PHOTO PREVIEW:Jo Spence-The Final Project
In Joe Spence’s practice, the performative efficacy of autopathography has primarily to do with its therapeutic power and its ability to facilitate popular education. Like Hannah Wilke’s, Spence’s early work was highly informed by feminism, but hers took on a distinctly Marxist slant. Her aesthetic choices were notably inspired by the tactics of Bertolt Brecht, which aim to pro-mote critical reassessments of social behaviours on behalf of the viewer.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Richard Saltoun Gallery Archive
Jo Spence’s last body of work “The Final Project”, which has seldom been publicly displayed, is on presentation at Richard Saltoun Gallery. The project explores the acute sense of unreality the artist felt about the possibility of death and non-being after her diagnosis with leukaemia in 1991. Unable to use treatments from her previous battle with breast cancer, Spence confronted the distinct contrast between her physical appearance and mental state by looking for more indirect and allegorical methods of exploring her condition. She tried to answer the questions “How do you make leukemia visible? Well, how do you? It’s an impossibility”. Spence began “The Final Project” upon her diagnosis in 1991. It occupied her until her last days. Over the previous decade or so, she had become a key figure in the radical visual practices that had emerged in the UK. Beyond her direct working class experience and a long bout of cancer, she was galvanised by feminism, collective politics, and the work of her great hero, artist John Heartfield. She grasped the profound potentials of montage, which informed nearly all her work, and brought together incompatible ideas: the familial, sexual and medical gazes upon women’s bodies; personal memory and political consciousness sincerity and the absurd; pragmatism and idealism reality and myth. This work takes the concept of death as its starting point, but looks at it through the guises of cultures that embrace it, that take death and make it very much part of the experience of life: from Egyptian mummification to the Mexican Day of the Dead. By this time, Spence was becoming increasingly frail. She used collage and superimposition to expand her physical horizons, and plastic dolls and masks to replace her own body. These are works that are intensely material, beautiful meditations on what it means to be physical, and that human relationship to nature. As the gallery note, this project is a fitting monument to an artist who steadfastly refused to bow to commercial opinion of what a woman in the public sphere is ‘supposed’ to look like. Here, she is fragile but honest, and always in control of her own image.
Info: Curator: David Campany, Richard Saltoun Gallery, 111 Great Titchfield Street, London, Duration: 11/2-25/(3/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.richardsaltoun.com
