The Dot is In!…Reflections on Roberts Rules

[August 17, 2012] Paul Kolker presents “The Dot is In!…Reflections on Roberts Rules,” an exhibition about the past hundred years in the development of American healthcare as influenced by the political process and most recently by the judiciary through a metaphorically ethereal, yet heroic, decision by Chief Justice Roberts. Kolker, through his historical narrative, anachronistic assemblage and montage of his cast of heroes, transforms a picture of the first use of ether anesthesia at the ether dome of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston almost 166 years ago into an epic battleground setting for a US Supreme Court decision of first impression that has its own unique numbing effect!

In the spring of 1960, Kolker sat for the first time in awe in the Bullfinch Amphitheater, under the ether dome of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Although he knew of the story of general ether anesthesia that began more than a hundred years earlier not far from where he sat, he had not seen the Robert C. Hinckley painting, “First Operation Under Ether, 1881-94,” at the Countway Library of Medicine until July 1965 when he was Harvard Fellow in transplantation surgery at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston and when Medicare and Medicaid came into being. At that time, Kolker was eluting, fractionating and identifying antibodies from rejecting canine kidneys using a dye, fluorescein isothiocyanate, which labeled the antibodies and showed where they anatomically attached, to basement membranes of vessels of the rejecting kidneys. Those photomicrographs, with of all things, when then viewed under very high magnification, were green fluorescing dots of antibodies which serendipitously became Kolker’s first dot pictures!

What Kolker shares of his art in this exhibition are his personal encounters, experiences and insights into what has become America’s premier insurance based healthcare industry of the twenty-first century. Kolker is truly the learned professional _ the artist who expresses and narrates his story by producing and curating the exhibition into an historical narrative and a road map for the future; the surgeon who has always had his finger on the pulse of humankind and knows what healthcare is all about as a provider, caregiver and patient; the healthcare lawyer who understands the language of the rule of law; the former director and president of a physician owned holding company of a healthcare insurance plan, who has learned first hand at 25 Beaver Street how the insurance industry works; who is Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at North Shore/LIJ Glen Cove Hospital; and who above all else, is a strong advocate for healthcare insurance for all!

As Chief Surgeon John Collins Warren said on October 16, 1846 at the Bullfinch Amphitheater upon his completing the head and neck surgery on Gilbert Abbott with the first general ether anesthesia given by Dr. William Morton…” Gentlemen, this is no humbug!” In this same vein Kolker paraphrases the statement as voiced by Chief Justice Roberts, in Kolker’s large-scale (99 x 198 inches) painting, “Ladies and Gentlemen, This is No Humbug! 2012.” While not unlike Woody Allen, in his Midnight in Paris, Kolker sets to canvas his enumerated and resurrected heroes of the past hundred years of American healthcare’s progress from Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 to the present. With scalpel in hand, Chief Justice Roberts validates the enumerated powers of congress to preserve the general welfare of our nation, the patient in the picture, and in accordance with the constitution….while Justice Sotomayor holds the anesthetic genie in the ether bell and Justices Kagan, Ginsburg and Breyer proudly assist as Ted Kennedy hovers over the patient, the Affordable Care Act of 2010, taking the pulse while clearly displaying the Senator’s indefatigable smile of success as finally particularized in Kolker’s grid of colored dots!

The Dot is In!…Reflections on Roberts Rules is on view at Paul Kolker, downstairs in the salon at 511 West 25th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in Chelsea from September 13 – November 15, 2012. For information please email info@paulkolker.com.