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87 Exposed Wounds: The Photographic Autopathographies of Hannah Wilke and Jo Sp

87 Exposed Wounds: The Photographic Autopathographies of Hannah Wilke and Jo Spence Tamar Tembeck, PhD candidate (ABD), Dept. of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University Résumé L’article s’intéresse aux autopathographies produites par Hannah Wilke et par Jo Spence inspirées par la lutte qu’elles ont toutes deux menée contre le cancer dans les années 80 et au début des années 90. Les deux artistes se sont tournées vers l’autopathographie pour réinventer leurs propres images corporelles, ainsi que l’image sociale de leur maladie. En examinant de près leurs productions, l’article décrit les stratégies esthétiques et politiques qu’elles emploient pour transmettre leur expérience. Wilke transforme activement son vécu souffrant en l’image d’un exosquelette blessé, où des marques réelles, ainsi que des signes construits autour de sa douleur, sont exhibés sur son corps et par lui. Par cette transformation, l’artiste parvient à exprimer une position critique face aux préjugés culturels qui sont rattachés à (l’image de) sa maladie. Spence, pour sa part, crée une dialectique visuelle du sujet malade, où son image ne peut facilement être réduite aux statuts extrêmes de « victime » ou d’« héroïne ». L’image du sujet qui en émerge demeure dynamique et complexe, et échappe aux stéréotypes préjudiciaux. L’article se penche également sur la dimension performative impliquée dans toute autoreprésentation, et, plus précisément, dans les objets culturels liés à la maladie tels que les talismans et les ex-voto, qui sont décrits par Thierry Davila comme étant des « formes agissantes ». Les œuvres de Wilke et Spence nous portent à réfléchir sur la lourde responsabilité qu’il nous faut assumer face aux œuvres pathographiques et aux images de la souffrance. The contemporary movement towards autopathographic production can undoubtedly be attributed to the growing vis- ibility of cancer and AIDS in the last quarter of a century. Yet the potent ties between illness and artistic representation reach back at least as far as Antiquity, notably in the guise of objects invested with restorative powers, such as amulets and talismans. The power attributed to representations tied with illness has not been restricted to their curative potential, however. In the history of art, the exposure of diseased bodies has consistently borne the mark of the abject, and the majority of illness repre- sentations in the West have moreover risked colluding in the circulation of stigma. Representations of illness thus also possess a potentially dangerous might, and as such, are often met with a compelling mixture of fear and fascination. As both Sander Gilman and Susan Sontag have suggested in their cultural analyses of illness, contemporary representa- tions of disease continue to carry the burden of stigma once attributed, for instance, to nineteenth-century representations of the syphilitic or mentally ill.1 Given the weight of such cul- tural inheritance, in order to depict ill subjects as well as the subject of illness with full dignity today, artists have sought to avoid proliferating stigmatic attributions to the ill body in spite of the dissemination of its image. Hannah Wilke, a multidisci- plinary artist, and Jo Spence, a photographer, each turned their established practices towards autopathography after developing cancer. As Wilke’s Intra-Venus series and Spence’s The Picture of Health? and The Final Project attest, both artists developed aesthetic strategies that complexify the representations of their diseased bodies. Each invests her self-portraits with a presence that confronts stereotypical denigrations of sick subjects. While the term autopathography is most often employed with reference to autobiographical accounts of illness or suffer- ing that take a narrative form, its definition is broadened here in order to include visual media, such as Wilke’s and Spence’s photographic self-portraits, which relate experiences of physi- cal illness first-hand. As public exposures of intimate suffering, autopathographies often employ tactical rhetorical devices that help to shape their affective reception. Viewers are typically torn between embracing or refusing empathy towards the image and towards the subject depicted. In this way, autopathographic works raise significant ethical questions that pertain to viewers’ responses and responsibilities in the face of images of suffer- ing. Following the examination of selected autopathographic works by Wilke and Spence, the problems raised in responding to such images will be explored in greater detail in this essay’s final section. Critical receptions of pathographic works typically fall along interpretive lines. From the angle of the image’s produc- tion, (auto)pathography is perceived as a militant act of situated visibility, as a vehicle for catharsis and recovery from suffering, as a