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Emma and Christy discover Margaret Watts Hughes's beautiful 'voice figures', a series of images made through the direct action of her voice between 1885 and 1904. In this episode, we discuss the earliest sound recordings, scientific 'instruments' (it's a pun), cat pianos, severed ears, occult science, seaweed scrapbooks, women in STEM, logos and the word of God, visualising the invisible, the Little Mermaid, clairvoyant research, 'thought forms' and the death agonies of pigeons, science and feeling, and why sonic media is always already haunted.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Margaret Watts Hughes, Impression Figure (c. 1904), courtesy of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery
Margaret Watts Hughes, Tree Form (before 1904)
Portrait miniature example: Nicholas Hilliard, Queen Elizabeth I(1572)
Anna Atkins, Dictyota Dichotomy (Forkweed) (1848)
Illustration from Margaret Watts Hughes, ‘Visible Sound: Voice-Figures’, Century Magazine (1891)
Margaret Watts Hughes's eidophone
Example of page from an algae or seaweed scrapbook by Eliza A. Jordan (1848)
Georgiana Houghton, Glory Be to God (1864)
‘Phonautography of the human voice at a distance’ (lines of recorded sound generated by Scott de Martinville’s ‘phonautograph’, 1857)
The graphic method: Étienne-Jules Marey's sphygmograph (a predecessor of modern EKG machines, 1881)
Louis Bertrand Castel’s ‘ocular harpsichord’ (1725)
Isaac Newton's colour spectrum and musical scale analogy (1675)
The cat piano (illustration from La Nature, 1883)
The ‘ear phonograph’ of Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J. Blake (1874), 2018 model by the Science Museum
Jan Van Eyck, detail from Annunciation (c. 1434–36)
Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, detail from The Annunciation showing raised gold lettering (1333)
Hippolyte Baraduc, two cameraless photographs showing various feelings ('restless desire to have phenomena of the hereafter'; 'mental sadness'), 1894–1913
‘The Music of Gounod’, illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's Thought Forms (1901)
‘Aspiration to Enfold All’, illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's Thought Forms (1901)
‘Radiating Affection’, illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's Thought Forms (1901)
‘The Intention to Know’, illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought Forms (1901)
Illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's Occult Chemistry (1908)
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‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling, image courtesy of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgeons
All audio content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy watch David Cronenberg’s 2022 film Crimes of the Future, exploring the themes of this work while also connecting to some of the director’s earlier movies. In this episode, we discuss the fears and the pleasures of the human body and cutting into it; surgery as sex; Cronenbergian body horror; the monstrous as art; being and becoming cyborgs; evolution and pain; technology as prosthesis; the posthuman; contemporary performance art (good and bad); the cosmetic gaze; the body as text; and meaning making.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
David Cronenberg, dir., Crimes of the Future (2022)
First scene with boy playing on beach, cruise ship overturned in water
Saul Tenser in the Orchid Bed
TVs showing ‘BODY IS REALITY’ during Saul and Caprice’s performance
Scuttling, insect-like bureaucrats of the National Organ Registry
Bureaucrat of the National Organ Registry telling Saul that ‘surgery is new sex’
David Cronenberg, dir., Crash (1996)
Saul Tenser in the BreakFaster Chair
Saul Tenser’s facial expression at the end of the film
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1652)
David Cronenberg, dir., Videodrome (1983)
The hand-gun in Videodrome
David Cronenberg, dir., The Fly (1986)
Odile (decorative surgery) performance art
Klinek (ear man) performance art
ORLAN, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990-1993)
Stelarc, Ear on Arm (2007 - )
The Swan reality show (2004)
The autopsy scene
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‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling, image courtesy of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgeons
All audio content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
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Emma and Christy present a brief history of tattooing in Europe. We talk tattoos as art history; sailors and soldiers; the archival (in)visibility of tattoos; the ‘Cook myth’, colonial contact, and contagion; syphilitic tattoos and pathologisation; working class bodies; tattoos and material culture; criminal anthropology; pain; the skin ego; danger and deviance; the limits of interpretation and (il)legibility of signs; ‘fugitive’ images; pilgrim tattoos; and art histories from below.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Human skin with tattoos of two women's heads and a sailor, French (1880–1920), Wellcome Collection / Science Museum
Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (1877)
Human skin with tattoo of a mermaid, Polish (late 19th–early 20th century), photographed by Katarzyna Mirczak (2010). For the exact specimen we discuss see Lodder, 'Things of the Sea' (2015), fig. 11.
