Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
The Urban Center, New York NY
Friday, July 10, 2009

Straitjackets, cavernous hallways with peeling paint, a title cast in a well-worn sensationalistic mold: the marketing for Chris Payne's Friday presentation at the Architectural League of New York set up a familiar sort of expectation for me. I knew what I would hear. The photographer, fresh from a day trip to one of the more convenient asylum-hulks in the area, would play up the Gothic-horror angle, show lurid closeups of bloodstained old medical equipment, insinuate that the place was haunted, then hawk his book to the audience. I, too, showed up, ready to do my part — scribble “Foucault” in my notebook, quote some old situationist to the effect that “the newest school buildings are indistinguishable from the newest prisons or the newest industrial complexes,” and so on.

Christopher Payne, "Patient Suitcases, Bolivar SH, TN," 2008, photograph, dimensions unknown. Via artist's website.

The reality was a pleasant surprise. Payne is no idle urban explorer; his project involves the careful photographic documentation of state mental hospitals all over the United States. He has a genuine affection for these old spaces, not because of their creepy ambiance, but because they are the remnants of self-sufficient little communities that once enclosed everything from dairy farms to power stations. For Payne, they represent an echo of an America that once was — a place where things were still made, where homes were more than faceless condominiums. (He is an architect by training, so it is unsurprising that the real horror for him is the asylums' gradual destruction at the hands of condo developers.) His photographs are thus suffused with a peculiarly poignant kind of nostalgia; in many cases, the buildings they depict have already been demolished.

The state mental hospitals, he explains, were built between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before psychotropic drugs and scientific psychiatry. (In fact, the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane was the precursor to the APA). In the absence of any reliable neurological treatment, the patients were offered complete isolation, natural surroundings and plenty of manual labor. At its height, the system housed over half a million people, the hospitals' farms and shops contributing to local economies throughout the country. In the postwar period, however, inmate labor was banned and a variety of new therapies made the asylums obsolete. Some still function; others are used as prisons or housing complexes, or simply stand empty.

Christopher Payne, Truck Scale, Athens State Hospital, OH, date unknown, photograph, dimensions unknown. Via artist's website.

In fact, their close counterparts were the Transcendentalist intentional communities that sprung up throughout America in the middle of the century. Like the Transcendentalists, the inmates of mental hospitals left their private possessions at the door (rooms full of still-packed suitcases remain in some of the wards). They lived and died in common, surrounded by nature. In their own way, the asylums were utopias too, and the “labor cure” a product of a specific kind of utopianism — one which shows through in Hegel, Thoreau and Tolstoy, not to mention the concentration camps of a later age. By shaping nature, imposing his stamp on it, the inmate could rejoin the community of men.

Chris Payne's photographs are nostalgic because he is a preservationist and because they record vanishing buildings. Even more fundamentally, however, they are nostalgic because their subjects had already disappeared. In one sense, the deathblow had been dealt by the ban on inmate labor, which enforced an atmosphere of constant idleness. (A few photographs depict stacks and stacks of chairs. “They sat around a lot,” Payne says.) This made them irrelevant to the economic life of their surrounding communities, parasitic rather than self-sufficient. But in another sense, the purpose behind the institutions had already become obscure with the passing of the nineteenth century. It is because all the utopian content was gone that these buildings could rejoin “the newest prisons and the newest industrial complexes,” spaces drained of everything but their disciplinary function. What distinguishes Payne from his horror-fetishizing counterparts is that he sees the motion of history at work in the asylums — not simply history’s absence.

The French Revolution, which we celebrate today, is often taken in tandem with the industrial revolution as marking the birth of the modern world. If this is the case, it stands that modern art was decidedly late to the party. Sixty-six years late, to be exact, if we take Manet’s Olympia as the first document worthy of the descriptor. Here’s T.J. Clark on the subject: “Something decisive happened in the history of art around Manet which set painting and the other arts on a new course. Perhaps the change can be described as a kind of skepticism, or at least unsureness, as to the nature of representation in art.” In this rendering, the modern revolution in art does not immediately seem to resonate with what we understand of the French Revolution, taken here as the modern revolution in politics - in either timing or content.

