Exquisite Suffering: A Review of “The Waiting Room”
The following is an excerpt of an essay by Gina Kaufmann from the book, A Waiting Room of Her Own: Contexts for the Waiting Room which compliments and expands on the art installation. Exquisite suffering. That’s the phrase the woman uses to describe her memories of depression.
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As she remembers her early episodes, they were cold and icy and brittle and bleak. But they were also decadent, like eating too much chocolate or staying out all night or lying too long in the sun. She knew that her mental state wasn’t healthy or good, but it was oddly enticing. It put her in touch with something outside the humdrum banality of healthy existence. And sometimes, despite her best efforts, she found herself struggling to resist its allure.
We don’t usually think of illness, mental or physical, as beautiful. But, so often, beauty is something we find in extremes. Mountain peaks inspire awe, in part because they also threaten avalanche. Tumultuous waters are more often extolled by the painter or poet than are stagnant ponds. Health, meanwhile, is all about balance: not deviating from the mean, not having too much of this or too little of that, not revealing abnormalities in the examination room or the X-ray or the cat-scan or the heart monitor. Health is a plain, not a mountain; a steady stream, not a tidal body susceptible to the whims of the moon.
Beauty is about the mark of distinction, surpassing the norm, standing out from the crowd, inspiring double-takes. But double-takes are not something you want your doctor to do upon looking at your brain scan. On a heart monitor, there are two kinds of hearts: a healthy heart—which is normal—and a heart that suffers from disease--which is not. The best heart in all the world is just a normal old heart. A heart like all the rest.
We describe beauty as breathtaking. But shortness of breath is anything but breathtaking.
A friend of mine told me, after her lymphoma diagnosis, that she felt like “the sick princess” of fairy tales, living out a fantasy she never really wanted to come true. Sleeping Beauty slept, and all the forest wept. Snow White’s good looks were so threatening that her own step-mom poisoned her, and a team of indignant dwarfs intervened. My friend got lymphoma, and her loved ones took turns bringing her dinner. They joined her for energy-healing sessions and complimented her wig (which Rapunzel would have envied). But chemo really sucked. And no singing birds made her a gown.
The ordinary and the extraordinary, the clinical and the sublime. The sterility of medicine and messiness of the human body. Science and sensuality, the orderly and the organic, control and recovery, anonymity and intimacy, mortality and fantasy.
Disease and beauty. The exquisite side of suffering.
This is what The Waiting Room: Lost and Found is all about, in content and aesthetic.
The exhibit is a collaborative installation spearheaded by artists Marguerite Perret, Stephanie Lanter,
Bruce Scherting and Robin Lasser. They came together to create a multi-sensory experience revolving around four chairs representing four different medical conditions: breast cancer, dementia, anorexia and depression. Each chair has been fabricated and adorned by the artists, and each chair clearly implies a person who might sit in it. In other words, a person who either suffers from the condition or cares for someone who suffers from that condition.
In contemporary America, it’s hard to separate health from sociopolitical considerations—preexisting conditions, Roe v. Wade, the future of Medicaid, male-centric research studies. Yet, although the Waiting Room artists might disagree, I would argue that this art is not political. Which is to say, these chairs are not bumper stickers or bite-sized slogans made for easy digestion and reveling in their own cleverness. This art is intimate, focusing not on widely accepted truths or dumbed-down rhetoric, but on the kind of nuance and complexity that only real life can supply. These chairs do not attempt to simplify the viewer’s understanding of the female patient’s perspective. Instead, they complicate it, depict it with exquisite detail.
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Gina Kaufmann is a Kansas City based freelance writer, editor, storyteller and broadcast journalist. In the early 2000s, she wrote a popular art column in Kansas City’s alternative weekly paper and, more recently, she co-hosted a daily talk show for public radio. Kaufmann also has been involved in the New York-based Heeb magazine and Heeb Storytelling series and has published art criticism in ArtNews and Lemon magazine.