Photograph showing a man with tattoos and a black eye (late 19th–early 20th century), published in Lombroso, Criminal Man (1911)
Staffordshire cream-ware bowl with inscription 'When this you see,/ remember me / And bear me in your mind / Let all the world,/ say what they will,/ Speak of me as you find', (late 18th century)
Diagram showing Ötzi the Ice Man's tattoos (c. 3230 BCE), from Krutak, 'Therapeutic Tattooing in the Arctic' (2019)
Sydney Parkinson (the artist on Captain Cook's first voyage to New Zealand), portrait of a Maori man with facial tattoos (1769)
Print showing signs signs of syphilis on the site of a tattoo (1889), from 'Notes of Cases on an Outbreak of Syphilis following on Tattooing' (1889)
Wax anatomical venus, Josephinum Museum of the Medical University of Vienna (late 18th century)
Princess of Ukok (Siberia), with tattoos (5th century BCE)
Print of the pilgrim tattoo of Ratge(r) Stubbe (c. 1669), showing Arms of Jerusalem tattoo
Example of material culture with iconography similar to contemporaneous tattoos: Convict love token, 'When this you see, remember me' (c. 1831-1832)
Tattoos by Sutherland Macdonald (late 19th century)
Photograph of incarcerated person known as 'Fromain' (1901), Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris, published in Angel, 'Roses & Daggers' (2015)
Drawing from Lombroso archives of the tattooed body of incarcerated person Francesco Spiteri, with labels describing and categorising his tattoos (1889), Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin
Dried human skin specimen from the body of 'Fromain' (late 19th century), Wellcome Collection / Science Museum, published in Angel, 'Roses & Daggers' (2015)
CREDITS
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‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
In this episode, Emma and Christy look at the complex paintings of the Spanish-Mexican Surrealist painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963). During our conversation, we discuss female alchemists, artist’s studio-as-laboratory, science and occultism, the overlapping practices of spiritual and material transformation, Carl Jung and esotericism in psychoanalysis, the Fourth Dimension, ‘objective art’, and alchemical androgyny.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
WORKS DISCUSSED
Remedios Varo, Useless Science, or The Alchemist [or, La Mujer Alquimista] (1955)
Example illustration of a Rube Goldberg Machine (1931)
Evelyn De Morgan, The Love Potion (1903)
Remedios Varo, La Llamada (The Call) (1961)
Remedios Varo, Creation of the Birds (1957)
Albrecht Dürer, Saint Jerome in His Study (1514)
Adriaen van Utrecht, Still Life with Parrot, or Allegory of Fire (1636)
David Teniers the Younger, The Alchemist (1650)
Kati Horna, Portrait of Remedios Varo in her Studio (with crystal on easel) (1963)
Remedios Varo, The Juggler (The Magician) (1956)
Remedios Varo, Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (Could Be Juliana) (1960)
Marc Chagall, Homage to Apollinaire (1911-1912)
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923)
Remedios Varo, Harmony (1956)
Example of an alchemical androgyne from Aurora consurgens (15th century)
Remedios Varo, The Escape (1961)
REFERENCES
Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq, Remedios Varo: Science Fictions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023)
Sven Dupré, Laboratories of Art: Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the 18th Century (London: Springer, 2014)
Pamela Smith, ‘Laboratories’, in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 289–305
Mary Anne Atwood, A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1918 [1850])
Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Carl Jung, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena (1902)
Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (London: Routledge, 1980 [1944])
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Boston: MIT Press, 2018)
Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension (London: George Allen, 1912)
George I. Gurdjieff, In Search of Being: The Fourth Way to Consciousness, ed. Stephen A. Grant (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2021)
Salomon Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1582)
FURTHER READING
Tere Arcq, ed., Five Keys to the Secret World of Remedios Varo (Mexico City: Artes de México, 2008)
Micah James Goodrich, ‘Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies’, in Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements (London: Springer, 2023)
Emma Merkling, ‘Physics, Psychical Research, and the Self: Evelyn De Morgan’s Spiritualist Portraits’, Art History 46.3 (2023): 458–83
You can read more about Emma’s project on alchemy here!
