Efectos colaterales is a book of a particular individual’s self-portraits and words. It displays images of a specific body, a female body and, moreover, of a woman’s body that has undergone a mastectomy. And yet, this distinct, asymmetric body in which disease lies in wait is the body of Gabriela Liffschitz, but it is also, and precisely for that reason, no particular body, belonging to anyone, or better still: all bodies, each and every one of them. When Liffschitz reveals what usually is concealed, she lays bare her own nakedness –right there, where clothing and prothesis try to cover up the effects of cancer. And at the same time, with the most complex naturalness, she lets it be seen that her whole body –everyone’s body– is nothing more than the scene of some tragedy that we never manage to completely understand.
However, Efectos colaterales doesn’t seek to uncover the horror that lurks, menacing everyday life, but rather it aims to explore the means of facing up to what is real. In other words: Liffshitz puts into practice a politics of the gaze which maintains that neither femininity nor eroticism reside in anatomy, but rather in a certain mise en scène. In that way, it seizes medicine’s own terms –morphine syrup, metatrexate, ciclofenax– away from it, in order to put them into play and convert them into something else; in titles that, like jewels, punctuate the four series in which a woman undresses, without sublimating the body or spiritualizing its appeal, but instead endeavoring to deepen its infinite plots.
The first two series, then, establish the rules of the game and propose a return to photography’s fundamental scene, to that moment when someone poses in front of a camera, to that instant in which something becomes the object of a photographic machine’s cutting gaze. And everything seems to indicate that it’s from this degree zero of the gaze that the colors and filters are discerned. The filter of medicine, for example, that has “operated on, revised, reread, affirmed, recontextualized, reinscribed” the bodies, is embedded in the very skin of the third series’ images. There, we contemplate an androgynous individual, tattooed by medical science’s emblem of the two serpents, crouching down and with her back to us.
But Liffschitz never comes up against the medical equipment nor denounces its ill-treatment. Her images reveal that, paradoxically, it’s only when a body ends up scrutinized and operated upon that we begin to ask ourselves what it means to have one. This question –a collateral effect of medical operation– seems to answer itself in the last series, when we perceive that a body isn’t an attribute, but rather a praxis. The portrait of a smooth-skinned woman wrapped in a black feather boa –whose baldness doesn’t appear to be an effect of chemotherapy, but instead a requisite of advertising aesthetic in order to put its appeal into effect– seems to assert that we never have and never are just one body; we don’t even suffer its complications. We gain it, we abandon it, we deliver it to pleasure and desire.
Journey throughout a life, photographical experiment and also non-authorized biography of cancer: Efectos Colaterales shatters the space of the victim and concealment in order to illustrate, defiantly, the forcefulness of a manner of conduct, a way of seeing. Confronted with the exhibition to which cancer has subjected her, the photographer decides to construct not a private space, but rather to overexpose herself –she, and for herself– and grant us the position of the party’s guests. For that reason, her work cannot be understood as a display of optimism in the presence of adversity, or as an “ode to life,” in the style of hollywood. Because it doesn’t consist of finding –despite all this– that which is beautiful in devastation, but rather of rendering the peculiarity a condition of beauty.
If in her last book, Recursos humanos, Liffschitz maintained that the images and the words had pulled her away from “the temptation of being the wound in order to transform me into the observation of it,” she clarifies now that even “before being and representing that wound,” it was necessary to “ascertain other means of reconciliation, other ways of considering it and including it in my life.” In Efectos colaterales, Gabriela Liffschitz is much more than just the wound, and much more than just the observation of it. This woman with only one breast that poses for herself constitutes the feminine scene par excellence. Not only for staging the conditions of the sphere of beauty, but also for being the eye that knows how to find –in the swelling of a spared breast or in the levelness of one that’s missing– a politics of eroticism.
Paola Cortés Rocca
Inrockuptibles
March, 2003
Translated by Ryan Popov
