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The Color of Pain

Andrew Irving

I am astonished that while we have such refined issues about

other subjects, we are so deprived about the subject of death.

We do not know how to speak of death or of colors either.

—Albert Camus, in Oliver Todd, Albert Camus: A Life

Colors in a Field

Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows is famous (fig. 1). A temporary aggregation of color and materiality (Appadurai 2006) of which copies circulate in books and magazines and on Web sites, television screens, posters, and postcards, it is renowned for swirling brushstrokes that have become synonymous with creative passion and artistic intensity. John Berger (1972: 28) discusses the painting in his groundbreaking book and television series Ways of Seeing. He asks the reader to “look at it for a moment” before expressing the view, now contested, that “this is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself. It is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence.” Accordingly, the painting not only exposes the uncertain relationship among language, knowledge,

Public Culture 21:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-2008-030 Copyright 2009 by Duke University Press

PHOTO - ESSAY

This photo-essay is dedicated to Will F. Willis, Harriet Nabesse, Dennis Potter, and their fami-lies. I thank Will, Harriet, Juan Arellano, Rebecca Guberman-Bloom, and Frank Jump, without whom this work would not have been possible; the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom for funding the original research; Concordia University, Montreal, for providing an intellectually stimulating environment while I wrote this piece; and Barbara Hunt, Chris Hogan, Nelson Santos, and Amy Sadao at Visual Aids New York for their great work and support.

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and perception but also provides, in Berger’s view, a material basis on which to begin speaking about the relationship between an artwork and the life circum-stances of the person who produced it.

By focusing on artworks made by persons confronting their own mortality, including Van Gogh, Dennis Potter, and artists with HIV/AIDS with whom I have collaborated over the past ten years, this essay explores the thinking and being of persons close to death and uses painting and photography to examine the necessary conditions and limiting factors that make possible an imagined “mutu-ality of the world,” that is, the sense of living and dwelling with other persons who experience and understand the world in a similar fashion. Mutuality, here defined in relation to material artifacts, offers a framework for understanding the intersubjective basis of perception and action, including the morals, beliefs, and aesthetic forms shared by groups and persons. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1992: 354), mutuality is not pregiven by virtue of mind and body but is formed through an active process of negotiation between self and other insofar as, within “the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground[, where] my thought and his are interwoven into a single fab-ric.” This suggests that diversity, difference, and otherness are not the opposite of

Figure 1 Vincent Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows. Reproduced by permission of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

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mutuality but the conditions that bring it into being as people attempt to under-stand one another through ongoing dialogue and interaction. Mutuality is thus predicated on a foundational difference among persons and is continually being generated, tested out, and reworked through social interaction, thereby turning it from a philosophical into an anthropological question to be understood through people’s actions and practices.

Commonalities of perception tend to be broadly based on two prevailing epis-temological approaches: those that assert mutuality on the grounds of specieswide phylogenetic capacities, shared biology, and cognitive mechanisms, so, for exam-ple, we all see color in the same way because we have the same physiological makeup, and those that presuppose a common worldview by virtue of people sharing the same social and cultural environment, say, a particular practical daily habitus or context whereby persons embody culturally similar ways of thinking and being or share certain moral values and experiences. These approaches are not incommensurable and are often combined to explain how diverse cultural forms and practices can emerge from universal, phylogenetic capacities — for example, when radically different forms of being and expression are said to derive from the same basic needs or desires. However, even in combination their episte-mological foundations continue to be challenged by the specificity of persons with their individual biographies and idiosyncratic bodily experiences of the world. Consequently, if we are to better understand the diversity and indeterminacy of human experience, it is less a case of reversing the precedence of biological unity over cultural difference — or bringing them into equilibrium — than of opening up a space in which to discuss the contingency of people’s bodies and being. In other words, to begin speaking about perceptions of color and death, we need to move beyond the universality of “anthropos” and diversity of “ethnos” (see Stock-ing 1992) and reinstate people into their own life histories, bodies, and imagina-tions — if only because the figure of the person overcomes the epistemological division between biology and culture (or, to put it another way, a person incor-porates both) and thereby offers a way of understanding human action beyond established disciplinary divisions.

In this essay I use painting, photography, and other artistic productions to cri-tique current approaches to knowledge and being. Beginning with Van Gogh’s iconic painting and its surrounding mythology, I then consider the works and embodied experiences of three artists, Juan Arellano, Rebecca Guberman-Bloom, and Frank Jump. By focusing on the relationship between an artwork’s bodily production and the material forms that subsequently come into being, we can investigate experiences of time, space, and the body in ways that recognize their

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specificity, diversity, and alterity but do not marginalize individual discrepancies in favor of the disciplinary truth claims of science and social science. Such an approach to the specific bodily basis of art was one of Merleau-Ponty’s (1994: 123 – 24) major concerns when he argued that evidence for Paul Cézanne’s “trou-ble with his eyes” could be found in the landscapes he painted, insofar as

the painter “takes his body with him,” says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transub-stantiations we must go back to the working, actual body — not the body as a chunk of space or bundle of functions but that body which is an inter-twining of vision and movement.

