Nelly Agassi
28 Jun - 16 Aug 2014
NELLY AGASSI
Down where the little fishes grow
28 June - 16 August 2014
INHABITING THE UNFAMILIAR SELF
An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
—Djuna Barnes
Visiting Nelly Agassi’s new studio recently I was astonished to take in what seemed a dramatic change of direction. Those familiar with her former work would recognize, chiefly, her own body at the center of it, projecting outward through various dress forms in space, or through prescribed actions recorded on video. Her work has been visceral, self-possessed, at once intimate and distancing, in the way we might see a powerful animal in a zoo, unfathomable natural forces moving within a tensile frame, bewildered or even upset at its containment by outside perceptions.
But here in the austere space of her new studio, all clean white walls and Midwestern summer light streaming through large windows, were a few small abstract drawings on one wall, and a tidy set of old color postcards and neat embroidered pieces of fabric on another.
Agassi had just moved in. Several relocations had taken place, from Tel Aviv to Chicago with her husband and young children; from cramped apartment studio shared with the beloved chaos of family space to a new, individually-dedicated workspace; and a subtler one involving her relationship to herself as mother and artist. How could she be expected to still be ‘herself,’ in the prior sense? Such dramatic transformations play out beneath immediate detection. An old artist friend once shared a nugget of wisdom with me, early on, when I was about to move into a new studio. “It’ll change your work,” he warned, more or less, in a constructive sense, that the new space will give new dimensions to the space of my ideas: be new, see new. The maxim is recognizable in artists’ work—Braque is an obvious example, Morandi an example of its inverse—an idea that the physical space of the studio is a direct allegory for the mind. Moving is like transferring the brain to a new skull.
Agassi hinted that she didn’t know exactly why her direction had shifted so completely, expressing no interest, almost disdain, at discussing her previous work. I had seen this in other artists, whose newest work naturally tends to captivate them most. Setting aside my questions, I listened as she explained the asylum architecture of Thomas Story Kirkbride, how he meant to shift the regard of the mentally ill to a position less outside the norm but more as an extension of it by degrees.1 His buildings fan out in wing-like formation—more straightforwardly than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wingspread or Santiago Calatrava’s gullish Quadracci Pavilion—delicately stepped back from the entrance and spreading out into the surrounding manicured landscape. The walls are dotted plentifully with windows, to let reminders of the outside world in to the hermetic environment of the asylum, and its captive minds unable to escape themselves. Agassi’s embroideries traced the fanning floor-plans’ basic structures, their rigid perpendicularities softened by her hand-sewn thread.
Alongside these small-scale fabric sketches were a collection of picturesque postcards of various asylums, the nostalgic qualities of the postcards not entirely overcome by the oddness of what they depicted— waterfalls and fauna in semi-natural landscapes surrounding Kirkbride’s buildings and entrance gates—that houses for the mentally ill (or ‘Insane Hospitals’ as they were sometimes called) were worthy of souvenirs.
The array of artwork all seemed so neat, tidy, small, even hesitant, nothing like the smeared lipstick or visceral sandpapered flesh of Agassi’s videos, expert confrontations of interior and exterior perceptions. Nowhere visible was the statuesque, quietly resonating presence of her body at the center of sculptural conglomerations, extending out into rooms and down stairs, flooding space with awareness of the individual as both vulnerable, intimate being and as concentration of forces. She commanded space in her work, projected herself outwards, took over the psychological vibration of a room and wielded it like a stone sculptor’s chisel. This new work, and her, were quiet.
Yet impressions glimmered into clarity as Agassi showed me drawings on vellum, styled as architectural renderings along the lines of Wright’s curvatures, or the podular cylindricals of Absalom, but based on female physiognomy—not literally, as Agassi explained, but as a starting point. The triangular formation of ovaries and womb were there, in pillars and curving walls, but structurally these floor plans were no different from any building with main entrance and compartments. Agassi had clearly recognized a quality in Kirkbride’s designs, not his intentional male/female wing-divisions (for safekeeping of those presumably feral energies loosed by irrationality), but a sense of architecture reflecting the bodily interior, its harmonies and disjunctures, as a container for intakes and absorptions, births and ejections, reconfigurations and maintenances.
