Literature and Medicine II

by Stella Bolaki, University of Edinburgh, UK

Through certain books, a truth unfolds. Anatomy and physiology, The tiny sensing organs of the tongue— Each nameless cell contributing its needs. It was fabulous, what the body told. (Rafael Campo)

1 Martha A. Hall created around a hundred artists’ books in response to her initial diagnosis of breast cancer in 1989 and the effects of later recurrences until her death in 2004. Leaving a new career in New York City as a business executive after being diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer in 1993, and returning to art, which she had studied as an undergraduate in Smith College in 1971, Hall took a series of art courses and workshops in book making, and familiarised herself with several printing and binding techniques. Her books vary in size, are made of diverse materials, and are either hand-bound or of folded or accordion construction. Most of them are in limited editions while a few exist only in the original. The books do not only combine words and images, including stamped designs, ink drawings, and acrylic paintings, thus embodying a new form of “visual literature” (Rice 59); they also contain medical artifacts such as X-rays, pill containers, prescribed medications in original envelopes and appointment cards, as well as black and white photographic prints, hairs, and other memorabilia. Some of the books are housed within handmade boxes of different shapes and sizes. [1] Images of Hall’s books can be seen at www.smith.edu/news/2004-05/MarthaHall.html.

2 Artists’ books, as most art historians agree, “mark a genuine historical moment of dissatisfaction with art’s outreach, a declaration of independence by artists who speak, publish, and at least try to distribute themselves, bypassing the system” (Lippard 50). These developments are more typical of the second half of the twentieth century. Hall does not specifically allude to such literary/political origins of the artist’s book as independent publishing or activist art. However, in her artist’s statement included in Holding In, Holding On (2003), a catalogue accompanying a travelling exhibition of her books in several US colleges and libraries, Hall writes that besides offering her a way “to have a voice in the world,” her books are “a means to effect change in the way medical professionals interact with their patients” (15). [2]All pages of quoted excerpts from Hall’s books, Hall’s artist’s statement, and Letha E. Mills’ foreword refer to the exhibition catalogue Holding In, Holding On (2003). A series of artists’ books have been used for the benefit of public causes, [3]See Hubert and Hubert for examples of artists’ books that have been used in this way, particularly pages 123-47. and in “The Artist’s Book as Idea and Form,” book artist Johanna Drucker writes that the question as to “whether such work can result in a change of political structure and policy opens the door to another set of debates about the role and function of art in the 20th century.”

3 Two critics who have contributed to this discussion specifically addressing the theme of illness, as well as Hall’s work from a sociological perspective, are Alan Radley and Susan Bell. In a recent article, which examines Hall’s work together with that of British photographer Jo Spence, they convincingly argue that visual images are important for “their anchoring potential in social practices surrounding breast cancer” while they also function as survival strategies and a source of social support for individual women who cope with life-threatening illness (369). While Spence’s work has been the object of much critical discussion, to my knowledge there is hardly any work focusing on Hall’s artists’ books other than the article mentioned and an earlier one by Bell, which equally revolves around the “benefits of a visual sociological imagination” (37, emphasis added). At the same time, while there are many studies on the personal, cultural, and political work illness narratives do and, more specifically, on the interventions of various genres of breast cancer literature, [4]A recent book on five genres of cancer literature by women is Deshazer’s Fractured Borders. there has not been an explicit focus on the kind of insights artists’ books, in particular, can offer to contemporary feminist understandings of breast cancer, questions of representation and embodiment, or to discourses of “witnessing” and to doctor-patient relationships.

4 Certainly, there are a number of better-known artists’ books which deal with experiences of illness, but they are often discussed in a different context or with different aims in mind. This results in marginalising the topic of illness, even though the technical excellence of the books is directly relevant to the demands posed by precisely such a topic. To mention a few examples, Scott L. McCarney’s Memory Loss is about his brother who had an automobile accident in 1985 that left him with traumatic brain injury. The book, which uses an accordion binding, is, in the artist’s words, “meant to be experiential, putting the viewer in the space of having only sporatic access to a lifetime of memories.” Similarly, Susan King uses the maze at Chartres Cathedral in France as the structure of Treading the Maze: An Artist’s Journey through Breast Cancer (1993). The book places the reader/viewer in the role of a pilgrim, walking into the maze of illness and back out again. In a chapter on artists’ books as “visual literature,” Shelley Rice briefly mentions three books which are of interest: Matthew Geller’s Difficulty Swallowing, which provides a medical case history of the artist’s partner who eventually dies of leukemia; Thirty Five Years/One Week, which is Linn Underhill’s memorial to her sister’s illness—there is a clear division of labour as the photographs included in the book document the sister’s normal life while the excerpts from the diary deal with her illness; and, finally, Nancy Holt’s Ransacked, which also consists of photographs and text, and which tells the simultaneous story of the gradual decline of Holt’s dying aunt and the falling apart of her house as it becomes invaded by a manipulative nurse (62-64).

5 It becomes obvious from this short overview of artists’ books with illness as their theme that, like other illness narratives, the authors/artists need to make certain choices when it comes to their narrative strategies, such as, for instance, create a balance between the clinical and the metaphorical, adopt a personal or distanced tone, or use a structuring motif to provide coherence and draw in readers. However, the specific characteristics of the artist’s book medium, such as its “complexity, density, and intimacy” (Drucker, “Cultural Status” 41), means that artists’ books create a different kind of “reading experience” compared to most ordinary books. While this is often described in terms of a powerful “aesthetic” experience, I am interested in exploring how artists’ books engage and complicate discourses of witnessing, which have become foregrounded in the fields of trauma, disability, and illness studies. In the epigraph that opens this essay, poet and physician Rafael Campo writes that “through certain books a truth unfolds” (What the Body Told 122). Another topic I address in the essay is what kind of truths artists’ books can communicate to medical practitioners, and what kind of changes they can initiate or facilitate in perspectives and attitudes towards illness and patients. Hall served for years on the Board of Cancer Community Centre, in South Portland, Maine, and received invitations to speak to medical professionals in hospitals and colleges. She decided she would like her work to be in public, rather than private, collections, particularly college libraries. Her books are currently used in Medical Humanities units, and the Maine Women Writers Collection, which owns twelve of her books, regularly receives requests to have the books used in medical schools across the United States. [5]Information on the “Martha A. Hall Collection, 1998-2003” at the University of New England can be found at www.une.edu/mwwc/research/hallm.asp. I am grateful to Cully Gurley, curator of Maine Women Writers Collection, for her help and for giving me permission to use the film I Make Books in my research. If the book as a cheap, portable, and accessible object has the capacity (at least in theory) to enter numerous locales, and to transform the viewers’ expectations, what impact could artists’ books have on future physicians and the medical community in general if they were to be used in this way?