In thinking about art as an intertwining of body, vision, and movement, I hope to extend but also to critique Merleau-Ponty’s model of intersubjectivity by explor-ing the relationship between the “interior” experiences of pain and imagination and the visible surfaces and materiality of art, as mediated through people’s artis-tic productions while they live with a sick, sometimes radically unstable, body.

Deathly Frames and Auras: Painting, Materiality, and Imagination

Although the exact circumstances are not known, a short time after he had painted Wheatfield with Crows, Van Gogh walked into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest. It is impossible to determine from the painting itself if there is any cor-relation between its subject matter and Van Gogh’s suicide or to measure objec-tively what passes between the painting and the viewer’s body when encountering its circumstances of production for the first time.1 It is the same sky and wheat fields, painted in the same colors that are sensed by the same retinal cells and processed via the brain’s same V4 visual pathway. However, it is almost impos-sible to see the painting as before, as its colors and textures are animated by an act toward death, that is, the willful taking of one’s life, and a surrounding discourse that draws heavily on the romantic correlation of art, suicide, and the tortured

1. To know if, how, or when one initially encounters reproductions of widely circulating works such as Wheatfield is very difficult. Fredric Jameson (1979) draws attention to the frequent impos-sibility of encountering popular songs and mass-produced images for the first time insofar as they are often already known and internalized prior to our conscious awareness. I cannot say when I first heard a Beatles song, saw roses on a birthday card or a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, or became aware of Wheatfield because each had already been embodied through a thousand fragments encoun-tered in shops, cafés, advertisements, and waiting rooms and on magazine covers, postcard racks, T-shirts, and televisions. However, I would argue that in this case the painting’s deathly aura is not entirely restricted to the original and can be effectively conveyed in other forms.

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genius. Once Wheatfield’s circumstances are known, they cease to be external to its content; they become part of our experience of the artwork itself insofar as the painting now seems to possess a deathly aura that plays on the imagination and alters perception in ways that cannot be dismissed as irrelevant or immaterial, if only because of the way that complex physical and chemical changes register in our brains and bodies.

Encounters with deathly objects are mediated by diverse social, religious, and historical practices (Kaufman and Morgan 2005; Hallam and Hockey 2006), but they play on the imagination in interesting and unexpected ways. Therefore, although people’s responses to such artifacts reveal shared moral perspectives about death and dying, they often evoke diverse, sometimes contradictory, feel-ings and sensations (Kastenbaum 2003). The complex range of emotions experi-enced by an individual when contemplating mortality (Rapport 2000) means that responses to death or dying are not reducible (philosophically or psychologically) to universal instincts, such as fear, dread, or anxiety, as in Heidegger’s (1962) mis-taken conflation of finitude with death (Dollimore 1998), nor are they explicable through social context. For finitude is primarily a property of the body’s limita-tions and situational circumstances rather than the common destiny of death per se (Sartre 1996), while context is a metaphor of analysis rather than a determining agent (M. Jackson 1996). Thus responses to Van Gogh’s painting can be under-stood as partial, situational responses to death and dying based on the existential particularity of the moment rather than as reflections of a specific cultural anxiety or timeless, universal dread.

My own response to the painting is formed as much by the way Van Gogh’s work and life story circulate in public culture as by my moral perspectives about suicide: for example, by watching Berger’s Ways of Seeing, by the angst written on Kirk Douglas’s face in Lust for Life, and by the emotional distress I imagine Van Gogh felt on that day in July 1890. In fact, the far less portentous Daubigny’s Garden and Cottages with Thatched Roofs are likely to have been his final two paintings; Wheatfield may have been painted as much as ten days before Van Gogh’s suicide (Hulsker 1996), leaving us to wonder if it is the imagination that is wholly constructing the portent of the picture. For Sartre, the imaginary that surrounds art is not a variant of thought or perception but encompasses both the act of imagining and the worlds it brings into being. As such, it is the imagina-tion as much as the image that brings together the respective worlds of artist and audience: “When I look at a drawing I posit in that very look a world of human intentions of which that drawing is a product [and for] the image to appear, the cooperation of my consciousness is necessary, but the artist knows this, counts

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on it; the artist solicits this cooperation” (Sartre 2004: 35). Wheatfield remains ambiguous because we do not know what type of cooperation Van Gogh was trying to solicit or how much the surrounding discourse on suicide plays on the viewer’s imagination. The painting penetrates deep into the nervous system and elicits complex material changes in electrical and chemical activity that not only are responses to color but are intertwined with the imaginative reconstruction of Van Gogh’s world. It is curious, then, that the imagination is often seen as the faculty of fancy and a disengaged mind rather than as constitutive of bodily experience and practice (Johnson 1987; Casey 1991). However, by tracing the etymology of imagination, we see that imaginem derives from imato (to copy) and mimos (to mime), thereby evoking bodily communication. This implies that the dialogue between image and imagination is in part a physical, bodily phe-nomenon that involves movement and being moved through exchanges of mean-ing. Just as mime possesses a “volume” that extends out from the body into the world (Irving 2007), we may say that the potential of an artwork to transcend its frame by acting through the imagination and into the world is what creates its power, effect, and meaning. In other words, the painting has obtained a social and religious life, animated by current preoccupations and carried through people’s bodies and imaginations within a longer social and material trajectory (Appadurai 2006). This temporary aggregation of meaning and materiality suggests George Santayana’s (1955: 182) discrimination between an object’s essential properties that exist independent of perception (existents) and those attributed by the human mind (subsistents): “All knowledge, being faith in an object posited and partially described, is belief in substance, in the etymological sense of this word; it is a belief in a thing or an event subsisting in its own plane, and waiting for the light of knowledge to explore it eventually, and perhaps name or define it.”

