Art matters: How art and medicine intersect in the art of Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability (Sir William Osler, 1849–1919). ¹

We often underestimate the experience of one field upon another. Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) serves as an example. Widely known today as a polymath with knowledge of biology, chemistry and microbiology that led to ‘pasteurisation’, the killing of bacterial micro-organisms, it was not until recently that I learnt that Pasteur had also been an artist. ² However, even more fascinating is the claim by the author Dr. Joseph Gal that it was Pasteur’s experience of lithography (a process involving etching a drawing onto a limestone slab with wax or oil and acid, and pressing white paper on top to produce a mirror image) that influenced his knowledge of organic chemistry and his description of the phenomenon of chirality. This relates to the ‘handedness’ of some molecules in crystals which, like hands, are mirror images of each other, yet cannot be superimposed. In other words, they are similar but different and produce different effects. A contemporary polymath, the doctor, artist, critic, novelist, filmmaker, arts administrator and teacher Brian O’Doherty provides us with another example, but from the opposite perspective, that of medicine informing art.

We commonly associate imagery in medicine with anatomical drawings or representational depictions of disease. Since the 1960s, some artists have sought a more conceptual approach beyond the anatomical or representational in the making of art. The ‘art of medicine’ is a phrase that seems to our technological biomedical model of medicine, somewhat dated. But is it? The word ‘art’ implies a sophisticated view and knowledge of the world that lies beyond that of common sense. In medical terms, it represents a form of knowledge that includes much more than identification of a disease; it is one that looks beyond a variety of contexts that might have an impact on the person and their disease. These are the same tools that an artist avails of when attempting to present an aspect of the world we inhabit. When the artist is also a medical doctor who brings both areas of specialist knowledge together, the results can often be thought provoking. One who has done so in a particularly fascinating way is Brian O’Doherty (a.k.a. Patrick Ireland).

Born in Ireland in 1928, O’Doherty (like Pasteur) always wanted to be an artist (personal communication). However, pressure from the family meant he followed his three elder brothers into the medical profession. While in medical training he taught himself to draw and paint exhibiting at the same time as publishing art criticism and poetry. After qualification with a M.B. B.Ch. B.A.O. in 1952 at University College Dublin, he won a Nuffield scholarship to work at the Experimental Psychology Laboratories in Cambridge, U.K. where he studied perception and memory. This experience together with a medical degree was to have a significant bearing on his artistic path. He emigrated to Boston in the late 1950s on a Smith-Mundt scholarship to Harvard where he was awarded a Masters of Science degree in 1958. From this point for the next 50 years he followed his chosen path as an artist, writer and critic living and working in New York.

An early conceptual artwork from the New York period with a direct link to his medical past was based on the notes and image cards of a perceptual experiment carried out earlier in Cambridge. The experiment set out to test imaginative responses in two groups of old and young people, on the assumption that the older group would be less imaginatively active. Using a series of cards with his own handmade drawings in which one object morphed gradually into another (tongs into a three-legged stool, the word THE into a toothbrush, etc.) (Figure 1), he showed that in the ‘in-between’ zone of identification, older people’s abilities exceeded expectations. This work was subsequently published in Alan Welford’s Aging and Human Skill (1958). ³ O’Doherty adopted this earlier material to make Between Categories (a significant title surely?) in 1968, but on this occasion, the context was art. As one of the pioneering generation in New York of the global phenomenon of conceptual art, this was a type of art that placed primary emphasis on ideas in contrast to traditional concerns with the aura, beauty or skill of an artwork. OPEN IN VIEWER

Mounted on a board in four registers, the first summarised text book data on perception, the second reproduced the experiment from Welford’s book, the third described the experiment, the fourth recorded O’Doherty’s meditations on the experiment and its application to the evolving field of conceptual art:

If you find yourself at the border of a category, at the border of the marvellous, you suddenly find yourself in another familiar territory. All you have done is switch categories. All categories are false, but they cannot be escaped.