The following is an excerpt of an essay by Gina Kaufmann from the book, A Waiting Room of Her Own: Contexts for the Waiting Room which compliments and expands on the art installation. Exquisite suffering. That’s the phrase the woman uses to describe her memories of depression.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
As she remembers her early episodes, they were cold and icy and brittle and bleak. But they were also decadent, like eating too much chocolate or staying out all night or lying too long in the sun. She knew that her mental state wasn’t healthy or good, but it was oddly enticing. It put her in touch with something outside the humdrum banality of healthy existence. And sometimes, despite her best efforts, she found herself struggling to resist its allure.
We don’t usually think of illness, mental or physical, as beautiful. But, so often, beauty is something we find in extremes. Mountain peaks inspire awe, in part because they also threaten avalanche. Tumultuous waters are more often extolled by the painter or poet than are stagnant ponds. Health, meanwhile, is all about balance: not deviating from the mean, not having too much of this or too little of that, not revealing abnormalities in the examination room or the X-ray or the cat-scan or the heart monitor. Health is a plain, not a mountain; a steady stream, not a tidal body susceptible to the whims of the moon.
Beauty is about the mark of distinction, surpassing the norm, standing out from the crowd, inspiring double-takes. But double-takes are not something you want your doctor to do upon looking at your brain scan. On a heart monitor, there are two kinds of hearts: a healthy heart—which is normal—and a heart that suffers from disease--which is not. The best heart in all the world is just a normal old heart. A heart like all the rest.
We describe beauty as breathtaking. But shortness of breath is anything but breathtaking.
A friend of mine told me, after her lymphoma diagnosis, that she felt like “the sick princess” of fairy tales, living out a fantasy she never really wanted to come true. Sleeping Beauty slept, and all the forest wept. Snow White’s good looks were so threatening that her own step-mom poisoned her, and a team of indignant dwarfs intervened. My friend got lymphoma, and her loved ones took turns bringing her dinner. They joined her for energy-healing sessions and complimented her wig (which Rapunzel would have envied). But chemo really sucked. And no singing birds made her a gown.
The ordinary and the extraordinary, the clinical and the sublime. The sterility of medicine and messiness of the human body. Science and sensuality, the orderly and the organic, control and recovery, anonymity and intimacy, mortality and fantasy.
Disease and beauty. The exquisite side of suffering.
This is what The Waiting Room: Lost and Found is all about, in content and aesthetic.
The exhibit is a collaborative installation spearheaded by artists Marguerite Perret, Stephanie Lanter,
Bruce Scherting and Robin Lasser. They came together to create a multi-sensory experience revolving around four chairs representing four different medical conditions: breast cancer, dementia, anorexia and depression. Each chair has been fabricated and adorned by the artists, and each chair clearly implies a person who might sit in it. In other words, a person who either suffers from the condition or cares for someone who suffers from that condition.
In contemporary America, it’s hard to separate health from sociopolitical considerations—preexisting conditions, Roe v. Wade, the future of Medicaid, male-centric research studies. Yet, although the Waiting Room artists might disagree, I would argue that this art is not political. Which is to say, these chairs are not bumper stickers or bite-sized slogans made for easy digestion and reveling in their own cleverness. This art is intimate, focusing not on widely accepted truths or dumbed-down rhetoric, but on the kind of nuance and complexity that only real life can supply. These chairs do not attempt to simplify the viewer’s understanding of the female patient’s perspective. Instead, they complicate it, depict it with exquisite detail.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gina Kaufmann is a Kansas City based freelance writer, editor, storyteller and broadcast journalist. In the early 2000s, she wrote a popular art column in Kansas City’s alternative weekly paper and, more recently, she co-hosted a daily talk show for public radio. Kaufmann also has been involved in the New York-based Heeb magazine and Heeb Storytelling series and has published art criticism in ArtNews and Lemon magazine.