As we can never be certain that the attributed essence actually inheres in the object itself — in our case, whether the content of Van Gogh’s painting is deathly or not — the doubt and skepticism that emerge must be balanced by faith: faith in words, faith in different disciplinary modes of interpretation and their epistemolo-gies, faith in art history, in discourse, in science, in social science, in hermeneutics, and in the biographical accounts of Van Gogh’s life. Without this faith, that is, when one operates in the realm of epistemological doubt, difficult questions arise about how artistic intentions and substance intertwine. For although the physiol-ogy and movement of Van Gogh’s wrist and elbow can be clearly discerned in the painting’s brushstrokes, we cannot say the same for his psychological condition or presupposed suicidal consciousness. Thus, we must ask, what are the limits of intersubjective understanding? How do we access and reconcile an individu-

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al’s interior experience with its expressive exteriority that is present to the eye? What constitutes “evidence”? What ontological status can we accord the viewer’s interpretations and imaginative reconstructions? For rather than provide a reli-able material witness to the painter’s embodied mental state, Van Gogh’s work raises further questions about evidence, content, and meaning whose resolution, as Berger suggests, is found not within materiality but through faith in words.

The Trouble with Words

“The trouble with words,” as the playwright Dennis Potter once remarked, “is that you never know whose mouths they’ve been in” (Wright 1993) — indicating the difficulty of finding modes of expression that are not overwhelmed by cultural his-tory, but also foreshadowing Potter’s struggle to articulate the relationship among perception, language, and death when, dying of cancer, he was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg in the spring of 1994:

Below my window the blossom is out in full now. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying, “Oh that’s a nice blossom” last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it. (Potter 1994)

Potter’s characters forged new ways of speaking. In his plays old words yielded new meanings and provided unsurpassed insights into illness and human frailty. But even Potter, whose lifelong struggle with illness familiarized him with the challenge of reclaiming meaning from bodily disorder, recognizes the impossi-bility of externalizing his sense of time and color toward the end of life. Seduced by “the nowness of everything” and the last spring he would see, Potter finds himself near the limits of expression and declares, “There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it.” His forlorn attempt to describe the experience of time during his final days recalls Thomas Mann’s (1999: 451) observations on the subjective experience of long-term serious illness: “Can one tell — that is to say, narrate — time, time itself, as such for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: ‘Time passed, it ran on, the time flowed

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onward’ and so forth — no one in his senses could consider that a narrative. It would be as though one held a single note or chord for a whole hour, and called it music.” Only by an excessive allegiance to referential models of representation can words simply be understood as expressions of experience, because expression is a constitutive part of experience (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997). With illness there is the further problem of how the linguistic self often becomes diminished while experiencing pain (Scarry 1985; Parkin 1999). Once language’s capacity as the primary means for mediating between subjective first-person and objective third-person experience becomes compromised, intractable borders are placed not just between person and anthropologist but also between persons and their communities (Das 1996). However, even when the expressive capacity of words is compromised, or has simply been lost over time, we have recourse to the material artifacts produced by people who are in pain, confronting mortality, and at times dwelling near the limits of expression.

The following artworks are by persons living with HIV/AIDS in New York and Portland with whom I have worked since 1998. These works do not allow us to experience colors as their creators do, or provide answers to the questions raised so far in the essay, yet attending to the circumstances under which these artworks were produced moves us away from concepts of perception toward those of the situated body and aesthetic appreciation. For although these artworks can-not tell us about the truths of perception, they offer a material opportunity to see how color is embedded in personal biography, bodily discrepancy, and people’s actions in the face of mortality.

Colors on Cardboard

For Juan Arellano, the days merged into one another. Too weak to sit or stand, he lay in a hospital bed for weeks, waiting, even longing, for death. Unable to eat or hold a conversation, he witnessed the overshadowing of the surrounding world and its colors by the unceasing presence and intensity of pain that had become his own world. Juan’s reality was untied from reason and language, and neither medicine nor his severely weakened body formed a basis on which to build hope, meaning, or action. His existence became unstructured by pain, and the only things that unified his consciousness or held his world together were his ever-present desire for the pain to cease and his futile attempts to fight it.