Mark Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Ricardo Ovalle, et al., Remedios Varo: Catálogo Razonado / Catalogue Raisonné (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1994)
Lawrence M. Principe, ‘Alchemy I: Introduction,’ in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (London: Brill, 2005), 12-16
Arturo Schwarz, ‘Alchemy, Androgyny and Visual Artists,’ Leonardo 13, no. 1 (Winter 1980), 57-62
Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1994)
Remedios Varo, Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, trans. Margaret Carson (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2018) -
Emma and Christy watch Julia Ducournau’s first feature film, the cannibal coming-of-age body horror flick 'Grave' (or 'Raw'), 2016. In this episode, we cover cinéma du corps and New French Extremity, empathy and monstrosity, the horrors of being a girl, the horrors of being in a body, eating disorders, veterinary science, ‘being meat’ and becoming animal, vegan cinema, self control, desire, and what it means to be a moral cannibal — and a moral subject.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Julia Doucournau, dir., Grave (Raw) (2016)
Julia Doucournau, dir., Titane (2021)
Marina de Van, Dans Ma Peau (In My Skin) (2002)
Eadweard Muybridge, Running (Galloping) (1878–79), animated here
Horse running on a treadmill (still from Grave)
Eadweard Muybridge, Male Running (1878–79)
Close-up of Justine during the monkey rape discussion (still from Grave)
Horse being tranquillised (still from Grave)
Students crawling over ground during hazing (still from Grave)
Justine eats Alex’s finger (still from Grave)
Hair vomiting scene (still from Grave)
‘Two fingers will make it come up faster’ (still from Grave)
Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 4, a and b (1882), image published in Sidlauskas, ‘Before and After’ (2017), courtesy of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 5, a and b (1882), image published in Sidlauskas, ‘Before and After’ (2017), courtesy of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
‘C’est pas humain’ (still from Grave)
Justine waking up in the blood of Adrien (still from Grave)
Justine holds the rod against Alex’s head (still from Grave)
Justine washes the blood off Alex (still from Grave)
Justine and Alex’s faces blurring together on the prison glass (still from Grave)
The father’s chest (still from Grave)
Justine gets a nosebleed watching Adrien play football (still from Grave)
CREDITS
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‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy look at dental phantoms — terrifying but ubiquitous tools in dental education since the nineteenth century that feature humanoid heads made out of metal or wood, and a gaping mouth full of teeth. With these objects as our starting point, we talk about why dentists and dentistry are so scary, collectors of vintage medical devices, mouth erotics, the history of simulation and ‘machines’ in medical education, ghosts of the face and the word ‘phantom’, faciality and animality, face transplants and facelessness, dental horror (particularly Little Shop of Horrors) and fetish, and teeth as ‘luxury bones.’
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Columbia Dentoform Corp of New York, Mid-century Dental Phantom Head Model on Custom Stand (c. 1960s)
Agent Gallery Chicago, ‘Dental Phantoms’
Agent Gallery Chicago, Group of Dental Phantoms, KaVo Professional Dental Phantom Simulation (twentieth century)
Brian Kubasco, Steampunk Skull Dental Manikin Oxygen Version 6 (2013)
Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse (1910)
‘Teeth on a Stick’ Dental Phantom: E. Oswald Fergus, ‘Neue Erfindungen und Verbesserungen - Zahnaerztiliches Phantom’ (1894)
‘Skull’ Dental Phantom: Eduard Fleischer, Ein zahnaerztliches Phantom (1878)
