Alienating Aesthetics: Performance Art and the Medical Imagination by Lauren Mitchell Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty Of
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Alienating Aesthetics: Performance Art and the Medical Imagination By Lauren Mitchell Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August 9, 2019 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Jay Clayton, Ph.D Candice Amich, Ph.D Rachel Teukolsky, Ph.D Joseph Fanning, Ph.D ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Everything that comes to mind for me to convey gratitude to the community that has supported me through my dissertation, and my graduate school career at large, risks sounding like a platitude. The words, “thank you” and “acknowledgement” feel insufficient for the amount of support and care I’ve received through this process. Writing a dissertation under the best of terms can be draining—your intellectual and emotional spaces become one in the same, and I describe in the chapters that follow that this particular project opened me toward a strange affective place. “Thank you,” in the case of these acknowledgements, indicate strong pillars of support for my project, as well as me as a person. First and foremost, I have been so grateful to my committee, Professors Jay Clayton, Candice Amich, and Rachel Teukolsky, for their razor-sharp insight into my project, their consistent feedback and support, and their compassionate willingness to talk me through revisions. I am a better writer, a better thinker, and a better scholar because of you all. I couldn’t have asked for better mentors and guides from my first year of grad school onward, and I carry your models of mentorship with me as I move forward in my career. Many thanks also to Professor Joe Fanning, who was willing and able to step in at the last minute as an outside reader, and whose feedback I value greatly. I am, likewise, grateful for my wonderful colleagues and friends with whom I shared writing groups, ideas, and rants. Amanda Lehr: the field of literature is so lucky to have a mind as brilliant as yours, and your patient wisdom regarding my messy, messy drafts helped to shape this project into what it is now. To my writing group partners, Alex Oxner, Kylie Korsnack, Rachel Gould, Terrell Taylor, ii Wietske Smeele, Sari Carter, Mariann Van Devere and Nadejda Webb: thank you for your comments, support, and the accountability structure our groups were able to provide. I thank the Robert Penn Warren Center at Vanderbilt University for providing me with a finishing fellowship this past year. I am thrilled that I had been able to work with Mona Fredrick prior to her retirement, and grateful to Terry Tripp for her unflappable demeanor when confronted with endless questions about bureaucracy at Vanderbilt. My fellowship group, Amaryah Armstrong, Katie McKenna, Iyaxel Coti Ren, Kadiri Vaquer Fernandez, and Emma Banks, provided me with invaluable support as my project came to completion. Thank you to my parents, Bill and Sandy Mitchell, who offered endless emotional support from afar and navigated me through a number of conversations when I felt overwhelmed, my sisters Lisa and Jessica—Jessica, who was on the ground in Nashville with me to see and participate in my struggles and joys. Likewise, I am thankful to my “chosen family,” my friends who prove over and over again that we make family from our communities: Kale Edmiston, Alice Sattler, Chelsea Miller, Mary Mahoney (my partner-in-crime), Kira Braham, and Stephanie Straub. And finally, thank you to my partner, Christopher Somerville, who joined me for many a disturbing film, book, and art installation, read my drafts, attended my lectures, and offered me a depth of support I did not sure was possible. Thank you for making me feel impossibly lucky. iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Riva Lehrer. Totems and Familiars: Mat Fraser. 2006. Added with permission………………….41 2. Riva Lehrer. Self Portraits: Ghost Parade: Cauda Equina. 2005. Added with permission……….44 3. John Barclay, “Male Skeleton Compared to Horse” from A Series of Engravings of the Human Skeleton, MacLachlan and Stewart, Edinburgh, 1824………………………………………………….46 4. John Barclay, “Female Skeleton Compared to an Ostrich” from A Series of Engravings of the Human Skeleton, MacLachlan and Stewart, Edinburgh, 1824………………………………………….46 5. Riva Lehrer. Self Portraits: Ghost Parade: Coloring Book. 2011. Added with permission………..47 6. Julius Casserius, De formato foetu liber singularis, 1626…………………………………………...73 7. Jacques Gautier-D’Agoty, Anatomie des parties de la génértion de l’homme et de la femme,……....73 8-10. Images from William Hunter’s Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata, 1774………...75 11. Image of an Anatomical Venus created at La Specola between 1784 and 1788. Photograph: Collections and History of Medicine, MedUni, Vienna. Re-printed in the article, “Cadavers in Pearls: Meet the Anatomical Venus” in The Guardian by Zoe Williams, May 17, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/17/anatomical-venus-anatomy-human-biology- joanna-ebenstein-books . Also appears in Joanna Ebenstein’s The Anatomical Venus………………114 12. J. H. Hasselhorst, “Lithograph of J. Ch. G. Lucae and his assistant dissecting a female cadaver.” 