Artist Bill Morrison talks about his new commission and collaboration with composer Bill Frisell.
In this video American artist and filmmaker Bill Morrison talks about his new film commission for ‘Electricity: The spark of life‘. Morrison used material from the Electricity Council archive at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry to create a visual journey exploring the production and distribution of electricity and its profound impact on our daily lives.
Using animated footage originally designed to quell our fear of electricity, Morrison shows how elemental units moving through space can mirror a broader reading of our natural state as intrinsically electric beings.
Working with an original score created by his frequent collaborator, the guitarist and composer Bill Frisell, Morrison recontextualises familiar graphic themes as a reflection on our interconnected lives across the planet.
Credits
Produced by Neil Karbank Music composed by Bill Frisell Performed by Bill Frisell, Jenny Scheinman, Eyvind Kang and Hank Roberts Music produced by Lee Townsend Recording Engineer, Tucker Martine Music recorded at Flora Recording and Playback
Artist John Gerrard talks about his new commission, a live simulation of an astronaut and a frog in zero gravity.
In this video, artist John Gerrard talks about his newly-developed commission for ‘Electricity: The spark of life‘. Gerrard’s ‘X. laevis (Spacelab) 2017′ responds to Luigi Galvani’s famous 18th-century experiments on the effects of electricity on amputated frogs’ legs, and to a video of a frog in zero gravity shot aboard the NASA space shuttle Endeavour in 1992.
Gerrard’s live simulation features a frog suspended in space between the hands of an astronaut, calling attention to the scientific relationship between humans and animals, and anticipating a future in which sustaining life beyond Earth may become critical to human survival.
Credits
John Gerrard / X. laevis (Spacelab) 2017 Produced by Werner Poetzelberger Programmed by Helmut Bressler Modelling by Max Loegler Rigging and posing by Michael Buettner Installation development and technical design by Jakob Illera/Inseq Design Hand modelling by Esther Balfe Game engine by Unigine
Here Comes Good Health! is a new exhibit at Wellcome Collection about the health propaganda films made by Bermondsey Borough Council in the 1920s and 1930s. In their attempt to create healthy lives for Bermondsey’s residents, the borough’s health department touched on subjects well beyond germs and medicine. Patricia Dark looks at a film that’s all about what you wear.
The Wellcome Films YouTube page describes Health and Clothing (1928), one of the Bermondsey Borough Council public health films, as ‘mildly diverting’; at first glance, from more than 80 years’ distance, it seems a generous description. Itopens with shots of kittens and of a baby in the arms of a district nurse: as the caption notes, animal babies are born dressed and human babies are born naked. Ponderous demonstrations of Tudor and Victorian women’s fashions follow, then a hapless toddler boy is stripped – twice – so his summer and winter clothes can be weighed and compared. Later scenes point out the properties of healthful clothing: light, warm, absorbent, loose, easily washed, non-flammable, and weatherproof. Sheep being shorn reinforce the point that wool is the fibre of choice. Finally, the film extols the virtues of modern fashion: healthy, cheap, and easy to make at home.
It leaves modern viewers with more questions than answers. Why is Health and Clothing so overwhelmingly feminine? What does clothing have to do with health? Why would the public health department advocate fashion? The answer lies in the background to the films: Bermondsey itself, and the conditions in which many viewers lived. Clothing and cleanliness, like almost all aspects of household life, was a feminine concern. Even for women who worked outside the home, keeping a clean, tidy, respectable house was a priority. The film’s particular stress on light, simple, easy-to-care-for clothing – especially for small children – would resonate with its audience.
Bermondsey’s housing stock conspired against the borough’s housewives, even years after Health and Clothing was released: much of it was wretchedly overcrowded and appallingly unsanitary. A Daily Express reporter found a family of seven living in one room eight feet square in 1924: a passage two and a half feet wide provided space to dry washing. Howard Marshall of the Daily Telegraph visited Cherry Gardens Pier in 1933: he found 4 families – 18 people in total – living in five rooms, with one tap between them. In 1939, the News Chronicle reported that Wolesey Buildings provided a single sink for 4 families – up to 30 people – that provided each family’s cooking, bathing, and washing water. Wolesey Buildings did have a communal washhouse, but it was derelict. Housewives there, as elsewhere in the borough, either did laundry in their tiny, overcrowded flats or spent more money to send it out to a laundry.
In these conditions, as the Daily Express put it, “[c]leanliness [was] utterly impossible; decency [was] utterly damned”. Dirty clothing irritated skin and provided perfect breeding grounds for parasites like body lice, which transmitted deadly diseases like typhus. But it was also demoralising – a tangible sign of the all-too-often futile struggle of the “honest…ambitious, God-fearing” people of Bermondsey against misery and despair. For the reformers of the Bermondsey Borough Council, clothing was a symbol: of the decent conditions everyone deserved to live in, and of the dignity and decency of the working class.
Snide stereotypes and cheap jibes were simply wrong – given the opportunity, the residents of Bermondsey took as much pride in their surroundings as more prosperous Londoners, and worked harder to beautify their homes and themselves. In 1930, an Evening Standard article called Bermondsey “[t]he most optimistic place in London”; alongside the riot of flowers in windowboxes and front gardens, the reporter singled out the “factory girls…” who “wore their trim little coats and their close-fitting frocks with what the modistes call ‘an air’.” Peter Ritchie Calder of the Daily Herald visited the Vauban estate – once one of the worst slum areas in the borough – in 1934. His report fairly glows with cleanliness – a young mother wearing a “spick-and span overall” hanging out “spotless” laundry on the drying-green, an elderly lady’s white lace curtains – and the power of pride, belonging, and the “moral pressure” of respectability.
Health and Clothing, then, is more than a mildly diverting film, or even a didactic one. At its heart, it is a celebration of the modern: modern dress, modern ideas, and a modern Bermondsey that its residents can be proud of.
Dr Patricia Dark is Local History Library and Archives Manager at the Local History Library, Southwark Culture.
The Bermondsey Borough Council films have been recently digitally remastered with material preserved by the British Film Institute and form part of Here Comes Good Health!, an exhibit running at Wellcome Collection from 22 February to 3 June 2012 together with other health educational materials. The films and photographs in the display have been supplied courtesy of Southwark Local History Library and Archive. For more details contact Southwark Local History Library and Archive, 211 Borough High Street, London, SE1 1JA. T: 020 7525 0232 E: local.history.library@southwark.gov.uk.
In advance of the upcoming Elements event at Wellcome Collection I spent an hour filming the brilliant Dr Andrea Sella (one of the event’s curators) as he gave me a tour of some of the elements in question. I’ll be sharing these on the blog over the next week or so, but you can also see all of them on our YouTube channel. It was a fun shoot, following him as he demonstrated experiments and bits of lab kit. There was a small fiery explosion, liquid nitrogen, clouds of purple iodine and more. I also get an inadvertent cameo role as he naughtily wore reflective glasses for the oxygen section, which I spotted too late.
In this first one, he shows us how oxygen will be turned from a gas into a liquid for use at the event (which has to happen behind the scenes on the night for health and safety reasons), and reveals its unusual colour. I had NO idea that this was what oxygen looked like.
Elements presents a world of immersive chemical performance, ingestion, activity and intrigue across all four floors of Wellcome Collection on Friday 8 April, 19.00–23.00.
Wellcome Collection Blog 