‘Wig Maker Model’ Dental Phantom: Utrecht University Museum Collection, Phantom Head (late 1800s)
‘Realistic Face’ Dental Phantom: Utrecht University Museum Collection, Phantom Head (date unknown)
‘Realistic Face (contemporary)’ Dental Phantom: Unknown, Dental Phantom Head and Rubber Shroud (1990s)
ASMR cavity removal example (2022)
Example of memento mori painting: Edwaert Collier, Vanitas (1663)
Fox Photos / Getty Images, ‘Two trainee dental hygienists operating on a dentist's dummy’ (1960)
‘Xenomorph’ from the film Alien (1979)
‘Demogorgon’ from the show Stranger Things (2016)
Madame du Coudray, Obstetric Phantom / Machine (mid-eighteenth century)
Koichi Shibata, Geburtshülfliche Taschen-Phanome (1892)
Kevin James Thornton video: Tammy the Face Ghost (2024)
Mark Gilbert, ‘Saving Faces’ series (1999)
ORLAN, Surgical Series (1980s/1990s)
Frank Oz, dir., ‘Dentist!’ from Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Gore Verbinski, dir., Dental Scene and Mouth Scene from A Cure for Wellness (2016)
The animal mouth the dentist shows Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors
Thomas Rowlandson, Transplanting of Teeth (1787)
CREDITS
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Follow our Bluesky @drawingbloodpod.bsky.social
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Surprise — it’s a minisode! In our very first interview, historian of early modern mining Dr Gabriele Marcon (I Tatti / Harvard University) shows Emma and Christy a painting from early modern Spanish America. Join us as we learn about the erotics of mining, the power of menstrual blood, early modern medicine, female alchemists, the long history of women’s invisible labour, elixirs of life, midwifery, and (somehow) Mount Rushmore.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
GUEST
You can find Gabriele on Twitter @GbbaMrc, and read his work at https://itatti.academia.edu/GabrieleMarcon
MEDIA DISCUSSED
The Virgin of the Cerro Rico of Potosí (c. 1680)
Mount Rushmore (completed 1941)
CREDITS
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy look at Alfred Gilbert's sculpture Mors Janua Vitae (c. 1905–1907) at the Royal College of Surgeons, London — a life-sized bronze which houses the remains of the couple Edward and Eliza Macgloghlin. We talk relics and transi tombs; Victorian atheism and the history of unbelief; cremation, miasma, and lead-lined coffins; books bound in human skin; Victorian sex (and free love!); affairs between artists and patrons; Welsh druids; paganism; birth control and the throuple; infidel feminism; and abolishing the family.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Alfred Gilbert, Mors Janua Vitae (c. 1905–1907)
Henry Weekes, John Hunter (1864)
Etruscan couple tomb: The Sarcophagus of the Spouses (c. 530–510 BCE)
Alfred Gilbert, Mors Janua Vitae detail: panel
Alfred Gilbert, Mors Janua Vitae detail: 'baby angel'
Examples of G. F. Watts paintings: She Shall Be Called Woman (c. 1875–92); Orpheus and Euridice (exh. 1890)
Photograph of the lobby of the Royal College of Surgeons, from Artistic Possessions at the Royal College of Surgeons of England (1967)
Alfred Gilbert, plaster (and wood) version of Mors Janua Vitae, exhibited 1907
Alfred Gilbert, The Virgin (1884)
Relic example: the bones of St Valentine, Basilica of Santa Maria, Rome
Relic example: the Veil of Veronica (cloth said to have wiped Christ's face on the way to the crucifixion), Vatican version
Nineteenth-century mourning jewellery made with hair of the deceased
Case containing William Morris's hair, by Robert Catterson Smith and Charles James Fox (1896–97)
Transi tomb example from Boussu, Belgium (16th century)
Victorian garden cemeteries example: Norwood cemetery (1849)
Alfred Gilbert, Mors Janua Vitae detail: mushrooms or people?
