Migraine Art: Different Ways of Seeing

By Petra Kuppers

In my talk today, I will speak about implicated agency: about working in constraints, about the creative use of strictures. In my discussion, I will look at visual riffing and improvisation – at the play with the personal, the medical, and the mythical through the analysis of an image that presents a fantasy, a creative re-vision of migraine.

I will focus my discussion on migraine art, i.e. art created by people who experience migraines. Migraine Art as a term gained currency through Derek Robinson, who worked for the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim Limited. He initiated 'migraine art competitions' in the 1980s, in Britain. The entered material was art work created by people who experience migraine – not art therapy material, or art created under the supervision or urging of medical personnel. Robinson later co-authored a report on the exhibitions, using the art entries as his research material , translating the artistic renditions back into the symptomatology of migraine, with its complex and multi-varied sensory changes. This uneasy alignment of diagnostic categories, art, and marketing continues in many forms, not least through numerous competitions and exhibitions dedicated to 'migraine art'.

The concept of migraine art has been further influentially publicized by Oliver Sacks, who is also fascinated by the diagnostic 'truth' of migraine art as it depicts changed vision and aura experiences.

The migraine art images I show here [powerpoint slide show] as examples were all found on the Internet. They are framed by medical and pharmaceutical discourses, they feed from and into the industrial complex of health and illness.

In order to discuss the relations between discursive frames and critique from a feminist perspective, I echo Donna Haraway's influential work on cyborgs, monsters and goddesses. Her framework allows me to focus on how to hold on to agency in implication: how to use story-telling as a means to undercut that which cannot be escaped. I am extending the strategies mapped out by her to discuss migraine art not as 'authentic' images of the truth about medical conditions, but as interventions and riffs on the multiplicity of experiences, discourses and power-relations that characterize patient/medical system encounters.

My main interest in migraine art rests in its multiple uses, its different frames given to it by its creators and by its exhibitors – migraine art is mobilized to express intensively personal issues of phenomenology, perception and pain, and yet its use in public contexts is designed to foster a public discourse, educate people about migraine, and provide a 'friendly' community-involved image of institutions.

Migraine is just one of many health/illness-phenomena on the web. A relatively recent phenomenon is the rise of 'infomercial' ware on the net: sites sponsored directly or indirectly (through ads) by pharmaceutical industries that coalesce around certain medical conditions. As part of the marketing strategy of these sites, 'soft' experts can engage with one another. Beyond the layer of medically qualified personnel servicing these sites and engaging with consumers, many sites have bulletin boards where 'ordinary people' exchange their experiences. In these sites, 'having' the diagnosis functions as the passport that allows entry into an exclusive community: a community of fellow travelers, sufferers, gossip groups, and support networks.

Art has an important function in these sites: it creates 'alternative' images, allows for a different mode of communication, in particular about issues such as pain that are difficult to express with the vocabulary of 'clinical' medicine. But when discussing art created for and exhibited in such venues, important issues around definitions of artistic practice emerge on the borderlines between 'art' and 'therapy', the difference between 'gallery' or mainstream art (commercially sold) and creative self-expression with its attendant values of privacy and intimacy.

These issues emerge with particular clarity in the processes surrounding a particular exhibition site, the biannual art competition run by the National Headache Foundation. The competition highlights art that is related to a specific sub-theme related to the experience of migraine pain. For an artist to enter this competition means to 'own' a diagnosis – and to out herself. With this, a tension characterizes the on-line (and gallery) art exhibit that emerges from the competition. This tension articulates the differences between medical diagnostic labeling and its mechanism of grouping, erasing patients' specificity during research and trials, and the creative industries, where the rhetorical emphasis is on individual specificity and non-normative singularity.

The genre of 'migraine art, or any art associated with a specific identity, exists within multiple layers of genre - the diagnosis itself, the cultural expectation about 'migraine experiences' set up by the label, and the cultural expectation of artistry, articulated in particular by the 'competitive', juried nature of the exhibit. And the law of the genre also ensures the citationality of these conventions, ritualizing them. As a critic, I need to choose. I either have to use a language of the general, describing 'common' features of the art exhibited in migraine art competitions, subsuming the works under the sameness of the 'migraine' term. Or else I can employ a language of the specific, the individual work.

