The Slice: Cutting to See

- Guillotines and Scalpels Provide Unique Opportunity To Reveal Unexpected Views into Architecture -
- AA School 20 Nov – 15 Dec 2010 -

17 November 2010: From the surgeon’s scalpel to Madame guillotine, the slice can reveal a secret order, uncover hidden structures and open new views. The Slice, a new exhibition at the ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, will explore the relationship between the external and what lies within by examining the peculiar traditions that link visibility to the swift saw.

The convention of the architectural cross-section here finds its parallel in the physical sectioning of anatomical specimens. The exhibition is made up of models, apparatus, and objects encouraging the voyeur to look beyond surfaces, delve deeper to explore hidden structures and provide fascinating insights across disparate fields and historical moments.

The Slice: Cutting to See
20 November – 15 December 2010
AA Gallery, 36 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3ES.
Press preview: 19 November 2010, 10am – 12pm  (Or a time suitable for you – please call Will on 020 7221 7883  to arrange).
Private view: 19 November 2010, 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Opening times: Monday to Friday 10.00am – 7.00pm; Saturday 10.00am – 3.00pm
Entrance is FREE

Items on display include:

A silver medal commemorating Joseph Ignace Guillotin, as President of Paris Academy of Medicine, by J.P. Droz, French, 1809.
Guillotin was opposed to the death penalty and hoped that a more humane and less painful method of execution would be the first step toward a total abolition of the death penalty. At that time, beheading in France was typically done by axe or sword, which did not always cause immediate death.

Tonsil guillotine, steel, chrome-plated, British, 1920-1937, with folding handle
A tonsil guillotine is used to remove the tonsils in a procedure called tonsillectomy. Tonsillectomy by guillotine, popular from the 1870s onwards, gradually fell out of favour in the twentieth century due to the high numbers of people who experienced heavy bleeding and recurrent sore throats, although the technique still remains in use today.

The FRAMEicarium by Hugh Hayden
A childhood ant-farm has been recreated into a living work of art that showcases the geological excavations of the tunnels formed by ants. The FRAMEicarium is constantly changing and active, demonstrating the elegant performance of everyday tasks and behaviours of an ant community. The ant-farm is housed behind acrylic within a frame from the estate of American financier, banker and art collector J P Morgan and a reproduction Hudson River-esque print titled Enchanted Glade by T Banks.  

The exhibition is a collaboration between the AA School and Cabinet Magazine, curated by Dr Christopher Turner, A former Editor-in-Chief of Modern Painters and an editor at Cabinet,  and  Prof Graham Burnett a historian of science, from Princetown and Cambridge.  (Curator Biographies below).

 
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Press information
Press releases and high resolution images can be downloaded from http://mediacentre.kallaway.co.uk/architectural-association-school.htm

For further information please contact Will Kallaway: 020 7221 7883 / william@kallaway.com

About the AA School
The ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTUREis the world’s most renowned international and influential school of architecture. Since 1847 it has pioneered a belief in architecture as profession, culture and form of human enquiry and is credited with fostering the creation of worldwide leaders of architecture.

AA School alumni include architectural leaders Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Lord Rogers, Will Alsop and many others. Through its unique, year-long, unit based system of teaching, direct intervention in cities and its intensively collaborative team based approach to learning, the school brings together disconnected worlds, fresh ideas and inspiring insights.  The AA School is celebrated worldwide as an imaginative setting for architectural culture.

About the curators:

Dr Christopher Turner, A former Editor-in-Chief of Modern Painters and an editor at Cabinet, he is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian. He completed a PhD at the London Consortium, a post-graduate PhD programme in the Humanities at the University of London, of which the Architectural Association is a part, and helped set up the Central Cities Institute, an urban think-tank based at the University of Westminster. Turner's ADVENTURES IN THE ORGASMATRON: HOW THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION CAME TO AMERICA will be published in June 2011 by HarperCollins in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US.

Prof Graham Burnett a historian of science, and recently held the Christian Gauss Fund University Preceptorship. The recipient of a 2009 Mellon New Directions Fellowship, he is currently working on connections between the sciences and the visual arts. Professor Burnett graduated from Princeton in 1993 as the salutatorian and a recipient of the Pyne Prize. He completed a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University (1997 [2001]), where he was a member of Trinity College. Burnett was awarded the 1999 Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography, and he has been editorially involved with the History of Cartography Project. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001 he taught at Yale and was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Columbia University (1997–1999) and an inaugural fellow in the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library (1999–2000).

His first book, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (2000), examines the relationship between cartography and colonialism in the nineteenth century. He is also the author of Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (2005), a monograph on Cartesian thought and seventeenth-century lens making, and A Trial By Jury (2001), a narrative account of his experience as the jury foreman on a Manhattan murder trial. His most recent book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (2007) won the 2007 Hermalyn Prize in Urban History and the New York City Book Award in 2008. Burnett has written essays and reviews for a variety of publications, including the New Yorker, Harpers, the Economist, the American Scholar Daedalus, the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Republic.  In 2008 he became an editor at the Brooklyn-based art magazine Cabinet <http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/> .

About Cabinet Magazine
Cabinet is a quarterly non-for-profit magazine based in New York. Now in its tenth year, Cabinet embraces and promotes the most expansive definition of ‘culture’ possible, one that includes both the quotidian and the extraordinary, in order to foster an ethic of curiosity about the world we have made and inhabit. (www.cabinetmagazine.org)