by Michael Pattison
We are made to look. A person in a white t-shirt, needle between his teeth, un-belts and unzips his trousers with one hand while the other holds and adjusts the filming device with which he is recording himself. With his trousers down and the position of his camera established, the person sits in such a way that the composition of his image foregrounds the flesh of his hairy thigh; with one of his hands now free, he pinches enough of his skin to tighten it and, with the needle moved from his mouth to his other hand, he plunges it into the resulting fatty mound. All the while, accompanying this single-take sequence, numbers are verbalised matter-of-factly and one after another on the unsynchronised soundtrack: ‘One hundred and fifty. Seventy-five. Ninety. Eighty. Eighty-one.’
Matthew Lancit’s Stomach, Thighs, and Ass is a portrait of the artist as a type one diabetic: his needle is an insulin pen, the numbers are his blood sugar levels. Presented here as a four-channel installation, the work is an epic of the everyday: a selection of daily snippets accumulated across a two-year period in which Lancit would film his own self-administered injection each morning, night and mealtime. Some of these diary entries are captured in private and/or very intimate quarters: a bedroom, a bathroom, what appears to be a hotel balcony at dusk. Others are recorded out and about: on a park bench, on trains and planes and boats, in airports and at busy crossroads, at the beach and in art galleries, at the Acropolis in Athens, outside a café eating an ice cream.
The sheer range of these juxtapositions provides its own low-key absurdity, as if to evidence the relentlessly quotidian character of living with a chronic illness. The simultaneous variation and familiarity of the settings underline the sameness of the activity being recorded: its round-the-clock and never-not-necessary nature flattens all cinematic backdrops as equally incidental. This flattening effect is reinforced by the exhibition context, with no distinction or hierarchy implied between channels. If the artist’s social function shifts from one scene to the next (there a father, here a tourist), the changes seem only to heighten the sense of constancy that living with a condition such as diabetes brings.
Lancit’s work plays out in contrast to the typically melodramatic scenarios reserved for onscreen depictions of diabetes and of people living with chronic conditions more broadly. If the conventional approach to illness is to include it only when a plot calls for it, Stomach, Thighs, and Ass strips the artist’s diabetes of a narrative logic. The soundtrack’s verbalised glucose readings imply documentation ad infinitum. As such, the film is best understood as a proposition without end, and one that therefore challenges the intrinsically burdensome expectations placed upon cinematic renderings of illness. This is not some triumph-over-adversity arc – much less a conclusive start-to-finish trajectory – but a document of and in fragments.
