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The Scar of Visibility — Medical Performances and Contemporary Art

by Petra Kuppers
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
259 pp., illus. Trade, $90; paper, $29.95
ISBN: 978-0816646524; ISBN: 978-0816646531.

Reviewed by Fred Andersson
Kämnärsvägen 7J: 238
226 46 Lund
Sweden

konstfred@yahoo.com

Most things in Society are made and arranged in accordance with the needs and abilities of average people. Likewise, in visual arts, representations of the human body tend to conform to certain ideals and certain notions of normality. Disabled, disfigured, or simply old or poor bodies are however relegated to the margins of horror or social pity. But when did we see a history of disability as a theme in art, written not by a bystander but by a person with personal experience of being physically disabled? Petra Kuppers' recent book The Scar of Visibility is exactly this kind of history. Her focus in the book is on the role of bodily transgressions and medical equipment in contemporary art — especially performance art — and movies. One could argue that this is an area that is already well covered and thoroughly studied. However, the specific perspective of the author and the socio-political significance of her interpretations go far beyond the conventional art-historical survey.

The book begins with an introduction in which Kuppers tells us about the motivations that have directed her research and the theoretical insights that she has gained from philosophers such as Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Deleuze. The highly subjective and personal tone of this introduction is maintained throughout the book. In chapter one, Kuppers turns to the role of anatomy in contemporary visual culture, notably in the traveling exhibition Körperwelten by Dr. von Hagens. Chapter two is, by contrast, dedicated to living bodies. Here, Kuppers studies the significance of duration as an aesthetic element in Douglas Gordon's video installations and in Angela Ellsworth's performances. Other chapters focus on the role of collaboration (for example between the “super-masochist” Bob Flanagan and his assistant/mistress Sheree Rose) and “intersections” (between bodies and intruders, for example the leeches that are used by the artist Kira O'Reilly). In an especially intriguing chapter, Kuppers broadens her investigation into the field of popular culture and the role of cyborgs and monsters in movies such as David Cronenberg's Crash. The “discourses of AIDS” and the significance of so-called outsider art are other topics that get their separate chapters.

Finally, Kuppers (who is also a professor of English) connects her observations to her own activities as a community artist, i.e. an artist who consciously relates her work to the interests and problems of certain groups. In this case people with disabilities. She describes some of her collaborative work within such communities, and she really captures the creative excitement that she and the other participators must have felt. In the end, the authority and significance of Kupper's book emanates primarily from her way of letting her own life and work illuminate the work of others, and her ambition to show she relevance of some postmodern philosophy in relation to what she calls the “disability culture”. However, she is not always successful when it comes to the integration of theory and experience, and in some passages there is a tendency towards tiresome and complacent namedropping. The book wouldn't suffer at all from a removal of some the most commonplace references to Deleuze and others. However, this theoretical redundancy shouldn't hide from view the obvious merits of Kupper's work.

 

 

 

 

 




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