For Dear Life: Art, Medicine and Disability, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCASD), September 19, 2024 – February 2, 2025
- Cuts thumb and finger on a table saw.
- Nurse cleans hand under cold water.
- Waits for cab.
So begins a numbered list under the heading “SHIPYARD WORKER’S HAND,” a section of Fred Lonidier’s The Health and Safety Game (Abbreviated) (1976/78). The list goes on to describe reconstructive surgery and a legal settlement, eventually reaching the following terminus:
- Loses unemployment.
Beside this list is another that describes the events surrounding this shipyard worker’s injury in greater detail, alongside photographs of the worker’s hand and interview quotes from him and his wife. One picture depicts his injured left hand pressed atop the other, the tip of his right thumb in search of a match.
This version of The Health and Safety Game, a project which has been installed in many different iterations,[1] features a large poster board and a video playing alongside it with documentation of injuries and health conditions with workplace etiologies. Each diagnosis belongs to a profession: Lead Worker’s Blood, Machinist’s Lung, Meat Inspector’s Disease. The edges of the board feature statements examining the many ways that employers may do wrong by their employees’ health.
There are many ways to characterize The Health and Safety Game. It is citizen science, conceptual photography, labor activism. The exhibition For Dear Life: Art, Medicine and Disability, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCASD), presents it as artwork. The exhibition, sponsored in part by the Getty Foundation’s current PST ART: Art and Science Collide initiative and curated by Jill Dawsey and Isabel Casso, will be on view until February 2nd, 2025. The aim of this review is to treat the exhibition, as well as its constitutive artworks, as legitimate texts in the history and anthropology of medicine. The scholarly valence of museum practices is well-recognized in art history, but seldom are there opportunities to engage with such cultural production in the other aforementioned disciplines. Here, by way of art history and its exhibitionary complexes,[2] is an opportunity to do so, in a format mirroring that of the book reviews published on Somatosphere.
For Dear Life’s most explicitly stated argument is that across the history of art, artists have modified their practices significantly in response to health-related provocations, often their own experiences of illness and disability. This loosely chronological account of American art since 1960 highlights how the specter of illness haunts major moments in American art history, with rooms thematized around the women’s liberation movement, HIV/AIDS, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (disability activism being a particularly prominent motif in the show), among other topics. The exhibition serves to rewire art history as not an account of individual geniuses or aesthetic teleology, but rather a series of dialectical relations between moldable materials and fallible bodies.
Notable in this arena are two works by the interdisciplinary artist Hannah Wilke, ink and watercolor on pillowcases from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center produced during a stay there in 1992 as she underwent a bone marrow transplant for lymphoma. On one cotton canvas, skeletal ink flowers teeter upwards beside an M logo, the coarse grain of the material making Wilke’s linework shaggy.
This was not the first time Wilke made work with fiber. In 1973, she exhibited Laundry Lint (C.Os), vaginal sculptures made from the titular material.[3] She stated that the lint was gathered from the many times she did laundry for her partner, the artist Claes Oldenburg.[4] At that point, Oldenburg’s career eclipsed hers, and so she transformed the detritus of his life into her own artwork, a fuzzy commentary on gendered labor and the misogyny of the art world. Laundry lint and hospital pillow cases are both patriarchal power structures made manifest.
Wilke, an artist most known for her work on sexuality, is historiographically reconfigured by For Dear Life as a woman wrestling with her illness through the place biomedicine provided her to rest her head. Other artists featured in the show, such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Bob Flanagan, and Frank Moore, are more commonly historicized through their medical conditions and disabilities, but For Dear Life expands the scope of such interpretations dramatically. Painter David Hockney’s proclivity for sending images by fax after years of hearing loss, alongside photographic documentation of Simone Leigh’s Black Panther inspired Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) performances, demonstrate the unexpected incursion of medicine into the work of artists usually not considered through its prism.
Wilke would die from her lymphoma four months after she produced her pillowcases.
The objects in For Dear Life are rarefied and compelling enough that they demand to be reckoned with as conducting rods for new discourses beyond art history and across the medical humanities. Most strikingly, many of these artworks represent a largely untapped archive of patient data, produced by and for individuals often operating outside of biomedical structures.
