COMBINE 2012: Annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life [...]. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”

—Michel Foucault

Marlee Parsons presents us with a performative and interactive installation entitled: Psychic Cell Reading in which she inhabits the role of a psychic cell reader. This performance piece, which is installed in the vitrine of the FOFA Gallery, is accessible to any passers-by whose eyes are captivated by the movement of the participants’ own living cells that are projected onto the wall.

Parsons invites the viewer to participate in her performance as her patient. As she scrapes a miniscule amount of cheek particles and places them under a microscope she begins a dialogue with the participant. Once the particles are projected, large-scale onto the nearby wall, which is clearly visible to the patient, the psychic, and the wider gallery audience, the image becomes a living portrait.

The artist examines the hundreds of the patient’s smallest individual organic components in front of an unfamiliar audience and in so doing the participant renounces any form of control over their appearance. Such exposure to one’s own physicality is a humbling experience, which questions the fear that is often attached to notions of one’s physical and mental health.  The artist is proposing an alternative to the sterile and impersonal consultation delivered at a traditional doctor’s office. Furthermore, occupying the temporal space of a gallery suggests that, even though it is not meant as a critique on the medical profession, it can certainly be interpreted as a jocular commentary on assumed structures of knowledge and interpretations of fleeting health.

In this context, one may recall Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘medical gaze,’ which recognizes medical knowledge as being entrenched in hierarchical power structures, wherein the patient loses the autonomy over his own body by depending on the medical professional to dictate the treatment of illness.

Parsons questions such subjugation in her performance by re-considering preconceived notions of sickness and health. She suggests that it is possible to gain control over one’s health by executing one’s own agency.  The artist does not claim to be a doctor; she is simply facilitating a dialogue that allows the possibility, as she expresses in her own words, for “the disruption of a certain hierarchy that seem to intensify the illness.” Just as Parsons debunks the myth that science is an absolute truth and that the only source of knowledge vis-à-vis health is the doctor, she invites the viewer to investigate the possibility of treating one’s own health through investigation and dialogue.