The argument could be made, certainly, that those shopkeepers, rentiers, artisans and journeyman who sacked the Bastille two-hundred and twenty years ago today were displaying a pointed skepticism towards the nature of representation in politics; but ‘unsureness’ doesn’t really capture the spectacle of the same dancing around Paris with the Governor’s head on a pike. Perhaps the comparison is fruitless, and ‘modern’ is best understood to be a mere chronological indicator, employed by different disciplines to recognize decisive moments in their respective histories, but irreducible to any common essence.

Or maybe the essence of the modern, in terms of its constant refusal of the past, both in art and politics, is best captured by its most famous critic, himself inspired by the events we remember today. In his take the modern is marked by "everlasting uncertainty and agitation... (as) All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Happy Bastille Day everybody.

Shane Hope whose solo show, Your Mom is Open Source opened recently at Ed Winkleman, answered some questions via email about his work -

ArtCat: One thing that immediately jumps out to me about your work is its relationship to multiple regimes or paradigms of representation: linguistic and visual at bottom, conceptual, scientific, and mathematical in effect or by invocation. Can you talk about what takes place in the movement between these fields? To what extent does your practice, considered in sum, rehearse the sort of being-across-substrates detailed in the concept of transhumanism?

Shane Hope: My Mol Mods are plans for playground ball pits of pure operationality, all about ackles as atomic access-privs pictures, looking like line-art after lines of code, solving for sundry imaging inversions and a new fantastical-fodder faux naïve. The modeling files I design or manipulate to build drawings anticipate their own actualization via nanofacture, for the files are also plans for later manifestation of material objects. Precision placement of atoms is poised to become the new pen, so I participate in picturing projected possible puny places for us people. I've conscientiously chosen to work in customized versions of user-sponsored open-source molecular visualization systems as necessitated by way of analogy: we are artificially selecting for the hardware environments upon which we ourselves will run. My hand-drawn lines become vectors become atomic coordinates become novel carbon-based building blocks bootstrapping the next layer of life.

ArtCat: There is a fascinating tension at work between your choice of media and the vocabulary deployed around it. To what extent do you consider your work figurative? Abstract? What is the relationship between the sort of progressive futurism of your keywords and the somewhat traditional method employed in rendering them - insofar as you are working in drawing and not in installation or some other baroque proclivity?

Shane Hope: I draft dot-to-dot descriptions with lines (of code) like runaway run-on sentences that will write the rest. The model is the message after all, and when infoviz meets infomorphs, images become recursively self-improving infovors. We are our own maps exceeding ourselves... I tangle lines and lines of code in esoteric yet key software platforms to better delineate operative scale-subjective distinctions between organic / inorganic and building / growing. Nanofacture will problematize fetishization of assemblage and collage. Making molecularly modeled hence particle-punny geeky-goofy drawings of sorts simply seems to me a more viable self-reflexive way to picture possible far-futures. First of all, the future is all of the above

Tattoo at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts is a multimedia exploration of tattoo art and its ever-changing role in society. The exhibition includes paintings, photography, sculpture and film, as well as a few empty bottles of Jack Daniels littered about the gallery for an something like an authentic, tattoo parlor feel. We caught up with Cullen, the director of the gallery, and asked about her inspiration for the show and her take on tattoo art.-- S.K.

Stephanie Korszen for ArtCat: What was your inspiration for situating the work of tattoo artists within the context of a fine art gallery?

Kathleen Cullen: The inspiration is really the everyday. You need only sit down at a café or bar, or stand at a traffic light, to grant your eyes the opportunity to admire the body art on others' skin. Additionally, one of the artists I represent, Max Snow, served as the catalyst for this exhibition. In 2008, Max documented the stories of Latino gang members in L.A., for whom tattoo art serves an important role in self-identity. Max also wears part of his identity externally in the form of body art.

In the 1930s, Herbert Hoffmann photographed people and documented their fantastic stories before they were sent to prison by the Third Reich. He developed a great respect for these people, whom he saw as hard-working and unpretentious. Many bore the simplest of tattoos on their arms and hands – historically a sign of degeneracy. Over the years, tattoos have broken free of this inherent link to all things degenerate, to the point where they now have the potential to serve as a status symbol on par with designer handbags. Bruce Willis, on the cover of W Magazine, sports tattoos. Supermodels adorn themselves with body art. We see biker motifs, as well as Maori, Japanese, and sailor themes – rich codes to decipher on other’s bodies.

