Subcutaneous

The Charles H. Scott Gallery is pleased to present the film and photographic work of New York-based artist, Matthew Buckingham. Buckingham’s Subcutaneous, a double-screen 16mm film installation, series of photographs and book traces out a history of physiognomy – the belief that a person’s personality might literally be read on the surface of the face through analysis of physical appearance – as it was developed and criticised in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment with special emphasis on the contemporary legacies of physiognomy in film and photography.

In 1831 Charles Darwin was almost denied passage on the HMS Beagle by the ship’s captain because the captain did not like the shape of Darwin’s nose. Darwin nearly missed the voyage that led him to theorise natural selection (a theory based, in part, on observations he made of the variation in shape of Finches’ beaks in the Galapagos Islands) because the Beagle’s captain was a follower of Johann Caspar Lavater and a believer in physiognomy.

In Europe, almost a century before Darwin’s voyage, the emergence of a new middle class and related changes, such as the repeal of sumptuary laws which regulated clothing according to social standing, created a demand for new tools of social navigation. Lavater’s enormous four-volume treatise, “The Physiognomic Fragments, Intended to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind”, not only attempted to fill this gap, but claimed to reconcile a science and religion while effectively employing xenophobia and racism to justify European expansion through colonisation.

The matrix of friendships and rivalries surrounding the publication of Lavater’s book, which included a very young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the highly critical physicist GC Lichtenberg, form a narrative that is explored through Buckingham’s installation. The double-screen film presents placeless people and people-less places that evoke and question film’s capacity to construct historical memory through conventions of acting, costumes and props.