Researching the collection of the Fleming Museum, Oatman discovered that its first director was a eugenicist. Eugenics was the "science" of racial purity - actually a totally irrational hodgepodge of racism, ignorance and anxiety. This installation is a fictitious recreation of Perkins's office, with many of the disturbing artifacts he collected combined with video and other work made by Oatman. Oatman's project goes to the heart of political challenges to science's claims to objectivity: science has always been shaped by the biases and prejudices of the people who create it.

from MASSMOCA's unnatural science (linked below)

{science has always art has always people have always, there's no way out of the bias, no way to shed prejudice, the cowardly self-blinding this particular attitude represents has fed the horrors of heartless 'eugenic' manipulation, fed it by denying the truth on which its faulty logic rests. the beauty and grace of the wolf is eugenically achieved, as is any grace and beauty in the natural world, including human intelligence,what we are experiencing is the tantrum of the denied child, the suicidal patricidal matricidal tantrum of the denied child, you can't. I will. you can't. and a chain of denials and conquests, each more polarized than the last, leading to the scalpel's soft slick entry into the heart of life. what we're really talking about is _intentional_ eugenics. obviously there is a technocratic eugenic selection being made now, as there were all different kinds of selections being made all through our biological history. what I see taking place is duplicitous arrangement, a hidden eugenic by a disguised selector, and because people have let themselves be calmed and made docile over time, the calmness and docility have become paramount traits, what should be feared now is not race-based eugenics, but gene-loyal selection, which is, in an inside-out way, what was always going on. more and more it occurs to me morality was a kind of opiate, to keep the crowd still long enough for selection to be carried out without panic. see how quickly 'eugenics' is passed over without discussion, without any real logical rebuttal, and yet wasn't there selection of a kind on the slave blocks of early American commerce? or think of the 'mountain men' of the 19th century and how they were revered from a distance, where besides prison are their counterparts today? isn't that a selection? a eugenics of softness, if you will. and isn't there a selection now, on the freeways? is it entirely random? I wonder sometimes. yet if it is, why were people so much more frightened by the 'Sniper'? over 100 people a day die on the roads of America. every day, all year long. nothing eugenic about that at first glance. and so that's more acceptable, isn't it? but why?}

put here 8:16 PM

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