Something Is Wrong

Abstract

Something Is Wrong Rachel Fein-Smolinski (bio) "Relief from pain through palliative artmaking can save us from the discomfort of living with this injustice and violence that we see every day, but it does not treat the basis for the pain. […] Is the artist perhaps unconsciously at first trying to fight inevitable death by stacking up the artworks? Hiding the foregone erasure of the body?" —Barbara Hammer, The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety) (2018) "Dr. Bailey: What is the most important step in the treatment process? Anyone? Dr. Avery: Physical Exam. Dr. Bailey: No, no chocolate for you. Dr. Yang: Lab and radiology evaluation. Dr. Bailey: Uh, oh, come on people. Now you're embarrassing me. Dr. Grey: Patient history. Dr. Bailey: Thank you." —Grey's Anatomy, Season 6, Episode 15 (2010) Fun fact: Something is wrong, and it has been for a long time. The epigraphs are from Barbara Hammer's final lecture on death, illness, and art as a prolific experimental filmmaker living with cancer, and Dr. Miranda Bailey, a fictional surgeon who values her patients' voices more than any other character in the medical drama Grey's Anatomy. In Hammer's lecture she used the term palliative artmaking to describe her practice. Palliative care is a medical practice focused on comfort, support, and symptom relief as opposed to cure. Reframing art making (and life) with those goals in mind informs how I make work as a chronically ill artist and educator. The many hours I have spent watching Grey's Anatomy—and other sexy, utopian (at least the early seasons) healthcare fantasies—informs this work as well. [End Page 26] Art and medicine are estranged siblings. Photographs are good at decontextualizing their subjects from the world that they exist in. A medical exam room is good at decontextualizing a person from the world they exist in. A person becomes a patient when their first-person experience is translated into third-person narrative. When looking at medical archives, the preservation of the historical context of the experiences of patients is a vital job of archivists and researchers. I collect and make images of the visual codices of illness, and share my own archive of experiences as a sick artist to explore mythologies of recovery. I began visiting medical archives in 2018 while I was working a 9 to 5 job, teaching part time, and unsuccessfully trying to manage worsening chronic pain that I have had since I was a child. I started going to the Archives and Special Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library in the morning before work to photograph objects from their collections and to look through unprocessed negatives, usually large-format portraits of patients. Through this I have found a deep well of documentation of intimate patient experience in a field whose narrative is often told from the perspective of the clinician. I have been hearing the term "evidence-based" a lot lately, mostly from my health insurance company when denying authorization for treatment. I thought I was the evidence. In the fine art photography world many theory-based workers focus on interrogating the indexicality (presumed truth value) of the photographic image. While evidentiary value is vital, for it to function, trust must be built. Before we used the verb "to photoshop" to describe the act of manipulating a photograph we used the verb "to doctor": as in, "This image looks like it's been doctored." The words "doctor" and "document" are derived from the same Latin verb docere, meaning to teach. These linguistic overlaps inform my relationship to both the evidentiary value of photography and the power of context, and become acutely visible in educational practices in both hard and soft sciences. First-person narratives are central, after all, to both art and medicine, and evidentiary function is not reliant on a value-neutral concept of objectivity. When those narratives are used to educate—which happens in both the hard and soft sciences—the people they belonged to are no longer present. Every clinical photograph with a patient's face is of someone presumed dead because of the date of the photograph. While on...