KC: We have everything from a Keith Haring poster, graffiti tattoos, tattoo-inspired furniture
and a film, Mark of Cain, by Alix Lambert. This film was part of a ten-year project during which the Lambert interviewed criminals in Russia. Lambert’s project inspired David Cronenberg to review the Russian criminal tattoo codes for the well-known movie Eastern Promises, starring Vigo Mortensen and Naomi Watts. Lambert reveals the hidden history behind Russian tattoos, as well as their complex symbolism.

Installation view of Tattoo at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts. Via gallery.

AC: How did you conduct your research for this exhibition?

KC: We began by researching books and articles on the tattoo subculture from the 1930s
through the 1950s, and then followed the evolution of the tattoo further into the punk generation of the 1970s and 80s. Tattoos have transcended their stereotypical role as the mark of a lowlife in the first half of the twentieth century – though youthful sailors often flaunted tattoos as a rite of manhood – to arrive at a socially-accepted norm. Represented in our exhibit are biker, Maori, Japanese and sailor motifs.

Also included is Larry Clark's Tulsa tattoo. Like Danny Lyons, Clark blurred the lines between observer and participant. Lyons photographed unwanted, hated bikers. A common underlying theme for the artists represented in the exhibition is the desire to share an emotional closeness with their subjects. The resulting works are not merely documents; they are empathetic portraits.

AC: In presenting tattoo art, all of the works on display also portray the tattooed. Do you feel that the meaning of a tattoo is inherently tied to – and thus dependent upon – the individual’s identity?

KC: The meaning of a tattoo is intrinsically tied to a person's identity, because without the individual, the tattoo is rendered meaningless. If the individual was done away with, the tattoo would become an image devoid of significance.

Earlier this spring I had the pleasure of touring New Orleans with two art and architecture historians from Tulane University. We of course spent a significant amount of time wandering the Lower 9th Ward, gawking at the rescue hieroglyphics spray painted on abandoned houses, and generally participating in what seems to be the booming industry of trauma tourism. But we also found time for art. In particular, we spent part of one afternoon with KKProjects, an exhibition space composed of six previously abandoned houses in the St. Roch neighborhood.

Founded by Kirsha Kaechele, KKProjects offers each of its spaces for three-month site specific installations, working with local, national, and international artists to develop locally-integrated, conservation-focused work. Currently on view at KKProjets is Knead, an urban farm/sustainable living project, and Safe House, a home converted into a giant safe that stores Mel Chin’s ongoing Pay Dirt. Both projects purport to engage local concerns. Pay Dirt invites participants to draw their own “fundred dollar bill” in an effort to amass 300 million of these fake notes to exchange with congress for $300 million of the real thing—the estimated cost to clean the lead out of New Orleans’ soil. Across the street, Knead hosts a backyard garden and what looks like a strange indoor jungle gym, though on explanation turns out to be a human-powered bread maker. Participants swing from poles to grind corn, which piles up on the floor to be collected by the gallery attendants and eventually turned into bread.

For a New Orleans visitor, the initial feeling standing in the middle of this dilapidated street is one of vague authenticity and intrusion. Like homes, these projects have an internal life that really doesn’t depend on viewership in the way one might expect. And given that much of the “relational” art I’m used to seeing manufactures need in order to instrumentalize its audience, the very real need in a place like post-Katrina New Orleans activates these projects, giving them an air of immediacy not always available between 10th and 11th Aves in Chelsea. The feeling quickly fades, however, as the degree of local integration becomes unclear. Racial and socioecomic lines obviously separate local residents from visiting art lovers, and in light of the continued need for nearby home renovation, these retro-fitted art houses seem to be a bit self-indulgent, and, at worst, inefficient mechanisms of social change. This is not a failure on the part of the project however—after all, squatters rarely integrate into the neighborhood. Instead, KKProjects has found a way to elbow socially engaged, conceptual work into a community space, which is arguably where it belongs. Although these projects are developed in part to work within the local context, what is most striking is how they work on the neighborhood. In a city marked by rebuilding (and alternatively, static not-rebuilding), Kirsha Kaechele has made art a permanent, active resident.