New Landscapes: Community Art, Video Process and Fantasies of Disability - After Image

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Petra Kuppers

Video allows us to tell our stories differently, to renegotiate the everyday, to engage layers of meaning, silence, image and sound in ways that are specific to the medium. Disability and chronic illness can be debilitating not only by their individual manifestations, but also because of the stifling, tragic social narratives, stories, images and pathways associated with specific conditions. In this essay, the social and private meanings of disability and the imaging possibilities of video are brought together as disabled artists renegotiate images and connections.

This article looks at two video projects: Shimon Attie's video installation "White Nights, Sugar Dreams," created in a residency with people with diabetes in Rhode Island, and The Olimpias's Earth Stories, a videopoem created with mental health system survivors in Wales, UK. In both of these projects, stigmatized diagnoses are re-visioned and revalued. Interviews with the Welsh participants of Earth Stories reveal how the process of the creation has a positive effect on the self image of people with mental health diagnoses. Both projects show how the interface between social stereotypes of specific "labels" interact with image, sound and spectatorial placement to create new spaces for difference.

Bodily fantasies

In 2000, Attie created "White Nights, Sugar Dreams," a video installation which speaks of personal experiences of diabetes. Attie, who is best known for his large-scale public video/computer projections, creates an intimate room where three video projections take up three walls, and quiet voices speak to the visitor of images and feelings that emerge from living with diabetes. The videos do not show interviewees or talking heads, nor do they display other documentary conventions. Instead, they present the viewer with an evolving and changing landscape. A red liquid changes texture and color as white crystals fall into it, building up into mountains, slowly dissolving in the liquid. A constant motion of transformation and change is made visible, and the strong, beautiful images allow the visitor to entertain new perspectives on a medical subject: the diabetic person's relationship to blood and sugar. An ornate, old-fashioned scale enters the stream of images, the only concrete link to the daily rituals detaile d on the taped interviews.

This installation was created in a residency, as part of the community based art series "Art ConText" at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Attie, who himself experiences diabetes, worked in collaboration with the Rocham-beau Branch of the Providence Library and students at RISD. During August 2000 he created hours of videotaped interviews with eight people with diabetes as well as the companion of a diabetic cat, speaking with them about everyday experiences of diabetes. Attie comments on his vision for the installation, saying, "I wanted to take these two essential elements that all diabetics deal with every day--blood and sugar--and then use them as a kind of springboard for a phantasmagoric journey or exploration." (1)

"White Nights, Sugar Dreams" plays with the fantasy components of physicality, with the associations, visualizations and images that surround the experience of diabetes. Viewers conceptualize the goings-on inside their bodies in images and stories, and the installation works by giving a visual language as well as a physical place to some of these fantasies, opening up new vistas on the dominant narratives of diabetes. One critic suggests that "the installation provides what Attie hopes will be 'a breath of fresh air' on the topic, as opposed to the numerous medical videos on 'living with a disease.'" (2) Disease and disability are often associated with a rupturing presence, a catastrophe, a disruption. Diabetes is a chronic condition, which isn't easily conceptualized by a "foreign" body attacking healthy tissue. Instead, in Attie's work, diabetes becomes a journey, a balancing act, an unfolding in time. The body as a battlefield is a well-used topos of cancer and AIDS narratives: armies of white cells marchi ng on the denaturalized enemy. In "White Nights," the body is not physically present (other than in the embodied presence of the visitor, enclosed and addressed by the three screens that give a clear spatial experience). Instead, the body is transposed, metaphorized into a landscape of "elements"--of elemental forces of water and solid mass, or meetings, dissolutions, accretions and change.

In conjunction with the human voices on the soundtrack, the video installation indexes life as a process in between solidity and liquidity, in exchange and alchemic reaction. The disability is not figured as a disruptive event, but as a mode of living, a specific attention to the materiality of biological process. There are no high or low points, no catastrophes--only ongoing movement.

I encountered "White Nights" not in the original exhibition at RISD, but as part of "Media/Metaphor," at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., December 9, 2000 until March 5, 2001. In this massive, neo-classicist environment, the specific audience address of installation art became particularly apparent. Weary after moving around the exhibition, the installation chairs provided a welcome rest for my aching body, and allowed me to engage with the sounds and sights in a different manner from that encouraged by canvases. My journey through the museum had stopped for a while. The soundtrack voices in the context of the moving image walls provided a grounding outside of the museum, a trace of creation, of community presence. The process unfolding in the images pertained to the whole of the installation, as well, as multiple voices spoke, and as I as spectator felt myself drawn inside, becoming a witness of a vision, rather than a surveying, disembodied spectator. Writing as a critic, l am unable to visuali ze the images without feeling the traces of the physical exhaustion that affected me as I slowly moved from my experience of my own body to the visions and impressions of other people's experiences. The immersive strategies of an installation, different from a row of exhibits, paintings, photos or sculptures, or the distanced observation of the theatre, allowed me to find a place outside the museum space, yet not outside my own physical presence.