This quotation becomes an apt description of the artist’s own life in which conventions of life and art were consistently challenged in a variety of ways. One of these was the issue of identity and specifically, artistic identity, perceived by some artists in the 1960s to be in danger of becoming as much a commodity as an artwork within a predominantly capitalist society.

To understand the seriousness of O’Doherty’s role in conceptual art, we must divert momentarily from the main theme, although even here, part of a doctor’s daily engagement with birth and death lies in the background. A critical convention within art since the late 1950s/early 1960s was that it should exist for art’s sake and not become contaminated with the outside world, in particular, politics. In 1972, O’Doherty directly refuted this dictum by making his artist’s name representative of a political conflict in his native country. Before a lawyer and witnesses, O’Doherty formally changed his artist name to Patrick Ireland in protest at the killing of 14 civil rights marchers by the British Army in Derry, Northern Ireland the same year, an event known as ‘Bloody Sunday.’ This performance by an emigrant artist addressed elements that shape identity like naming, ⁴ language and the colour symbolism of national flags. With peace and a power-sharing government established after many years of bloodshed, O’Doherty ‘buried’ an effigy of Patrick Ireland in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and resumed the artist name O’Doherty in 2008.

But to return to art and medicine, earlier in 1966, the traditional concept of portraiture as the true likeness of a person’s face was overturned with a medically devised portrait of fellow artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) (Figure 2). Duchamp was regarded as one of the most seminal, provocative thinkers in the world of art in the second half of the 20th century. Yet, O’Doherty chose Duchamp’s heart rather than his mind for this key conceptual portrait. However important the mind is to the body, it cannot function without a pumping heart. The portrait worked on a number of levels: as a perverse tribute to an artist he admired but equally as a challenge to some of Duchamp’s ideas about art. In particular, O’Doherty wanted to challenge Duchamp’s dictum that once you put art on the wall of a museum or gallery it ‘dies’. O’Doherty took an electrocardiographic tracing of Duchamp’s heart using equipment rented from a nearby medical centre. When finished Duchamp asked: ‘How am I doctor? Thank you from the bottom of my heart’. The tracing became a 16-part artwork of drawings and boxed oscilloscopes which when plugged in, simulated the heart beating indefinitely on museum and gallery walls ever since. Duchamp died in 1968, making O’Doherty’s portrait the last. With it, the art of medicine came into play in a novel way: this medically generated portrait revealed evidence of heart disease in terms of an older infarct on subsequent examination. OPEN IN VIEWER

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) once said: ‘Every writer invents his own precursors’. This is as true for O’Doherty as it was for Borges. Apart from Duchamp’s ideas on art, O’Doherty’s medical background led him to consider the consequences of the 1967 medical breakthrough of the first successful heart transplant by Christiaan Barnard. What effect would an artificial heart have on a recipient’s identity? In a lecture in 1970, ‘The Politics and Esthetics of Heart Transplants’, he returned to the subject: ‘We find Dr. Barnard’s scalpel separating two ages from one another’. Another source of the thinking behind Portrait of Marcel Duchamp was the practice of preserving the heart of distinguished individuals after death. Dating back to the 13th century amongst royalty as well as dignitaries of the Catholic Church, the practice was based on the belief that the heart was a symbol of immortality, purity, suffering and love. When the Irish politician of Catholic Emancipation (an act of 1829 which allowed Catholics to sit in Westminster), Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847) died on his way to Rome, he requested that ‘his body go to Ireland, his heart to Rome and his soul to heaven’. The silver-encased heart lay in the Church of the Irish College in Rome, then at St. Agata dei Goti (6thc.A.D) until 1925 when the Bank of Italy extended into the grounds of the church. It has not been seen since!

