Do only women get to suffer in public?

Across contemporary art, a striking asymmetry persists in how serious illness, specifically cancer, is made visible. Despite men having a higher overall incidence of cancer and being more likely to die from the disease, it is overwhelmingly female and queer artists whose work about their diagnosis enters the canon, framed as intimate, courageous or confessional. Comparable work by straight men is still rare, or is redirected into metaphor. So, why do depictions of male illness remain largely private in our age of self-disclosure?

Writing in her journal, Susan Sontag deliberated on possible titles for what would become her well-known essay, Illness as Metaphor (1978). One candidate was ‘Women and Death’, under which she jotted, ‘There is no sororal death as there is a fraternal death (Beau Geste).’ A public female death is not a noble one, Sontag posited. Yet for numerous female artists who have dared to openly navigate their experiences of cancer through their art, there has been a subsequent recantation of their critical reputations. 

Consider Tracey Emin who since her recovery from bladder cancer in 2020, is arguably at her most visible since her YBA heyday. Despite the humanity and technical brilliance of her work, Emin was long trivialised as a hot mess from Margate with a proclivity for airing her dirty laundry in public. But since she has survived a trauma perhaps less confronting than abortion, miscarriage or childhood sexual abuse, we have embraced Dame Tracey, the key maternal figure of the British art scene, nurturing a new generation of young artists through her foundation. Her forthcoming Tate Modern retrospective is aptly titled A Second Life. 

Or consider the late Hannah Wilke, relentlessly criticised during her lifetime for being a shameless exhibitionist whose practice amounted to ‘little more than the artist’s enthusiastic exploitation of her own dark-haired good looks,’ as Roberta Smith put it in her The New York Times obituary for the artist. In the face of such criticism, Wilke had doubled down, using the so-called gaze-baiting to expose the internal hypocrisies of the second-wave feminist movement. Following the posthumous 1994 exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts of her final photographic series Intra Venus, which graphically documented her treatment for cancer and her approach toward death, the critics had changed their minds. One writer for Art News declared with some palpable relief that the late work ‘cancels out the narcissism of her earlier work, imbuing it with more purpose than could be seen at the time’.

When male artists do address cancer explicitly, their work tends to frame the disease less as embodied or emotional crises than as a loss of authority, productivity, or a curtailed capacity to make work as usual. In his brilliant 2024 film, Being John Smith, the artist-filmmaker voices his anxieties that the cognitive effects of his ‘head and neck cancer’ will impede his capacity to continue making work with political heft. Conversely, sometimes a diagnosis can thrill the market with a burst of innovation, an example being Henri Matisse, who developed his cut-out technique when intestinal cancer left him unable to paint. Here the story reverts to the genre of the male artist genius, the unconquerable creative spirit that no mortal affliction can match.

Or perhaps those surrounding the artist prefer to change the subject. Commercial galleries sometimes tremble when an artist announces the production of new work that could be deemed depressing, sending a shudder down the collective spine of the sales team. Ahead of the artist’s first major retrospective in 20 years at Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2015, Bruce Nauman decided to revisit Walk with Contrapposto (1968), an early video work that caused him ‘plain embarrassment’ to watch years later, despite being held in the collections of MoMA and the Pompidou. The artist hardly ever revisited work, but Nauman wanted something out of the idea that the original had been unable to achieve. 

In Contrapposto Studies, I through VII (2015/2016) we see the artist almost half a century later, in the same old uniform of white T-shirt and jeans, striking the same classical pose on repeat – weight on one foot, hips jutting and shoulders tilting ever-just-so (think Michelangelo’s David) — putting sculpture into motion once more. But this time, as he shuffles laboriously through his messy studio, Nauman is unsteady on his feet, unable to sustain the pose for long. The white T-shirt now strains against a rounded belly. We catch glimpses of the artist’s colostomy bag. The mode of presentation has moved on too: with the help of high-tech cameras and 3D technology, Nauman’s figure is multiplied, sliced and stacked across seven large-scale projections that magnify a body in disarray. 

The work’s notes make much of Nauman’s status as ‘one of the most radical and revered artists of our time’ using the latest image and sound technologies to offer a powerful meditation on time’s passing. No mention is made of the artist’s rectal cancer, which he was recovering from at the time. ‘The radiation caused some nerve damage that left me with a loss of feeling in my feet that I was just getting back,’ he shared with The New York Times in 2016 ahead of the Philadelphia opening. Of course, it is the artist’s prerogative alone to share or withhold their state of health. Yet it seems that Nauman was comfortable with audiences knowing this information: he had disclosed his cancer and its effects on his mobility with one of the world’s leading newspapers. He had made no effort to conceal his colostomy bag in a project precisely about motion, vitality and the Western cultural history of the ideal human form.

