Drawing Blood

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 

Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_

Follow our Blue Sky @drawingbloodpod.bsky.social

‘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 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

Visit our website drawingbloodpod.com

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!!

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

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!!

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!