UCLA Collects! Bodies of Knowledge (review)

UCLA Collects! Bodies of Knowledge sparkles and burns with energy. The objects are stunning, and the exhibition curators show rare restraint in allowing the viewer to respond to each object rather than being subjected to an overstructured narrative. Quite wonderfully, one gets the sense that the exhibition is a visual and intellectual conversation that the curators are sharing with the public.

UCLA Collects! takes for its topic collecting as a social and cultural phenomenon using artifacts representing the human body. Within a single gallery, the exhibition presents the university's collecting enterprise, skillfully balancing an array of dazzling objects from UCLA's five collecting institutions—the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, the Department of Special Collections in the Charles E. Young Research Library, the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, the Rock Art Archive in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, and Fowler Museum itself—and shows the contribution of its central patron, Franklin D. Murphy, who was UCLA chancellor from 1960 to 1968. It also shows that collecting was difficult, demanding, and frustrating work that went far beyond the scope of Dr. Murphy's tenure. The inner circle of the exhibition tells the individual histories of the five institutions, with choice pieces from their collections. It thus has affinities to the recent exhibition at the British Museum on Henry Wellcome's early twentieth-century efforts in assembling his medical history museum.

Arranged around the outer space of the gallery are objects from UCLA's anthropological, art, literary, medical, and ethnological collections, the collaborative effort of their curators and directors. The theme is the human body. The visitor is greeted by an extraordinary four-and-a-half-foot-high papier-mâché Manuel Linares skeleton, and then encounters a series of astonishing drawings, photographs, ritual objects, books, clothing, and medical artifacts, many of which have never previously been put on public display. Released from their disciplinary boundaries, the objects are visually connected to each other in unexpected, challenging, and playful combinations, rather than in the standard format of caption-based, chronologically arranged artifacts. One remarkable case brings together intensely colored illustrations of head dissections from Gautier d'Agoty's extraordinary eighteenth-century Anatomie de la tête, Antonio Sandri's nineteenth-century Preparazioni anatomiche, and a nineteenth-century commercially produced German anatomical wax model of the head and neck. These particular objects are visually dazzling; their sheer physical presence is arresting; and they display a masterful use of individual media forms. They also challenge us to experience the deeper connections that have always linked and continue to energize the endeavors of art and science.

Creative visual and intellectual juxtaposition and a sense of playfulness are not new exhibition strategies, but today, when ponderous catalogs and audio tours have frozen the experience of looking, museum visitors welcome direct contact with the object. One is reminded of Lorraine Daston's observation that if "things are 'speechless', perhaps it is because they are drowned out by all the talk about them."¹ This exhibition reminds us that objects are the principal reason we go to museums. As an added benefit, the curators here offer viewers a rare window onto the process of exhibit-making, with its distinctive energy and moments of delight and insight.