Of course, I told myself. Suddenly it all made sense:
NEW STUDIO
NEW PLACE
NEW CITY
NEW KIDS
NEW BODY
NEW LIFE
NEW RELATIONSHIP TO WORK
NEW RELATIONSHIP TO SELF
(from notes I scribbled furiously during the conversation)
With perhaps ‘new body’ being the most important note. Agassi now saw herself as a kind of machine, or architecture, she had become almost unfamiliar to herself as she allowed the births of children and the absorption of family life to take over her own will, the most natural thing a mother can do. Yet the mind must still wrap itself around its new identity, not as mere giver but as given, in the axiomatic sense, or as given over wholly to a process.2 In this new role, she had become unfamiliar to herself. She was seeing her insides as reflective of her outsides, the distinction between these two usually perpendicular fields now gone. Here it all came radically together, the idea of inside and outside: in asylums away from the norms of society towards the depths of the private inner mind; in architecture as its own primary definition; and of the body as extending from mental and physical interior outward into exterior, projected space—exactly like her performative sculpture and video work.3 This was a new approach to an old problem for her, how to transform an inner state into an exterior condition. Her exhibition title, “Down where the little fishes grow,” is taken directly from one of those asylum postcards, which shows a dog on the bank of a flowing creek. For Agassi, this acts as a reference to her process of evolving an emotion, that most interior and inexplicable human condition, towards an idea, with intellectual heft and communicative force. Something like bringing a ew person into the world, then seeing oneself become a response to it.
Fully aware that as a male I am wading into complicated and charged territory, of the female as mechanism or baby-machine—I mean in no way to minimize the complications of various eras’ approaches to female roles—I am drawn back precisely to Agassi’s main subject, of who and what is outside a subject or space and who or what is inside, and the relative valances of familiarity and unfamiliarity at play in any situation. In her performative work, the body is present, but to heighten the sense that we cannot ever know what is going on within that preciously individuated space. Sculpturally, psychologically and politically considered, a body in space hums with uncertainty, if only because those outside of it cannot grasp how it differs from us. In one sense, architecture is the confluence of sculpture and psychology. So is a body.
Agassi is aware that the space she occupies has become unfamiliar, and accepts it as a challenge. The difference is a new recognition, a new intrigue, a new relationship to self. Though a bit dark for the context, the coincidence of having recently read Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood amplifies the thought:
Your body is coming to it, you are forty and the body has a politic too, and a life of its own that you like to think is yours. I heard a spirit new once, but I knew it was a mystery eternally moving outward and on, and not my own.4
For me, this sentiment echoes the sense I’ve been experiencing having reached middle age, the maturity that recognizes how the momentum of past acts declares the range of future possibilities, how the past self walks away into a zone of unknowability and the body begins to express its own intentions. Obviously mine is different from Agassi’s situation, but novelistic truths are meant to bring us closer to a universality of experience. Whether it is possible to convey an interior experience is perhaps one of her main subjects, now more than ever.
—Nicholas Frank
Milwaukee 2014
FOOTNOTES
1. Admittedly no expert on Kirkbride or asylum architecture, this is a paraphrase of what I was able to take in during the brief absorption period of a single studio visit. Such thinking was part of the time, with Charles Darwin expressing it as a “perfect gradation between sound people and insane” in his M Notebook of 1838, and similar ideas playing out in the anti-psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and others in the 1960s. Best to leave the initial impressions intact here, to preserve the process of learning how an artist’s interests motivate her.
2. Mary Kelley’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79) is particularly illuminating in this regard, as an example of one artist’s exploration of the ‘loss’ associated with giving birth. Kelley’s work focused on language development in the infant as a means of reconnecting these two distinct bodies, even the pre-linguistic communication of the infant through bodily processes. While these are not exactly akin to the “building-as-care”[a] methodology of Kirkbride, or Agassi’s interest in it, control over the basic functions of life and mind, and loss of control, are at the heart of the subject matter.
a. Sourced from Wikipedia entry “Kirkbride Plan,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkbride_Plan.
3. Even the asylum postcards express a figural ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ connecting one person to another through space and time in their original function, and now connecting one era and purpose to another entirely outside their initial intent.
4. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, ©1937. New Directions Paperbook No. 98, 1961 (New York), p. 152
By Abigail Winograd
Nelly Agassi: Down Where the Little Fishes Grow
Asylums are the stuff of nightmares. As an idea they suffer greatly from the stigma long attached to mental illness. The mental hospital as an institution immediately conjures the specter of confinement, misery, and brutality; images of authoritarian Nurse Ratcheds subjecting patients to invasive and unwanted treatments designed to subdue unruly patients committed against their will, not for disease but for testing the boundaries of social propriety. The writings of Michel Foucault, the eminent French structuralist who famously decried the asylum and the very idea of insanity as mechanisms of oppression and control of difference in Madness and Civilization (1961), typify the misgivings and sinister motivations generally ascribed to such spaces. However, this has not always been the case. At the turn of the nineteenth century, lunatic asylums, as they were commonly known, were considered foundational civic institutions. Across the United States, in nearly every state, government monies supported the construction of enormous asylums considered to be crucial pillars of enlightened society.
Thomas Story Kirkbride (American, B. 1809-1883) was an ardent advocate of the American asylum boom. He was among a group of reformers who sought to bring the lunatic asylum in line with the values of Enlightenment by applying scientific practices to the treatment of mental illness. After years of serving as the superintendent and chief physician of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia and traveling extensively to visit its European counterparts, Kirkbride published On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane (1854). In it, he presented what would come to be known as the Kirkbride Plan – a blueprint for the ideal asylum. The Kirkbride asylum was gargantuan, located in the country, highly segregated by sex, illness, and social class. Kirkbride’s ideal institution combined physical and psychological treatments administered in carefully organized, meticulously designed spaces. In addition to traditional programs, patients in such asylums were able to attend lectures, physical education courses, and other assorted corporeal and intellectual stimuli. Bearing remarkable resemblances to European hotels, they were what the eminent sociologist Erving Goffman deemed total institutions; places apart, in which, individuals were removed from the rhythms and concerns of normal life, placed under rigorous systems of control that governed every aspect of their existence. A concept Goffman elaborated in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) the result of a decade of research at a Kirkbride asylum, Saint Elizabeth’s the Government Hospital for the Insane, in Washington D.C.
Kirkbride’s use of architecture as a therapeutic medium is the departing point for Nelly Agassi’s new series of drawings. For Kirkbride, the architecture of the asylum was an integral component of the “moral treatment” available to those who sought or were forced to undergo its therapies. The institutions built following his blueprint were lavishly appointed, beautifully landscaped - some of them by the likes of Frederick Law Olmstead (American, B. 1822 – 1903) and Calvert Vaux (American, B. London 1824 -1895) who would eventually translate their experience creating gardens for mental hospitals into the designs for some of America’s most spectacular public parks - architectural gems, and marvels of modern engineering. In their grandeur, they became sources of civic pride, featured on postcards, and touted as tourist attractions. Using Kirkbride’s original layout as inspiration, Agassi produces her own architectural plans employing the tools (rulers and design templates) and concerns (space and control) of architectural drawings. As an assemblage the images become a sort of architectural Rorschach test alternately resembling masks, faces, and even the female reproductive system. Starkly and precisely rendered, the elusive and allusive aspects of the drawings echo the slippery reality of the institutions to which they pay homage. The highly regimented and tightly controlled working method pays homage to the rigor of Kirkbride’s architectural and therapeutic concerns while interrogating the juxtaposition of expansive vistas and mandated confinement, luxury and abjection as they existed in the mental and emotional lives of patients in these turn of the century hospitals.
With these drawings, Agassi engages the asylum as place. Capitulation, for Goffman, was the defining feature of the “total institution.” In an asylum, the submission of autonomy, self-control, and identity – a withdrawal with the promise of an eventual return to health - indicated an acknowledgment of illness. This last item may seem obvious; however, the individuals in asylums for the mentally ill may not, necessarily, have been disturbed. Commitment to a hospital for the insane rarely occurred with the consent of the patient and, historically, individuals sent to such establishments were not necessarily ill but often considered degenerate or deviant in some way. Despite the very conscious and deliberate appeals to the humanity of its residents, the Kirkbride asylum remained a site of detention in which the truly “disturbed” patients were kept in basement cells under conditions similar to those of zoo animals. It is these contrasts, the murkiness of the total institution, and its status as a liminal space, which Agassi explores. Indeed, the Kirkbride asylum was a space that in its claustrophobic openness defined time and space for its patients. It is this condition that Agassi seeks to reflect; namely, the ambiguity of a life governed by a regime of irreconcilable oppositions. She achieves this state by elaborating irrational and impossible spaces in drawings that are meditations on health, confinement, and the architecture of the institution in its historical and aesthetic dimensions.
