Courtesy the artist, Socrates Sculpture Park, and P “Abuelx,” a term he coined in the absence of a gender-neutral Spanish word for “grandparent,” framed the earth (“planeta”) as a wise elder deserving reverence and care, who in turn provides vital resources for healing.Īerial view of Guadalupe Maravilla’s Tripa Chuca, 2021, at Socrates Sculpture Park, New York Photo Mark DiConzo. The show likened bodily maintenance to cultivating a garden, and Maravilla infused his space for collective grieving with a gentle call to action. “Planeta Abuelx” provided a healing space to mourn the elders we lost to Covid-19. For his exhibition “Planeta Abuelx,” on view this past summer at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, he grew food crops and medicinal herbs around one of his “Disease Thrower” sculptures, and hosted occasional healing sound bath sessions, using the sculpture’s gong to create soothing sounds.
WHO BETTER TO practice healing than the sick, who have likely experimented relentlessly, and who manage their own bodies every day? The El Salvador–born, New York–based artist Guadalupe Maravilla has channeled his experience with cancer and migration into a healing-focused practice. These artists also take care to frame healing as an ongoing process, distinct from cure, and to highlight the unique They offer refreshing counterpoints to the melodramatic or confessional modes that have plagued depictions of serious illness in film and literature. Those authored by Lazard, and by Panteha Abareshi, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Jordan Lord, and Guadalupe Maravilla, among others, often purposely focus on the quotidian aspects of sickness.
That’s why it’s time to find new chronic illness narratives. Susan Sontag’s oft-quoted Illness as Metaphor (1978), published following her diagnosis of cancer, makes the case that illness narratives have a profound impact on real life. Writers like Lazard, Anne Boyer, Porochista Khakpour, Susan Sontag, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha point out how burdened they feel by the conventions of illness narratives: the pressure to mimic a patient testimonial, the convention of using illness as a device for drama, the knowledge that readers often pity infirm writers and characters. It isn’t just stigma that makes talking or writing about illness challenging melodramatic tropes abound to which many sick people simply can’t relate. Accordingly, plenty of individuals with chronic illnesses find reason in this attitude to opt for silence. Today, many people with access to WebMD or toxic op-eds-even those who lack both symptoms and biological expertise-feel entitled to voice their myriad medical opinions. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 51.8 percent of Americans have at least one chronic condition-surely a low number, as the CDC conducted the study using only ten common diagnoses. There have always been, and will always be, chronically ill and disabled artists, and many of them these days cite Lazard as influential in emboldening them both to speak out and in charting new formal strategies for doing so. And, by focusing on boredom, Lazard subtly challenged the depictions of hospitals we see on TV, where they are typically portrayed as settings for acute drama, rather than banal, drawn-out interludes. The work’s constant channel changing called to mind the experience of being too ill or too medicated to concentrate on much, yet too bored to tolerate zero stimulation. Cable is, of course, a medium in decline, but in hospitals, it persists, a necessary distraction and a reminder of the world outside. More than that, Extended Stay addresses the boredom associated with illness-a feeling that many people experienced during quarantine, deprived of the usual outlets for socializing and entertainment.