Visualising Disease and Disability

Question 1

Key Points

• Social and cultural phenomenon
• Key concern: The challenges
• Artist’s representations of disease

Answer 1

• Disability as a social and cultural phenomenon that is rooted in viewing.
• Key concern: Strategies used by contemporary artists to represent disability through critical means: to critique prevalent attitudes and to challenge the way disability is seen, and to challenge the absence of disability in history of art.
• Artists’ representation of illness - in relation to social issues - including anxieties about disease, the body and notions of identity.

Question 2

‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ (2005) by Marc Quinn (1964-)

• Who was Marc Quinn?
• Description of artwork and location

Answer 2

Who? Mark Quinn is a British contemporary visual artist whose work includes sculpture, installation and painting. Quinn explores genetics, identity, environment and the media.
What? This is a marble statue of Lapper (who is an artist herself), which is an example of public art. It was first shown on the 4th plinth of trafalgar square in London.

Question 3

In Relation to the Key Points: ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ (2005) by Marc Quinn (1964-)

• What does it challenge?
• Why was it also attacked?

Answer 3

Potential of the work to make a statement around and about disability. How contemporary art makes visible certain subjects that may be invisible. This work challenges the conceptions and limited conventional notions around beauty and sexuality. The work was also attacked and criticised, but in other cases it was seen as a kind of powerful statement on femininity, sexuality and disability.

Question 4

‘Cutting the Ties that Bind’ (1987) by Mary Duffy

• Description of the artwork
• Davis’ interpretation

Answer 4

What? Photo series of a standing figure draped in a white cloth against a dark background (contrast). Gradually the drapery is removed, revealing a nude female figure without arms. The photographs are dramatically lit in a dark space. The artist is the female disabled artist, showing how she is rendering visible her body and is rejecting the idea that her body is incomplete. Davis refers to Duffy’s work in relation to this idea of fragmentation, creates a frame around her body in order to claim its completeness.

Question 5

‘Visualising the Disabled Body: The Classical Nude and the Fragmented Torso’ in The body: a reader (2005) by Lennard J. Davis

• Cultural phenomenon
• The Venus sculpture
• Issues with art historians (defence mechanism)

Answer 5

Davis argues that disability is a cultural phenomenon.
Disability is a socially and psychologically rotted phenomenon which is related to modes of viewing.
Davis talks about the Venus sculpture, which is a famous representation from antiquity that is missing limbs. He says that it is an image of disability but also pinnacle of ideal of western beauty. He argued that the mutilation of Venus is overlooked by art historians. The overlook absences and fills it with presence. Which means that, damaged limbs were brought back through act of imagination, which Davis explains is a defence mechanism that allows the sculpture to be seen as whole.

Question 6

Representations of Illness

Answer 6

Large amount of artists produced representations of the AIDS crisis.

Question 7

‘Untitled’ (1988) by Mark Morrisroe

- Description of the artwork

Answer 7

What? It is a manipulated bright coloured photograph of an x-ray. It kind of functions like a self-portrait, but doesn’t provide a recognisable likeness of the artist but offers a trace of the artists body. Get the shadows and cavities of the body, this work is a mediation on illness and on disease using the medium of clinical apparatus.

Question 8

‘Narratives of Dis-ease’ (Exiled) (1990) by Jo Spence and Dr Tim Sheard.

• Documentation of her breast cancer
• The importance of the medium photography

Answer 8

What? Jo Spence made a series of self-portraits that documented her battle with breast cancer in the work. She exposes herself and her scars and exposes her body in order to offer commentary on her experiences. The medium photography allows the artist to explore her experiences, and to understand herself. She makes visible an unhealthy and Middle-ageing body. Questioning assumptions, monster is written across her chest, of age and beauty.