The five senses of the human body have been another medically informed source for O’Doherty’s art since the 1960s. Apart from being organs of perception they have also been the mainstay of the medical examination for millennia. Study for The Five Senses, Hearing (1966), for example, is a gouache, ink and pencil drawing on paper that represented anatomically the development of the human ear. Hearing (1966) is a mixed media vertical cylindrical sculpture showing the rotating semi-circular canals of the ear through windows placed at eye level. The Five Senses of the Bishop of Cloyne (1967–1968) (Figure 3), the bishop of the title being a favourite philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), who lived in the small Irish village of Cloyne until his death, is a work that demonstrates an important shift in O’Doherty’s art. In this quasi-scientific drawing, a key component of conceptual art, language, is fused with colour and the five senses. The language is an ancient Celtic one called Ogham (2/3-7th c. A.D.) that uses merely lines. From his earlier study of perception, a medical training and an Irish background, O’Doherty had devised his own distinctive form of conceptual art that would be sustained in drawings, installations, wall paintings, sculptures and paintings for over 50 years. OPEN IN VIEWER

The Body and Its Discontents of 1964 (Figure 4) refers most obviously to a medical training. The body reappears here in the form of a found rectangular wooden box with movable compartments or ‘drawers’. On each of these 60 half cubes, the artist inscribed the names of anatomical parts of the body (pancreas, pericardium, vas deferens, ovary, etc.) in red; the sense organs (Eustachian tube, Meckel’s ganglion, cochlea, Bowman’s glands) in yellow; physiological parts (saliva, lipase, lactic acid, bilirubin) in white and pathological features (infarction, arthritis, colon cancer prostatitis) in blue. In this work, colour is used not as the traditionally expressive medium of art but as a taxonomic scientific tool. By inviting the viewer to randomly rearrange the cubes, the ‘body’ could produce different combinations of colour-coded features of phantom patients and phantom illnesses. The title too has a medical reference, obliquely invoking one of medicine’s great innovators, Sigmund Freud, who wrote about the mind and neurosis in Civilisation and Its Discontents in 1930. OPEN IN VIEWER

So how has this doctor/artist contributed to the field of art? One of the ways was to produce artworks which brought issues to the foreground that are not only central to the sciences but also to the arts and philosophy, namely, how do we acquire knowledge of the world? Is it through a priori reasoning alone (rationalism) or through the sensory experience of the world (empiricism)?. The latter became part of the scientific method. In the late 1960s, the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) called phenomenology adopted the empirical approach stating that the essence of perception and consciousness lay in direct experience. This became a fruitful source of work for many artists in the 1960s, including O’Doherty, who, as already seen, also invoked the empiricist, George Berkeley. His dictum Esse est percipi posited that the world only existed through direct perception. In a revealing letter to art critic Lucy Lippard in 1984, O’Doherty (then still Patrick Ireland) wrote that Berkeley:

fused your senses by making them idea and sensation and object at once…So perception is the critical tissue through which the world knows us…The senses weren’t just five inferior pathways to the citadel of ideas up there in the lighthouse, but were one and the same with it. You are what you see, touch, hear, feel, taste.

The above artworks show this artist’s determination to challenge the dominance of the western tradition of rationalism which had become the basis of modernist formalism in art. By alluding to the body and the senses from within an art form that privileged ideas, O’Doherty firmly refuted the traditional dichotomy between the two. At the same time, he demonstrated every doctor’s experience of disease as a phenomenon that involves not only the body but also the mind.

It is encouraging that in recent decades in undergraduate schools of medicine in the western world, there has been a realisation of the value of the humanities alongside the biomolecular model of medical education. Their insertion into the curriculum, it is hoped, will broaden future doctors’ approach to a discipline that remains primarily an art that uses scientific methods. The examples of Pasteur and O’Doherty show how fruitful a collaboration of art and science can be. Apart from many awards for his contribution to art, O’Doherty also received an Honorary Fellowship from his former profession, at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in 2003 for his contribution as a doctor to another field.