In her poem “Pain Has an Element of Blank” Emily Dickinson, trying to describe the unceasing continuity and presence of pain, wrote that pain “cannot recollect when it began” and “has no future but itself,” while Drew Leder (1990)

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asserts that pain possesses a distinct episodic temporality. These are less episte-mological contradictions than reflections of the difficulty of depicting how one experiences time while in pain and an acknowledgment that severe pain is based not on duration but on endurance. For Juan, pain revealed the hidden viscosity of time. The awful paradox was that since his diagnosis, time had unrelentingly passed and brought him closer to death, but now time was static and no longer flowed. He willed for time to pass, willed for oblivion and the annihilation of death to bring his pain to an end. Accordingly, what Juan desired most intensely was the negation of consciousness and through it the absence of pain. For one in severe pain, it is difficult to imagine what it feels like not to be in pain, confirming that the imagination is a bodily property rather than an aspect of a disembodied mind. Here desire and imagination become radically discontinuous insofar as “pain-consciousness is a project toward a further consciousness which would be empty of all pain; that is, to a consciousness whose contexture, whose being-there would not be painful” (Sartre 1996: 333).

After Juan had spent nearly six months in the hospital, his pain gave way to weakness and exhaustion, and the world slowly came back into view. He ven-tured out, picked up a piece of cardboard, and smothered it in color. Thus the first painting he created after the months of extreme pain had abated was of simple, broad brushstrokes of various colors on rough cardboard, the first sur-face at hand (fig. 2). From all the colors he could find, he painted the reddest

Figure 2 Juan Arellano, Untitled. Reproduced by permission of the artist

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of red and the yellowest of yellow, going through whole tubes of paint. He was filled with the simple joy of there being such a thing as color in the world, the blueness of blue, the redness of red, and the yellowness of yellow, for while these colors already existed, they were now no longer overshadowed by pain (fig. 3).

Juan remained too weak to return to work. Trained as an architect in his native Colombia, he decided to fill his world with color and die as a painter. Painting consumed all his energy. He worked intensely, each painting taking him three or four hours. His illness returned, and Juan found himself back in the hospital, preparing for death once more, too weak to paint and having to have his diapers changed by his sister. He was able only to hold a piece of charcoal and make small sketches, his world reduced to white paper, black char-coal, and gray smudge (fig. 4).

One’s perception of color is, before all else, a way of being-in-the-world. By the summer of 2000 Juan’s health had stabilized, thanks to anti-retroviral medications, and he began painting again. He put on weight and regained his bodily integrity and his future. Thus he now took a whole month on each painting, rather than just three hours. Through Juan’s drawings and paintings we can trace not only an undulating trajectory and

Figure 3 Juan Arellano, Tricolor Man. Reproduced by permission of the artist

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experience of time and space but also the waxing and waning horizons of his world as encountered through his changing body.

Bloodlines and Other Things

Three Days of Blood, an extraordinary piece by Rebecca Guberman-Bloom, uses color and its transformation to speak about things such as life, death, and the passage of time (fig. 5). It shows the double indeterminacy of blood, in that while blood is a substance that gives Rebecca life, it also carries a virus that threatens her existence. The piece shows how blood changes in color, con-sistency, and texture over time and reveals how her blood possesses a languagelike quality that structures time, creates a narrative, and refers to events in the world. Like language, blood is fluid and carries irreconcilable ambiguities that tend to solidify and otherwise change in status when they leave the body to speak about things the artist never intended. Three Days of Blood not only physically inscribes HIV into the canvas (and thereby renders it harmless, as it cannot live long outside the body) but also makes aspects of Rebecca’s personal biography and circumstances publicly visible.

Rebecca was infected with HIV a few days before her eighteenth birthday by a boy who knew that he was HIV-positive but did not tell her and did not use a condom. For her, the purpose of her art is “a lot about the process of living and dying and the intensity that comes with it, much of it focuses on myself, that is, my pain and my vision.” Rebecca had to see the HIV in her own blood to break down the denial she experienced after her diagnosis. Her art also uses skin and (found) dead animals; in many ways it is not really about AIDS but reflects the wider existential and aesthetic dilemmas of being an organism aware of its own mortality and continuing to live in a world of infinite objects, possibilities, and variety (fig. 7).

Guberman-Bloom’s art reminds us that skin, like persons and social life, can be broken to reveal blood and other things that are not immediately visible. The

Figure 4 Juan Arellano, untitled charcoal drawing. Reproduced by permission of the artist

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Figure 6 Rebecca Guberman-Bloom, Blood Work (detail). Reproduced by permission of the artist

Figure 5 Rebecca Guberman-Bloom, Three Days of Blood. Reproduced by permission of the artist

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skin covers depths that are not often publicly accessible. But Rebecca uses her own skin and blood to allow us to witness both the surface and the interi-ority of her existence and to show just how close to the skin the ambiguity and complexity of her life is. The close link between complexity and complex-ion, from the Latin denoting “with” or “together,” and plectare, “to plait or twine,” suggests how the complexion of a person’s skin combines many stories. Although in modern usage complexion refers to the surfaces of the body, if we trace its history beyond the past few hundred years, we find that complexion once was used to describe not only the skin but also the character and consti-tution of the body (Connor 2004).

The changing colors and textures of Rebecca’s blood and skin do not expose a greater truth, for probing farther into the matter of her art only reveals more surfaces. We glimpse the inner sur-faces of Rebecca’s life through an event that she experienced as a teenager but whose formative effects remain not just in her art but in her life. When I first wrote to Rebecca in 1998, she had been living with the virus for almost ten years, and she replied by sending not words but a feather from a dead bird and the skeleton of a leaf that had had its life juice taken away but had somehow remained intact. When I asked Rebecca what her art would look like without HIV, she could not say, for having lived under the shadow of the virus all her adult life, she found it difficult not only to conceive of art apart from disease and death but to imagine what life itself might consist of or be like. For Rebecca, art, death, and disease are inseparable, as in Georges Bataille’s idea of water dissolved in water. For her, sex is never normal, bodies are never stable, and different shades of blood tell all sorts of stories.

