Dr Wendy Garden

Testimonies and Confessions, Maroondah Art Gallery, 2012

Between the lines

Psychotherapy is often referred to as the talking cure, which reflects beliefs in the ability of language to unlock repressed fears and provide relief from distress. However while language can provide insights it is never innocent. Although words can heal they can also wound. Language is a sign system imbued with the ideologies particular to the laws and social divisions of society. In this respect language circumscribes ‘what can be said, or even thought, and by whom.’1 Within language the ability to name is a manifestation of power relations which traditionally privileged patriarchal knowledge over understandings of women and people from other cultures. Within medical discourse the history of naming disease, both physical and mental, produced knowledge that affirmed male agency and privilege. In the field of mental illness labeling the bodies of women in order to know, contain and limit could sometimes have tragic outcomes.

Violeta Čapovska’s captivating body of work in this exhibition at the National Gallery of Macedonia is informed by the role of language in medical science. Resulting from a residency she held at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia in 2004, her project over the last seven years has involved a nuanced consideration of the naming acts inherent in the diagnosis and treatment of women suffering various forms of mental malady. Her work is informed by research into the archives of St Vincent’s where she encountered the medical records and case notes of women in the early 1900s. References to hysteria and other mental afflictions provided glimpses of attitudes that considered many types of mental distress peculiarly female afflictions. Understandings of hysteria at this time were informed by Jean-Martin Charcot’s systematic study of hysteria based on visual scrutiny of women’s bodies. Based at the notorious Paris-based Salpêtrière hospital, an asylum for ‘insane and incurable women,’ Charcot’s quest for a ‘visible alphabet of the body’2 resulted in hundreds of photographs and drawings of women ‘performing’ hysteria for the camera. 3 Published in three volumes entitled, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière between 1876 and 1877, Charcot’s pioneering research paved the way for Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s interest in hysteria, hypnosis and psychoanalysis and ensured a medical gaze remained steadfast on the bodies of vulnerable women well into the twentieth century.

Čapovska maps the genealogy of pathology in a number of linoprints and textiles. For instance, Hypnosis 1 and Seance 1, 2004-06, are based on drawings made at the Salpêtrière of women under hypnosis believed to be a cure for hysteria. The originals were created in the nineteenth century to demonstrate the power of men over their female subjects and encapsulate the male fantasy of complete possession. Bourneville, who worked alongside Charcot, describes these drawings as demonstrating women in the ‘state of fascination, the hypnotized subject belongs absolutely to the fascinator.’ 4 Čapovska faithfully recreates the original drawings, her images distinguished largely by the subdued visual noise of the parallel lines in the background. What could easily be overlooked as an insignificant detail however is poignant and permeates throughout Čapovska’s imagery. For instance the linoprints in the series, Naming the Name, 2008-2011, are each distinguished by bands of fine threads rendered in softly hued ink. Each small tile comprises a woman’s name. For Čapovska this began as a personal homage to the women in her maternal family. However the names of female patients treated by Freud and Breuer were included in response to her interest in psychoanalysis. The names of heroines from history and literature such as Ophelia, Julia, Mary Magdalene and the Macedonian legend of Sirma also appear. Recent names include Mukhtar, Liraz and Aure and remember ordinary women raped, stoned or killed by men in conflicts in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iran. These simple names are depicted paralyzed against their rhythmic strands, the pared back palette a foil to the excess each name represents. Powerfully defiant they refuse to drift quietly into their muted background. In another work the labels assigned to sufferers of various mental conditions such as ‘neurotic’, ’insane’ and ‘hysteric’ encapsulate desires to reduce complex experience to simplistic categories. The lilting fine bars of grey ink, while referencing early wood engravings, create a visual agitation that both imprisons and resists.

In another work, Untitled, 2008, the motif of parallel bars is again deployed. Comprising ten panels of linoprints arranged in pairs, one print is positioned on top of another. The top print is depicted in grey tones and features a simple statement such as ‘Missing Mother’ with its corollary carved in reverse ‘Protecting Mother.’ This work speaks of good mother/bad mother anxieties, repressed fears and the contradictory messages many mothers attempt to reconcile. The print underneath is rendered in various shades of baby pink evoking gender classification that begins at birth. These panels are reflective spaces. Again slim bands of ink run across the page evoking minute indecipherable writing or a scrambled television broadcast signal. A secret script outside of language, they bring into play both entrapment and escape. 

This motif is continued in many of the textile works. Cut out dresses and aprons reminiscent of those worn by women at the Salpêtrière also include printed text hinting at maternal ambivalence. A number are created in bleak charcoal fabric with delicate bands of jet, silver or red beading corseting the waist. For instance Womb 1, 2008, combines two layers of muted black organza cut out in the shape of a dress over a lithographic print of an oversized uterus. Its expansive proportions dominate. The word hysteria derives from the Greek word for uterus and the condition was first thought to be a result of its malfunction. In this work Čapovska makes a poignant statement about the way in which gender has been equated with biology, the complexity of real experience overlooked in the pursuit of knowledge that advanced the understandings of men. It is an image of mourning that evokes what has been lost. But placed alongside similar works, the accumulative effect of the whole creates a combative presence. 

Together the work in this exhibition enlists the lived experiences of women to unhinge the authority of medical language that pathologized female anxieties. Through prints, textiles and video Čapovska provokes a reconsideration of the ways in which women have been subjugated by language while holding in balance the redemptive possibilities that exist between the lines.

1 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old mistresses: women, art, and ideology. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981, 114.

2 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge & Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003, 26.

3 Ibid.

4 Bourneville quoted in Georges Didi-Huberman, 217.