Tamara James, Exude
The Care of the Self Tamara James confides at the outset that she comes from a family with a long history of mental illness. In stating this fact, she does not seek to reconcile herself to a fallibility, but to find her own point of flight. It is as an artist that James uncovers the surest route to – momentary – recoveries.
T
WORDS: ASHRAF JAMAL
he question remains: what defines health, and
far more thrilling, is the quest, always, to become the other
what ill health? As Michel Foucault has pointed
of our afflicted self.
out in Discipline and Punish, the so-called ‘normal’ only possesses its cogency – its ‘truth’ – because
In The Care of the Self, Michel Foucault underscores this drive. ‘I don’t think it is necessary to know exactly what I
of the so-called ‘abnormal’. At every turn we are policed,
am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone
measured, judged, because, as Foucault reminds us, we are
else that you were not in the beginning.’ For those who
all caught in a ‘panopticon’, pitted against each other, and
believe in consistency, or imagine life to be a calibrated arc,
surveilled at every instance.
Foucault’s view may be threatening, for what he supports is
However, for an artist such as Tamara James, who has taken illness – her own and that experienced by others – and
not a piecemeal alteration of being but a stark shift. Foucault’s reasoning behind this view stems from his
made it the core and substrate of her work, we need not be
abiding suspicion that ‘self-knowledge’ is a hoax, that
divided against ourselves, and need not be the victim of
we live in doubt and confusion and fear, and that we
another’s judgement. For what also awaits us, and which is
cannot apprehend who and what we are in advance. The
66 / Creative Feel / November 2018
