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Volume CXXXIII, Number 3 |
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Spirited exhibit of ghostly art opens at museum
DIANA HEALD
STAFF WRITER
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| Art with supernatural themes abounds in the new exhibition The Disembodied Spirit. (Nancy Van Dyke, Bowdoin Orient) |
The exhibit features the work of artists including William Mumler, Georgiana Houghton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Jeremy Blake, Nancy Burson, Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell, Ann Hamilton, Glenn Ligon, Tracey Moffatt, Mariko Mori, and Bill Viola.
The show explores ghosts and spirits as they interact with humans and as they act as representatives of other cultural issues such as the AIDS epidemic and the traumas of adolescence. Many of the earlier works also deal with spiritualism, a predominantly 19th century belief in the soul's immortality. Spiritualists often tried to establish communications with the spirit world through various methods, and these attempts inspired many of the earlier works in the show. The artists submitted works in various mediums, including film, photography, painting, and sculpture.
One of the more bizarre phenomena in the show is the photography of ectoplasm, an ephemeral substance that fascinated many late 19th century photographers of the spiritual world. Many people at the time believed that the bodies of people in contact with the spirit world occasionally emitted a strange white substance called ectoplasm, which was the refuse of spirits. It was supposedly only visible through the camera lens and disappeared upon contact with light.
Late 19th century photographers used this myth as inspiration for their photographs, in which they used double exposures to create images within the ectoplasm. The show includes various 19th century depictions of ectoplasm, as well as some late 20th century photographs they inspired.
The butterfly is also a prevalent image in the show as a symbol of the spirit world. One of its most striking inclusions is Gregory Crewdson's untitled photograph. The piece shows a young girl standing in her backyard looking at a garage, which is emitting a strange, glowing light and out of which flies a cloud of butterflies.
Another striking piece is Jeremy Blake's film, Winchester, inspired by the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. Its owner, Sara Winchester, a spiritualist, constructed the house as a home for ghosts. The continuously looping film combines photographs of the house with other images in an attempt to represent the ideas and paranoia within Winchester's mind.
The concept for the show grew from the mind of Alison Ferris, the Museum's curator. "Part of my job is going to art galleries," said Ferris. "My inspiration came from the contemporary art world and the many contemporary artists using ghosts as inspiration." The show features a range of artists and styles.
Ferris said, "What's exciting for me is to see them all together, to see them interact with each other." In fact, many of the pieces seem to take on greater significance in the context of the show as a whole.
Ferris hopes the show will do more than just stimulate the viewers visually. "I hope people's imaginations [will] be engaged," she said. The show features both 19th century photography and the modern art it has influenced.
"People can be seduced by technology-you can leave your body behind, enter the spirit world, and take on other identities, yet our history, our societal, political and race issues will ultimately remind us [of our humanity]," she noted.
For those of us who may not pick up on these thought-provoking issues right off the bat, the museum will be featuring several speakers throughout the course of the fall. Two of these speakers are Bowdoin professors: Madeleine Msall, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, will lecture on November 5, and Peter Coviello, assistant English professor, will speak on November 12.
In her lecture, entitled "Rational Ghosts-The Allure of Scientific Theories of the Unseen," Msall said she plans to discuss "how vocabulary and images from the frontiers of theoretical science are appropriated by non-scientists to connect supernatural experiences with natural philosophy."
She said, "Often such borrowings are intended to validate non-scientific ideas by giving them a patina of rationalism, but sometimes the intent is a critique of science and a dialogue contrasting the richness of human experience with the limitations of science."
In his lecture, "Ghosts of Freud," Coviello said he will discuss Freud's fascination with ghosts-"how Freud sought to understand the ghostly-and how Freud, in turn, deepened our own sense of what…ghosts might mean." Ferris asked him to lecture because some of his work at Bowdoin deals both with Freud and with ghost-related works of other writers. Coviello said the show is "beautiful, challenging, and incisive, and provoking in the very best sense. I love particularly how intriguingly the 19th and 20th century works speak to one another. It manages to be weird, comic, grave, intensely beautiful-and somehow entirely coherent."
"I love the museum," said Coviello. "It is, I think, an absolutely amazing institution, and a true gift for the College to have, so I'm always happy to be part of their programming."
Other lecturers speaking in relation to the exhibition include Marina Warner, a writer of fiction, history, and criticism; John Jacob, the former director of the Photographic Resource Center in Boston; and Tom Gunning, a Professor of Art History and Criticism at the University of Chicago. Warner will speak at the opening reception on October 3, Gunning on October 30, and Jacob on October 8.
The show will run from September 25 to December 7.
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