Visual Cultures of Contagion, Hygiene, and Convalescence
Today, at the CAA (College Art Association) Conference in Chicago, there is a lecture/panel discussion about illness and the image: Visual Cultures of Contagion, Hygiene, and Convalescence, ca. 1870-1940. Speakers include:
Marni Kessler, University of KansasFriction and Contradiction in Edgar Degas’s “Le Pedicure”
Fae Brauer, University of East London and University of New South WalesThe Pasted Paper Devolution: Health and Degeneration, Hygiene, and Contamination in the Cubist Papier-Colles
Susan Sidlauskas, Rutgers University The Aura of the Asylum: The Photographs of the Holloway Sanatorium
Alison Matthews David, Ryerson UniversityOf Sweatshops and Sequins: Fashion Victims in Gilded Age New York
Cory Pillen, University of Wisconsin, Madison Make Your Health Points: FAP Posters and Public Health Education
Unfortunately, I am not attending it - I am out of town - but i want to know how they end up addressing illness. Do they see its representations as metaphors? Is illness itself a metaphor.
Throughout literary and art history, illness has been used as a metaphor to talk about greater social and human conditions. Illness has and is rarely used as a condition in and of itself - it always seems to speak to something else, something better and grander than being just sick. This serves as a detriment to those living with illness. Susan Sontag writes in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, “My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (1978: 3).
Chronic illness is not a metaphoric condition for those who live with them, including myself. Illness is real and not some literary device. There is a real need for illness to be addressed and (re)presented as itself. Many artists and writers are attempting to do just this. The illness narrative is become especially pertinent. Sarah Manguso’s memoir The Two Kinds of Decay is an especially excellent example.
I am seeking, throughout this blog, to address these artists’ and writers’ works. Who are they? What are they doing? What are illness’ images? What are the metaphors?
Edgar Degas, Le pedicure, 1873
