Tag: hospital

Doris Salcedo, Untitled

Salcedo developed these works for the XXXI National Salon for Colombian Artists, held in Medellín in 1987. The sculptures are made primarily from abandoned hospital furniture and reveal the artist’s ongoing interest in combining different objects and materials for their symbolic value.

Untitled (1986), partially constructed from a found bed frame, juxtaposes animal tissue, ten plastic dolls, and the severe angularity of the steel frame. Salcedo physically transformed the surfaces and colors of these objects, applying acids or allowing the pieces to weather and collect dust. These works developed out of the artist’s consideration of how Colombian drug cartels have recruited poor boys from Medellín as hired assassins, known in Spanish as sicarios.

Orlan, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan 

The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN, a new project that started in 1990, involves a series of plastic surgeries through which the artist transformed herself into elements from famous paintings and sculptures of women. As a part of her “Carnal Art” manifesto, these works were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York.[14] ORLAN’s goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of female beauty as depicted by male artists. When the surgeries are complete, she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana (as depicted in a 16th-century French School of Fontainebleu painting), and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. ORLAN picked these characters, “not for the canons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” ORLAN chose Diana, because she is inferior to the gods and men, but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa, because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, that she represents; Psyche, because of the fragility and vulnerability within her soul; Venus, for carnal beauty; and Europa, for her adventurous outlook on the future.[15]

Instead of condemning cosmetic surgery, ORLAN embraces it;[16] instead of rejecting the masculine, she incorporates it; and instead of limiting her identity, she defines it as “nomadic, mutant, shifting, differing.” ORLAN has stated, “my work is a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned), and God!”.[17]

“I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering!… I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage… I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities… Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me.” (from Carnal Art manifesto)

“Sainte ORLAN” came from a character that I created for “Le baiser de l’artiste” from a text called “Facing a society of mothers and merchants.” The first line of this text was: “At the bottom of the cross were two women, Maria and Maria Magdalena.” These are two inevitable stereotypes of women that are hard to avoid: the mother and the prostitute. In “Le baiser de l’artiste” there were two faces. One was Saint ORLAN, a cutout picture of me dressed as Madonna glued onto wood. One could buy a five francs church candle and I was sitting on the other side behind the mock-up of the vending machine. One could buy a French kiss from me for the same amount of money one could buy a candle. The idea was to play on the ambivalence of the woman figure and the desire of both men and women towards those biblical and social stereotypes. Being showcased in the Paris International Contemporary Art Fair, the artwork was somehow both an installation and a performance,“[18] said ORLAN, in her interview with Acne Paper.

Muriel Zeller

Self, Time and External Circumstances

   1.

   The disconnected self cut
   the filaments
   that held up my life.

          You are sick–very, very sick

   The hospital psychiatrist asked
   a question.  I answered correctly,
   "Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey
   Oswald on TV.“

          You use your intelligence in negative ways

   I have lied in each
   different life, covering
   tracks of the last.

          I saw you when you were someone else

   I laughed
   when I told the story:
   my father held a gun
   on my brother.

          Your laughter is inappropriate

   I took the opiates
   as prescribed and wanted
   less and less  
   to be flesh.

          You may refuse your medication at any time

   I made lists
   of what I wanted  
   to recall.

          You could benefit from electroconvulsive shock therapy

   My body refused to release
   urine.  I became sick:
   searing ache and longing
   to take away the pain.

          Your past is the reason you can’t urinate

   She arrived in a black dress,
   one of a long line
   of therapists.  She began

          You don’t like black, do you?

   as I watched light stipple
   her dress through the iron
   mesh on the windows.

          Tell me about the abuse

   In a corner of night,
   I hunched and hunched
   to make myself small,
   invisible.

          Where are you?

   2.

   I passed each day,
   clutching a pillow
   rocking back and forth
   as gently as I would
   on Charon’s river.

          Tell me, then, what do your tears think?

   I paced the halls, hid
   in my closet, made a collage.
   The attendants cooed.
   I smiled at them with rage.

          This is very complex

   I threw a strike.
   "The bowling pins are my family,”
   I said.  The other patients  
   cheered.  I did it again,
   and the chaperones grew uneasy.

          I think its time to leave

   I was released from the hospital
   after a month–just
   when my insurance ran out.

          Reconnect with your therapist on the outside

   I am scary.  I scare myself.
   I scare my outside therapist.
   She doesn’t want me anymore.

          Once, I thought you were going to attack me

   At home, I have my own riot.
   I scream in the shower.
   The walls bruise my body.
   My head pounds back.

          I will make arrangements for you to see someone else

   The telephone can change
   shape.  It will lie to you.
   My memory reeked
   of the black dress.

          She won’t talk to you unless you make the call

   I moved on to the next
   recommended therapist
   with my own psychotic symmetry.

          I’m counseling a group of sex offenders next

   3.

   I got pregnant.
   My husband’s form
   fathered fetal tissue–
   I was too old.

          You cannot abort the baby

   After-birth I mothered my daughter:
   bathed, dressed, nursed and loved,
   all the while knowing nothingness
   waited for me in a clutch of medication.

          We have a pact.  You won’t kill yourself.

   Cross my heart
   and hope to die.

          What kind of pills, how many?

   The doctor didn’t hide
   his contempt as he guided  
   a tube down my throat.

          Where is her underwear?

   After a day,
   angry and sullen, my husband
   took me back home.
   I had to nurse the baby.

          What do you think you were doing?

   The baby bit down hard
   on my nipple with her tiny teeth,
   punishing me
   for risking her life.