Figure 7 Rebecca Guberman-Bloom, Skin (detail). Reproduced by permission of the artist

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Fading Blues

Frank Jump, who teaches at a school in Brooklyn, New York, spends his evenings and weekends walking around the city, looking for evidence of the passing of time. He wears Hawaiian shirts and takes pictures of garbage and rotting fruit. However, his main obsession is documenting the fading advertisements painted on the sides of buildings. He captures them before they fade away and puts them on his Web site.2

Some of these advertisements are more than a hundred years old. (Reckitt’s Blue [fig. 8] dates from around 1890.) Painted up to fifty feet tall in attention-grabbing colors, they were considered eyesores in their day. Mostly they adver-tise products that can no longer be bought, made by companies that no longer exist. What remains are faded traces of color. Frank was twenty-six when his illness was diagnosed and was told that he had “a couple of good years left.” So he took himself out of college and filled in all the offers for new credit cards and bank accounts that came to his door in the junk mail, thinking, “I’ve never got to pay any of this back.” But Frank did not die. When we first met, he had been

2. See Jump’s Web site at www.frankjump.com.

Figure 8 Frank Jump, Reckitt’s Blue. Reproduced by permission of the artist

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HIV-positive for thirteen years, had gone bankrupt, and had reenrolled in col-lege. Frank was acutely aware of himself as a body that might disappear; a body in an urban landscape that, like the advertisements, was fading; a body that, like them, was not supposed to last long but somehow remained part of the city. Accordingly, Frank sees his reflection not in the mirror but in the fading colors of the advertisements that provide him with evidence of his existence. As time moves on, the epidermis of the city peels off, to be replaced by a new skin constructed by succeeding groups and generations (fig. 9).

The skin of New York City is evocative of the difference between cutis and pel-lis. Cutis is the living skin that breathes and renews itself, while pellis is the dead skin that has become scoured, has loosened, or has simply fallen away from the body. It seems that like the skin, the city, too, has a complexion that weathers and betrays the passing of years.

Frank has mostly remained healthy, and HIV has been more a psychologi-cal burden and a brooding potentiality that overshadows his existence and calls his future into question. His body has responded to the disease in an extraordi-nary way, so much so that his body is an object of medical curiosity and doctors keep devising challenges for it. In late 1999 some doctors wanted to know what

Figure 9 Frank Jump, Omega Oil. Reproduced by permission of the artist

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would happen if they took him off his med-ications. Ordinarily, when someone stops taking antiretroviral medications, the dis-ease returns stronger than before. This is one of the pitfalls of triple-combination medication. Once on it, you are on it for life — or you risk a more potent infection. You live with the side effects: distended belly, nausea, diarrhea, low testosterone, nightmares, and the possibility of Crixivan crystals forming in your kidneys.

Frank agreed to stop his medications so his doctors could observe what would hap-pen. They told him that he would become sick but that they wanted to know if the conventional wisdom was right — namely, that in chronic infection the body’s abil-ity to mount an immune response is lost forever — or if instead Frank’s body would develop an immune response. After eight weeks Frank would resume his medica-tions, and then the process would be repeated. Afterward the amount of virus in Frank’s blood would be measured to see if his body had fought back. Frank likes to

throw himself into the fire, and this time he faced three bouts of miserable and painful illness. Frank e-mailed me thus:

My viral load has shot up from 0 to two million in less than 6 weeks. My T-cells have dropped to my lowest ever and I panicked. When I discov-ered these results I went back on antivirals (but only after I visited my physician who didn’t check my viral load until my normal appt). The study apologized to me for not keeping me abreast of the T-cell numbers and let me know that my viral load was tremendously high. I said I’d try this twice more. If after the second time, the viral load increases as high again, I won’t try it a third time. If the numbers peak at a considerably lower number, indicating some kind of “intelligence” on behalf of my immune system, I will try a third time. If this doesn’t work — tant pis — I’m ready for another theory.

Figure 10 Frank Jump in front of a fading advertisement. Photograph by Andrew Irving

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Speaking of Colors

Merleau-Ponty (1994: 70) argues that “although it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that that work to be done called for that life.” It is impossible to be sure, but it is highly probable that none of these artworks would exist without the art-ists’ HIV diagnoses. Would Juan have abandoned his career as an architect and painted colors on cardboard had it not been for those weeks lying on what he thought was his deathbed? Would Rebecca have used her own blood in her paint-ings or been curious enough to magnify and make art out of the effect of viruses on the body and skin? Would Frank have identified so closely with fading colors or made the association with his own mortality when encountering the old adver-tisements dotting the city?

