SAN FRANCISCO: TERRY FOX
THE DAY I TALKED WITH Terry Fox about the “hospital piece” he was preparing to reenter the hospital for three months, to have his sternum removed. In fact, he reflected, he’s been going in and out of hospitals with a mysterious cancerous chest infection for the last eight years which is, considering he’s only twenty-eight, his entire artistic career. “Maybe my whole thing as an artist has been about this—death, and the hospital,” he said.
Fox has been referred to during the past two years, when he “surfaced,” as a Conceptualist, processist, “body” artist, and theatricalist, none of which referring to the titleless hospital, quite nail it. Cindy Nemser’s definition of “body” artist (Arts, September, 1971) comes close: “. . . all . . . work within real time and space and with themselves in terms of their own identities. Secondly, whether their works use media of live performance, film, photo-documentation, tape recordings, videotape, or written information, these pieces are not considered actualized unless carried out by the body itself.” Fox’s body carried out hospital beforehand, and what we then own, like paint in Pollock, is the residue of tribulation, which is all the artist can tender us, which he hopes will “charge” the space with the numbing, cyclical drone of catastrophe he felt, and will feel, flat on his back in a humorless antiseptic cubicle, bandaged and cathetered, tubed and charted. Hospital moved me, almost to tears at certain moments: it’s beautifully buskined, like some small Schwitters or what Rauschenberg might have done, had he looked inside, instead of constantly out.
Hospital consists of four items in a main, wide corridor, two addenda at the ends, and four earlier déjà vu textural ink drawings. At opposite walls in the center are an enormous “easel” inscribed with a ghostly blackboard blowup of his itemized bill (“Oct. 27, Incision & Drainage, $13.00”), and another slate slab with a bread-covered pole propped against it. To one side of the latter is another pole, wrapped in tape, plaster, and bread. Two tape recorders punctuate speakers attenuated to either side, everything linked by arteries of symmetrically plopped wire; the hook-up plays a loop of Fox’s wheezing, monster-movie breath, scored by an intermittent singsong madrigal of moans. Near the entrance (to Reese Palley’s slick, roomy emporium) lurks the “Rosebud” sled of the piece: a cone-hooded lightbulb dangling a foot from the floor by a heavy black cord, slapping down a cruel bright circle of light on whose fringes lie a small wash basin, soap, and red towel. I told Fox the digression set off a string of trauma triggers in me: stays at the Manhattan “Y,” that demicharitable concentration camp of Lysol’d perversion, failure, and poverty; the bathtub drain in Psycho; suicide in the bathroom (Lupe Velez); and a vague pitiful reminder, like the piles of children’s shoes at Auschwitz, of what we can be reduced to. He answered that his direct allusion was to his long obligatory ritual of washing and changing an enormous, ubiquitous chest bandage, but that my references were OK because the mood was the point. Toward the gallery’s posterior is the least effective particular, a leaning stretcher.
It’s the least effective because it’s obviously the most literally symbolic. True, the whole piece is laden with direct equivalents: “I don’t know exactly why the things are the shapes they are and look the way they do. They work to convey the claustrophobia of marrow in the bone. The corridor is a section of vessel. The water bowl and soap are ritual, the stretcher is claustrophobia. The action of the state of mind on the physical state. The drawings show the surface of the bread which is my wound. The breath is not self-sustaining, it relies on a system and attendants to the system in order to function. So does the chant. The wires = arterial system, the membrane, ear drum. The walls are pious and charitable; the bases are isolated from the energy of the floor and walls by electrical tape.”
Much new art, the kinds relying on those devices listed under “body” art, seems pretentious because the media, by either necessity or boast, are s-p-e-l-l-e-d o-u-t as if accomplishment itself. And most always they’re insufferably, condescendingly didactic, little correspondence school lessons in Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, George Kubler, or, worst of all, Marcel Duchamp (whose graveyard r.p.m.’s are that unending buzz you hear). Fox’s previous pieces save some of that sound (Art Deposit), and a little of the smell (a “bread rising” piece), but mostly it’s attempted magic. Further, hospital was the first piece Terry Fox planned, sprouting from a seed planted when, by stunning coincidence, he found this quotation from Artaud while in his sickroom bed pierced with a plastic canal: “This sin consisted of a temptation visited upon me to pass the breath of my heart through a tube to both sides of the surface.” The announcement, a photograph of Fox so fettered, is intended to serve as a preconditioner, so the spectator views the piece in terms of a hospital experience, rather than short-run art history.
In an earlier work, Levitation Piece, Fox lay on a mound of loam for six hours in quiet and darkness while he tried to levitate. He had, he said, “the feeling for a while that I was out of my body.” What spectators saw was the imprint of his figure in the dirt and four tubes containing the body elements of urine, water, milk, and blood coursing from the depression. It was an attempt—skeptical, passionate, and honest—to “charge” the space with the energy and possibility of levitation. Hospital works on many levels: elegant drawing (the wires, poles, and walls), grand sculpture (à la Serra, Andre, and Sonnier), and teatro povero staging. But finally and best, it’s gristly poetic narration: Fox’s struggle with his imperfect body, which is the artist’s struggle with the world, which is our struggle with our treacherous selves. Fox says of it: “the absolute impartiality of the object and its function, the total partiality of the context, the ‘drone’ of experience like a recurring nightmare or dream, the base of operation.”
—Peter Plagens
