Julian Walker

Proposals & Forthcoming














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A proposal for an exhibition based on Sir Thomas Browne’s Musaeum Clausum & Bibliotheca Abscondita

 (The Sealed Museum and The Concealed Library)

 

 

Sir Thomas Browne 1605 – 1682 was born in London and moved to Norwich in 1637, where he practised medicine till his death.  His writings on archaeology, medicine, philosophy, design and religion include Religio Medici (the Faith of a Physician), Urn Burial (an exploration of early cremation practice), and Pseudodoxia Epidemica (an expose of common errors and mistaken beliefs).

 

Browne has been described as a link between the beginnings of scientific thought in the early enlightenment and the mystical faith of the Mediaeval Church.  As a thinker, he refers to a wide range of sources in literature and religious writing, while as a scientist he is an empirical observer.

 

The regard in which he was held in his time can be seen from the circumstances of his knighting; King Charles II, on the occasion of a visit to Norwich, was intended to confer knighthood on the Mayor of Norwich, who stood aside in favour of the eminent local writer, physician and authority on many subjects.

 

The Musaeum Clausum & Bibliotheca Abscondita, a text published posthumously in 1684 as one of a set of tracts, is a description of a curious collection of books, pictures and curiosities, some lost, some viable, some fantastical, imagined to be in a seventeenth century "sealed museum and hidden library".  It has been read as carrying aspects of the satirical, melancholic and as an example of the breadth of knowledge and allusion in use at the time.  The British Library has copies of Miscellaneous Tracts (1684) and Complete Works (1686), which contain the earliest published versions of the work.

 

The proposed exhibition is to comprise artists' works in response to Browne's museum.  This proposal is collated by Julian Walker.

 

Artists' works in response to Browne's museum and library

 

 

The following artists have been invited to make preliminary proposals in response to the text, and their proposals are available on request:

 

William Cobbing

Polly Gould

Uriel Orlow

Judith Stewart

 

 

I have proposed to make the following works:

 

Three works responding to three items in the Musaeum Clausum, one from each section

1/5. A punctual relation of Hannibal's march out of Spain into Italy, and far more particular than that of Livy, where about he passed the River Rhodanus or Rhosne; at what place he crossed the Isura or L'isere; when he marched up toward the confluence of the Sone and the Rhone, or the place where the City Lyons was afterward built; how wisely he decided the difference between King Brancus and his Brother, at what place he passed the Alpes, what Vinegar he used, and where he obtained such quantity to break and calcine the Rocks made hot with Fire.

A film of a family seaside event, testing the process of breaking up a large rock using fire and vinegar; presented as a family video.

2/4. A Moon Piece, describing that notable Battel between Axalla, General of Tamerlane, and Camares the Persian, fought by the light of the Moon. 

A drawing of the moon exactly as it appeared on the date and at the time of the battle, as seen from the location of the battle.

3/8. A large Ostridges Egg, whereon is neatly and fully wrought that famous Battel of Alcazar, in which three Kings lost their lives.

An essay inscribed upon the surface of one or more ostrich eggs, examining the history of ostrich eggs as grounds for writing; as cultural objects conveying a variety of concepts; the relationship if any between the ballad, if it is the ballad in the Roxburgh Ballads, which describes the Battle of El-al-quibir (The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Stukeley) or George Peele’s play The Battell of Alcazar with the Death of Captain Stukely; Sir Thomas Browne’s collecting and ornithological studies; and the importance to European history of the Battle of El-al-Quibir in Morocco 1578. The egg or eggs to be on a slowly revolving motor.

 

 

 
Private Walker
 

Frederick William Walker attested under the Derby Scheme in 1915, thus affirming that when called he would immediately join the Armed Forces.  He was enlisted in 1916 and sent to the Western Front, where he was wounded and evacuated, and returned to the front in 1918.  Between August and November 1918, he was stationed near Houplines, where he was injured in a gas attack.

 

I have visited some of the places mentioned in the wartime diary of my grandfather, Rifleman Walker, and have seen the places he would have travelled through.  These include Toc H, the all-ranks rest centre in Poperinge, which preserves a concert hall where troops entertained other troops with concert-party performances.

 

In peacetime Fred Walker was a concert-party performer of comic songs, and though his diary records no performances at or near the Front during the conflict, it does contain lyrics for a song he was writing.  In February 1919 he was part of a concert-party troupe called the Acorns (a reference to his battalion unit) which gave a performance at the YMCA in Roubaix.

 

I am working with the ideas of how we read the land which was so essential in this conflict, in terms of the front-line soldier’s close visual association with the soil; and with how it is possible to comprehend the naivety of concert-party in the context of the soldier’s experience of World War One.  

 

I am currently working with the following ideas:

 

  • Video filmed through the lenses of my grandfather’s spectacles (he was rendered partially-sighted by the gas attack, which he documented in his diary).

 

  • Some work made from fragments of ceramic in trench areas.

 

  • A video/live art work of me performing comic songs without accompaniment, in the field at Houplines.   Songs of the period I have records of my grandfather performing are My Wedding Gift, I Know Where The Rhinosoceros, and Bill’s Asthma.

 

  • Close photographs and drawings of the soil, particularly areas of the location of the trenches where my grandfather was stationed.  Two large-scale drawings have recently been shortlisted for the Discerning Eye Drawing Bursary 2008  and will be shown at the Discerning Eye exhibition in November 2008.

 

I will also be trying to find the spot where my great-uncle, Gunner Leonard Lightfoot, was killed in 1917, and looking at the possibility of making related work focusing on that location.

   
 
















Research-based project on cross-disciplinary thinking

and its place in historical medical practice

 

In 1787 Edward Jenner kept a journal on the experiments he was doing moving birds between nests, placing a young blackbird in a hedge-sparrow's nest, a wryneck in a blackbird's nest, and so on, and observing the results in terms of acceptance and rejection. In 1796 he placed cowpox pus from Sarah Nelmes into two cuts in the arm of James Phipps, followed two months later by smallpox pathogens, noting the results in terms of acceptance and rejection, and effecting the first vaccination against smallpox.

This project is based at the Royal College of Physicians and the Museum of Medical History and the Institute of Microbiology & Hygiene in Berlin; it is a research led artwork based exhibition exploring the notion of cross-disciplinary thinking and its relevance to medical research. Particularly the project looks at those medical researchers who have been active in other fields, such as natural history, archaeology, or literature, and how thinking methods work across disciplines. The project will be shown in London, Berlin, and we hope in the Thackray Museum of Medical History in Leeds. There will be educational tie-ins, reciprocal education-based visits between the curators in London and Berlin, and a publication. We are currently exploring the idea of taking part of the show to schools and hospitals.

The exhibition will be sited with objects from the respective collections. The research will be looking at the work of Robert Koch, Rudolf Virchow, William Stukeley, Paul Ehrlich, Hans Sloane, Edward Jenner, Anthony Askew, Richard Mead, and others. The artwork will explore ways in which we may think about the multi-disciplinary research activities within the context of the cultural history of medicine. The works will comprise hybridised objects, employing forms and materials from the material cultures of both the examined worlds and the position of the examiner. They will seek to make links between the tools and the objects of study in the various fields of activity, to examine how the material culture indicates underlying connections in notions of desire, probing, treasure, purification, naming and knowing. The work will seek to provoke thinking about the links between cross-disciplinary thinking and empirical processes in medical exploration.
















 
 
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