Down where the little fishes grow
28 June - 16 August 2014
INHABITING THE UNFAMILIAR SELF
An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
—Djuna Barnes
Visiting Nelly Agassi’s new studio recently I was astonished to take in what seemed a dramatic change of direction. Those familiar with her former work would recognize, chiefly, her own body at the center of it, projecting outward through various dress forms in space, or through prescribed actions recorded on video. Her work has been visceral, self-possessed, at once intimate and distancing, in the way we might see a powerful animal in a zoo, unfathomable natural forces moving within a tensile frame, bewildered or even upset at its containment by outside perceptions.
But here in the austere space of her new studio, all clean white walls and Midwestern summer light streaming through large windows, were a few small abstract drawings on one wall, and a tidy set of old color postcards and neat embroidered pieces of fabric on another.
Agassi had just moved in. Several relocations had taken place, from Tel Aviv to Chicago with her husband and young children; from cramped apartment studio shared with the beloved chaos of family space to a new, individually-dedicated workspace; and a subtler one involving her relationship to herself as mother and artist. How could she be expected to still be ‘herself,’ in the prior sense? Such dramatic transformations play out beneath immediate detection. An old artist friend once shared a nugget of wisdom with me, early on, when I was about to move into a new studio. “It’ll change your work,” he warned, more or less, in a constructive sense, that the new space will give new dimensions to the space of my ideas: be new, see new. The maxim is recognizable in artists’ work—Braque is an obvious example, Morandi an example of its inverse—an idea that the physical space of the studio is a direct allegory for the mind. Moving is like transferring the brain to a new skull.
Agassi hinted that she didn’t know exactly why her direction had shifted so completely, expressing no interest, almost disdain, at discussing her previous work. I had seen this in other artists, whose newest work naturally tends to captivate them most. Setting aside my questions, I listened as she explained the asylum architecture of Thomas Story Kirkbride, how he meant to shift the regard of the mentally ill to a position less outside the norm but more as an extension of it by degrees.1 His buildings fan out in wing-like formation—more straightforwardly than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wingspread or Santiago Calatrava’s gullish Quadracci Pavilion—delicately stepped back from the entrance and spreading out into the surrounding manicured landscape. The walls are dotted plentifully with windows, to let reminders of the outside world in to the hermetic environment of the asylum, and its captive minds unable to escape themselves. Agassi’s embroideries traced the fanning floor-plans’ basic structures, their rigid perpendicularities softened by her hand-sewn thread.
Alongside these small-scale fabric sketches were a collection of picturesque postcards of various asylums, the nostalgic qualities of the postcards not entirely overcome by the oddness of what they depicted— waterfalls and fauna in semi-natural landscapes surrounding Kirkbride’s buildings and entrance gates—that houses for the mentally ill (or ‘Insane Hospitals’ as they were sometimes called) were worthy of souvenirs.
The array of artwork all seemed so neat, tidy, small, even hesitant, nothing like the smeared lipstick or visceral sandpapered flesh of Agassi’s videos, expert confrontations of interior and exterior perceptions. Nowhere visible was the statuesque, quietly resonating presence of her body at the center of sculptural conglomerations, extending out into rooms and down stairs, flooding space with awareness of the individual as both vulnerable, intimate being and as concentration of forces. She commanded space in her work, projected herself outwards, took over the psychological vibration of a room and wielded it like a stone sculptor’s chisel. This new work, and her, were quiet.
Yet impressions glimmered into clarity as Agassi showed me drawings on vellum, styled as architectural renderings along the lines of Wright’s curvatures, or the podular cylindricals of Absalom, but based on female physiognomy—not literally, as Agassi explained, but as a starting point. The triangular formation of ovaries and womb were there, in pillars and curving walls, but structurally these floor plans were no different from any building with main entrance and compartments. Agassi had clearly recognized a quality in Kirkbride’s designs, not his intentional male/female wing-divisions (for safekeeping of those presumably feral energies loosed by irrationality), but a sense of architecture reflecting the bodily interior, its harmonies and disjunctures, as a container for intakes and absorptions, births and ejections, reconfigurations and maintenances.
