Brenda Atkinson review OFTHEWEEK I revisited MuseuMAfricA at the weekend to find a few favourite things to write about – helpful signposts, if you like, in the extraordinary terrain of objects and events that is Urban Futures. I thought I would focus on the fourth floor, site of Rory Doepel’s exhibition Bones and Bytes: Healing and Revealing, where on opening night I’d achieved brief glimpses of anatomical gore – both human and animal – that willed a return under less claustrophobic circumstances. Beginning with Two Icons: The Atom, the Body – an “atrocity exhibition” curated by James Sey and Kathryn Smith – I concluded four hours later having found one favourite thing: Doepel’s entire exhibition. Smith and Sey’s foray into the medico-legal and techno-scientific systems of the body explores that body in its pathological modes, and with reference to the impact of destructive atomic energy (the bomb) and space exploration on how we have re-thought our physical being in contemporary times. “The body” as a subject of artistic and cultural discourse has been widely explored in the past decade, and you might well suppress a yawn at this stage. But Two Icons is a compelling – if frequently nauseating – point of entry into the larger exhibition, which stages a riveting discussion around different traditions of healing in South Africa. To the extent that Two Icons represents Western medical systems of healing, it does so with a firm fixity on the body in crisis: cancer, amputation, congenital deformity, serial killing and institutionalised misogyny are some of the issues engaged by the artists on the show, as well as by the scientific and popular documentation of “pathology” assembled by the curators. Although the exhibition – which is staged in two rooms – reads as an integrated whole that is intelligently conceived and structured, British artist Alexa Wright’s photographic images of amputees are the most compelling of the works on the show. Commissioned in 1997 by the Wellcome Trust, London, these digitally manipulated prints attempt to image each amputee’s experience of a phantom limb – the sensory memory of a limb lost through amputation. Each image series is accompanied by a short text from interviews Wright conducted with her subjects, as well as information detailing the circumstances of their physical damage, their age,and the length of time since the amputation.
Much of the power of the photographs lies, not only in their simple, low-key (re)construction, but in the relationship between image and text. One 64-year-old man, whose cancerous arm was amputated below the shoulder, says of his phantom limb: “It feels as though the arm is still there, bent at right angles at the elbow. It is as if it is encased in plaster or a tight bandage from just above the elbow to the fingertips. The arm will move laterally, but I can’t change the angle of the bend … The phantom doesn’t respond to anything, it’s just there. I can’t scratch it, I can’t hit it, I can’t do anything with it; it’s not there, except that it feels as though it is there …”
Another man, who has also lost an arm, says: “There is an intermittent crushing pain but the phantom is always there. It’s part of me, it will never go away completely. I will always be this, I will always have two arms, it’s just that one of them is missing. The real me is without the prosthesis; it’s uncomfortable; it’s not me. It’s surprising how one-armed I look when I see photographs of myself; my self- image is two-armed.” In her images, Wright “grafts” the phantom limb into the picture, doing what it does in the experience of the subject. Thus the man who can feel his phantom arm below the elbow is imaged with his back to the viewer, his prosthetic arm hanging at his side. His living, healthy, phantom arm is a ghostly presence bent at a right angle behind his back. In another image, a man who has also lost an arm is pictured sitting at a table, his healthy hand resting on the table’s surface, the stump of his other arm visible just beneath the sleeve of his short shirt. Wright inserts the phantom hand on the table too, but leaves the gap between stump and phantom hand to reveal the space behind and the edge of the table. The result is a series of “phantom” works that figure in the true sense of the Freudian uncanny: we apprehend as visible that which can’t – and shouldn’t – be seen. Together with this ghostly chill, there is an immense dignity to the subjects she photographs: their plight is communicated as an ordinary brush with the extraordinary, their experience a necessary gesture towards wholeness. Like much of the other work on Bones and Bytes – which is staged as a series of interventions by many contributors – at a superficial glance Two Icons could be dismissed as gratuitously gory. But it works as a fascinating departure point into an experience from which you won’t want to return for quite some time.