Artist, Barbara Hammer: A Horse is Not a Metaphor touches on what it’s like to go through chemotherapy, a medical treatment that takes you to your knees.
Narrator: That’s artist Barbara Hammer. After she was diagnosed with cancer, she made this film about her experiences—receiving treatment in the confined space of the hospital but also riding freely across New Mexico, Wyoming, and upstate New York. For her, this was a way of rejecting the label of cancer “survivor,” embracing instead an identity as a cancer “thriver.”
Barbara Hammer: I have a whole thing against the use of war terminology to describe diseases. I’m not fighting ovarian cancer. It’s not a war. This is living with a disease. Eventually, I will die, but I will be living until I die.
So much of my film has been about mortality. I’ve been fascinated by it from an early age. We get to experience birth once and we can’t remember it, and now we'll get to experience death once and not be able to remember it. So these two things are existing in the ether.
I’m trying to learn what a graceful death might look like. None of us get to explore death until it’s here, and we've all been so afraid of it. In a way, it’s exciting, because it's an adventure. The thrill and openness of something new happening is always an option. I hope I die embracing new options, not denying them.
Archival audio from: Oral history interview with Barbara Hammer, 2018 March 15-17. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.