A
colour photograph hangs at eye level, of a middle aged woman seated
on a child's ceramic potty. Her body is stooped and twisted in
shame, face lost in shadow, girlish white knickers bunched around
bare ankles. Behind her, scuffed floorboards, a bannister worn with
age, the bumps and bruises of family life. This is the excavation of
human trauma in the name of healing and of art.
2012
is the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jo Spence. By way of
homage SPACE, London and Studio Voltaire have collaborated to create
a two part exhibition that chronologically spans the artist's career.
As a key component of Spence's modus operandi was collaboration,
this synergy feels right.
Part
II takes place off Clapham High Street and covers the period 1982 to
1992. The subject matter is Spence's cancer diagnosis, her
subsequent journey into the world of holistic health care and the
pioneering photo therapy that makes up the greater part of her best
known work.
For
Spence, photo therapy meant using the camera to heal herself within
the broader context of psychoanalysis. It was a process she
undertook with photographer Rosy Martin and through which they both
discovered that 'there is no single self, but many fragmented selves,
each vying for conscious expression, many never acknowledged.'
Coming
into dialogue with the fragmented selves became a means of
self-empowerment and of moving towards health; a way of rejecting
existing mythologies and the systems of hegemony and dominance that
spawned them, yet without creating new ones in which to get lost once
more. It was a way of acknowledging her own constantly shifting
totality.
One
set of photo-theraputic works is devoted to the re-enactment by
Spence of various moments in the life of her mother. Putting herself
into her mother's position, she reported, made her feel guilty for
the way she had behaved towards her mother when she was alive. This
material is so raw and so emotionally fraught it may begin to explain
why work of such evident potency has been almost totally overlooked
by the existing art establishment. The exhibitions at SPACE and
Studio Voltaire are her first retrospective in London. The Victoria
& Albert is the only public collection in England to include her
work and that by donation. As Spence herself once observed:
“breaking out is not painless for anybody.”
The
work on show at Studio Voltaire evidences her rejection of the cult
of the artist. She employs a democratising technique of willed
amateurishess, even abandoning the title 'artist', envisioning
herself instead as 'cultural sniper', capable of appearing anywhere
and in any guise. Her work is more commonly laminated than framed,
giving the exhibition an awkward, community centre feel. Yet
Spence's output is steeped in theory, amalgamating the academic with
lived experience.
In
1991, having contracted leukaemia, she began The Final Project: A
Photo fantasy and Photo therapeutic Exploration of Life and Death.
She spoke of a crisis of representation. “I have not the faintest
idea how to represent leukaemia except for how I feel.”
In
one self-portrait from this series, traces of dark hair creep out
from behind the toothy grimace of a rubber death mask, whilst over
one black-clad shoulder a large wicker shopping bag nonchalantly
hangs. The power of Spence's work is in its directness. She
projects the strength of an army with the sensitivity of a butterfly.
This confrontation drags death into life rather than the other way
around. And not just into her life, into ours as well.
It
may seem that Spence's political engagement, her socialist and
feminist sympathies and the documentation of her difficulties with
the NHS during what she parenthetically referred to as 'the cuts',
could lodge her intensely auto-biographical work into a time specific
niche outside of which it lacks resonance. This show at Studio
Voltaire dispels that myth. Spence uses the deeply personal nature
of experience as a means of accessing the universal. She presents us
with the inescapable facts of all our lives – childhood, ageing,
illness, death - and she does so without cliché. It is the brutal
honesty with which she casts the objective gaze upon her own life
that makes this exhibition so important and so long overdue.
WORK
(Part II)
13 June to 11 August 2012