1864 chalk drawing. From the Wellcome Library, Creative Commons……………………………...117 13. Photograph of the scene list from Venus…………………………………………………………124 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………………...…ii LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………..................iv Chapter Introduction: The Medical Imagination and the Productive Purpose of Discomfort…………………….1 The Art of Medicine ……………………………………………………………………….…………….1 Alienating Aesthetics…………………………………………………………………………………….4 The Museum as a Dual Performance…………………………………………………………………….7 Alienating Bodies and Body Horror……………………………………………………………………13 Alienation and Empathy………………………………………………………………………...………19 I. Displays of Grief: Riva Lehrer’s Ghost Parade, Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries, and the Dynamics of Death Culture……………………………………………….……………………………..……………27 The New Resurgence of Death Culture…………………...……………………………………………27 Riva Lehrer’s Artwork: Visual Representation and Care Ethics……………………………………….36 Vulnerability and Disarticulation: Ossuaries…………………………………………………………...48 Necropolitics and Grief…………………………………………………………………………………57 II. Demonizing Mothers: Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist…………………... 64 Hyperreal Surgical Representations…………………………………………………………………….72 Decapitating the Mother: Hereditary…………………………………………………………………...82 Hysterical Surgery in Antichrist………………………………………………………………………...93 Fragmented Mothers…………………………………………………………………………………..105 III. Erotic Surgery: Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”……………………………….……………………………………………………..…...114 Vaulting Forward, Looking Back……………………………………………………………………..119 Love and Dissection in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus……………………………………...…………….124 The Queering Erotics of Speculative Worlds………………………………………………………….136 v Crash and the Curious Eroticism of Wounds ……………………………………………………..….138 Monstrous Pregnancy in “Bloodchild”………………………………………………………………..148 Dissecting Fantasies…………………………………………………………………………………...154 IV. Radical Self-Exam: David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, ORLAN’s Carnal Art and Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” ……………………………………………………………………………………….....158 Who Sees Inner Beauty?........................................................................................................................158 This Will Hurt You More Than It Will Hurt Me: ORLAN’s Surgical Performances………...………169 Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” and DIY Neuroscience…………………………………………………...180 Mad Scientists, Mad Artists…………………………………………………………………………...191 Epilogue: The Formation of the Brechtian Spectator……………………………………………...….199 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………………...209 vi INTRODUCTION THE MEDICAL IMAGINATION AND THE PRODUCTIVE PURPOSE OF DISCOMFORT The Art of Medicine A number of years ago, the medical school that was affiliated with my hospital job offered a figure drawing class in the cadaver lab, taught by disabled visual artist Laura Ferguson, whose work I had long admired. The class filled immediately, and I fought tooth and nail (no pun intended) to get in. Eventually, I pestered Laura enough to find space for me. I don’t know what I was expecting when I walked down a long, dark staircase to the basement to get to the lab. By this point, I, a recovering squeamish person, had spent years wandering around operating room spaces where my role was exclusively to provide emotional, physical and informational support to patients who were having surgeries; this also meant I was available to provide similar affective support to their doctors, who needed it in equal measure in the beast that was the public city hospital where we worked. On the surface, I wanted the opportunity to take such a rare class because I had hoped it might help me understand the process of surgery better, and because I felt compelled by the emotional disturbance I thought it would cause. I walked in expecting to feel humbled at the fragility of the human body, of the intimacy that I had already felt while bearing witness to surgeries. I wanted to take a step further in order to take the strange combination of being beholden to and alienated by the bodies of my patients as they were surgically altered. The class, unfortunately, did not bring me to the cathartic crescendo I had hoped it would. I soon found two things: that I was indeed still squeamish, so much that the formaldehyde-smelling, constantly greasy (with what?!) lab made me want to fold