So let me rest on one image [see here]. This image is a watercolor created by Carole Stoiber, an artist from North Carolina, entitled "Migraine Medusa." Carole Stoiber identifies as a self-taught artist. The image can be found at the Discovery Channel Health website, where it is displayed as part of the runner-up winners of the National Headache Foundation 2001. The site states that the competition (open to professional and amateur artists) was funded by a grant from Pfizer, Inc., i.e. a pharmaceutical company. The original call for art emphasized both the individual and social effects of migraine (as opposed to the interaction between individuals and medical personnel, or between pain and medicine). All winners agreed to a purchase award clause. Also, all copyright to their image, as well as the image itself, were bought by the Foundation. In the case of Carole Stoiber, she received 100 dollars for her original watercolor image and all rights (as the original contract made clear). From this, artists had to pay shipping costs, as well. In return, though, the artists received significant publicity, and a durable, international presentation of their work in a professional Internet site.

The image clearly operates in a naturalist, representational idiom. It represents a form of folk art, a naïve style that merges realist conventions with surrealist and expressionist elements. The expressive amalgamation of sharp edges of glass splinters and soft, multiple traced curved lines in the face and neck represents potential visual experiences of people experiencing migraines. Sacks' work on Migraine, still a well selling book and updated in 1992, has many images that 'decode' these visual characteristics – migraine aura, fortification, mosaic vision, color shifts, blind spots, etc.

If I use Robinson's and Sacks's material, I can read the contrast between carefully worked, complex shading and line drawing in the snake body with the large expanses of color in evidence in the left half of the image as simulations of the optical illusions, the loss of detail and the fractured nature of vision many people who experience migraines report. The focal point of the image is the eye: but an eye decentered, broken, by a geometric, algebraic object, a refraction. Reflections, refractions, and the dissolution of boundaries seem central to the work, and, as a commentary on migraine experience, the image draws on the vocabulary of (social) separation and dissolution, as well as on the contrasts between organic and anorganic and the human/animal.

Liquid drops from the snake's fangs onto the neck of the woman, and Medusa-like, the snake body seems part of the woman's head. The image draws on mythological figures - Medusas and mirrors- to make sense of, create stories about, and contain migraine experience. Citing both Greek mythology, and one of the core symbols of surrealist art practices, Stoiber becomes part of a genealogy, a line that riffs on specific themes. The genre and the work twine snakelike into one another, in a move similar to one Rebecca Schneider asks for when trying to find a feminist vision of solo work:

As suggested by artists like Gertrude Stein and Yvonne Rainer, can we pick up the formal emphasis by which solo is not read as discrete but as imbricated in and punctuated by the movements of participants in what John Chernoff, writing on African aesthetics, called "a swinging back and forth from solo to chorus or from solo to an emphatic instrumental reply"? Can we read solo as collective?

Let me transpose this call for a musical/dancerly/performance solo as collective: Chernoff’s call harmonizes with the tensions between instance and genre, individual and society, story and myth, woman and Woman. To see this image as instance and chorus at the same time opens a path for my desire to find a voice that is neither wholly beholden to the categories set up by the system (such as the necessity for the 'individual artist's voice'), nor essentialist and disdainful of differences (such as seeing every woman's work as woman's work).

This conundrum, revisited in a different form, fuels another writer writing against phallocentric language and its positioning of woman in the margin. Hélène Cixous claims the laughter of the Medusa as the way out of the hard place constructed by phallocentric discourse: 'They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss' . Writing in the (impossible) position of the woman (rather than writing through the mask of the masculine position and its horizon of possibility), the Greek myths take on a different charge, they fail to keep the woman in her (secondary, scary, powerless) place. When the sphere of Greek myth can be seen as a place of stories, the Medusa can step forth from behind the curtain of its narrative containment: 'You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing' .

Literality and physicality mix and merge in Cixous's text, making it impossible to divide apart the righteous borders of each. Cixous's prose tiptoes on the limits of the intelligible borderlines of definitions. It is this strategy of implication and subversion that has fuelled critiques of her work as essentialist (fallen too much into 'the body'). But it seems that this very leakiness of the discursive fields provides the excessive, uncontained ground for the Medusa's laughter. And with Chernoff, I listen for the rhythms, foreign and painful to phallocentric discourse, that emerge in the encounters with Medusa. In Stoiber's image, the face is unreadable: no laughter, but also no tears, hold the truth about her.

Let's stay with the topos of the rhyme and the song:

Within Robert Graves's poetic myth-analysis in The White Goddess, the story of the Medusa has been captured as a struggle between a 'primitive' droning sound, an ululation of the rounded mouth, and the ordered, classical symphony of Mount Olympus. The Medusa becomes a repressed ur-principle, its powers are chaotic, life-giving and yet accelerated towards death.

