Altered X-Rays

The Altered X-Rays are Cohen's most distinctive body of work. Begun in response to the AIDS epidemic, they are interventions in chemicals, pigment, and physical abrasion on exposed roentgenographs. Some works efface, dissolve, or burn portions of the film. Others answer its slick surface with rivulets of pigment, metallic powders, mica, wax, and polyurethane. The series emerges from anger at the government's failure to take the epidemic seriously. Cohen considered them "elegies for the dead," laments for the loss of human touch, with her transformations as gestures seeking to restore it.

From “Altered X-Rays”
by Cora Cohen

Since the start of her Altered X-Rays series, Cora Cohen wrote many brief essays about this distinctive body of work with only minor variations of wording. This is the version from 2015 she posted on her website:

“My altered x-ray series is a complex and continually evolving body of work that I began in the early nineties in response to the AIDS epidemic. Using the exposed x-ray films of men who had died of AIDS, I intervened with chemicals and paint, burns and cuts. At times, I transformed the image of the diseased part. At times, my interventions were an intuitive response to the disease and the devastation it was causing, and paralleled the deterioration and decay of the body.”

“Although the anonymity of disease and alienating medical technology do not surrender so easily to the interventions of artmaking, my early altered x-rays provided me with a way of processing loss. They serve as elegies of those passed and act as reminders of our own vulnerability and mortality. As works of art they possess a horrific beauty and perhaps they retrieve some individuality from the anonymity of death and disease.”

“In the late nineties, I began to include the films of strangers, friends, and colleagues diagnosed with a wide variety of disorders. Many ailments and conditions are represented by newer imaging techniques. I interrupt both the scientific measuring and the represented image with paint, cuts, eradicated zones, and snippets from popular culture. I embed images of ancient architecture taken from discarded, deteriorating books. These re-contextualized bits act as interferences that sabotage the scientific status of the x-ray, sonogram, and magnetic resonance films and impart a sense of unfinishedness. Many of these additions refer to unseen and overlooked places, events, and objects. Their inclusion reflects the quotidian aspects of my personal and social engagements. Collapsing the distance between the technologized (alienated) realm of medical practice and the transcendent domain of pictorial beauty, I am “altering” the deadly empiricism of medical diagnosis as I am also refusing to accept a fully sublimated escape into art. In disrupting the intent of the films and their nearly impervious surfaces, a sense of certainty is supplanted with ambivalence, experimentation, and the transitory. As answers recede, questions come to the fore.”

In an essay from 1996, for the exhibition Cora Cohen: Paintings and Altered X rays (1983-1996), Sidra Stich adds:

“Not only do these exaggerate the relationships between positive and negative, presence and absence, physicality and immateriality, but they also call forth life-and-death issues in terms of the human body – more particularly, bodies in a diseased, declining condition. And though she provokes awareness of opposites, hers is not an art shaped by dualistic thinking or the idea of an ultimate synthesis. It is rather an art built upon oscillation between different modes; an art permeated with the feeling of constant renewal and ongoing activity.”

RELATED DOCUMENTS

Lauri Bortz, “Far Less Tangible States of Being,” Abaton Garage, Jersey City, New Jersey, 2006.

Sidra Stich, “Paintings and Altered X rays (1983-1996),” catalog essay (Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, 1996).