Do Only Women Get to Suffer in Public?

Writing in her journal, Susan Sontag deliberated on possible titles for what would become her well-known essay, Illness as Metaphor (1978). One candidate was ‘Women and Death’, under which she jotted, ‘There is no sororal death as there is a fraternal death (Beau Geste).’ A public female death cannot be a noble one, apparently. Yet it would seem that for the numerous female artists who have dared to openly navigate their experiences of serious illness through their art, there has been a subsequent recantation of their critical reputations. Only a few live to see this.

In our age of self-disclosure a striking asymmetry persists in how disease, specifically cancer, is made visible across contemporary art. Despite men having a higher overall incidence of cancer and more likely to die from the disease, it is overwhelmingly female and queer artists whose work about their diagnoses enters the canon, framed as intimate, courageous or confessional.

Consider Tracey Emin, arguably at her most visible since her YBA heyday. Despite the humanity and technical brilliance of her work, Emin was long trivialised as a hot mess from Margate with a proclivity for airing her dirty laundry in public. Since her recovery from bladder cancer in 2020 – a trauma perhaps less confronting for the public than abortion, miscarriage or childhood sexual abuse – the British media has embraced Dame Tracey as its art matriarch, nurturing a new generation of young artists through her foundation.

The market has followed suit. Like A Cloud of Blood (2022), ‘painted in her first wave of creativity after her recovery’, at £2.33m sold for more than double its estimate at auction in 2022 – her highest hammer price after her iconic My Bed (1998, £2.55m). Her current Tate Modern retrospective is aptly titled A Second Life. 

Consider the late Hannah Wilke, another female artist charged as a shameless exhibitionist during her lifetime, whose performance and photographic works were deemed ‘little more than [the] enthusiastic exploitation of her own dark-haired good looks,’ as Roberta Smith would parrot in her obituary. By the time of the posthumous exhibition of Wilke’s final photographic series, Intra Venus, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1994, the critics had acquiesced. Art News declared with palpable relief that the late work, which graphically documents her cancer treatment and approach toward death, ‘cancels out the narcissism of her earlier work, imbuing it with more purpose than could be seen at the time’.

Tracey Emin, Like a Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 152 x 182cm. © Tracey Emin. Courtesy the artist and Christie's, London

Nonetheless, when an artist announces new work that might be considered ‘depressing’, it can send a shudder down the collective spine of a gallery’s sales team that registers on the Richter scale. For artists who have the privilege of making work that is not reducible to identity (read: male, white, able-bodied) some commercial galleries might prefer to change the subject entirely. Others will call in the Comms team, whose task will be, if all goes well, to make the work ‘sexy’ again (‘life-affirming’ and ‘inspiring’ will also do for most clients).

Ahead of his first major exhibition in seven years at Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2016, Bruce Nauman decided to revisit his video work Walk with Contrapposto (1968). The early work shows Nauman repetitively pacing a confined corridor in an exaggerated pose – weight on one foot, hips jutting, shoulders tilting just-so (think Michelangelo’s David) – transforming a classical symbol into an aimless, awkward act of endurance. In Contrapposto Studies, I through VII (2015–16) we see Nauman half a century older, in the same uniform of white T-shirt and blue jeans, putting sculpture into motion once more, with the help of some hi-tech camera equipment. But this Nauman is unsteady on his feet, unable to sustain the pose for long. The T-shirt strains against a rounded belly. We catch glimpses of the artist’s colostomy bag. 

Notes published alongside the work underline Nauman’s status as ‘one of the most radical and revered artists of our time’ here using the latest developments in 3D technologies to offer a powerful meditation on time’s passing. No mention is made of the artist’s rectal cancer, from which he was then recovering. ‘The radiation caused some nerve damage that left me with a loss of feeling in my feet that I was just getting back,’ he told one of the world’s most-read newspapers, The New York Times ahead of the Philadelphia opening. For the museum and the Pinault Collection, joint owners of the work, it was a detail seemingly impertinent to a project precisely about motion, vitality and the Western cultural history of the ideal human form.

Kaari Upson, 192, 2013, silicone and pigment, 203 x 190 x 20 cm. © Esmé Trust / Kaari Upson Trust. Courtesy Sprüth Magers

‘I didn’t want to talk about cancer,’ Kaari Upson told Even magazine in 2016, recalling a conversation with Ed Ruscha around the time of her diagnosis in 2011. ‘So I talked about all the couches and beds I see when I drive.’ By the time of her death in 2021, the artist had discussed her breast cancer in relation to her art-making in several interviews. ’It was a cult of invalidism,’ she explained of her attraction to the discarded mattresses on the streets of Los Angeles that she would cast into unsettling silicone and urethane sculptures. ‘I was at a point when I was either going to get up from [a bed] or die on one.’

Beds had long been on Upson’s mind, in fact. As part of her sprawling, quasi-forensic opus The Larry Project (2005–12), the artist had already produced works referencing the soiled mattresses that littered the abandoned property next door to her childhood home, whose former resident was a seedy playboy she called Larry. Through erotic drawings, paintings, sculpture, video and performance, Upson concocted an obsessive, semi-fictional relationship with the neighbour – ‘a psychotic tour-de-force’, as one critic put it, that was dizzying in its detail, complexity and range. Having previously been criticised for being too opaque (a ‘big curator’ visiting her studio had whined, ‘The sculpture is amazing, but how am I supposed to know all of that by looking at this?’), by 2013 ‘the market lapped it up,’ as Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s curator Anders Kold writes in his introduction to Dollhouse, a touring retrospective of Upson’s work which travelled to Kunsthalle Mannheim this year. Had the artist’s revelation of her illness, which she hadn’t wanted to discuss at all, help simplify work that would otherwise be too challenging for the market?

