Terry Fox: Foreword by Elsa Longhauser

(Partial text, from the catalog) Throughout his thirty-year career, Terry Fox has been a key figure in conceptual and performance art. Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1943, he traveled to Europe to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti, in Rome, shortly after graduating from high school. Fox participated in the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and was deeply affected by “the theater in the streets”; this experience, coupled with his discovery of the work of Antonin Artaud, ignited his interest in myth and magic. In the late sixties and early seventies, he was a primary figure in the overlapping genres of video, performance, and installation art in San Francisco’s Bay Area. In 1980, however, he removed himself from the influences of America and permanently relocated to Europe. Fox’s early works—psychologically charged, yet reductive actions employing everyday materials—drew on personal experience. Taking pain, fear, solitude, and a need to transcend the body as his point of departure, Fox imbued his gestures with the resonance of metaphors, linking his own fragile health with such profound issues as the war in Vietnam and the transience of human existence. These works are best understood in the context of a traumatic, eleven-year period in Fox’s life, when he suffered from Hodgkin’s disease, a condition that was cured, finally, in 1972 after extensive radiation, surgery, and subsequent isolation to avoid infection. His near death and “resurrection” have resulted in a personal aesthetic of solemnity, characterized by precariously balanced elements, transformations, and altered states of consciousness. In the works between 1972 and 1985, Fox concentrated his energies on the regenerative aspects of existence, on spiritual transfiguration after psychological death. Often using his own body as sculpture to represent a human triumph over death, Fox wanted his works to achieve “the heights of his heartbeats,” a wish based on the realization that those beats might cease at any moment. The structure of the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, in France, serves as a metaphor for his own life struggle with cycles of illness and health. In recent works, Fox has juxtaposed grids or panels of found text with found elements, uniting word and object to comment on the use of social, political, and religious euphemism. The Labyrinth and Other Works: 1972-1978 from Constance Lewallen’s essay “Terry Fox” Back to catalog page Galleries Directory | Levy Gallery Artists Registry | Publications & Artists | Email Moore College of Art and Design

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