In Weberian terms, there is an “elective affinity” between Juan’s, Rebecca’s, and Frank’s experiences of living with HIV/AIDS and the intentionality and sub-ject matter of their art. The paintings’ and photographs’ very existence offers a way back to the uncertainties of living with an unstable and immune-compromised body, even if this path remains beyond the limits of our mortal epistemologies. We must also acknowledge the historical, cultural, political, economic, and dis-cursive influences on Juan’s, Rebecca’s, and Frank’s works, for these are central to their lives and are constitutive of the ways they see, interpret, and represent their experiences. However, it is difficult to establish with any critical certainty how these experiences might be realized within the materiality of each artwork, and I would argue therefore that we need to prioritize the ontological certainty of the artwork, namely, the artwork’s bodily production at a specific point on the person’s illness trajectory, biography, and circumstances in relation to a specific experience of bodily integrity.

This shift in emphasis, from understanding an artwork through discourse and signification to understanding it through the constant transformation of the indi-vidual body, opens a space for us to speak about the aesthetic appreciation of color and perhaps to gain a brief insight into the lifeworlds of people diagnosed with a terminal condition and confronting mortality with an unstable body. Three Days of Blood speaks about the ambivalence of a young woman whose own red blood contains traces of both life and death. Juan’s colors, painted on the first surface he found, speak about color in relation to the presence or absence of pain, while the fading colors of Frank’s advertisements speak of the processes of entropy and decay simultaneously found in the body, the environment, and paint itself. Their art offers a publicly available and material basis on which to discuss how the world

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is transformed by contingent life events, bodily instability, existential uncertainty, and the possibility of death, and although the artworks’ colors — the yellow of Juan’s painting, the red of Rebecca’s blood, the blue of Frank’s photographs — are equally explicable in terms of how the brain’s pathways respond to certain fre-quencies of light or to their discursive signification and cultural symbolism, these remain lifeless explanations until the person’s experiences and bodily circum-stances shed light on them. Colors do not exist independently in the world outside a perceiving body, and as such they are not alive until they touch the retina and become intertwined with the person’s circumstances of thinking and being. At this point presumptions toward universal color perception (e.g., Hardin 2005; Kay 2005) have to be questioned, for there is little recourse to shared experience based on common phylogeny or biology when the bodies and circumstances compared are so radically unstable or in pain (Irving 2005). Yet ever since Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969) formulated their evolutionary model of universal color percep-tion, it has been difficult to challenge universal claims about color or to argue for an experiential diversity of color on relational terms, which has left color to the mercy of models that equate perception with computational cognitive processes. Paul Churchland (1989: 106) claims, for example, to have found “an effective means of expressing the allegedly inexpressible”:

The “ineffable” pink of one’s current visual sensation may be richly and precisely expressed as a 95Hz/80Hz/80Hz “chord” in the relevant triune cortical system. The “unconveyable” taste sensation produced by the fabled Australian health tonic Vegemite might be poignantly conveyed as a 85/80/90/15 “chord” in one’s four-channelled gustatory system. . . . And the “indescribable” olfactory sensation produced by a newly opened rose might be quite accurately described as a 95/35/10/80/60/55 “chord” in some six-dimensional space within one’s olfactory bulb.

The problem with this type of neurological analysis is that it does not traverse the divide between descriptive and inductive forms of meaning. That is, it does not link the certain to the probable, which is necessary to our understanding of the relationship between the brain’s physical processes and the phenomenological experiences they produce. Thus, rather than being “rich” or “precise” expressions of sensory experience, such approaches tell us little about how color is experi-enced by living, sensory beings but a lot about the power of scientific discourse and the epistemological limits of knowing “the human.” It is not that Church-land’s description is inaccurate but that, in reducing perception and the person to the physiological mechanisms involved when producing sensations, it simply

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restates the long-standing division between the theoretical knowledge about a phenomenon and its realization in sensate experience. The problem of this type of approach has been comprehensively outlined by Frank Jackson (1986: 291), who describes an imagined girl who has learned “all there is to know” about the neurology, physics, and chemistry of color but was raised in a black-and-white room. In short, she knows everything that science has to teach on the subject and yet cannot tell the difference between a red chair and a blue one, because “Mary does not know all there is to know. For when she is let out of the black-and-white room or given a color television, she will learn what it is like to see something red.” In other words, the gap between subjective first-person and objective third-person experiences remains intact — and therefore any truly objective knowledge about perception is impossible — because access to the brain is achievable only via public signs and representations, such as language, self-reporting, and brain imaging, which are neither neutral nor objective, for they are interpreted in terms of particular disciplinary interests and epistemologies. Recent developments in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) mean that the scenario of “look-ing inside someone’s head” has progressed from taking snapshots of the brain’s gross anatomy to monitoring the activity of the brain at work, so that changes in neural activity can be measured while a person is perceiving color. However, although this shift in focus from brain anatomy to brain activity allows us to see astonishing images of the brain’s functioning, it does not give us access to perceptual states but instead offers representations of neural activity that need to be decoded and interpreted. Whenever we encounter contexts in which the inherent polysemy of a sign or image is restricted to a dominant interpretation, we must look toward the presuppositions, operations, and powers at work (Volosinov 1973), be they social, political, or biomedical (Haraway 1991).

