Andrea Gyorody on ‘For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability’, Museum of Contemporary Art
Andrea Gyorody, Artforum
January 2025
One of the first images that visitors see in ‘For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability’ is of a hand. Projected high on the wall at large scale, Hand Movie is Yvonne Rainer’s first film, which the artist made in the hospital while she recovered from major surgery in 1966. With the rest of her body immobile, she danced the only way she could: by stretching her fingers one by one and rotating her palm to explore its full range of motion. ‘This moment,’ curators Jill Dawsey and Isabel Casso write in the exhibition’s catalogue, ‘designates the hospital bed, and the experience of illness itself, as a generative space for art.’ […]