Stoiber makes interesting use of the death/life tension in her image of the Medusa, the woman who kills anyone who looks at her, and who can only be overcome by a mirror worn as armor. Stoiber's image is rather different, shining and alive, from Arnold Böcklin's [see here] archetypal representation of the goddess as death mask (1878).

Böcklin's presentation of Medusa's head emerges from undifferentiated mist. A large hole gapes in the face – the mouth is open, a dark cavern. Nothing escapes, not even the fearsome animal teeth that are supposed to guard this entry. The mouth opens into the past – the past of the ululation, of the pre-order state, that which is (incompletely) vanquished, rearing its head in the painting's black oil. The eyes, likewise, are not looking out, but become holes, soulless pools in which to drown, rimmed in black and grey.

Stoiber's Medusa is much more contained – death is not a feature here, the poisoned fangs of the snake closing on her neck not withstanding. There is a muscular strength in the set of the mouth, a defiance. And the blue eyes escape outwards, linking in color with the woman's shirt, and with the blue expanse around her, the realm of others, darkened and schematic behind the veil of migraine's mirror. The snake's rattle is positioned centrally, and sound enters the alignment of color, narrative, past and present (time's flow seems also present in the large waves that create the background for the image: pulsing headaches, life's pulse, history's ocean). The longing for connection I see in those eyes seems taken up by the dry rattle of these chitinous scales, and the sounds the silhouetted child makes as it raps its hands, entreating for attention. The face is blank, though: no clear story emerges, only anchor points for multiple storytelling.

Stoiber's image and her evocation of the Medusa seems to stand in relation to domesticity and wildness, past and future, containment and expansiveness – refusing to be pinned down, made clear, this representation of pain and migraine uses the disruptive potential of the monster to oscillate between repulsion and integration.

Agency, and who does what to whom, is an issue both in the variants of the Greek myth, in Stoiber's painting, and in Stoiber's account of her copyright relationship with the National Headache Foundation.

Stoiber's image speaks to me both of the strong line that demarcates the head from the environment, and of the permeability of thickness (of flesh) by color and wave. Just as the fore-grounded figure is strongly kept apart from the background, the figure itself wavers inside its bounded envelope, the boundaries breached and played with. The snake is penetrating her neck, and also domestically, cozily, merges with the woman through the comfortable turban-like fit of the snake on the woman's head. In her interview with me, Stoiber acknowledges that for her, her migraine experience, imagined as a glass sheet, disrupts and upsets the dynamic of her family situation. It keeps her apart, yet within, creating tensions within the family unit. In painting her migraine, Stoiber has to think hard about her position, and her self. Broken boundaries between self and other echo in the image, undecided borders merge sinuously and sensuously – as a woman trained to look for feminist subtexts, I delight in the ambivalences, but I also acknowledge the presence of pain.

As Cixous' use of the Medusa witnesses, mobilization of a mythical female character is a familiar trope in feminist studies. Many female figures in Greek mythology, for instance, hold a qualified power, and can be quoted as anchor points for critiques, and partial identification. The laugher and the voice of the Medusa, the riddle of the Sphinx, Cassandra's sight, or the drama of Athena have held the attention of feminists eager to find expression for struggles within compromise, figures at distance from the angry Zeus, and yet under his sway.

Sigrid Weigel pin-points the problem of the Medusa in her work on women's literature, entitled the Die Stimme der Medusa, the voice of the Medusa:

There is no voice of the Medusa – unless it be her other, soundless 'speech'. When she does begin to talk, to give expression to her horror, or even to communicate, she has to leave her place, is no longer that Medusa.

Using a voice that might not be hers, a place that isn't hers, and a position from which she is 'unspeakable'/'unspoken'/'spoken for' she becomes an analogue for the migraine patient's experience a propos the medical system.

The minor, inflected key weaves a melody out of multiple diversities: art canon imagery, visual explanatory schemes for migraine auras popularized by Sacks and others, feminist histories, Greek myths, patriarchal struggles and female-focused storytelling, personal experiences of migraines, and their effects on one's self and one's family. Stoiber, and the other artists whose images delight me, re-member agency, rebuild it, in each brushstroke, refusing closure and labeling. Surveying the genre and the instance of migraine art, I delight in the surprising rhythm of laughter, in the iridescence of color, and in the openness that emerges between silence, image and story.

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