Access to patient data is a perennial problem in the history of medicine in particular, where poor safeguarding of records combines with well-intentioned restrictive legal frameworks[5] to produce a dearth of usable materials. When materials are preserved, the political asymmetry of the clinical encounter often becomes inscribed in the archive, as many historical projects that aim to center patient experiences must operate primarily through medical records held by clinicians, if at all.[6] In such practices, patients can only become known as such, through the discursive realm of biomedical practices and bureaucracy.
These issues of archival lack are certainly not unique to the history of medicine,[7] but the discipline does have unique answers to them. The history of medicine has aimed to address these concerns by paying renewed attention to an expanded set of primary materials. Historian Michael Pettit writes of using “therapeutic archives” that emerge under the conditions of psychological modernism, wherein patients opt to retain their own medical records and/or produce media and writing alongside them as a way of understanding their own subjectivity in the face of illness.[8]
It is with the concept of the therapeutic archive in mind that the true richness of For Dear Life reveals itself. In the rigorous study of art there lies an opportunity to center the self-described experiences of individuals with a wide range of illnesses and disabilities, without the filter of a clinician or the vicissitudes of archival conservation. This is not to say that the mores of the art world are any less pernicious than those of archive-building, but merely to posit that artworks are powerful adjuncts to medical records and other archival materials when doing historical work. Indeed, much scholarship in this vein is already underway,[9] though often not located directly within the history of medicine.
The central argument of For Dear Life, that experiences of illness and disability permeate social life and cultural production far beyond the environs of the home or the hospital, open up a space for a more expansive vision of the history of medicine. Wilke’s pillowcases, Hockney’s faxes, Lonidier’s documentation each in turn demand close looking, aesthetic appreciation, historical understanding. So does the institutional frame in which they sit. In the works exhibited within For Dear Life, and in the many therapeutic archives of art history that remain beyond it, there is fertile ground for scholarship.[10]
[1] Jill Dawsey and Isabel Casso, “Holding On for Dear Life” in For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability, eds. Jill Dawsey and Isabel Casso (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024), 24. Of particular note here are versions of The Health and Safety Game which have been installed in union halls.
[2] This term is lifted from sociologist and cultural studies scholar Tony Bennett, who traced the relationship between exhibitions and state power. See Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex” New Formations, 4 (1988), 73-81
[3] Rachel Middleman, “Rethinking Vaginal Iconology with Hannah Wilke’s Sculpture” Art Journal, 72, no. 4 (2013): 40-43
[4] Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 1998), 211-212
[5] Susan C. Lawrence, “Access Anxiety: HIPAA and Historical Research” Journal of the History of Medicine, 62, no. 4 (2007): 436-446
[6]See as an example Regina Kunzel, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), which most focally draws on patient records and correspondence compiled and held by Dr. Benjamin Karpman of Saint Elizabeths Hospital.
[7] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” Small Axe, 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14
[8] Michael Pettit, “Becoming Glandular: Endocrinology, Mass Culture, and Experimental Lives in the Interwar Age” The American Historical Review, 118, no. 4 (2013): 1056-1057
[9] Suzannah Biernoff and Fiona Johnstone, “What can art history offer medical humanities?” Medical Humanities, 50 (2024): 529-538
[10] While not all readers will be able to see the exhibit in person, the exhibition catalog is being distributed by the University of Texas Press and is currently available for purchase. See utpress.utexas.edu/9781477331026/for-dear-life
Bibliography
Bennett, Tony, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, 4 (1988): 73-104.
Biernoff, Suzannah and Johnstone, Fiona, “What can art history offer medical humanities?” Medical Humanities, 50 (2024): 529-538.
Dawsey, Jill and Casso, Isabel, “Holding On for Dear Life,” in For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability, eds. Jill Dawsey and Isabel Casso. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024.
Hartman, Saidiya, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.
Kraus, Chris, I Love Dick. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 1998.
Kunzel, Regina, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Lawrence, Susan C., “Access Anxiety: HIPAA and Historical Research,” Journal of the History of Medicine, 62, no. 4 (2007): 422-460.
Middleman, Rachel, “Rethinking Vaginal Iconology with Hannah Wilke’s Sculpture,” Art Journal, 72, no. 4 (2013).
Pettit, Michael, “Becoming Glandular: Endocrinology, Mass Culture, and Experimental Lives in the Interwar Age,” The American Historical Review, 118, no. 4 (2013): 1052-1076.