L: Jo Spence, A Picture of Health: Property of Jo Spence?, 1982; R: Remodelling Photo History (Realization) Series 2: The History Lesson: Self As Image, 1982–1983. © Jo Spence Memorial Archive, The Image Centre. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

In The Undying (2019), Anne Boyer notes how the silence once hushed upon the subject of breast cancer has been replaced of late with ‘an obligation’ to publicly share one’s diagnosis. For Jo Spence, the British feminist photographer and self-styled ‘cultural sniper’, her first instinct was ‘to turn my illness into something useful… I was so anxious to be useful that I exploited myself in some ways.’ The promise that a common good can be founded on a woman’s private suffering is something we have long been primed for – since the Virgin Mary archetype, whose stoicism is underscored by the legibility of her anguish. It is unsurprising then that illness might see a ‘difficult’ artist’s work sent into the realm of a safer femininity and its synonyms of vulnerability, care and tenderness, where previous interpretations of a disobedient, malignant female identity can be put to rest.

John Smith, Being John Smith (still), 2024, HD digital video, 27 min. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London

When male artists do address their experiences of cancer explicitly, their work tends to frame the disease less as abject, embodied or emotional crises than as a loss of productivity, authority or physical agility. In John Smith’s 2024 film, Being John Smith, the artist-filmmaker questions if his ‘head and neck cancer’ will impede his cognitive capacity to continue making work with political heft. Elsewhere, the story often reverts to the genre of the male artist genius, the unconquerable creative spirit no mortal affliction can match. Henri Matisse’s cut outs are considered some of his most important and innovative work, a technique he developed after intestinal cancer left him unable to paint.

But as the British artist Michael Landy knows, having spent three decades exploring such ideas, triumph can also be found in oblivion and depletion. The dumping ground can be fertile territory. A few years after his headline-grabbing work Break Down (2001), in which he destroyed all his worldly belongings on a conveyor belt in a former department store on London’s Oxford Street – an experience he likened to ‘witnessing my own funeral’ – Landy discovered a tumour in his left testicle. Aged forty, he had just moved back into his parents’ Essex home as ‘artist-in-residence’ for his Tate Britain commission. The plan was to make work about his father, who had suffered a devastating industrial accident in the 1970s that had left him unable to work, heavily medicated and emotionally distant. It was only while he was drawing his father’s mangled leg following a bypass that the artist considered sharing his own diagnosis. “We never really talked about things as a family,” he tells The Art Journal, “[but] I saw it as a kind of exchange going on since I was drawing his scar. Suddenly, it went full circle and I was drawing my own body parts.”

Michael Landy, Radical Orchidectomy for a Solid Mass in the Upper Pole of the Left Testis, 2005, colour pencil on paper, 57 x 78 cm. Photo: Todd White Art Photography. © Michael Landy. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery

Delicately tracing the seam that marks the absence of the removed testicle, Landy’s observational drawings of his groin spare no detail. "The male director of my gallery can't look at them.” A friend’s young son started crying when he saw one at the artist’s recent solo exhibition LOOK at Hastings Contemporary. “It's like when you get kicked in the balls by a football. Men always wince. It's to do with the male private domain, or something.” For Landy though, the artworks were cathartic: he was able to not only process his own brush with mortality, but also to reframe what had happened to his father decades before. The cancer drawings are ultimately about “all sorts of different manhoods, and how they can get taken away.”

For the French artist Benoît Piéron, whose practice draws on the many years he has spent in hospitals for meningitis, leukaemia and two bouts of cancer, the Covid pandemic meant that illness was no longer a niche subject. “Suddenly I was able at this moment to speak, and people could also listen. They had questions because they were all on the same page,” the artist tells The Art Journal. When museums and galleries reopened, we saw a wave of curatorial programming focused on themes of health, fragility and radical care. Nonetheless, “if you make work about illness, you have to think about being tokenised,“ Piéron adds. “And some illnesses are more visual, more bankable than others.”

As with other marginalised bodies, audiences can feel a sense of entitlement and expect an ailing body to be laid bare: “Crip bodies are considered public space. Like the cop with the flashlight, they [audiences] want to see everything without shadows. Along with the darkness, there is the fear of opacity, [where] it’s not easy to touch our fears and to act on them. That's why I work with shadows,“ the artist adds, referring to the crip porn shadow theatre work he has produced for his new solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo.

Benoît Piéron, Stars or Storms, 2024 (installation view, Magasin CNAC, Grenoble). Photo: Grégory Copitet. © Magasin CNAC. Courtesy the artist

For Piéron, who learned last year that he is intersex, the feminisation of illness can be harnessed as a subversive and emancipatory strategy. “I use softness so people can see through the eyes of the illness, which is death alive. Ill people are non-binary people between birth and death. My strategy is to be inside the institution. If I do some patchwork, some crochet, some scrapbooking, it's because these are mediums that came from the waiting rooms. It’s what the hospital put in front of us so we would shut the fuck up. So we [crip artists] took these kinds of pastime skills out of the non-productivity time and put them into production.”

‘Illness is the night-side of life,’ wrote Sontag. ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ It might be within Piéron’s logic of the waiting room – this space of the in-between, which by definition is all-encompassing and home to us all – that the answer of who gets to share their suffering with others might lie.