The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art

by Petra Kuppers

Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging—and the bodily access they imply—to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another’s bodily experience and the effects—physical, emotional, and social—of medical procedures.In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and “knowledge projects” surrounding the human body. Among the works she investigates are the controversial Body Worlds exhibition of plastinized corpses; video projects by Shimon Attie on diabetes and Douglas Gordon on mental health and war trauma; performance pieces by Angela Ellsworth, Bob Flanagan, and Kira O’Reilly; films like David Cronenberg’s Crash and Marina de Van’s In My Skin that fetishize body wounds; representations of the AIDS virus in the National Museum of Health and on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations; and the paintings of outsider artist Martin Ramírez.At the heart of this work is the scar—a place of production, of repetition and difference, of multiple nerve sensations, fragile skin, outer sign, and bodily depth. Through the embodied sign of the scar, Kuppers articulates connections between subjective experience, history, and personal politics. Illustrated throughout, The Scar of Invisibility broadens our understanding of the significance of medical images in visual culture.Petra Kuppers is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge.

Genres: Disability, Bodies

259 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Kathleen O'Neal · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book focuses on a fascinating issue (the body and illness in contemporary museum art) and talks about some very interesting artists (Bob Flanagan in particular caught my attention as someone whom I would like to know more about) the literary criticism jargon often made this book needlessly obtuse. The book could have been improved by discussing its subject matter in more straight forward language.

[Jacob Hale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through intriguing, insightful, theoretically-informed readings of artworks made by disabled people, Kuppers demonstrates the complexities of the power relations among medical systems and bodies, and the productive abilities of such art to open up new possibilities for alignments of power, individuality, and sociality. I found especially fruitful for my thought Kupper's ruminations on the many meanings of scars, and her attention to the interplay between the phenomenological and practices of viewing in meaning-making processes. Sometimes I had a hard time understanding the connections she intends between her expositions of the theorists from whom she draws and her readings of particular artworks, but maybe I was just a dense reader.

I actually read a paperback edition, not the more expensive hardcover, although the paperback was pricey enough!