It is craaaazy out here on weekends! It feels like half the city is trying to get away from itself by coming here. I wonder if the island is big enough for all these people?
But my studio is cool and private enough -- it's a nice feeling to come out in the middle of this mass and then be able to sneak away and work when everyone else is escaping together. It's the inversion of the standard practice that makes it a real escape, I guess. And since my studio is just on the edge of the gallery space, I'm sort of vaguely observed by the visitors, which keeps me working. It's good.
So, it's been a while since I've written but it hasn't been a while since I've been coming here -- I've been coming out pretty regularly now that I am feeling better and my schedule is a tiny bit less hectic. I've just been soo busy producing stuff -- brick walls, sound files, etc. K, M and I moved 500 bricks out here last week for me to use in my installation. It was so much fun. But it made us realize how much labor goes into the littlest things. 500 bricks probably won't even make the room. So imagine how much work it takes to make a big room, a building, the pyramids. And it's detailed work -- each one has to be pretty carefully placed or the wall will topple higher up.
I have so much to write about, but I actually want to get to work. N is coming with a marine radio and a projector soon and we're going to to a studio visit. I need to talk with someone other than myself about my ideas.
But one thing that I've been thinking about, since the seizure -- or remembering -- is how we can be trapped in our own bodies. I was thinking about this when I visited Roosevelt Island and then was thinking about it even more when I was so limited by my injuries and illness. It was very restful when I could accept my limitations -- when I was really, really not well and couldn't do much. But then the process of recovering physical and cognitive capability/mobility was most difficult because I felt my limits so strongly. It was like hitting a brick wall -- I'm trying to work, I'm trying to go places, I'm trying to communicate and then BAM! I'm tired, or I just absolutely can't remember how to spell, or I'm just not seeing straight and there's absolutely no way to will myself around it.
So, back in the day, epileptics were confined with the 'insane' -- I'm not clear on whether there was an understood distinction between the physical condition of epilepsy and emotional/psychiatric illness, or if epilepsy was actually considered a manifestation of madness. It seems like there was a distinction, at least in France just before the revolution. I think in the US there was not. In any case, Foucault writes about how being labeled and confined as mad makes you mad:
"Early in the nineteenth century, there was indignation that the mad were not treated any better than State prisoners; throughout the eighteenth century, emphasis was placed on the fact that the prisoners deserved a better fate than one that lumped them with the insane. ... The struggle against the established powers, against the family, against the Church, continues at the very heart of confinement, in the saturnalia of reason. And madness so well represents these punishing powers that it effectively plays the part of an additional punishment, a further torment which maintains order in the uniform chastisement of the houses of correction. La Rochefoucauld-Laincourt bears witness to this in his report to the Committee on Mendicity: 'One of the punishments inflicted upon epileptics and upon other patients of the wards, even upon the deserving poor, is to place them among the mad.' The scandal lies only in the fact that the madmen are the brutal truth of confinement, the passive instrument of all that is worst about it. Is this not symbolized by the fact - also a commonplace of all the literature of confinement in the eighteenth century - that a sojourn in a house of confinement necessarily leads to madness?"
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