‘I didn’t want to talk about cancer,’ Kaari Upson told Even magazine in 2016, recalling a conversation with Ed Ruscha, ‘so I talked about all the couches and beds I see when I drive.’ From the time of her diagnosis of breast cancer in 2011 to her death in 2021, the artist had discussed the connections between her illness and her art making in several interviews. ’It was a cult of invalidism,’ Upson offered in explanation of her impulse to rescue discarded mattresses from the streets of Los Angeles and cast them into unsettling, beguiling silicone and urethane sculptures. ‘I was at a point when I was either going to get up from one [a bed] or die on one’.

Beds had long been on Upson’s mind, however. As part of her sprawling, quasi-forensic opus The Larry Project (2005-12), she had already produced work on the stained mattresses that littered almost every room in the abandoned property next door to her childhood home, formerly occupied by a seedy playboy neighbour she would name Larry. Having previously been criticised for making work that was too opaque (a ‘big curator’ visiting her studio had mewed in frustration, ‘The sculpture is amazing, but how am I supposed to know all of that by looking at this?’), by 2013 she had moved on from Larry and into a somewhat more traditional practice of domestic sculptural objects. ‘The market lapped it up,’ curator Anders Kold writes in his introduction to Dollhouse, a touring retrospective of Upson’s work that debuted at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark last year, and which will open at Kunsthalle Mannheim this month [from 13 Feb—31 Apr]. To some extent did the artist’s confession of her illness simplify work that was otherwise too gloriously knotty for the market, which at every turn made uncomfortable demands on your personal distinctions between biography and fantasy, self and other, desire and disgust?

It appears that women artists are expected to demonstrate their experiences of illness in as transparent terms as possible, to make artwork that makes us feel better about them feeling terrible. We have long been primed for this, ever since the Virgin Mary archetype, whose stoicism is underscored by the legibility of her darkest grief: a promise that a common good is founded on private suffering. It is unsurprising then that sickness might be used as an opportunity to send a ‘difficult’ female artist’s work further into the realm of femininity and its synonyms of vulnerability, care and tenderness, where previous interpretations of a troublesome type of female sexuality can be put to rest.

Bringing men back into the frame would offer the realm of masculinity something too. “[You hear] the word cancer and of course you think, ‘Oh Christ, I’m going to die.’ But it wasn't even necessarily about my own demise, it was more about all the artworks I hadn't made,” the artist Michael Landy tells The Art Journal on receiving his diagnosis of testicular cancer back in 2004. Landy, then aged forty, had just moved back into his parents’ Essex home to assume the position of ‘artist-in-residence’ as part of his Tate Britain commission, Semi-Detached (2004). This was a couple of years after his headline-grabbing work Break Down (2001), in which he destroyed all his worldly belongings, an experience he likened to ‘witnessing my own funeral’. 

Back at home to make work about his father, who had suffered a calamitous industrial accident in the 1970s that had left him unable to work, heavily medicated and emotionally distant, Landy discovered a tumour in one of his testicles (the artist wonders if the stress of his return caused his illness). It was only when he was drawing his father’s leg following a bypass that the artist decided to share his own diagnosis. “We never really talked about things as a family,” he explains. “I’d only had the operation the week before, and so I saw it as a kind of exchange going on between me and him since I was drawing his scar. Suddenly, it went full circle and I was drawing my own body parts.”

The resulting series of observational drawings, which delicately trace the seam on his groin that marks the absence of the removed testicle, are tender, emotive and spare no detail. "The male director of my gallery can't look at them.” An artist friend’s young son started crying when he recently saw Radical Orchidectomy for a Solid Mass in the Upper Pole of the Left Testis (2005), currently on display at the artist’s solo exhibition LOOK at Hastings Contemporary [until 15 March]. “It's like when you get kicked in the balls by a football or a cricket ball. Men always wince. It's to do with the male private domain, or something,” Landy adds.

Two decades later, the artist reflects on the experience of making the works that enabled him not only to process his own confrontation with mortality, but also to reframe what had happened decades before to his father after the accident. The cancer drawings are ultimately about “all sorts of different manhoods, and how they can get taken away. At least I can make artwork out of it. My dad wasn't able to do that”.

As the artist well knows from three decades exploring such ideas, triumph can be found in both oblivion and survival.