Week 4: Art & Medicine
Week 4:
Art and medicine go hand in hand in some aspects of life. There are many artists that like to use human anatomy in their art, and there are doctors and surgeons that can be considered artists seeing as they are changing the way someone looks through surgery. Because of the creation of the MRI machine, more artists have had the ability to incorporate the body in their art on a more intense level. Like artist Virgil Wong using the human muscular system in his art, or Justine Cooper who used the MRI machine to create different art pieces using the images and sounds.
The largest crossover that was pointed out in lecture this week was plastic surgery. While plastic surgery was created to help soldiers that were wounded in war, it has evolved into something a lot more. People get plastic surgery all of the time because they want to look different. Their plastic surgeons are the artist, and the patient is the canvas. While plastic surgeons are artists when it comes to plastic surgery, they are not always great artists. When professor Vesna was talking about plastic surgeons during lecture I immediately thought about the show Botched. Two plastic surgeons fix what other surgeons messed up. People come to them because they want to look a certain way, and they can not because another surgeon messed up.
While plastic surgery is one way art and medicine meet, I think tattoos are also other ways that they meet. While tattoo artists are not technically doctors, they use needles to inject ink into people’s bodies permanently because the person wants art on their body. In my eyes, getting a tattoo is basically a minor surgery. Being the person that permanently inserts ink below someone's skin is a very important job because these people trust you to not mess up something that they can not get rid of very easily.
1) “J U S T I N E C O O P E R.” j u s t i n e c o o p e r, http://www.justinecooper.com/.
2) S;, Casini. “Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as Mirror and Portrait: MRI Configurations between Science and the Arts.” Configurations, U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22371981/.
3) Tyson, Peter. “The Hippocratic Oath Today.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 27 Mar. 2001, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/hippocratic-oath-today/.
4) “Art.” Virgil Wong, 8 Sept. 2020, https://www.virgilwong.com/art/.
5) Ingber, Donald E. The Architecture of Life. http://www.learningmethods.net/downloads/pdf/ingber--architecture.of.life.pdf.
Hi Danielle!
ReplyDeleteI love your analysis of how art and technology are so intertwined. I find your focus on plastic surgery so interesting, and like how you used Botched to show how something that was once a necessity used during war is now something that normal people get and even mess up— it shows the development in medicine through how common it is now. Additionally, I like how you pulled this together with tattoos— I’ve never though of this as a mixture of art and medicine; however, it makes total sense considering how expressive and permanent they are.