By excluding and/or averaging out the specificities, contingencies, and idiosyn-crasies of perception, a standardized model of phylogenetic capabilities acts as a norm against which other bodies differ or fall short in terms of statistics (Hacking 1990), medical classification (Canguilhem 1991), and discourse (Butler 1999). People’s lived experiences become reduced to abstract universal capacities in the form of an a priori subject that sees the world in terms of standardized cognitive mechanisms and normal commonalities of perception. Although anthropology frequently asserts the instabilities, contingencies, and diversities of people’s bod-ies, its own methods and epistemological practices often presuppose similar a pri-ori capabilities and levels of bodily integrity as bases on which to assert socially or culturally defined commonalities of perception (e.g., Bloch 1998). Thus anthro-pology glosses over individual differences to generate orderly theories about dis-

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ordered, messy bodies (Clare 2001). Such levels of theoretical overdetermination mean that not only color but also people, their life histories, imaginations, and situations, are lost amid competing disciplinary truth claims. This is terrifying precisely because it is as if these persons did not exist anymore.

Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler’s (2001: 349) observation that “no one is ever more than temporarily able-bodied” cautions against the assumed abil-ities of the “normal” able body and reminds us of the ever-present possibility of illness and bodily instability. Thus, rather than presuppose a general set of phylo-genetic capabilities, we might effectively recast approaches to perception through more precise ethnographies of particular bodies in action, in their phenomeno-logical and existential realities (see Toombs 1992; Murphy 2001), whereby in-depth analyses “of bodily difference might open up new avenues of exploration, or stretch existing ones” (Staples 2003: 295). This is a question not of deciding which truth claims are more accurate but of recognizing their theoretical limits and of paying closer attention to how experience is differentiated through specific bodily biographies and existential circumstances.

We can use the artworks in this essay to demonstrate how colors, like bodies and landscapes, are experienced in different ways according to people’s life cir-cumstances, imaginations, and biographies. The red of Rebecca’s blood, the fad-ing blue of Frank’s advertisements, and the broad yellow brushstrokes on Juan’s cardboard each have a visible exterior and a lived interiority; that is, these colors each present to the world a material surface that is intertwined with shared social meanings and historical interpretations, but they also possess an inhabited inte-rior whereby color is understood through individual experience and imagination. For example, Berger’s Fortunate Man (1997) follows an English country doctor called John Sassall on his daily rounds. Berger (1997: 23) describes how there is a particular “bend in the river which often reminds the doctor of his failure” whenever Sassall drives past it. The bend in the river has no fixed cognitive or social meaning that equates bend with failure, thereby opening up the possibil-ity of a type of free play of signification and association that liberates perception and experience from the overdeterminations of commonality based on shared biological heritage or social context. Meaning and memory are unstable right down to the molecules in the living interior of the brain, and here the instabil-ity inherent in the body enters into dialogue with the exterior instability of phe-nomena encountered in the environment. Depending on the person, it might be a certain quality of light, a turn in the weather, a shade of green, or the shape of a building that calls to mind his or her regret over a particular word spoken out of turn or an unfinished conversation. As such, substance, shape, and color enter

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into a world of infinite possibilities and variety generated by the free play of imaginative signification beyond the realm of shared perceptual mechanics and/or cultural symbolism. No act of perception (of red) or interpretation (of a red painting) is anything other than momentary; it remains time-bound. The redness of blood, for example, is collectively perceived, and certain interpretations may be shared, but its redness is also inhabited and experienced in particular moments of being and imagination, as in Rebecca’s many conceptions of what it means to live with infected blood for all of one’s adult life. Likewise, the fading blues of Frank’s advertisements are inhabited in the form of the different bodily feelings and passing associations that Frank experiences as he walks around the city and that emerge out of a specific biography and imaginary whose validity is at least equal to collective and canonized interpretations.

Ending: Colors in a Field

The colors in these artworks can never be pure, for they are too contaminated by disease, emotion, and imagination for the purposes of cognitive science and are too intertwined with specific personal biography and situation to represent shared cultural meanings. Different shades of red tell a thousand different sto-ries of blood, death, and disease but, when painted next to yellow and blue on a piece of cardboard, can convey a day without pain. For color is not always what it appears to be, as it often contains secret shades found in people’s biographies, situations, and imaginations: “We must invent the heart of things if we wish one day to discover it. Audiberti informs us of milk in speaking of its secret black-ness. But for Jules Renard, milk is hopelessly white, since it is only what it seems to be” (Sartre, quoted in Bachelard 1971: 8). The story of color is located as much in the conditions under which colors are imagined and made — including the challenge of producing art while sick — as in finished artifacts, recalling Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) point that the meaning of art is often found in its making rather than in its final content. We might usefully combine Victor Turner’s (1982) poesis of “making” with the etymology of aesthetics as “perception with feeling” (Eagleton 1990) to emphasize how both the production and the interpretation of art are practices of the body. This is the idea of meaning as embedded in life, pur-pose, invention, and imagination, and although it reveals little about scientific or social-scientific truths, it says much about being a person whose existence is com-promised and who finds purpose in creating art in the face of pain or mortality.

