This is History…that is not over

Freeing the Insane (Installation View 1); mixed media installation: oil on canvas with black & white photographs in wood frames attached; xerox-transfer text on fabric; dimensions variable (approx. 144” x 144” x 120”), 1991

Freeing the Insane (Installation View 2); mixed media installation: oil on canvas with black & white photographs in wood frames attached; xerox-transfer text on fabric; dimensions variable (approx. 144” x 144” x 120”), 1991

In Freeing the Insane time/history is layered in space. Moving from back to front, the first layer is a 9’ x 12’ painting after Tony Robert-Fleury’s nineteenth century work, Pinel Freeing the Insane. On the surface of the painting are mounted small black and white photographs. These are a combination of re-photographed, manipulated versions of pictures of nineteenth century hysterics and contemporary fashion images. At staggered distances, in front of the painting and photographs hang two large scrolls. One scroll reproduces an excerpt from Freud’s famous Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. The other presents an encapsulated commentary on the history of hysteria.

Freeing the Insane (Detail); mixed media installation: oil on canvas with black & white photographs in wood frames attached; xerox-transfer text on fabric; dimensions variable (approx. 144” x 144” x 120”), 1991

Picture Yourself; mixed media installation: 16” x 20” black & white photographs in gilded frames, velvet drape on wooden rod; wall paint; dimensions variable (approx. 144” x 144” x 108”), 1991

This installation uses simple means to suggest a Victorian parlor or portrait gallery. A velvet drape, pulled back in a swag style, hangs at the entrance to the room in which nine photographs in Victorian, cameo-style gold portrait frames are displayed. The images of the women contained within the frames, however, seem more like the proverbial “madwomen in the attic,” than the likenesses one would expect to find here. Two of the photographs are copied from fashion advertisements, and four from nineteenth century “medical” photographs of hysterics. The remaining three images are photographs of a live model. In some cases it is not clear which photographs are from which sources. By mixing sources of images I draw parallels between them and raise questions about who is posing and who is not.

Picture Yourself (detail), 16” x 20” photograph in gilded frame in mixed media installation

Beauty Secrets, oil on canvas in 2 panels, 50” x 102”, 1991

Posing, oil on canvas in 2 panels, 73 ¼” x 77”, 1990

The Reproduction of Hysteria: Crucifiement, 1991, oil on canvas, 50” x 72”

8 drawings (plates II, IV, VI, etc.), compressed charcoal on paper and 8 text panels (plates I, III, V, etc.), laser transfer text on paper 30” x 22 ¼” drawings and text panels

This is History…that is not over

This is History…that is not over offers a sardonic view of hysteria as a defining metaphor for femininity. The work draws parallels between the world of contemporary advertising and the nineteenth century institutions that produced and reproduced hysteria as a spectacle. It is built around a series of late-nineteenth century photographs of women institutionalized for hysteria at the Paris hospital la Salpêtrière under the care of Dr. Jean Martin Charcot. I appropriated these images, layering and juxtaposing them with fragments of historical and contemporary materials.

More about Dr. Charcot:

Dr. Charcot, who began his work on hysteria in 1870, carried out the most extensive use of photography in all nineteenth century psychiatry. Charcot tried to solve the riddle of hysteria by observing its visible manifestations. In pursuit of his study with its exhaustive photographic documentation, he employed hypnosis, electric shock, and manual stimulation of the muscles. He conducted weekly lectures for the medical community at which the main attraction was the demonstration of hysterical seizures by young female patients. Charcot’s hospital, La Salpêtrière, became “an environment in which female hysteria was perpetually presented, represented, and reproduced.” (Elaine Showalter) Charcot’s photographs, which were intended as objective medical documents, can now easily be seen as highly subjective works of art that had a tremendous influence on the manifestation of hysteria and its interpretation.