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Operating Theatres

Inhale/Exhale

by Lia Lapithi
Publisher: n/a, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2001 and 2003
ISBN: 9963-8604-0-0; ISBN: 9963-8604-1-9
Author’s Website:
http://www.lialapithi.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, USA

mosher@svsu.edu

In the 1970s a statistic made the rounds that over 90% of the commercial galleries in the United States were owned by doctors' wives. To many angry young artists, that physicians would give their spouses a money-losing hobby exhibiting art explained the general triviality of what was exhibited. Yet Lia Lapithi has called to our attention what a rich vein of unexplored medical imagery remains, and it may take an artist intimate with physicians to mine it.

These two self-published artist's monographs, texts in both English and Greek, document the medical art of Lia Lapithi Shikoroglu. The artist's father was Cyprus' first eye surgeon, her mother its first female pediatrician, and her brother is an orthopedic traumatologist. She reminisces of growing up behind the eye clinic, playing marbles with artificial eyes, attending family vacations that were scheduled around medical conferences. She has concentrated on medical imagery since the late 1990s, and her easily read conceptual artworks have represented Cyprus in international competitions. She has won prizes at the 20th Biennale of Alexandria (Grand Prix) and the 3rd Florence Biennale

Operating Theatres collects artworks about medical intervention. Many women have elective surgery for beauty, and Lapithi exhibits a video of her nose job at age 37. Its gallery installation was surrounded by blue pears with extreme close ups of skin blemishes, ruptures, rashes, and wrinkles projected upon them. A video of eye cataract surgery juxtaposed with desiccated pears. Two other works employ life-sized outline drawings of Botticelli's Venus with appropriately inserted video screens depicting an esophageal-gastro-endoscopy or a gastric bypass operation. The cool black and white outlined Venuses make the little surgical video window a bit less grisly, and the bypass surgery raises the question if the Renaissance's ideal of beauty is obese by today's standards, necessitating that Venus go under the scalpel.

Lapithi finds inspiration in a leg operation for one sculptural work, its blue legs like George Segal's colored body parts. The leg is cast from the artist's own, the tibia revealed and held by external fixators. The cold metal supports are as disturbing as the medical erotica of the J. G. Ballard novel Crash (that book's obsessiveness insufficiently conveyed in David Cronenberg's movie version two decades later). A variety of bare female breasts are projected upon a cast of a male torso, considered too sexual for one public exhibition. Hey, didn't the Rolling Stones' drummer Charlie sport a similar t-shirt on one tour?

There is a political subtext to some of Lapithi's works. In another work on leg operations and amputations, she juxtaposes tattoos used in policies of medical identification with those the Nazis used for ethnic extermination. Her artwork on cryonics includes a video of a split-brain operation and cryonic procedure projected upon a steel operating table, the brain's two lobes metaphor for divided Cyprus. In a 2001 conversation with Daphne Nikita, discussion of cryonics questioned what brain-preservation says about philosophical notions of the self. The reader almost doesn't notice several tiny, witty drawings reproduced in the book of women with collaged band-aids replacing limbs or organs. Towards the book’s end is a photo of the artist surrounded by surgeons, her brain trust. The picture of her brother in the group may have been tipped in using Photoshop, another form of surgery.

Lapithi's second book Inhale/Exhale documents her gallery show and accompanying video of 19 artworks that use medical equipment in their construction. Some works use cribs, ventilators, and fetal x-rays. An operating table with an accusatorily pointing kitchen knife attached has the incised legend, "UNTIL DEATH DO US PART." There is an absurdly elevated metal bed with gauze bandages woven around the springs, which suggests the elevated platforms on which some Native American plains tribes deposited their dead for exposure to the elements and scavenging birds. Another bed is constructed of saltlicks, perhaps to attract the healing presences of cattle or deer? A sterile double mattress is bound up in tape. My wife has speculated on the long collective pissoirs in the men’s rooms of some bars I described to her; Lapithi provides us with a witty velvet-cushioned "female urinal couch" stylish as a 1956 George Nelson marshmallow sofa.

The artist writes upon a surgeon's gown and a series of microscope slides. There are uninhibitedly female arts of decoration at play, in surgical stirrups whose pads are decoratively studded like a girl's (Lia Lapithi's?) bellbottom jeans in the 1970s. There is delicate embroidery upon sanitary napkins. A tampon is shaped into a self-portrait, its string like a spermatazoa's tail. A curtain consists of latex surgical gloves stitched together, and the artist's daughters are pictured wearing long gloves that trail like improperly discharged afterbirths or the elongated gowns displayed by American sculptor, Beverly Semmes. Yet feminine crafts also include the entertaining skills required of a doctor's wife, and we are served a coffee table arrangement of medical containers, including gauze and extracted teeth. Have another helping, dear?

"Medical Tourism" upholsters the striped canvas you'd expect on a beach umbrella or patio furniture on an operating table and a wheelchair. The booth with a beaded curtain of capsules may be Lapithi's wittiest and most pleasing work. Giant Prozac-like capsules, called Pro-Z-Art, may be one of the least successful. If at times the Inhale/Exhale series are more visually arresting than their predecessors, they are somewhat slighter than the Operating Theatres series with its political resonances and necessary incisions. There is a lightness and eclecticism in her approach to this series——here a video, there a flashing sign, whatever works.

Operating Theatres and Inhale/Exhale are the first two volumes in Lapithi's proposed three-volume work. This reviewer wonders what the third volume will bring. The two books were designed by Chrysis Shammas and Milos Gazdic, and readers might wish Inhale/Exhale had provided more explanatory or contextualizing text. If these large hardcover books seem a bit of overkill (is there a medical term?) at times for high-concept artworks that might sufficiently be documented in smaller paperbacks, Lia Lapithi, nevertheless, gives us handsome coffee-table books to brighten the waiting room of a surgeon or medical supplier.

 

 




Updated 1st February 2005


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