(Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1997)
Review by Bridie Lonie
"Only your body remembers."
Painting Myself In is an account in words and images of the writer’s history as a sexually abused child and her mediation of that history through painting. The writer was encouraged to work in images by an art therapist, though the works were produced outside the contexts of the psychoanalytic encounter. Seventy-nine pages of explanatory text accompany forty full-page paintings produced over the period 1988-1994. The writer/artist argues that
being in constant physical pain, and being an abuse survivor have many parallels, especially in the way you are treated. You are pretty much invisible, for a start. What you are or have doesn’t show; you have something that won’t clear up or go away or get better. Most people find that very difficult to accept. So mostly they ignore it or pretend you/it don’t exist. (p. 78)
The images in this book are active representations of a state of mind and its causes.
Classical psychoanalytic techniques with their notions of fantasy, displaced imagery and repression have been recognised as counter-productive for sexual abuse survivors. Because these people are used to a climate of secrecy, techniques of mirroring and the suggestion that descriptions of events are metaphoric in nature, further discredit the experience. Instead, acts of witnessing are required to validate the experience, by therapists and others alike.
Painting Myself In is a relevant title. These representations insist on the self as characterised by the events described. Painting, like any other cultural system, is not simply unmediated expression. It reflects the image-base built up in the painter’s mind; it articulates these as a common language. While this book does not represent a therapeutic encounter within the structures of art therapy, its work overlaps with that discourse. Within art therapy, there are many debates about the way the image works. Some writers suggest it can become talismanic, can hold affect, in a Jungian, almost mystical sense, and process it. Poststructural thinking suggests that the act of creating imagery within a shared image base draws the subject into the symbolic order, and allows her to position herself within the collectivity of humanity, therefore taking a stand against the isolation and silencing that is created by enforced secrecy. Because the social discourse of art suggests that art is about integration, it has become an active agent in the creation of a sense of internal coherence.
While the book does not present itself as a therapeutic engagement, it presents a movement towards integration. The sequence of images is dated and begins with a vision of hands over unrepresented eyes. It moves through the opening of those eyes, and the positioning of the child in a social context. The child grows older and the social contexts are elaborated, even to the parallel depiction of a crucifix and a Star of David. Groups of little girls are shown; weatherboard and brick houses contain and absorb the represented bodies of children and young women. Words occur in the images as vocalisations of positions or as comments on the images; in one instance the writer/artist writes of the silence of images, which repeats the silence of the child, and ends "only your body remembers". (September 1992, p. 66).
Many images deal with eyes which will not see and mouths which must remain closed. The body becomes a turkey trussed on a table between hungry family members, a child at the bottom of the chasm, a torn and bleeding rag doll, a small child at play between disappearing images of reality which remind one of René Magritte’s The Human Condition. The viewer is asked to move between the viewing positions of predator and hunted.
In this instance, two strategies are adopted and used in different ways. The words depend upon the images, while the images present the evidence of affect and articulation. Specific images, such as a curved hand over small bodies, a cot with a cowering child, bifurcated bodies and hearts, occur in different case studies of child abuse and as the work of survivors. The images grow in representational information, but do not lose their emotional coherence. They also reflect an understanding of works by artists such as Magritte and Colin McCahon.
In the image facing the text cited above, October 1993, (p. 79) the artist has constructed a column of five naked women figures. The lowest lies face down, the fourth has divided blue, white and red bleeding hearts covering her arms and breasts, the highest is a bird/woman with the heart’s two sides opening up and becoming wings. The sequence rises against a blood/red background of slightly opened black doors. This is perhaps one of the most positive images, despite its problematic solution in a winged, but armless, figure.
Writing Myself In is problematic as a text in several ways. It has irritated therapists; indeed it sets out to do this. It appears to both use therapeutic techniques and deny their effectiveness. However when Mariette writes
The point of abuse is that whenever you have held on to some vision of yourself you’re not sure of it, it doesn’t seem real (p. 58)
the function of this act of visual projection becomes most apparent. For Mariette, the most coherent image of herself is one that includes the history of her abuse. Images in the text clearly indicate the importance to her of what have been called the "religions of the book". The projection of that image into the form of a book inserts that image into what Lacan calls the symbolic order through the juridical function of the act of publishing and the witness of the published text. For her readers, these images and her discussion of them articulate the significance of self-imaging in the processes of self-awareness.
Bridie Lonie is the head of Section for Theory and History of Art at the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand. She is a writer, practising artist and has completed a masters project on theoretical frameworks for the art therapy encounter.