Visualising Viscera and Performing Medicine

Question 1

Key Points

• Exploration of the body
• Artistic responses to scientific and medical innovations
• Cultural perceptions (‘anatomical fact’)
• Medical technologies/ biological sciences (new ways of representation)
• Viscera, the interior body

Answer 1

• Exploration of the body, blood and viscera and body modification.
• Artistic responses to scientific and medical innovations. Shift in cultural perceptions of the body away from ‘anatomical fact’ and towards artificial and fragmented forms of the body (destabilising of boundaries, rendering visible the normally hidden viscera).
• Art that draws on advanced in medical technologies and the biological sciences to construct new ways of representing the body. Performance of the surgical body (e.g. Orlan).
• Thinking about viscera and revealing viscera. Reveals the instability of the body and of identity.
• Contemporary artists like Quinn, are challenging/ undermining the idea of a fixed identity. The interior of the body becomes exciting/ interesting for contemporary artists. Because it acts as a metaphor for identity, and metaphor of life and death.

Question 2

History of seeing the ‘viscera body’

- The strategies

Answer 2

• Historically in history of art there are strategies of seeing the viscera body. Primarily strategies of evasion, so strategies of not showing the inside of the body.
• In western art conventionally, there is a lack of viscera. However, contemporary artists, became interested in exploring viscera, rendering viscera visible.

Question 3

‘Self’ (2006) by Marc Quinn

• Who is Marc Quinn?
• Description of the artwork

Answer 3

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? Quinn made this portrait many times using blood. It uses a refrigerator unit to keep the work running. It’s an infective double self-portrait. It looks like him, but is also made by a material from his own body. We can think about the work as a modern day version of dutch still life vanitas tradition, where its about mortality and think about the work in terms of the fragility of human existence and exploration of what constitutes the self. Quinn is not only rendering viscera visible but actually makes the work from it.

Question 4

‘The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan’ by Orlan

• Who is Orlan?
• Description of her artistic project

Answer 4

Who? Orlan is a French multimedia performance artist who is known for drastically changing her appearance with plastic surgery.
What? Orlan went under a series of serious of plastic surgeries where she modified her face, drastic form of body modification/ alteration sculpting and manipulating her own body. She uses her body through cosmetic surgery, and that is the medium of her art.

Question 5

‘The Surgical Self: Body Alteration and Identity’ (1997) by Philip Auslander
- Relationship between Orlan and her surgeons

Answer 5

• Auslander argues that Orlan’s refusal to play the role of a passive patient is important in terms of gender politics. She becomes an active performer, as do the surgeons - the surgeons are dictated by art discourse as much as she is dictated by medical discourse.

Question 6

Key Question

- Role of performance

Answer 6

What is the role of performativity? The performative element, the costumes, poetry and music that accompanies it. That is it a temporary process but an ongoing shifting and changing her identity. Auslander says that Orlan’s performance is a feminist critique, do you agree?