Spiritualist painting referencing 'Mors Janua Vitae' (written on the book on the floor): Evelyn De Morgan, The Hourglass (1904)
Joseph Noel Paton, Mors Janua Vitae (1866)
Photograph of Dr William Price (1884)
Alfred Gilbert, Anteros, in Piccadilly Circus (1893)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy use Eugène Grasset's lithograph Morphinomaniac (1897) as a starting point to talk about artistic depictions of morphine and historical opioid addiction, as well as decadence and degeneration in fin-de-siècle Parisian society. In this episode, we cover vampires, hypodermic syringes, Orientalism and Japonisme, 'dangerous' women, masturbation, pleasure, and sex work, true crime waxworks, and gendered consumption — of women, goods, and drugs.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Eugène Grasset, Morphinomaniac (1897)
Photographs of a ‘hysterical’ woman yawning at the Salpetrière from Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (c. 1888-1918)
Eugène Grasset, Inquiétude (1897)
Aubrey Beardsley, cover illustrations for The Yellow Book, An Illustrated Quarterly (1894)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan Japonais poster (1892-93)
Bernini, detail from Rape of Proserpina (1621-22)
Edvard Munch, Vampire II (Vampyr II) (1895)
Walter Sickert, Reclining Nude (Le lit de cuivre) (c. 1906)
Examples of Parisian wax work: Death of Marat at the Musée Grévin (photograph taken 1959)
Albert Joseph Pénot, La Femme Chauve-Souris ('The Bat-Woman') (c. 1890)
Luis Ricardo Falero, Vision of Faust (1878)
Eugène Grasset, Vitrioleuse (The Acid Thrower) (1894)
Katsushika Hokusai, The Waterfall Where Yoshitsune Washed His Horse at Yoshino in Yamato Province(c. 1832)
Jules Cheret, Vin Mariani (c. 1896-1900)
Jean Bernard Restout, Morpheus (Sleep) (c. 1771)
Pablo Picasso, Waiting (Margot) (1901)
Pablo Picasso, Morphinomanes (1900)
Paul-Albert Besnard, Morphine Addicts (Morphinomanes) (1887)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song - Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy look at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph 'Maud' (c. 1874) and discuss plant consciousness, agency, and erotics. In this episode, we cover tendrils and tentacles, Victorian queerness, plant horror, early ecologies, Darwin and plant sex, interspecies entanglements, photography and desire, colonial botany, tipitiwitchets, sadomasochism, and whether your houseplant can kill you.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Julia Margaret Cameron, Maud (c. 1874)
Bernini, Apollo and Daphne (1622–25); see also this detail from Rape of Proserpina (1621–22)
Julia Margaret Cameron, Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, and Other Poems (London: King, 1874–75)
Alfred Tennyson, ‘Maud’, excerpted by hand by Julia Margaret Cameron (1874–75)
Julia Margaret Cameron, Pomona [Alice Liddell](1872)
Anna Atkins, cyanotype from Photographs of British Algae (c. 1843–53)
Earlier Julia Margaret Cameron illustration of Maud: The Passion Flower at the Gate (c. 1865)
Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Darwin (1868)
Charles Darwin, ‘Diagram showing the movement of the upper internodes of the common Pea, traced on a hemispherical glass and transferred to paper’ (1867)
Hokusai, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814)
Illustration from H. G. Wells’s The Flowering of the Strange Orchid (1894)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
We will be back soon with the second half of season two!
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Emma and Christy discuss M. Night Shyamalan’s 2021 film Old. We talk about what makes good (and bad) horror; harmful representations of disability in movies, art, and society; aging and chronic illness; the history of medical experimentation; critical disability studies; and “crip time”. We may not recommend actually watching this film, but we definitely recommend thinking through some of what’s going on in it!
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Old (2021)
Movie poster
Hotelier offering the secluded beach trip to the Cappa family
Mid-Sized Sedan
Corpse floating to bump into Trent Cappa
Close-up of Chrystal’s make-up streaked face as she dies
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Midsommar (2019) (see our previous episode on this film)
Get Out (2017)
Unbreakable (2020)
Split (2016)
Ann Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
The Kingsman (2014), the ‘Gazelle’ ‘super crip’ character
Poster for the Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937
The Black Stork, 1917 film
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy look at Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (c. 1940s) AKA dollhouses of death. We talk Victorian children and dollplay; the origins of legal medicine; CSI as visual analysis; Barbies and buzzcuts; girlbossing on the police force; busybodies, gender, and the history of policing; class voyeurism; contemporary art and crime scene photography; Sherlock Holmes; and the afterlives of evidence.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Frances Glessner Lee, 'Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' (VR experience) (c. 1940s)
Frances Glessner Lee, 'Living Room' and details ('Body' and 'Cigarettes') (c. 1943–48)
Frances Glessner Lee, 'Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Detail)' (c. 1930s)
Narcissa Niblack Thorne, 'Thorne Miniature Rooms' (c. 1930s)
Ben Shahn, 'The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti' (1931–32)
The Scarpetta House
Frances Glessner Lee, 'Red Bedroom' and detail (c. 1944–48)
Frames Glessner Lee, 'Parsonage Parlor' and detail (c. 1946–48)
Pre-Raphaelite painting: William Holman Hunt, 'The Awakening Conscience' (1853)
Angela Strassheim, 'Evidence (Kitchen Knife 2)' (2009)
Angela Strassheim, 'Evidence (Pistol 1)' (2009)
Angela Strassheim, 'Evidence No. 8' (2009)
Angela Strassheim, Left Behind series, 'Untitled (Horses)' (2004)
Paul Seawright, Sectarian Murder series, 'Tuesday 3rd April 1973' (1988)
Stephen Chalmers, 'Unmarked' Series (c. 2010)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy play The Sims 4 Paranormal ‘Stuff Pack’, exploring the game’s haunted house and séance aesthetics. We talk Victorian occult imaginaries, playing Sims as an emotional outlet, the promise of perfect capitalism, video games and affect, queer computer spaces, technopagans and cyber covens, and esoteric beliefs on the internet.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
All screenshots from The Sims 4 Paranormal can be found, in order of discussion, in the image carousel on the episode page linked above.
