The shock of human truth

Discuss this article atFirst Drafts, Prospect's blog

Tom Chatfield: Is Wellcome Collection something new?

Ken Arnold: Yes, I think we're doing something that's pretty unique here because of the sheer mix of galleries and facilities. They defy people's tendency to think in categories—we have old and new together; we're a museum, a library, a gallery, a collection, a venue; we have all these different themes that connect with and explore medicine from so many angles—the social, the scientific, the literary. This resonates with my own early passion for museums, because it feels like we're recovering something of what museums once were: places where you could find curious things and were given tools to wonder about them in an active way. The narrative you get here is bizarrely broad—it's humanity, what it is that makes us human—and it starts with the sense that at the core is our health and a scientific understanding of that. The science then leads on to art, to culture, to spirituality. You loosen disciplinary confines, and end up creating more curious and inspiring stories than by thinking there are academic limits that you must stay within.

TC: And what's the story behind it?

KA: In at least three ways, the story starts with Henry Wellcome. Pragmatically, it starts with his building. Second, it's run and funded by the Wellcome Trust, which was one of his babies—and, like the Trust, Wellcome Collection is all about health and medicine. And third, Henry Wellcome left us the bizarrely eclectic range of interests that are captured in this sprawling edifice. We're trying to update that legacy and make sense of it today.

TC: How did you set out to do this?

KA: First, by gathering around me a remarkably able, energetic and enthusiastic group of colleagues. There were also a heck of a lot of resources the Trust already had—this huge collection, direct access to scientists, contacts in the art world. So we went through what we could draw on, and Wellcome Collection's character was determined by what was already in our past and on our doorstep. The crucial ingredient all these things have in common is that they are real and original; the one early decision I made was to try not to create materials, but to draw on things that are already out there, as Henry Wellcome did. He mopped up vast acreages of material culture that already existed and then pulled them together. We followed this lead not only in presenting his artefacts, but also in trying to use intermediaries as infrequently as possible—so, we say, let's have a conversation between a real artist and a real scientist rather than between journalists speaking on behalf of science and art. It's about trying to be as unmediated as possible, and of course you have to do a different kind of mediation to achieve this. The idea at the heart of it is that people have the right to be engaged by the things themselves rather than by somebody talking on their behalf.

TC: In a way, this felt slightly unsafe. I found more that was genuinely shocking—like the heart from a recent transplant operation, set inside a block of glass, which the person from whom it was removed has actually been to see—than I do in most modern art, which is "shocking" only in inverted commas. Is there a conscious desire to jolt people out of mentalities that say it's "just art," or "just science"?

KA: I suppose that's the outcome, but we started from a different place, with the idea that the body and our idea of the body is pretty shocking, and there's something both revolting and exciting about contemplating what is going on inside us. It's been very difficult for us not to expose in all three of the galleries things which are in and of themselves shocking, and it seems to me that the curatorial discipline is to take the gratuitousness out of it, so that you end up with a genuine sense of surprise, sometimes sadness, sometimes disgust, but not with a sense of being tricked. We've tried not to do it salaciously, but it ends up touching really raw nerves. I also hope it's not too po-faced. There are jokes and bits of humour in there, some of it gallows humour. I'd be disappointed to think that visitors aren't smiling for some of the time.

TC: I certainly found a lot of playfulness in the collaborations between disciplines—human chromosomes depicted as pairs of socks, for example. Does this reflect something in the wider world?

KA: The arts and sciences are going through a rather good period at the moment, and there's a lot of interesting fermentation between them. There are still basically art galleries, heritage sites and science places, but what Wellcome Collection is trying to do is to get around that clichéd sense in which you have to know the parameters of a space before you get inside. We hope this is a generous enough space that you can come in and genuinely be awed and educated. Some things here are purely scientific, yet they knock you off your feet because they're so extraordinary. Similarly, a lot of the art is rigorously research-based: Ellie Harrison recorded everything she ate during her 22nd year, and that's a kind of research project, an idiosyncratic, very personal project. So you can learn from the art, and be left in emotional turmoil at the science.

TC: One of the most beautiful things I saw was the motion of the machinery used to sequence DNA.

KA: Oddly, scientists often seem to feel freer to use the word "beauty" than artists, and the things that feel the most quintessentially beautiful in here are often scientific: the DNA robot, the heart-lung machine, the 17th-century anatomical diagrams; these are spellbinding. There are essays to be written about what they tell us, but instantly they are just amazing things to gawp at.

TC: Another divide the galleries cross is a historical one. In The Heart exhibition, you see a heart-lung machine right after a 16th-century wooden icon of a heart, and suddenly you find yourself constructing these astonishing continuities between them. Is this intentional?

KA: I'm slightly allergic to criticising the present for failures of historical awareness because I think that, to some extent, we're all guilty of this—but I do think that in Wellcome Collection we're re-invigorating some old and obscure objects by drawing direct parallels with the present. And there is a part of me that hopes some historians will be offended by this, just as there are scientists who are offended by the inclusion of art, or artists who can't understand what the science is for.

TC: Have you tried not to put curatorial pressure on people?

KA: That sense of not being led by the nose is important. There are, for instance, dozens of drawers with artefacts in, unlabelled on the outside, that people can just open. It's in part derived from some of my favourite museums, like the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, and of course Pitt Rivers was a formidable figure of inspiration for Wellcome. Everything is there for you to do your own discovering and browsing around—the stuff is the story.

TC: And how will it develop?

KA: At least half of our space is for temporary projects, so every week there are one or two new events, and there's a new exhibition every three months. There's a common thread, but in any given week and any given month there will be a different idea and a different methodology. The analogy of a river is useful: the banks stay the same, but the thing that makes you want to go back and look again and again is the fact that the water coursing through is never the same.

TC: What do you think Henry Wellcome would make of all this?

KA: I think he'd be very satisfied and completely amazed. He'd recognise the spirit that it's built on, but I think that as well as the technology, he'd be most astonished by who Wellcome Collection is for. In the Edwardian era, "the public" meant a relatively small number of the carefully washed, but now it is freely available for everyone.The openness would be quite shocking.

TC: There are people today who would still identify what Henry Wellcome did with an unsavoury colonial project. Do you think there's anything to that?

KA: Wellcome was of course a man of his time, and there's lots of bad in that. But he had a huge amount of respect for views that were not his own. He collected far more non-western than western materials, and his life's work was very much based on a global stage; he did lots of great work in the Sudan, he integrated his archaeological interests with his humanitarian instincts. You can find any amount of stuff in his story that makes you cringe, but running through it is a sense of somebody who had a progressive view of society. And the Wellcome Trust is thoroughly international—something we hope Wellcome Collection is very much part of.

Images, above, from top to bottom: "Jelly Baby 3," Mauro Perucchetti, 2004; "HIV Sculpture," Luke Jerram, 2004; Sri Lankan mask, circa 1870

Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's blog