ALAN BLEAKLEY
In his talk, Alan Bleakley demonstrated the value of art-science collaboration by drawing on both historical and contemporary research. He opened his talk by investigating the strong discipline boundaries that still exist based on a history of separation and the continual policing of borders in any science and art collaborations. He referred to Bruno Latour’s suggestion that modernism never happened, because the post-Enlightenment project of purity through discipline separation offers an impossible project in the face of a hybrid world. The posthuman condition, where bodies and identities are mediated and distributed by technologies, is hybrid. Hence, Bleakley inferred, we cannot justify a separation between 'art' and 'science', especially where this is framed as an opposition. Further, stereotyping of scientists by artists, and vice versa, is unproductive. Rather, let us celebrate dialogue and collaboration, particularly where this raises issues of difference that act as the grit making the pearl.

The presenter also gave an account of a project where 3 experienced visual artists have been paired with 3 consultant physicians - a radiologist, histopathologist and dermatologist - who work daily with visual clinical material. The project seeks to anatomise clinical judgment, or diagnosis, as an aesthetic and ethical, rather than technical, process. The artists have been able to illuminate and deepen the way that the doctors make sense of sign and symptom.

In conclusion, he argued for an aesthetics of medical praxis in which medicine is recognised for its value as a cultural resource, where the sensitive practitioner comes to a new identity construction through resistance to habitual or normative practices. This approach calls for an overhaul of traditional medical education, in which the medical humanities plays a central role and is not an afterthought or a compensation for an instrumental education. In an era where visual artists have appropriated medical images, the talk demonstrated how medicine itself displays aesthetic, connoisseurship and curatorial interests.

Alan Bleakley began his academic career as a scientist, first in zoology and biochemistry, and later neuropsychology. Disillusioned by a lack of ethical consideration in the treatment of laboratory animals, he switched to study of psychotherapy, humanities and cultural studies, gaining a DPhil from the University of Sussex in a comparison of the use of animal imagery in classical shamanism and contemporary archetypal psychotherapy.

He has taught and researched in higher education for nearly 30 years and currently works in medical education and medical humanities for the Peninsula Medical School, Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, based at a large hospital in Truro, Cornwall. He has been active in developing a core medical humanities curriculum and a research base in medical education and medical humanities.
His current research focuses upon teamwork in operating theatres and the aesthetics of medicine, including clinical judgment. Alan has collaborated on visual arts projects with his wife Sue, and is a widely published poet. He has written three books on the psychology of imagination and is currently working on a book on the aesthetics of medical practice. His main passion is surfing.

 

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