One of the more intense images at SF MoMA was a photograph of sugar and blood by Shimon Attie, from a series called “White Nights, Sugar Dreams.” Although not all his art deals with the subject, this image was a way for the artist to address and interpret his diabetes.
For viewers, the images not only offer a way to understand diabetes, but position diabetes as a metaphor for general illness, forbidden desire, and for discontent. Sort of like diabetes cookbooks.
Other articles delve further into Attie and his contemporaries, but the real impact for me was the way that his art acts as a bridge between his disease and the outside world. How does my art (not as good as Attie’s, but I long ago discarded the fear of mediocrity: there’s no wheat without chaff, and if my art is crap, at least I enjoy making it) work with respect to my particular ailments? (Yeah, sure, art can reflect health and joy and success too, but let’s be honest: the cool stuff is the conflict, the death, the things that disturb, sicken, fascinate, and madden.)
Anyway, I want to start creating more, not just in a blogging way– making prints or shirts, writing, going back to that Rojas translation. I’ll be posting, I hope, pieces of the Rojas translation, possibly in a new category, shortly.
Secretly Ironic 