Petra Kupper,
The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art.
London: University of Minnesota, 2007.
ISBN: 978 081664653 1
US$29.95 (pb)
360pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)
When I was about eight years old I lay in hospital with a long, thick strip of sticky material across my lower belly. As the young male doctor examined me and slowly began to peel the ‘thing’ back, I screamed my head off. “If you were a boy I’d smack you” he said – I’m not kidding he actually said this. Now in my forties the memory of this procedure, the upshot of an acute appendicitis which took me in lightning speed from primary school to the operating theatre, is etched into my skin through a chunky worm-like scar that has sprouted a few marks and puckers. Doctors who examine me these days tut tut at the patchy work – and yet I love this marker of childhood fuck-you-impudence and bravery. But hang on, the book review isn’t about me – or is it?
Scars are evidence of survival, indelible memories on flesh, signs of courage, tributes to our ability to mend. The paradox is, they’re often hidden. It’s as if revealing the vulnerability of the body will inevitably embarrass, repulse or disturb rather than affirm the evolving and shape-shifting nature/project of the self. This is the essence of Petra Kuppers’ latest book, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art – “The scar, the trauma, and the cut are not simply sites of loss” she writes “but also, more important for me, sites of fleshy (and skinly) productivity, if productivity at a price” (18-19). With a gift for bringing to life, art and performances that focuses on bodily imperfection, healing and decay, she gives us access to images largely reserved for small and exclusive audiences. Her reactions and memories are mixed into the vivid descriptions of each work she engages with. In reading how and what Kuppers experiences, I too am thrown back to my scars, discomforts, survival and mortality, as I imagine any reader of this mesmerizing study would be.
The book is divided into seven themed chapters each exploring a wide variety of performers/artists/media – Vision of Anatomy: Space, Exhibitions, and Dense Bodies; Living Bodies: Staging Knowledge, Fantasy, and Temporality; The Collaborative Arts: Pain and Performance; Intersections: Blood, Laughter, and the Space-Off; Monsters, Cyborgs, Animals: Crashes, Cuttings, and Migraines; Medical Museums and Art Display: The Discourses of AIDS; and Reaching Out: Outsider Art, Specialists, and Positions in Between. A wide variety of tastes are catered for in this visceral smorgasbord. Although I didn’t find every exhibition/performance art piece discussed of equal interest, and this is just a matter of personal curiosity/preference, I had more than enough to get my teeth into. The sheer breadth of Kuppers’ reach is admirable. The way she unravels the possible meanings of each experience she walks us through, via familiar cultural theorists (Foucault, Groz, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Cixous, or Haraway for example) and/or her own responses, is sharp, articulate and lyrical. There is a great deal of patience, commitment and density in her analysis. It makes demands on the reader, but only to guide us through different ways of imagining our own bodies, bodily encounters, and the fine, fleshy line between what is anatomically visible and invisible/possible yet unthinkable.
Kupper questions Linda Kauffman’s take on the S/M performance work of cystic fibrosis sufferer Bob Flanagan inBad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (1998). Noted for his performance collaborations with partner Sheree Rose and the documentary Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (USA 1997) where he nails his penis to a piece of wood (a scene I vividly remember when the film previewed in Australia), Flanagan’s work is for Kuppers not about deconstructing/reducing the human body to meat (as Kauffman sees it), but “meditations on the narratives of self and body that use affect and focus on sensation to redirect our gaze from the spectacular body back onto the spectator’s everyday, naturalized embodiment” (90). Again Kuppers would have us look at ourselves through performance. Sick still registers as an intensely moving film, playing with notions of the ‘everyday’ – the bodily pleasures and pains that keep us alive/addicted/motivated.
We’re also taken from the bodily plays of the Australian Stelarc, the performances of Kira O’Reilly who attaches leeches to her naked back during art gallery events, to artwork born of illness and AtaXia, Random Dance’s production based on the muscular disorder ataxia. Kuppers extends her discussion of embodiment by textually analysing an AIDS related episode of the television series CSI (‘Snuff’) and David Cronenberg’s Crash(Canada/UK 1996) where the wound and the scar are overtly sexualised.
These brief examples can’t do justice to the rich and absorbing qualities of The Scar of Visibility. It’s a piece of work that I’m sure will begin to appear on many university reading lists and appeal to a wide range of readers interested in art, performance, embodiment, gender and disability. By confronting us with the extraordinary Kuppers takes us home – back to the stuff that sits on and under our skin.
Terrie Waddell,
La Trobe University, Australia.