Drawing Blood

You've likely noticed that we've been on bit of a hiatus - but we're still committed to the Drawing Blood project and we're hoping to come back with a new season soon! In the meantime, we're on the lookout for someone to help us outfit the pod with new music as we move forward. If that's you, get in touch with us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening! Keep sharing with your friends and enemies!

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.

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.

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)