On medicine, the arts and sharing the burden

The patio in front of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art on Toronto’s Queen Street West was choked with people. Be-tuqued and mustachioed couples stepped in and out of the pools of light while a man in a dark suit polished his recently emptied hors d’oeuvre tray. It was the end of a long day and I had returned to spend a bit more time with an installation by Montréal’s Raphaëlle de Groot, which I’d stumbled across a couple of days earlier, when I remembered it was time for the announcement of the Sobey Art Award, for which she’d been shortlisted. Given the size of crowd, I thought my chances of muscling in to see the piece that so interested me was pretty small, so I crossed my fingers for her and continued back to my hotel.

The Burden of Objects — Inventory 1 (diptych), 2009, by Raphaëlle de Groot, digital print, 78 × 92.3 cm +78 × 53 cm.

Image courtesy of Patrick Altman Le lieu

It hadn’t immediately stood out to me: it comprised a small glass-topped credenza plus a diptych in which the left panel showed tiny pictures of discarded objects, and the right panel showed a series of quotations from the objects’ owners. The credenza displayed stacks of paper, scribbled over in various languages — answers to questions posed by the artist: whether the object held any special meaning, how the object came into the owner’s possession, why the owner was letting it go and where it had previously lived.

At first I wasn’t sure what had drawn me so powerfully to the exhibit. It wasn’t the objects themselves: a pair of eyeglasses, a scorched frying pan, a partial dental plate, a chamber pot, a band saw a plastic thermometer. Perhaps it was the little glimpses of despair: “I have too many photos of myself wearing this dress and looking young and in love.” “It destroys everything it touches.” “In 2004, on this telephone I received word of my mother’s impending death.” (Though if it was despair I was drawn to, her suggestion of a dismembered corpse, represented by a tweed jacket stuffed with junk, tied in omentum-like bags of plastic surrounded by tangles of red thread showed that much more obviously.)

I realized afterwards it was the title of the piece that had moved me: Le Poids des Objets? (or, in English translation, The Burden of Objects). The artist recognized that memory — here embodied in material things — can be oppressive. Then she went a step further: she exorcised her collaborators’ oppression by asking them to tell a story. Much the way doctors do when we ask a patient to talk through a trauma, because we know that putting things into words is a kind of salvation. As Rita Charon wrote recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, “One’s experience becomes visible when given form … Experience without mediation through representation is evanescent, not because it’s forgotten, but because without material form — painting, story, poem, it cannot be beheld, and so it’s as if it never happened.1

I have what some might consider an odd habit of writing poems about old photos of people I find in junk stores.2 I think what draws me to the photos is that need to represent experience: in discarding a picture, a person unburdens himself of the story contained within it, but who then speaks for what’s been abandoned? I suppose my poems peer out on De Groot from the other side of the looking glass. Either way, I realized it wasn’t the visual impact of her piece, but rather her impulse that I found beautiful.

Later that night I looked up to see who had won. Here’s what the Sobey award committee said when they gave her the $50 000 prize:3

Through her practice we are called on to be active witnesses, intrigued by what we see, disturbed by what we discover of ourselves and by what is revealed to us in this encounter with art and the artist … Her work reinforces common values and shared human experiences.

That sounds like there are some lessons for medicine in that.