Fieldwork — like art and color — is also something made: a practice of the body involving imaginative reconstruction and sensory-aesthetic activity that takes the

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form of a daily “testing out” of new surroundings, ideas, and misunderstandings within the sphere of other people’s social lives. Art can be used in fieldwork to mediate between artist and audience. In 1999 I showed copies of artworks made by Juan, Rebecca, and Frank to HIV-positive persons I had been working with in Kampala, Uganda, with the aim of using art to create a cross-cultural dialogue about different experiences of living with HIV/AIDS. Harriet Nabesse, a twenty-three-year-old Ugandan artist, was particularly interested in works by fellow HIV-positive people in other countries, and we often met to look at and discuss such works. When I returned to see Harriet in April 2001 with a new set of artworks, her health had radically deteriorated; she was clinging to life. She was too weak to look at art, and her appearance suggested that nothing but pain and suffering lay beneath her sunken eyes and her diseased and blemished skin. The room was small and dark as I sat there with her. From her bed and my chair, we both looked through a small window at a yellowing colonial bungalow where she and her grandfather had lived when she was a child and whose walls were set against a blue equatorial sky. Although she could not move her body, lift her head off the pillow, or reliably form coherent sentences, she still wanted to talk about what the world meant to her and make sense of the things around her. She wanted to talk more but was too weak, and so I arranged to see her the next day; however, when I arrived, I found a fire burning outside her home, a sign that she had died in the night.

I do not know what Harriet saw as I sat with her in those final hours, any more than I know what was going on inside Van Gogh’s head when he painted Wheatfield. I cannot name or imagine the things Harriet felt as she looked at her grandfather’s house or at the sky above. But as an act of looking, it reminded me not only of Potter staring out of his window at inexpressible white blossoms while dying but of the last days of a friend of mine, Will F. Willis, who died of HIV/AIDS the same spring that Potter succumbed to cancer. Will was an enthusiastic amateur painter, and the paintings he created shortly before he died resonated with an intensity absent from his earlier work. His last and best painting was of yellow daffodils outlined against a blue and purple backdrop, painted in the knowledge that this was the last time he would see spring (figs. 11 – 12).

Our dominant epistemologies continue to be challenged by the experiential and biographical diversity of persons and their idiosyncratic, bodily constructions of the world. These foundational differences mean that although colors possess mutually constructed cultural meanings and objectively measurable wavelengths and elicit predictable material changes in the nervous system, our models and measures are too static to capture the ways that people aesthetically experience the world. We may appreciate why grandfathers’ houses or blue skies are signifi-

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cant, know about the cultural symbolism of white blossoms, or locate the yellow of daffodils in Berlin and Kay’s model of color perception. We may even be able to identify the cognitive mechanisms and visual pathways involved or to monitor brain activity by fMRI. However, these are not grounds on which to assert the unity of perception, given the extent to which people’s subjective experiences are differentiated by individual excess and radical otherness.

Will, Harriet, and Potter each had access to the blue of the sky — which became central to their experience of dying during their last weeks — but it was a

Figure 11 Wall of Harriet Nabesse’s grandfather’s house. Photograph by Andrew Irving

Figure 12 Will F. Willis, untitled. Photograph by Andrew Irving

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blueness mediated by diverse aspirations, specific emotions, and changing ideas about illness, hope, the past, and whatever is imagined to exist after death. Thus the common act of looking at the sky in the face of mortality brings human beings together while exaggerating the hermeneutic borders between them, challenging Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that a common ground is constituted through dialogue where thought is “interwoven into a single fabric.” Instead of common ground or sky, we must recognize the borders and limits placed on mutually shared and intersubjective forms of perception. I would argue, however, that these borders are not simply barriers to understanding but a rich source of knowledge about people (including experiences of illness); they mark the beginning of other forms of aesthetic appreciation and understanding. The limits of intersubjectivity and objectivity demand a recognition of the existence, excess, and radical alterity of other people’s experiences (Levinas 1996), and by allowing certain experiences to remain theoretically and scientifically underdetermined, a type of knowledge and appreciation is created that cannot be defined in terms of mutuality, intersubjec-tive understanding, or objective truth but nevertheless offers a basis for engaging with the experiences of other people. Perhaps it is the sharing of life and the rec-ognition of alterity in these moments that allow color to resonate most vibrantly.

Accordingly, I would like to suggest that the meaning of the artworks in this essay can be found in the realm of the human subject’s recognition of the indivis-ible presence and alterity of other people’s experiences (including moments of pain, emotion, and bodily degradation). We must refuse the temptation to make their specificity, subjectivity, and existential alterity known by simply reducing them to commonalities of cognition and context. Their colors emerge from phe-nomena that demand to be included in any discussion of perception — namely, from personal biography, from the creativity of the imagination, and from the instability of the existential body — while the struggle to make art that reclaims humanity and constitutes meaning in the face of disease, decline, and death elicits a recognition of both the shared humanity and the radical differences between persons. We may not be able to prove or deny the theories and mechanics of perception, but by attending to the circumstances under which color and art are made, we can recognize people’s aesthetic appreciation of the world as mediated by their present, situated circumstances. For while these artworks do not tell us about the truths of different disciplines, they present us with an opportunity to begin speaking about lived relations of the body to perception, including that of color, pain, and death.

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