Forever Altered

I too had lost and was losing friends and colleagues to the AIDS epidemic. My early X-rays serve as elegies for those who died, and act as reminders of our vulnerability and mortality. –Cora Cohen

Our responses to trauma are themselves a kind of exigency that produces anomalies. Simply put, when bad things happen, we adapt or react in ways that we might not otherwise. This is especially the case with the effects of illness or mortality, events that shake our souls as much as they shape our lives. These changes, which might be pronounced at first, often temper over time and become more integrated into the entirety of our experiences and expressions. Yet we sometimes forget that these processes alter us in such a way that when we gradually return to the routine of living, we find ourselves forever changed. In some indefinable but substantial way, we are never again quite as we once were.

Cora Cohen’s Altered X-Rays lie on that spectrum of grief and growth where we measure loss as a kind of gain, and where the profound impact of the AIDS epidemic and crisis, which once made us flinch in our certainty like some terrified reflex, has become subtly evident and permanently ingrained as a reflexive marker in our evolution.

Not everyone was infected, but everyone was affected.

Cora began her extended project of working over X-rays, MRIs, and sonograms with paint, chemicals, and physical interventions such as scratches and abrasions in the early 1990s, at a time when, like so many in the arts, she found herself surrounded by death, as so many of the very best were dying of AIDS. In fact, her earliest such works were produced on X-Rays of men who had died of the disease that she got from her internist, an infectious disease specialist who had treated them. These mediated medical images were a way of mapping both the quotidian and the emotional experiences of her life in that fraught era where art and AIDS were painfully conjoined. But to consider her entire series of Altered X-Rays over the decades of her career, we must not only contextualize it within the wider visual response to AIDS in the culture but see how, after the immediacy of the crisis, it became a pictorial language for Cora’s continued meditations on mortality, impermanence, and frailty. These concerns are not specific to any single disease or epidemic. They are inescapable and fundamental to the human condition.

There’s always an unsettling shift when an artist veers between abstraction and representation. It’s a two-step, just off the beat—a kind of about-face, often a bit awkward, like a stumbling forward. Abstraction is a pursuit that spirits an artist away from the domain of pictures and storytelling. Any retreat from that mission (Philip Guston is an easy example) is inherently radical, if not outright heretical. So what must it have taken for Cora Cohen to disinhibit the elegant and demanding language of mark-making so it could talk directly to the visuals of anatomical diagnostics?

The most obvious answer of course would be a profound sense of loss that might be unspeakable in her existing artistic vocabulary. In this case, however, the abstract and the concrete are oddly contiguous, serving, as in previous works, as mappings or recordings of her day-to-day experience. New York/Koln (1998) outlines her commute from home to studio. Hansaring (2000) is a photographic record of memory and memorial, flux and itinerancy, read in a specific urban topography by an American Jew visiting Germany. The Altered X-Rays remark on the body as visceral fact, a measure of specific bodies in space and time, their place in the world made manifest in a cartography of psychogeography.

Considering Cohen’s altered medical scans both apart and alongside her paintings, they are visually more literal, yet conceptually elusive, readable as a poetics of what appears cropped, flashed, distorted as if by a memory we might call melancholia. They are also far more experimental than her oil paintings on canvas, and it is interesting that the artist herself remarked that many of the discoveries she made in the unorthodox and unpredictable processes of her modified X-rays would migrate throughout her practice and inform her work in new directions.

Cora would, by fortuitous happenstance, turn to this medium to fill the void of loss so many of us were feeling at that time. But as excavation and landfill, it also proved fertile ground for ideas—largely set free from the gestures of painting—that she would return to in time as a playground, a theater, a battlefield upon whose slippery slopes the commonplace transforms into the uncanny.

The twentieth century—in fact most of what we call history—is hurt deep into our body politic. Cora’s creative touch is the hand that feels the scar, acknowledges the memory of the wound, and reenacts the cuts, abrasions, erasures, and interventions, and the colonization of public space. Whether as architecture or anatomy, her hand bears record to the visionary dreams and nightmarish violence of life.

Medical sciences can tell us if something is a birthmark, a cancer, or a lesion. But not all that is beautiful is benign, nor is malignancy without meaning.

Cohen came to think of her acquired medical scans as found objects with a certain history and resonance that allowed her both a starting point of invention and a contested domain of what she saw as the “medicalized body,” where a set of information that she could radically modify or even obviate would continue to dwell like the echo of a shadow. Hers is a stunning act of witness toward all that is transient in the world and frail in the self, a peculiar sort of truth born of transfiguration.