Electronic Arts, The Sims 4 Paranormal ‘Stuff Pack’ (2021)
Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017)
Jean-Marc Vallée, Sharp Objects (2018)
Solomon J. Solomon, A Conversation Piece (1884)
The green ghost, ‘Slimer’, from: Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters (1984)
Electronic Arts, ‘Can a computer make you cry’ advertisement (1983)
‘Miss Calendar’ from: Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)
Linden Lab, Second Life (first released 2003)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy look at the ethics, politics, and practice of displaying human remains — from museum collections of mummies to photographs of dead bodies. We talk bog bodies, the rights of the dead, dry vs. ‘wet’ specimens, Free Renty, consent, repatriation, museums’ imperial histories, burdens of care, and how recent art — from Andres Serrano to Gala Porras-Kim — might exacerbate or enact solutions to these issues.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading. PLEASE NOTE: we have elected not to include Serrano's photographs in this carousel because they contain content viewers may find especially upsetting. To view these images, click the image link beside his name below.
OBJECTS DISCUSSED:
Gala Porras-Kim, Sunrise for 5th-Dynasty Sarcophagus from Giza at the British Museum (2022)
Photographs from the ‘Life Before Death’ exhibition by Walter Schels at the Wellcome Collection (2008)
Andres Serrano, The Morgue (select works) (1992) [GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING]
Louis Agassiz, Renty, An African Slave (1850)
Head of Tollund Man, a bog body (from c. 375–210 BC)
Gala Porras-Kim, Sights Beyond the Grave (2022)
Gala Porras-Kim, A Terminal Escape from the Place that Binds Us (2021)
Gala Porras-Kim, Mould Extraction (2022): view one and view two
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy explore the story of surgeon-saints Cosmas and Damian through paintings of the ‘miracle of the black leg’ from c. 1370-1495 in Italy and Spain. These pictures bring up complicated ideas around visibility and race, surgery, and historiography. In this episode, we talk Blackness in early modern Europe, organ donation and race, the long history of systemic racism in the medical system, surgeon-historians, and looking at the past from a modern perspective.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
Master of Los Balbases, A verger’s dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg (c. 1495)
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533)
Joan Miró, A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress (Painting Poem) (1938)
Fra Angelico, The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian (c. 1438-1440)
Matteo di Pacino, St. Cosmas and St. Damian (c. 1370-1375)
Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994)
Example of a 19th-century silhouette portrait: Mamma (c. 1834)
Sano di Pietro, Madonna col Bambino Angeli e Santi, Predella con Storie dei Santi Cosma e Damiano (1444)
School of Castile and Leon, Saints Cosmas and Damian Healing a Christian with a Leg of a Dead Moor (c. 1460-1480)
Image of a dark-skinned man with a white nose: From the ‘Dissertation of Noses’ in A Solution to the Question (1733)
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy look at Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar and talk environmentalism, nationalism, community, grief, horror (obviously), folk art, facial transplants, whiteness, screaming, and IKEA.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
The camera turns upside down as the Americans enter Hälsingland
Part of the Ättestupa ritual (and the fall off the cliff)
The Hårga in their white clothing
The painting at the beginning of Midsommar
Dani as May Queen (and the famous ‘frown’)
Christian sewn into the bear suit
Dani running and choking in front of the burning building
Dani during the maypole dance
Grass growing from Dani’s hands and feet
Josh’s foot sticking out of the ground
Stig Lindberg, Melodie (1947)
Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)
The face-smashing part of the Ättestupa ritual
Facial difference: the Hårga’s inbred oracle
A member of the Hårga wearing Mark’s face
The yellow and blue A-frame building (IKEA vibes)
