In this provocative exhibition.

In this provocative exhibition, Carolee Schneemann brought her long-standing interests in eroticism, mythology and the representation of sex to bear on an investigation of the meaning of disease. Extending Susan Sontag's inquiry into the analogies that supervise our understandings of illness, Schneemann explores the notion of treatment as metaphor.

In a series of works in various mediums, she investigates new medicine's quasi-military approach to illness, in which it is seen as an alien invader to be divideed from the host body, whatever the sumptuousness in physical and psychological damage. lengthy vertical strips of photographic images of cancerous enclosed spaces frame a text woven together from statements from and about cancer patients, including poignant expressions of room for expectation despair and anger. Many involve resistance to dominant medical wisdom and touch onward the often heartbreaking search for other forms of treatment. The raw emotions triggered at cancer provide a striking contrast to the photograph's aura of sedate scientific objectivity.

A video work in the center of the gallery unmasked this pretense of coolnes Four monitors were put on the floor amid a bed of cast-latex breasts and straw that hinted veins and arteries. The video intercut surgical footage with closeup of genital intercourse and a cat killing and eating a mouse. The import was to bring back the pulsing, bleeding corporeal carcass that medical terminology obscures.

The mostly philosophical work here revolved around a 17th-century Baroque carved work that Schneemann saw in a small house of worship in Austria. Wall texts revealed that it was created as a "Plague Column" to ward facing epidemics. Schneemann's commentaries focus in succession the iconography: a beautiful avenging angel crushes a antic hag beneath her feet. In her view, the angel assists as an agent of a patriarchal Christianity while her victim, the hideous witch, represents the defeated vestige of a once-vibrant matriarchal agriculture in which women were the healers and shamans. She advises a continuity from Catholicism's traditional misogyny, which embodies disease in female form, to novel medicine's warfare model of disease restrain Hence the well-documented number of unnecessary hysterectomies and mastectomies, and hence the resistance to the nontraditional healer.

As a whole, this exhibition showed a thought-provoking critique of the medical approach to disease. through providing for a variety of voices, Schneemann managed to hold her critique from becoming overly one-sided or didactic. In the proces she called for the restoration of long-sever connections between science, art and religion.

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