Photo: Dennis Brett

Craig Hilton was born March 1961 in Christchurch, New Zealand. He trained as a scientist and in 1995 completed a PhD at the University of Otago. Subsequently, he took a position as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and later at the University of Massachusetts. Various international journals have published his medical research findings.

His interests in photography began in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and continued to develop in the USA where he participated in shows and taught part time at the New England School of Photography. On his return to New Zealand with his new family, he completed an MFA at the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2003.

Craig Hilton’s interests include the use of photography and other media as well as writing to investigate the relationships between the photograph and the viewer and the intersections between science and art, technology and biology.

Sirius 8.April - 4.June 2006

ROUTINE ART

Craig Hilton’s photograph of Billy Apple (under anaesthetic and the sterile drapes) is a double act. It functions conceptually within an art context for both protagonists – the photographer plays witness to the conceptual artist’s activity.

In Hilton’s photograph we can see the starting details of Billy Apple’s hip operation - a passive performance declared as art. Billy Apple claimed his life activities as artworks in 1962 when he branded himself as the artwork and removed the separation between art and life.

Any taboos have been set aside, and surgeon, Gary French, with scalpel in hand is working his way through soft tissue to the ball-and-socket joint of Billy Apple’s right hip. He will successfully replace the ball at the top of the femur with a titanium prosthesis and lengthen Billy Apple’s right leg by 12mm. This corrects a pre-existing tilt to the patient’s pelvis for which he will be forever grateful – he is now straight.

To use a Billy Apple art term, Hilton has worked with the ‘givens’ of the operative process to make the large format photograph. The consent procedure, theatre environment, demands of sterility and progression of the operation all serve to impinge on the viewpoint. Translated into camera speak, Hilton, wearing scrubs, was positioned beyond the sterile field where he set up a 4”x5” camera mounted on a tripod. The limitations of a flattened depth of field, the overhead theatre light source, estimated exposures and staff that kept him in his place are the photographic ‘givens’.

Hilton’s work does not subscribe to the carnavalesque photographs of cosmetic surgery performed on performance artist, Orlan, where she swapped the painter’s brush for a surgical scalpel to become a prescriptive beauty. Nor does it relate to the cool, emptied out operating rooms of a carefully constructed Neil Pardington photograph. Neither particularly speak to the routines of surgical medicine.

Hilton, on the other hand, has captured the insider’s view of everyday surgery as well as another slice of Billy Apple’s art life.

— MARY MORRISON, March 2006

Craig Hilton

27. Billy Apple’s Operation Theatre

Price: $1100
Media: Archival Ultrachrome Ink printed on Acid-free Rag
Edition: Open
Dimension: 889 x 1187 mm