OK. Comics… I'm getting there
I'd been exhibiting my work for several years, landscape based, abstracted paintings and intaglio prints, and avoiding any overt medical subject matter, for fear of it coming out all… ewww, yucky, sentimental, melodramatic. I felt too close to the subject matter, too embedded and conditioned to make anything worthwhile. I think the best art that takes medical or biological subjects as its starting point is produced by artists who come at the subject with a fresh, uncorrupted viewpoint (although, granted, they may have just as many presuppositions as scientists who try to make art). I think when someone approaches a discourse like medicine and wants to make art based on something within it, it is best approached from a neutral position. Some artists seem to get excited by medicine or scientific subjects and are able to introduce radical new viewpoints, although I've also seen unsubtle, axe-grinding narrative work that is informed by some previous bad experience and ingrained prejudice. You'd think that the great critics of medicine like Foucault would be taught at medical school wouldn't you? Nope. I doubt there are many medical students or doctors or nurses who have even heard of him, let alone read him.
Well, I was feeling rather… torn, fragmented. There was no bridging factor between my work as an artist and my three days a week as a doctor. Maybe that was a good thing, there is, after all, no inherent reason why we should integrate all the facets of our lives, but nevertheless I felt the urge to try to find some link. I think the main factor I felt was lacking was some common language with which to discuss the two areas. Then a friend of mine, a well read GP who is into poetry and literature, introduced me to to the relatively new, interdisciplinary field of Medical Humanities, which uses the "conceptual tools" of the arts and humanities to examine the field of Medicine. I felt I had found my niche. I enrolled on a part time MA course based in Swansea University.
I'd thoroughly recommend going back to university as a mature student. I've done it twice now. I really enjoyed the taught modules of the MA, a crash course in philosophy, history, literature, theology, sociology and anthropology. I thought I'd end up writing my dissertation on the visual arts in medicine, but to be honest, I never found anything that really floated my boat. I'd really enjoyed studying narrative and decided to apply some basic narratology to an old love of mine: comics and graphic novels. This seemed like an excellent excuse to spend a great deal of time reading comics in the name of research. I decided I'd try to find everything I could in the comics form that related to medicine, or stories of illness and suffering.
Of course, once you start looking…
I've built a website dedicated to the subject:
more on comics next posting, we're getting the contextual part out of the way first.
