Body As Temple

Last Sunday and Monday, doctors held office hours at the Fogg Art Museum where medical practitioners and patients from a local AIDS counseling and treatment center held regular medical appointments with their psychiatrists and clinicians.

Instead of meeting in a private office, doctor met patient within a specially designed "clinic" sculpture in the Strauss Gallery of the Fogg Museum. This action, called Medicine as Art/Art as Medicine, is the work of artist and doctor Eric Avery in conjunction with the Multi-Disciplinary AIDS Program at Cambridge City Hospital's Zinberg Clinic.

Avery works as a print-maker and physician at the University of Texas at Galveston. The son of a doctor and an artist, Avery sees himself as existing between the art and medical worlds. His prints, sculptures and installations deal with issues of health, healing and sexuality and very often borrows imagery from familiar paintings and etchings from Piranesi to folk art.

The clinic in Medicine as Art/Art as Medicine exhibit is an eight by ten foot structure with two doctor's-office white walls, and an exposed front and back, by means of which the audience is invited to observe the clinic in action. Avery situated the three dimensional structure of the clinic in an environment of two dimensional traditional art pieces. The outside of the white walls are covered with a wallpaper based on a 1749 century etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, entitled Prison VII. A wood-block pattern of the life-cycle of HIV is incorporated into the Piranesi etching and illuminates the relevence of the Piranesi's shadowy and contorted confinement imagery to the disease.

Avery's installation alters the disease to the point of ominous abstraction. A traditional sterile hospital bed and two metal chairs are housed between the two walls and a gabled pine-rafter roof. Beach ball-sizes models of the HIV virus hang from the gallery ceiling over the clinic's roof. These black balls, marked by a wood-cut print of the HIV virus's polka-dot structure, envelop patient, doctor, and visitor alike.

In addition to integrating the clinic into the museum physically, Avery attempts to conceptually integrate his structure by modeling his clinic on the architectural structures in the museum's surrounding art-works -- in this case the architectural prints featured in the "New York/Rome" exhibit. The roof of the clinic structure, for example, is modeled on the temple depicted in a 17th century print by Gerard Audran of the Triumphal Entry of Constantine into Rome.. By merging his installation into the museum's high-brow art works, Avery intends to enshrine the clinic. He wants to recreate the medical world within the traditional temple of the museum.

Avery's action--the act of treating patients--makes use of the intimate relationship among medical practice, education and visual display, and at its core, Avery's innovation reminds one of the anatomical theaters in centuries past.

The practice of healing was at its most theatrical during the Renaissance when doctors operated on dead bodies and treated living patients in the center of a pillared medical theater. Leonardo da Vinci depicted several such scenes in his paintings. In placing Medicine as Art/Art as Medicine within this historical and artistic context, he is further able to blur the boundary between art and real life.

Not even public AIDS-related art is new. Especially in the last decade, artists have been using scientific images such as anatomical models (Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith), and scientific specimens (Damien Hirst, Annette Messager). But Avery is unusual in bringing medicine itself--not simply a representation of medicine--into the museum. The literalness of translating medicine in to art (and vice-versa) in this exhibit distinguishes it from other such pieces.

Simply, Art as Medicine/Medicine as Art turns the private clinic into public art. In the space of the Zinberg clinic, staff and patients were shown to the public, bringing viewers face-to-face with the reality of human disease and medical treatment. Participants create a political and educational action from their personal suffering, sacrificing their intimacy and privacy for the sake of a larger project.

It is unfortunate that the actual practice of medicine within the clinic lasted only two days; though it was brilliant while it lasted, two days is hardly enough time to expose a large audience to the work.

The clinic structure will stay up as an installation in the Strauss Gallery through January. The piece will be necessarily tranformed, though, when the action ceases. Avery says his work is "more about space, and less about the body," but it is doubtful that the structural remains of Medicine as Art/Art as Medicine can stand on its own as as more than a representation of times past and diseases that exist only outside the museum space. Action itself defined Avery's installation; the "act of healing" can not linger in the art space when all the doctors and patients have packed up and gone back to the hospital

Not even public AIDS-related art is new. Especially in the last decade, artists have been using scientific images such as anatomical models (Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith), and scientific specimens (Damien Hirst, Annette Messager). But Avery is unusual in bringing medicine itself--not simply a representation of medicine--into the museum. The literalness of translating medicine in to art (and vice-versa) in this exhibit distinguishes it from other such pieces.

Simply, Art as Medicine/Medicine as Art turns the private clinic into public art. In the space of the Zinberg clinic, staff and patients were shown to the public, bringing viewers face-to-face with the reality of human disease and medical treatment. Participants create a political and educational action from their personal suffering, sacrificing their intimacy and privacy for the sake of a larger project.

It is unfortunate that the actual practice of medicine within the clinic lasted only two days; though it was brilliant while it lasted, two days is hardly enough time to expose a large audience to the work.

The clinic structure will stay up as an installation in the Strauss Gallery through January. The piece will be necessarily tranformed, though, when the action ceases. Avery says his work is "more about space, and less about the body," but it is doubtful that the structural remains of Medicine as Art/Art as Medicine can stand on its own as as more than a representation of times past and diseases that exist only outside the museum space. Action itself defined Avery's installation; the "act of healing" can not linger in the art space when all the doctors and patients have packed up and gone back to the hospital