Spot price

Daisy Alioto on a new three-part project by Goldin+Senneby.

In 2017, I interviewed the phenomenologist Don Ihde for Guernica magazine. A significant portion of our conversation was spent discussing medical imaging, and how seeing images of the brain can have a philosophical impact on the human sense of self.

“It’s very interesting because we have no direct experience of our brain. I can’t experience my brain because I’m inside of it,” he told me. It’s only in the relatively recent history of medicine that we can see inside the body, Ihde explained.

A new body of work from Goldin+Senneby, published by Triple Canopy, explores what happens when the perceived value of medical imagery supersedes the value of the patient––their subjectivity, and their quality of life. This is not a project that can be understood quickly and although it lives online it is staunchly resistant to comprehension through mere clicking around. In fact, I had to read the press release several times to actually get what was involved.

All of which is to say, it’s worth it. The Stockholm-based duo Goldin+Senneby (a partnership between artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby) has for years been investigating the language of autoimmunity, diseases which lead a body to attack itself. The impetus is Senneby’s MS diagnosis, the backstory of which forms the first part of the work, the essay Regions of Interest.

Regions of Interest begins in a hospital room. But the story of Senneby’s diagnosis starts with a flare up in Paris while the artist was listening to Air’s Premiers Symptômes on repeat, which he now finds to be prophetic. It isn’t until the lesions on his brain are made visible through magnetic resonance imaging that the intermittent “loss of touch” he experiences has a name.

His physician is excited by the clarity of the lesions, but for Senneby, “all I could think about was what to do with the rest of my life: I’d wasted too much time visualizing meaningless products for corporate clients on unreasonable deadlines!”

Senneby first hides his diagnosis, then treats it as a site of artistic and intellectual inquiry. His questioning leads him to neurologist George Ebers, who expresses skepticism about the role that imaging plays in treating symptoms rather than the root cause of MS. “The MRI is a great tool for diagnosis, but we shouldn’t be treating the scan,” Ebers said. “We should be treating the patient. But now we look at the scan instead of the patient—as if the image is the disease.”

Senneby also tries several different medications, listing their side effects and––in some cases––the web of kickbacks and financial incentives that led to their prescription. “I didn’t want to be at war; I didn’t want to be the self that manifested in the rhetoric of medicine,” he writes.

The medical image as a tool for prioritizing one type of drug over another is the basis for a second piece in the Triple Canopy work: Spot Price. Spot Price is a double entendre, both a financial term for the current price of an asset and a literal description of the lesions on Senneby’s brain. Spot Price is made up of fifteen real scans of the artist’s head, hosted on the blockchain, each revealing a “slice” of his brain upon mint. The oldest scan is from the year 2000. The pricing of these artworks is based on the market cost of three MS drugs.

Without the context of Regions of Interest they would be a mere oddity, a digital wunderkammer. Instead, Spot Price feels like the type of autobiography most patients are denied. “I felt an urge to look at—and possess—the portraits of my brain that had captivated the attention of so many doctors and served the shareholders of so many drug companies. I wanted to see myself as they had seen me,” says Senneby.

For some reason this reminded me of the Air’s Premiers Symptômes again. There is no song on the 1997 EP called Premiers Symptômes. Instead, the standout track is Le soleil est près de moi which consists of one line over and over again. Repetition is the defining experience of the modern medical patient. It takes a motivated mind to forge something more than banality from it. And who can blame the one that doesn’t?

Eventually, Senneby finds a neurologist that recognizes and applauds his subjectivity, making no distinction between the experience of having a brain and a mind that conceives of it: “Instead of pitching the latest gadget or biotech concoction, he turned from assessing treatments to asking about my thoughts and concerns, casually bringing up artworks and novels that enriched my own observations. He ushered me into an intellectual and emotional realm where I could be myself as a patient.”

Senneby’s experience has also produced a new novel, a collaboration between Goldin+Senneby and the writer Katie Kitamura. An excerpt of this novel, Flare Up, forms the third piece of the project. The novel is narrated by a new neighbor of an MS patient whose experience resembles Senneby’s, yet another refraction of medical subjectivity. Kitamura’s 2021 novel Intimacies has stayed with me as a coolly constructed tale of translation and mistranslation. Although the excerpt of Flare Up is engrossing, I expect the final work will say less about chronic illness than its observation from a distance––which is where, for the moment, I sit as well.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• "There have been GAWD songs that I heard once and was never able to find again, leaving me to wonder if they were hallucinations." Pitchfork profiles a prolific rapper-producer

• Last Donut of the Night turned me on to DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ

• Weyes Blood releases a new music video directed by Adam Curtis (YouTube)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Alicia Kennedy on coffee shops: “Being a regular provides special treatment but one should never become too comfortable, is my view.”

• Raven Leilani on Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, one of the best books of the 2020s so far IMO. (NYRB)

• “I’m kind of like, ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’” The SBF trial is for the spectators. (NYT)

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