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy discuss surgical and cultural ideas embedded in Andy Warhol’s series of Before and After paintings (1961/62) of a nose job. In this episode we talk plastic surgery and big egos, the before-and-after image trope, racial typification, criminology, connoisseurship, and American consumerism and capitalism.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
Andy Warhol, Before and After [1] (1961)
Old Lady / Young Lady Optical Illusion (See also: William Ely Hill, My Wife and My Mother-in-Law (1915))
National Enquirer Ad (recurring ad; ran at least in 1961 and 1962)
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962)
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe (1967)
Andy Warhol, Before and After [2] (1961)
Andy Warhol, Before and After [4] (1962)
Example of: Jackson Pollock (1948)
Example of: Lee Krasner (1964)
Example of: Roy Lichtenstein (1964) (note his use of Ben Day dots for the girl’s skin)
Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola [3] (1962)
Andy Warhol, Bonwit Teller window with paintings (1961)
Margaret Bourke White, The Louisville Flood (1937)
Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi (c. 1500)
Giovanni Morelli, Ears Illustration from Italian Painters (1892)
Alphonse Bertillon, Ear Photographs from Identification of Persons (1893)
Examples of Francis Galton’s composite images: The Jewish Type (c. 1877–c. 1890) and Composite Portraits of Criminal Types (1877)
H. Stickland Constable, illustration showing an alleged similarity between ‘Irish Iberian’ and ‘Negro’ features in contrast to the higher ‘Anglo-Teutonic’ (late 19th c.)
Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker, Recreation of colouring Roman busts: the Treu Head (second century AD); see also marble bust showing traces of red pigment on lips, eyes, and the fillet (first century AD)
Andy Warhol, 13 Most Wanted Men (example from the most wanted men series of works) (1967)
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We're still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy look at archival photographs from the séances of Mina 'Margery' Crandon (around 1925) and talk slimy protrusions, sex, scientific photography, the testing of mediums, and the science of spiritualism.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
Will Conant, Untitled (Ectoplasmic Hand Emerging from Margery's Navel) (1925)
The Belvedere Torso (1st century BC)
William Hunter, 'Table 6' in The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Tables (1774)
Baron von Schrenck Notzing, 'Flashlight Photograph [of Eva Carrière]' (1911) in Phenomena of Materialisation (1913)
Will Conant, Untitled (Ectoplasmic Hand Emerging from Margery's Navel and Resting on Eric Dingwall's Hand) (1925)
[Photographer unknown], Untitled (Margery in a Trance During a Séance) (c. 1925)
Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll (1975)
[Photographer unknown], Untitled (Margery Under Control: Neck Secured with Steel Wire) (c. 1925)
Annie Louisa Swynnerton, Cupid and Psyche (1890)
[Photographer unknown], Untitled (Walter Putting Ectoplasmic Sample into Test Tubes) (1924)
[Photographer unknown], Untitled (Walter's Hand Emerges from Margery and is Fingerprinted in Wax) (1925)
(The archival photographs of Margery belong to the Harry Price Archives at Senate House Library, and the Society for Psychical Research, London.)
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We're still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! -
Emma and Christy look at Lee Miller’s photographs Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Surgery in a Place Setting I) and (II) (c. 1929) and talk about double mastectomies, fragmented bodies, feminist(?) art, Georges Bataille… and recipes for ‘cauliflower breasts’.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
Lee Miller, Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Surgery in a Place Setting I) (c. 1929)
Lee Miller, Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Surgery in a Place Setting II) (c. 1929)
Man Ray, Anatomies (1929)
Man Ray, Indestructible Object or Object to Be Destroyed (1923, remade 1933, editioned replica 1965)
Man Ray, Observatory Time: The Lovers (1932)
Roland Penrose, Lee Miller with Body Cast, known as ‘Bewitches Witch’ (1942)
Man Ray, Minotaur (1933)
Man Ray, The Return to Reason(1923)
Photograph by Edward Steichen, Lee Miller in a Kotex ad (1928)
Jo Spence, Property of Jo Spence? (1982)
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We're still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!! - もっと表示する