performance of identity, and as a relational outreach to- wards others. These interpretive perspectives come together in the belief that the practice of (auto)pathography is intrinsically restorative, if not therapeutic. From the angle of the image’s re- ception, autopathography is deemed to convey firsthand docu- mentary “truth” of an experience of illness. It is also surmised that the reception of autopathographic representations can provoke vicarious catharsis in their viewers. While this suggests that autopathographic works potentially build bridges between their producers and receivers, such images also effect a relational memento mori, and as such may instead widen the affective and communicative gap. Autopathographic Performativity The above interpretations all credit pathographic representa- tions with a certain power to act. The performative dimension of the pathographic image is tied to its function as a pharmakon: 88 RACAR XXXIII | Numbers 1-2 | 2008 art can enable finding a cure within a poison, which here takes the form of creativity within disease.2 For Arthur W. Frank, this is the “dangerous opportunity” afforded by illness, and the very reason for which autopathography can be morally restorative.3 The remedial function of art harkens back to the birth of aes- thetics, with Aristotle’s Poetics. Aside from Aristotle’s (and in the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht’s) privileging of the dramatic form as containing a morally curative potential, there exist a number of pagan and religious objects that embody a similar potential for positive transformation in both their producers and receivers. In his description of the ancient potency of icons, Thi- erry Davila introduces the notion of an “acting form” (“forme agissante”) to explain their performative quality: “The image must go beyond the exclusive scope of pure contemplation or distanced veneration in order to reach a realm in which direct action onto bodies and events constitutes its veritable raison d’être.”4 The figure of the ex-voto can similarly be regarded as a type of acting form. An ex-voto functions as the incarnation of a prayer or wish, and tangibly commemorates ensuing health improvements. As a fabricated object, its role is to intercede be- tween the person making demands and a divinity. In effect, the ex-voto actually performs what is being prayed for: it acts both as the sign of a prayer and of its accomplished result, but also as a depository for faith and psychic investment that is dedicated towards healing. As we will see, the autopathographic photo- graphs of Wilke and Spence are likewise invested with such complex acting potential. On the one hand, the creative pro- cess of self-representation offers the artists a means by which to transform their subjective experiences of illness. On the other, the acting power of their pathographic images also potentially spills forth, in order to alter viewers’ typically stigmatizing per- ceptions of disease. The performative dimension of the autopathographic im- age is exacerbated by its ties to autobiography and to self-por- traiture. According to Judith Butler, the fiction of the subject “I” is instantiated through accounts of the self, in addition to its everyday performances.5 Such accounts can take the shape of testimony or autobiography, both of which are closely linked to the functions of autopathography. In any account of the self, the construction of a symbolic “I” depends upon the concomi- tant projection of a linguistic and conceptual “you.” As Butler explains, accounts of the self are inevitably structured in the form of an address to another.6 Outside of this structure of ad- dress, the “I” and its referent simply do not exist. It is through an interlocutory address that the account of the self enables and even instantiates the existence of the “I” and its referent. In this sense, any autobiographical account that is directed towards a receiver, such as a public autopathography, effectively and per- formatively constructs the “I” to which it refers. As in any autobiography, then, the account of the self al- ways remains at least a partial fiction.7 Amelia Jones examines the theatrical exaggeration conveyed in photographic self-por- traits by Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, and others. For Jones, their self-portraits are all characterized by no- ticeable artifice. The exaggerated performativity in each artist’s self-display appears to “foreground the ‘I’ as other to itself.”8 In their works, the supposedly represented “I” remains forever un- graspable and irreducible either to the image, or to its referent (which here consists in the artist as both the author and subject of her work). Thus, in light of Butler’s and Jones’s insights, at least two levels of performativity can be found in feminist auto- pathographic images: on the one hand, the constitution of the subject “I” through uploads/s3/ exposed-wounds-the-photographic-autopathographies-of-hannah-wilke-and-jo-spence.pdf