Blood on Silk/Buy Sell, installation zinc, fabric, ink, video and found objects, 165 x 70 x 110 (h)cm 2017
This work focuses on the materiality of blood. It considers the daily ritual within ICU of sampling blood for external testing. If the results are unsatisfactory, adjustments are made to the medication or treatment, a little bit of time is allowed to pass and then the blood is resampled for retesting. This process continues. Such a focus on testing also applies to the supply of blood and blood products for transfusion.
Blood on Silk: Buy/Sell 2017, Zinc, fabric, ink, video and found objects, 165 x 70 x 110 (h)cm
The wonder cabinet work, Blood on Silk: Buy/Sell, sits on the boundary between the determination of blood’s quality and materiality in transit and the governance of the means and modes of transit. Again, a zinc box sits on a table top. Groups of red stained test tubes protrude through the top face of the box. Within the interior, rotating lights flash through the red stains of the test tubes. The sound of the rotating lights is similar to the sound produced by a mechanical test tube washer.
A context of the work is the process of quality control and governance of the blood, blood products and body parts being prepared for transit into another body. Testing is a direct examination of the material properties of a specific individual unit. The tensions between the rule of law, self-determination, anarchy, and autocracy are evident in the global market for blood, blood products, and body parts, and are played out in complex and changing patterns in this work. These market configurations for blood and blood products can be likened to the models found in markets supplying many contemporary commercial products and services. In the contemporary situation, the health and safety effects of a product or service are controlled by the relevant layer of government through a framework of regulation and law. When a market of providers can convince the government that they can regulate themselves without interference, they establish a set of standards and administer their own compliance. Within the globalised market for blood, blood products, and body parts, the intersections of anarchic black markets, the practice of self-regulation and the administration of international law can become very complicated and produces multiple tensions. This last focus on materiality reflects the effects of this specific market, and in particular the black market, in many parts of the world.
In Australia, the ability to buy and sell blood and blood products on the open market is controlled by government regulation.[1] It is not legal to pay donors of blood or plasma suppliers, and there is little evidence of a back market. There are private banks providing storage for blood products, such as umbilical cord blood. Private blood banks were established in the 1980s but have since ceased trading.[2] The payment of plasma suppliers is allowed in the United States which is now responsible for around 70 percent of the world’s known plasma supply. Many poorer US states, such as Alabama, are both net blood and plasma exporters.[1]
The second aspect of the work is the removal of blood for external testing; that is, testing outside of the body and not in real time. This movement of blood from one body to the laboratory is one of the rituals or routines of the ICU; it is a form of quality control testing of how the body is functioning. For the longer-term ICU patient, even this procedure becomes routine; something that is so familiar it is domesticated.
In other areas of the hospital the taking of blood samples is less frequent and tends to be a marker that something is not quite right, that more information must be acquired. Within the hospital, the distribution of blood samples is also regulated following proscribed paths and patterns, whether using a manual or automated system. The information within blood is a substantial instrument of surveillance; a way of describing the body’s experience of the past, its current state in the present, and its predictable future.
[1] Luke Shaefer and Analidis Ochoa “How Blood-Plasma Companies Target the Poorest Americans “ 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/plasma-donations/555599/ accessed 24th Jan 2018
[1] Therapeutic Goods Act. (1989). https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2016C01117 accessed 15th September 2019
[2] Australia National Blood Authority “ Home” 2018 https://www.blood.gov.au/ accessed 24th Jan 2019
The Exhibition:
The exhibition included historical medical artefacts from the Medical History Museum and the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Melbourne with contemporary artworks by Ollie Cotsaftis and Sarah McArthur (Aus) Basse Stittgen ( NL/DE), Hotham Street Ladies ( Aus/UK/DE), Bea Haines(UK) John O’Shea (IE) Daniel Elborne (Aus) Tobias Klein, Victor Leung and Jane Prophet (CN/USA/UK) Penny Byrne (Aus) Jipil Jung (KR) Izabela Zolcinska (PL/NO) John McGhee (Aus) Jordan Eagles (USA) Bai Yiluo (CN) Cecilia Jonsson (SE/NO) Art Oriente Objet ( Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoit Mangin) (FR) Nick Thieberger and Rachel Nordlinger (Aus) Judy Watson (Aus) Raphael Lozano-Hemmer (MX/CA)
https://melbourne.sciencegallery.com/blood-exhibits/blood-on-silkbuy-sell