section of my genome, representing the scientific conquest of the body, with a Roman bust from the era of the first world empire and Eadweard Muybridge’s photography of an elephant walking, the first mechanically objective images of animal movement.

(Dr Blair Coffey Aug. 2019)

James Gillray (English, 1756—1815)

The print by Gillray in the Stopping Time exhibition, Connoisseurs examining a collection of George Morland's, is discussed below. It is interesting to first examine Gillray’s print Very Slippy Weather from 1808 as it not only illustrates Hannah Humphrey’s print shop, showing where and how many of Gillray’s prints were displayed for sale, but also what the British Museum catalogue entry describes as “a grotesquely ugly ragged boy with skates.” This street urchin is of course modelled on one of the earlier numbered creatures in Lavater’s “Frog to Apollo” evolution diagram that had been published four years before Gillray made this print. Gillray was not the only artist to use Lavater’s “Frog to Apollo” transformation as this example by the great French illustrator Granville shows. However it was a short lived flirtation by artists with the frog as the zero point of human evolution.

For a full description of the Gillray prints in Humphrey’s window see the British Museum Entry.

Francisco José de Goya (Spanish, 1746 -1828)
Until Death (Hasta la muerte.) Plate 55 from 'Los Caprichos'

1799. Etching, aquatint, drypoint on heavy laid paper, with watermark Goya wearing a cap (tenth edition) plate 220 x 150mm. sheet  365 x 260mm (Private collection)

Widely acknowledged as one of the most important Spanish artists of the Romantic era, Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) was a supremely innovative printmaker, thanks to his experimentation with the newly invented aquatint process. Aquatint produces areas of tone by applying powdered resin to the metal printing plate, and Goya combined this with etching and burnishing to produce images of great tonal depth, employing theatrical contrasts of light and dark.

This is Plate 55 in a series of 80 etchings by Goya called Caprichos. An English sale catalogue of 1814 described Caprichos as representing ‘every kind of vice from the highest to the lowest classes…the avaricious, lascivious, cowards, bullies…prostitutes and hypocrites’. These caricatures, attacking the familiar targets of lawyers, doctors, soldiers and priests, were deeply unpopular with the Spanish Inquisition.

Here an elderly woman admires her reflection in a mirror, as a number of young onlookers suppress their mirth. It represents an age-old topic for social criticism, the deluded vanity of old age, as the wizened crone clings to the illusion of her beauty ‘Until Death’. 

Although Goya enjoyed enormous popularity in France, admired by the poet Chales Baudelaire and painters including Édouard Manet, the English were slow to appreciate his work. The critic John Ruskin, disgusted by their ‘immorality’, burned a copy of the Caprichos in 1872, and the National Gallery acquired no works by him until 1896. The antiquarian, Francis Douce (1757–1834) was one of Goya’s few early admirers, owning two copies of the Caprichos. Douce bequeathed his collection of prints to the University of Oxford in 1834 and the majority of these were transferred from the Bodleian Library to the Ashmolean Museum in 1863. Source: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Francisco José de Goya (Spanish, 1746 -1828)
You will not escape (No te escaparás.) Plate 72 from 'Los Caprichos'

1799. Etching, aquatint, laid paper, (eighth edition) plate 220 x 150mm. sheet  365 x 260mm sheet c. 380 x 270 mm (Private collection)

This plate can be grouped with a number exploring "devils and witchcraft". Goya presents the representation of a young woman persecuted by witches and creatures of the night. The pantomimic gesture of flight can be interpreted as the unconscious search for adventure, or sexual innuendo. Source: Prado Website.

Francisco José de Goya (Spanish, 1746 -1828)

There they go plucked (Ya van desplumados) Plate 20 from 'Los Caprichos'

1799. Etching, aquatint, laid paper, (eighth edition) plate 220 x 150mm. sheet  365 x 260mm sheet c. 380 x 270 mm (Private collection)

This Caprice or Folly is one of a number of plates that relate to prostitution, specifically here the theme of the exploitation of lustful men by unscrupulous women. Goya continues to use the metaphor of men - birds that, attracted by lust, are plucked and stripped of their goods. More than the world of prostitution as such, Goya emphasizes the consequences of prostitution, and emphasizes the foolishness and recklessness of those who neglect and do not gain experience with the misfortune of others. Source: Prado Website.