Misbehaving Bodies is about what happens to human flesh when it fails to conform to “normal” good health. The show focuses on works by Oreet Ashery and Jo Spence that explore the portrayal of illness, the relationship between patients and carers, and how film and video can influence our memory of the dead.
Spence was born in Putney, London, in 1934, and had a grim and dispiriting wartime childhood. In 1967 she set up as a portrait photographer, capturing the respectable denizens of Hampstead as they performed masquerades of familial perfection for her camera. She became interested in what wasn’t shown in such images: the way even the youngest children knew to present a composed facade for the camera.
She began to explore wider issues of class, gender and sexuality. In the first autobiographical project shown here – Beyond the Family Album (1979) – she annotated photographs of her family to indicate the invisible presence of her mother’s unpaid domestic labour, her own childhood unhappiness, financial struggles, and her parents’ ailing and diseased bodies. Examining images of herself as a girl and young woman, she identified the conventions of posing for the camera that she had assimilated – how she too had dutifully learned to play the role of sweet, pretty, happy girl for the lens.
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982 (she died in 1992), Spence found her body treated proprietorially by the medical profession: her left breast was drawn on with a marker pen, and she was informed that it would be removed. She was so shocked by her own initial unthinking compliance that she documented her pre- and post-surgery body, and her psychological response captured through a form of roleplay for the camera she termed “phototherapy”.
Through text, photography and collage, Spence analysed how socioeconomic circumstance might have contributed to her cancer and how, in turn, illness exacerbates existing difficulties. She preferred the term “cultural sniper” to “artist” – observing and taking aim from the sidelines, with devastating effect. The text and image studies on family, class, gender and health that she made in the 1970s and 80s were simply laminated on large sheets of card. The format permitted them to be circulated and shown widely, fulfilling Spence’s desire that they reach the people most affected by the issues explored.
Oreet Ashery takes a similarly anti-elitist stance with her experimental web-based film series Revisiting Genesis. Here, all 12 short episodes are clustered by theme and shown at viewing stations within mottled reddish textile tents suggestive of the body’s interior. Ashery, born in Jerusalem and based in the UK, takes as her theme the modern way of death: how life-limiting illness affects artists, the question of online immortality, and the products available to capitalise on our fear of losing control of our creative legacy after death.
Revisiting Genesis is non-narrative, and uses both actors and artists to speak words derived from interviews Ashery conducted with palliative care nurses and their patients. The concepts and products discussed – digital wills, augmented reality tombstones, cremation jewellery – are all real. The constant litany of commercial offers made by the “nurses” effectively transforms them into salespeople for the “next stage”. Capitalism’s illusion of choice, it seems, extends to the final moments of life.
Ashery explores difficult subjects with a refreshing dose of weirdness: there are recurring references to custard cream and bourbon biscuits, sharks and the TV series Nurse Jackie. Performers wear ashes on their face like blusher, and gold paint across their eyebrows like a funerary mask. The “Genesis” of the title is a dying artist. We never see her, but she carries elements of the sculptor Dora Gordine, singer Amy Winehouse and Ashery herself (all female, London-based artists of Jewish origin).
There is much to admire in Revisiting Genesis. It raises complex questions about death, illness and the creative ego. Nevertheless, it is hampered by an issue common to many scripted artist films: because it is presented like a commercial TV or cinema production, we feel licensed to judge it on those terms – and get pulled up short by stilted performances. Mike Leigh this is not, though neither is it intended to be.
Both Spence and Ashery push hard against the cliches around sickness and death: dignified suffering, courageous battles, heroic legacies. It would, then, be revoltingly pat to describe this show as “life affirming”, but the pitch black humour and anti-establishment ferocity of both artists certainly make it an invigorating – if ultimately heartbreaking – experience.
