Reading and Writing Cancer by Susan Gubar

Author:Susan Gubar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Provoking us to feel for and with characters dealing with terminal disease, the sublime plays a role not only in fiction about death but also in visual art about cancer treatment. In viewing photographs and paintings, however, we never gain even the limited sort of access to subjectivity that Tolstoy and Olsen give us into Ivan’s and Eva’s thoughts and emotions. Instead, our tangled fascination and aversion derive from the weird juxtaposition between content—the patient’s lack of control—and form: the artist’s command, exerted primarily through cultural references. The detached scene of treatment within a framed photographed or painted image raises a host of unanswerable questions about the specifics of the individual’s background, of diagnosis and prognosis—information withheld from us. What we are given, instead, is the larger cultural context furnished by allusions.

When Hannah Wilke and Robert Pope put on display their own or another person’s suffering, they cross a line of privacy that most of us respect, and their transgression renders their work unsettling. They do so to propose a genealogy of suffering that makes the experiences of cancer patients less anomalous, though perhaps more disturbing.

Hannah Wilke was accused of narcissistic display when she produced photographs of body performances in the 1970s and ’80s, but in her later series Intra-Venus she explores the anti-narcissism prompted by intravenous treatments for leukemia. Scenes generally hidden from view—concealed inside hospitals and behind privacy curtains—become a spectacle involving a body stripped not only of clothing but even of a flimsy hospital gown.

On the Web, you can find Wilke’s images of herself as a sick, naked patient with bloodied body bandages on both hips, or bloated in a bed with tubes infusing the chemotherapy that caused her weight gain, or sitting on a plastic commode, again attached to infusion equipment. These pictures cannot but instill fear at the fatigue evident in the downward cast and shadowed eyes, the flaccid flesh, the hair loss. To some, they may look repugnant, perhaps even masochistic or sensational. Yet because Wilke orchestrated the staging and the taking of these visceral photographs, we understand her to be not only the model but also the creator, not just an object but also a subject.

In this regard, the series Intra-Venus differs from the series of paintings Ferdinand Hodler produced from 1905 to 1915 of his dying model, Valentine Gode-Darel, who, after two breast surgeries, deteriorates from a vertical strong young woman to a horizontal debased corpse. Touching as some of these images are, it is impossible not to think about the artist drawing while his model is dying, his making something permanent of the absence she will become. To this extent, the paintings seem exploitative.

But Wilke actively directed her husband, Donald Goddard, to produce lasting images out of her passivity as a patient and her impending erasure. Her agency is revealed through her allusions to cultural history. So, for example, the image of her washing herself in a shower is taken through a shower curtain and recalls the frightful murder in Psycho.

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