["New York Close Up"]
I try to create a traumatic experience.
I want the audience to walk away feeling like they can't unsee what they just saw.
Something that is burned in and lasts, and you can never get rid of it.
["Red Hook, Brooklyn"]
["Doreen Garner Sculpts Our Trauma"]
I use the body in my work mostly because of the trauma that I have,
[Doreen Garner, Artist]
watching how one small thing can make the entire body fail.
I'm from Philly.
My sister, when she was eight years old, she had a massive stroke.
There was basically a blood vessel that burst,
and she was left physically and mentally disabled.
She lived until she was eighteen and then passed away in 2007.
--This could have used more vaseline.
When I was younger,
I would end up spending a lot of time with her in the hospital.
I remember one kid that had his leg in this crazy metal cage
with pins in his leg.
All these things that are burned into my brain
are slowly starting to seep back out into the real world.
I'm working on this show, "White Man On A Pedestal."
All of my work is focusing on J. Marion Sims, who's known as the father of modern gynecology,
but made a lot of his progress through torturing Black women--
three of which are documented: Betsey, Anarcha, and Lucy.
So he ended up performing a vesicovaginal fistula repair on Anarcha
over thirty times in the course of five years, without anesthesia.
He said that Black people experience pain less
so he didn't need to use anesthesia on them.
But it was just an excuse for him to torture them.
And if there was a patient that didn't seem like they would make it through,
he would just leave them in the field to die.
--It's weird, this process of basically giving him a rub down.
--Because it's like a caring notion, but I have no care for this guy so...
--I guess I should just think of it as caring for my own work.
His statue in Central Park,
it's currently up for debate on whether it should stay there or not.
I think they should take down the statue, and they should chop off the head,
and give it to me so I can use it for other projects.
Pearls and Swarovski crystals and glass beads
end up standing in for fat cells and muscle tissue.
It's not about creating a gruesome work.
It's about creating a work that has subtle nuances,
where you don't really completely know how to feel,
and maybe that's what stays with you.
I'm doing a silicone skin cast on Sims's body--
peeling that off and then using that for a surgery
where I'm performing vesicovaginal fistula repair
that he performed on Black women.
Some crazy shit is going to go down. [LAUGHS]
--Yeah touch it, feel it.
--You can smack his face if you want, punch him.
I ended up buying an endoscopy camera,
so when it goes inside people will be able to see
what's going on inside the body,
as well as on the outside.
When you think about ways that Black people have been used in this country,
it does just come down to the body.
Extra sets of hands to do tasks,
people to take out your anger and frustration on,
people to do experiments on--
just disposable bodies.
Me as an artist, I'm operating in a really weird place.
I'm slicing up the skin, I'm chopping up the bodies.
I'm a Black woman horrified by these actions,
and yet I have to show all these actions,
so that it's not a situation where people are able to overlook this information anymore.
It's not a desire that I naturally have,
it's just what I have to do.
[In January 2018, the City of New York decided to relocate the Sims statue]
[to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he is buried.]
[The statue will be installed without its pedestal.]