In the Garden of Knowledge: Et in Arcadia Ego
Dominic Paterson, 2010
One of the successes of Christine Borland’s To Be Set and Sown in the Garden is that it is not immediately visible as an artwork. Indeed, for many of those who visit it most often – students of the University of Glasgow – it may not appear to be anything other than a series of 10 helpfully placed benches with attractive planting around them, offering a place for rest and leisure outside the library on the occasional days when the campus is blessed with sunshine. The more attentive viewer, however, might be intrigued enough by some aspects of the benches to inquire further. Without knowing that this is a work by Christine Borland, indeed, before recognising it as piece of visual art, one might be able to sense that, in scale and in form, the benches are keyed to the human body. One might also register the delicate patterning on the white ceramic elements of each bench as representing particular plants. These discoveries might then provoke the viewer to investigate each pair of benches in turn, and to find out that they are differently decorated. A night-time visitor might find her or his bearings through the work thanks to a series of short illuminated texts alongside each bench, but in the day these remain opaque. How then does this piece operate as art, what are its concerns, and its relationship to the site it so subtly occupies?
Commissioned by the University to commemorate its 550th anniversary, To Be Set & Sown in the Garden addresses the relationship between knowledge and the body, particularly with regard to the history of medicine. Borland’s starting point for the work was a planting list for a Physic Garden, written by the Rev. Mark Jameson in the mid-16th century on the back inside cover of a copy of Leonhart Fuch’s 1549 Significant Notes on the History of Plants. As Borland notes, Fuch’s book, which is held in the Special Collections of the University Library, “is the earliest work on plants which can properly be called ‘scientific’ and subsequently influenced the development of Medicine and Botany.”[i] But, intriguingly, many of the plants on Jameson’s list – including birthwort, marigold and penny royal – were thought to induce abortion. It remains unclear whether this garden was ever ‘set and sown’ or, indeed, what Jameson’s motivation for it might have been. The engravings on the white ceramic elements in fact illustrate plants from Fuch’s Herbal, but more significantly those elements themselves are linked to a later development in medicine – namely pathological anatomy; they are modelled on the ‘pillows’ which support the head of a cadaver on the dissection table. Borland’s work thus points to an interweaving of life and death, and to the complex emergence of our modern self-knowledge from sometimes opaque pasts.
In The Birth of the Clinic, philosopher Michel Foucault analyzes the consequences of pathological anatomy’s link to dissection, speculating that it is decisive for our culture that the “first scientific discourse concerning the individual had to pass through this stage of death.”[ii] Foucault wants to show that medical history is not a continuous evolution towards ever clearer understanding, but a series of different arrangements of knowledge, in which vision and the human body occupy different places in different epochs. With the emergence of modern anatomy, relations of life, death, and visibility are profoundly reconfigured. Though we might think of medical science as progressing through the integration of other senses – especially in diagnosis, with listening tools like the stethoscope – Foucault emphasises the dominance of vision: it is “the triumph of the gaze that is represented by the autopsy,” and other senses are merely stand-ins “until such time as death brings to truth the luminous presence of the visible; it is a question of a mapping in life, that is, in night, in order to indicate how things would be in the white brightness of death.”[iii] Pathological anatomy, for Foucault, enables medical science to see human health and disease, but on condition that this seeing and knowing occupies the point of view of death. Borland’s achievement is to link layers of historical knowledge – from the 16th-century Herbal to the birth of modern anatomy in the late 18th-century – and make this linking the possible occasion of a reflection on the present. In this, her artwork bears a family resemblance, perhaps, to Foucault’s own historical methodology.
To Be Set & Sown in the Garden, then, which itself only gradually becomes visible as an artwork, turns precisely on the relation between visibility and knowledge. It offers a delicate reminder of the place of death within our self-understanding, as well as within nature. Human mortality and human bodies are acknowledged as establishing of the grounds on which our seats of learning have gathered and disseminated, set and sown, so much of what we know about ourselves. Borland’s work makes visible this often overlooked fact.
[i] Christine Borland, ‘To Be Set and Sown in the Garden,’ Studio 55, http://www.studio55.org.uk/researchers/christine/garden.html (accessed 20/2/2010)
[ii] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan, (London: Routledge, 1989), 197.
[iii] Ibid, 165.
Dr Dominic Paterson lectures in History of Art at the University of Glasgow, where he completed a PhD on aesthetics and the work of Michel Foucault in 2007. His publications include several essays on modern and contemporary art and on critical theory. He recently curated a series of film screenings and artists’ talks for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Dr Paterson is a regular contributor to MAP magazine and an honorary Associate Member of Glasgow Sculpture Studios.