Unraveling Social Knots - Artists Pages - Clare Cornell C - Brief Article

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Clare C. Cornell

I WAS TEACHING HIGH SCHOOL IN SUBURBAN DENVER

I TOLD KIM TO GET THE PIECE OF JEWELRY OUT OF THE SULFURIC ACID SOLUTION WITH HER FINGERS

MY PARTNER HAD A LESION ON HIS TONGUE THE SIZE OF A QUARTER THAT WAS BLEEDING PROFUSELY

I THREW AN ERASER AT JAMIE AND CUT HER ON TOP OF HER FOREHEAD

I STARTED PROZAC AND DIAZEPAM

The time with my partner seemed to crawl along. His muscular body wizened up. His medical records indicated the wasting but cited that "he had the torso of an athlete"...with a shunt. The events that followed were typical for people who were dying as a result of AIDS in 1991: Karposi's Sarcoma (KS), Pneumocystis and general body aches. As the virus accelerated my emotions became flatter. My memory changed from reasonably sharp (I saw 150 students daily) to a muddle in between isolated events.

As the decay of John's body advanced I told my mother that John had cancer. I was concerned about her reaction to AIDS because, as Douglas Crimp states in Mourning and Militancy, "Seldom has a society so savaged people during their hour of loss." She told me to never come home again. This became the source of schisms that acted to form new knots and tighten old ones, both consciously and unconsciously.

Nonsister banned me from her home because if John had "it" then I had "it" and if I played with her children I would sweat and the virus would go into their bodies through their skin, enter their blood streams and they would die. The significant part of her statement had to do with the power that she and other cultural factors had over me. "I need to protect my children so you can never see them again" is a discursive trope that she used to position her power over her "perverse" big brother. This statement and my mother's edict are performative acts as described by Judith Butler in Critically Queer. "Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech. Implicated in a network of authorization and punishment...[they] confer the binding power on the action performed." To Nonsister and Mother I became symbolic of AIDS, death and homosexuality. I also became a vehicle for them to position themselves as the authority and punisher of me in order to displace their homophobia and AIDSphobia.

For me, my main system of support was lost and "family" became symbolic of the dominant order fighting to survive by using aberration to help define and legitimize that dominance. The function of family shifted. It was no longer a space of nurturing or healing. Family was now a psychological space that I needed to recode in order to take care of myself and care for John.

After John died my emotions kept coming back at me like a trauma patient who remembers more and more with the passage of time. Problems at work, John's Ph.D. research partner putting an AIDS pamphlet in his drawer, euthanasia, family, blood on the pillow, screaming in the night, diapers and on and on created aberrations in my body that needed to be fixed.

Combining photographs and writing in my diary helped. The camera was an instrument I could write with and not worry about technique in order to attempt a translation of my conscious and unconscious into visual form. The photographs were primarily byproducts of performances that I staged. They gave physical form to acts that rebelled against societal taboos and gave me agency to act upon desire that I typically would not act upon. Performance also gave me a chance to act out dramas in order to change the dynamic of authority and punishment that surrounded me. I would force a psychological space by planning a performance with John's ashes on my body while projecting his image on the wall beside me. The result was erotic, horrifying and beautiful. There were also those moments when my new partner became John. This was involuntary. I went with it. It was he, for a moment, and it was comforting. The sessions lasted for over two years in order to (re) configure and (re)place conventions of mourning that didn't work for this survivor of someone with AIDS. I redefined and maybe invented a process of mourning for myself, which was a transgressive act because, as Roland Barthes said, "language is a system of contractual values...that resists the modification coming from a single individual." Despite this ever tightening social knot, I use photography, writing, performance and video to loosen emotional constrictions. As a result of this investigation I have realized that, for me, mourning is dynamic and ongoing. It's sensual, sexual, horrific and a myriad of other emotions.