Arts reviews: Hunterian Museum | Marilene Oliver | Calum Mackenzie

THE Hunterian museum has a fascinating collection, and most intriguing is the catalogue for it written two centuries ago – by a man about whom we know almost nothing.

This Unrivalled Collection: The Hunterian’s first catalogue

Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow

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Marilene Oliver: Confusao

Edinburgh Printmakers

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Calum Mackenzie: Tableau Vivant

Glasgow Print Studio

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Observation and description have been the key to understanding the world ever since the beginning of the long scientific revolution to which we are heirs. To be really useful, however, they have to be backed by comparison: looking at things side by side to understand their differences and their relationships. The next stage is taxonomy, classification, finding order in those relationships, how things relate to each other and in turn to their environment, both as they exist now, but also how they have evolved.

It was Darwin, of course, who provided the answer to that last question. Others before him had speculated about the origin of fossils, but in doing so, as Darwin himself did, they depended on collections, on museums in fact, where such materials brought together made observation, description and comparison possible. As a student, for instance, Darwin studied fossils in Edinburgh University’s Anatomy Museum. It follows that museums are not simply dusty depositories of redundant objects, and shouldn’t be regarded as curiosities only vital for the tourist trade. Some may be no more than that, but the greatest never were and they continue to be essential windows of understanding, not just onto the natural world, but onto our history and culture too.

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In turn, however, the key to the usefulness of any museum collection is its catalogue. Unless you know what is there and how it is ordered, museums are limited in their usefulness. In 1813, the first catalogue of Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum, Scotland’s first public museum, was published. It was actually only the second such catalogue ever to be published in Britain and the only one relating to an extant collection. It was a significant milestone in the history of our museums, so the modern Hunterian is marking the bicentenary with an exhibition.

The 1813 catalogue, titled after several attempts A General Account of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, was written by an individual named John Laskey. It is a little frustrating to come out of the exhibition This Unrivalled Collection: The Hunterian’s First Catalogue knowing so little about him, however, or why he undertook this task. Incidental information in the labels does reveal that he was a captain in the Kirkcudbright and Wigtown militia. The country was at war with Napoleon and he was stationed in Scotland, but he was born in Devon. His military duties cannot have been onerous as he had also formed and dispersed a collection himself. He also produced other scholarly publications beside this one, but there seems to be no portrait of him and he remains a bit of a mystery.

The Hunterian actually opened its doors in 1807 in a handsome building designed by James Stark. Shamefully it was knocked down long ago, but it is represented by a model and also by the architect’s plans, which show how the collections were arranged. Their core, and hence also the name Hunterian, was the rich and diverse collection formed by the anatomist and Glasgow alumnus, Dr William Hunter, and bequeathed to the university in 1783.

The Hunterian was not the first museum in Scotland, but it was the first to be set up as a public asset, self-sufficient in its purpose. It was no coincidence that though Hunter’s collections ranged far beyond anatomy, they should have been formed by a medical doctor. It was in medicine that the collecting habit had already proved most useful, and some specimens here do indeed relate to Hunter’s own research. He laid the foundations of modern obstetrics, but the collection is much more comprehensive than that. There are sample objects on view that range from geology to coins, medals, early printed books and illuminated manuscripts.

His remarkable art collection is on view elsewhere in the building, but there are examples here of “artificial curiosities”, artifacts from the South Seas brought back by Captain Cook’s expeditions. Laskey’s catalogue is discursive and his observation of the analogy between stone axes found in Scotland, for instance, and similar objects from contemporary cultures is suggestive of later ideas about human cultural evolution. Hunter’s own speculations on the mastodon, an extinct species of elephant represented here by several massive teeth, are equally intriguing. The evidence for the extinction of any species undermined belief in the static order of Creation, laid down in the book of Genesis, opening the way to the theory of evolution.

There can be no doubt that living and working in London, Hunter was inspired both in his collecting and in his bequest by the creation of the British Museum. Presenting not just the objects it contained, but also the potential knowledge they represented as public property, the British Museum was a new kind of institution.

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Hunter’s ambition was to create something equivalent in Scotland. Whatever intention the British Museum’s founders had that it should be public property, however, Hunter’s close friend, the painter Allan Ramsay, complained that bureaucracy made its collections almost inaccessible. Hunter intended to do better. There do not seem to have been any bureaucratic defences to discourage the visitor in Glasgow. There was just a visitors’ book. In it, too, we find John Laskey’s name inscribed as though he was just a casual visitor. He was certainly more than that to the Hunterian, although what exactly is still a mystery.

William Hunter certainly understood the critical relationship between art and anatomy and indeed taught anatomy at the newly founded Royal Academy in London. He would, I think, therefore have been intrigued by Marilène Oliver’s exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, if only for the way it demonstrates how the inner mysteries of our anatomy, which he explored so laboriously, have become commonplace.

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The principal works in the exhibition are based on the digitised three-dimensional representation of an anonymous female body analogous to the artist’s own. Digitisation allows her to repeat the body in different formats, but also to have a human shape while being sliced like a salami to reveal its inner details in cross section. She presents the body, sliced horizontally and reassembled variously in transparent acrylic, in beaded sections and sprouting acrylic hair. She has also printed it in vertical sections onto light organza that flutters ghost-like in the small draughts made by people moving round the room, alternately revealing and concealing its human shape.

One of the most mysterious works is, however photographic, a representation of Ophelia as a subaqueous presence created by a photograph or photographs of a woman printed onto layers of acrylic. She achieves a similar effect by a kind of drawing made by drilling holes in transparent acrylic. Described this way, a glimmering body hangs suspended in a block composed of drilled of acrylic sheets looking like a ghost in ice. Adding LEDs to this format, she presents two hands and a face floating like ectoplasm in light boxes.

At Glasgow Print Studios, digitisation is also the key to Calum Mackenzie’s recent work. Mackenzie, for seven years from 1975 director of the Print Studios, works in the surrealist tradition of collage, creating rich and complex images, but instead of cutting and pasting in the old-fashioned way, he assembles his images from a huge range of sources, including his own painting, using digital imaging. The compound image that results is then printed using “archival, digital printing”.

Gallery director John Mackechnie explained to me that this is a printing process that uses pigments instead of inks and dyes, hence its archival quality. It is richer in effect and more durable than conventional digital printing. Certainly prints like Mackenzie’s Tulip suite of still-lifes, or Mary Mary, a kind of collaged riff on the theme of the birth of Venus and female beauty, make very satisfying images. So too, however, does much of his earlier work, especially a sequence of dramatic etchings inspired by Ossian. Done 40 years ago, they are given an extra poetic dimension by the fact that Mackenzie is himself a native Gaelic speaker.

BEST IN SHOW

William Hunter’s art collection is displayed in the Hunterian Art Gallery separately from the exhibition that marks the bicentenary of the museum’s first catalogue. The objects in the exhibition are, on the whole, more science-related, but one does stand out for its beauty. It is a leather parade shield decorated with beautifully rendered reliefs of a unicorn and winged victories. Acquired by Hunter as Roman, it seems in fact to be a superb piece of Renaissance art originating in the Sforza court if Milan in the late 15th century. It was the moment when Leonardo was working there. His main project was a grand equestrian statue which does not survive. It may be fanciful, but perhaps its form is echoed in the magnificent prancing unicorn on the shield.

• This Unrivalled Collection runs until 11 August, Confusao until 11 May, Tableau Vivant until 5 May.

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