Of course, I told myself. Suddenly it all made sense:
NEW STUDIO
NEW PLACE
NEW CITY
NEW KIDS
NEW BODY
NEW LIFE
NEW RELATIONSHIP TO WORK
NEW RELATIONSHIP TO SELF
(from notes I scribbled furiously during the conversation)
With perhaps ‘new body’ being the most important note. Agassi now saw herself as a kind of machine, or architecture, she had become almost unfamiliar to herself as she allowed the births of children and the absorption of family life to take over her own will, the most natural thing a mother can do. Yet the mind must still wrap itself around its new identity, not as mere giver but as given, in the axiomatic sense, or as given over wholly to a process.2 In this new role, she had become unfamiliar to herself. She was seeing her insides as reflective of her outsides, the distinction between these two usually perpendicular fields now gone. Here it all came radically together, the idea of inside and outside: in asylums away from the norms of society towards the depths of the private inner mind; in architecture as its own primary definition; and of the body as extending from mental and physical interior outward into exterior, projected space—exactly like her performative sculpture and video work.3 This was a new approach to an old problem for her, how to transform an inner state into an exterior condition. Her exhibition title, “Down where the little fishes grow,” is taken directly from one of those asylum postcards, which shows a dog on the bank of a flowing creek. For Agassi, this acts as a reference to her process of evolving an emotion, that most interior and inexplicable human condition, towards an idea, with intellectual heft and communicative force. Something like bringing a ew person into the world, then seeing oneself become a response to it.
Fully aware that as a male I am wading into complicated and charged territory, of the female as mechanism or baby-machine—I mean in no way to minimize the complications of various eras’ approaches to female roles—I am drawn back precisely to Agassi’s main subject, of who and what is outside a subject or space and who or what is inside, and the relative valances of familiarity and unfamiliarity at play in any situation. In her performative work, the body is present, but to heighten the sense that we cannot ever know what is going on within that preciously individuated space. Sculpturally, psychologically and politically considered, a body in space hums with uncertainty, if only because those outside of it cannot grasp how it differs from us. In one sense, architecture is the confluence of sculpture and psychology. So is a body.
Agassi is aware that the space she occupies has become unfamiliar, and accepts it as a challenge. The difference is a new recognition, a new intrigue, a new relationship to self. Though a bit dark for the context, the coincidence of having recently read Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood amplifies the thought:
Your body is coming to it, you are forty and the body has a politic too, and a life of its own that you like to think is yours. I heard a spirit new once, but I knew it was a mystery eternally moving outward and on, and not my own.4
For me, this sentiment echoes the sense I’ve been experiencing having reached middle age, the maturity that recognizes how the momentum of past acts declares the range of future possibilities, how the past self walks away into a zone of unknowability and the body begins to express its own intentions. Obviously mine is different from Agassi’s situation, but novelistic truths are meant to bring us closer to a universality of experience. Whether it is possible to convey an interior experience is perhaps one of her main subjects, now more than ever.
—Nicholas Frank
Milwaukee 2014
FOOTNOTES
1. Admittedly no expert on Kirkbride or asylum architecture, this is a paraphrase of what I was able to take in during the brief absorption period of a single studio visit. Such thinking was part of the time, with Charles Darwin expressing it as a “perfect gradation between sound people and insane” in his M Notebook of 1838, and similar ideas playing out in the anti-psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and others in the 1960s. Best to leave the initial impressions intact here, to preserve the process of learning how an artist’s interests motivate her.
2. Mary Kelley’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79) is particularly illuminating in this regard, as an example of one artist’s exploration of the ‘loss’ associated with giving birth. Kelley’s work focused on language development in the infant as a means of reconnecting these two distinct bodies, even the pre-linguistic communication of the infant through bodily processes. While these are not exactly akin to the “building-as-care”[a] methodology of Kirkbride, or Agassi’s interest in it, control over the basic functions of life and mind, and loss of control, are at the heart of the subject matter.
a. Sourced from Wikipedia entry “Kirkbride Plan,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkbride_Plan.
3. Even the asylum postcards express a figural ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ connecting one person to another through space and time in their original function, and now connecting one era and purpose to another entirely outside their initial intent.
4. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, ©1937. New Directions Paperbook No. 98, 1961 (New York), p. 152
By Abigail Winograd
Nelly Agassi: Down Where the Little Fishes Grow
Asylums are the stuff of nightmares. As an idea they suffer greatly from the stigma long attached to mental illness. The mental hospital as an institution immediately conjures the specter of confinement, misery, and brutality; images of authoritarian Nurse Ratcheds subjecting patients to invasive and unwanted treatments designed to subdue unruly patients committed against their will, not for disease but for testing the boundaries of social propriety. The writings of Michel Foucault, the eminent French structuralist who famously decried the asylum and the very idea of insanity as mechanisms of oppression and control of difference in Madness and Civilization (1961), typify the misgivings and sinister motivations generally ascribed to such spaces. However, this has not always been the case. At the turn of the nineteenth century, lunatic asylums, as they were commonly known, were considered foundational civic institutions. Across the United States, in nearly every state, government monies supported the construction of enormous asylums considered to be crucial pillars of enlightened society.
Thomas Story Kirkbride (American, B. 1809-1883) was an ardent advocate of the American asylum boom. He was among a group of reformers who sought to bring the lunatic asylum in line with the values of Enlightenment by applying scientific practices to the treatment of mental illness. After years of serving as the superintendent and chief physician of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia and traveling extensively to visit its European counterparts, Kirkbride published On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane (1854). In it, he presented what would come to be known as the Kirkbride Plan – a blueprint for the ideal asylum. The Kirkbride asylum was gargantuan, located in the country, highly segregated by sex, illness, and social class. Kirkbride’s ideal institution combined physical and psychological treatments administered in carefully organized, meticulously designed spaces. In addition to traditional programs, patients in such asylums were able to attend lectures, physical education courses, and other assorted corporeal and intellectual stimuli. Bearing remarkable resemblances to European hotels, they were what the eminent sociologist Erving Goffman deemed total institutions; places apart, in which, individuals were removed from the rhythms and concerns of normal life, placed under rigorous systems of control that governed every aspect of their existence. A concept Goffman elaborated in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) the result of a decade of research at a Kirkbride asylum, Saint Elizabeth’s the Government Hospital for the Insane, in Washington D.C.
Kirkbride’s use of architecture as a therapeutic medium is the departing point for Nelly Agassi’s new series of drawings. For Kirkbride, the architecture of the asylum was an integral component of the “moral treatment” available to those who sought or were forced to undergo its therapies. The institutions built following his blueprint were lavishly appointed, beautifully landscaped - some of them by the likes of Frederick Law Olmstead (American, B. 1822 – 1903) and Calvert Vaux (American, B. London 1824 -1895) who would eventually translate their experience creating gardens for mental hospitals into the designs for some of America’s most spectacular public parks - architectural gems, and marvels of modern engineering. In their grandeur, they became sources of civic pride, featured on postcards, and touted as tourist attractions. Using Kirkbride’s original layout as inspiration, Agassi produces her own architectural plans employing the tools (rulers and design templates) and concerns (space and control) of architectural drawings. As an assemblage the images become a sort of architectural Rorschach test alternately resembling masks, faces, and even the female reproductive system. Starkly and precisely rendered, the elusive and allusive aspects of the drawings echo the slippery reality of the institutions to which they pay homage. The highly regimented and tightly controlled working method pays homage to the rigor of Kirkbride’s architectural and therapeutic concerns while interrogating the juxtaposition of expansive vistas and mandated confinement, luxury and abjection as they existed in the mental and emotional lives of patients in these turn of the century hospitals.
With these drawings, Agassi engages the asylum as place. Capitulation, for Goffman, was the defining feature of the “total institution.” In an asylum, the submission of autonomy, self-control, and identity – a withdrawal with the promise of an eventual return to health - indicated an acknowledgment of illness. This last item may seem obvious; however, the individuals in asylums for the mentally ill may not, necessarily, have been disturbed. Commitment to a hospital for the insane rarely occurred with the consent of the patient and, historically, individuals sent to such establishments were not necessarily ill but often considered degenerate or deviant in some way. Despite the very conscious and deliberate appeals to the humanity of its residents, the Kirkbride asylum remained a site of detention in which the truly “disturbed” patients were kept in basement cells under conditions similar to those of zoo animals. It is these contrasts, the murkiness of the total institution, and its status as a liminal space, which Agassi explores. Indeed, the Kirkbride asylum was a space that in its claustrophobic openness defined time and space for its patients. It is this condition that Agassi seeks to reflect; namely, the ambiguity of a life governed by a regime of irreconcilable oppositions. She achieves this state by elaborating irrational and impossible spaces in drawings that are meditations on health, confinement, and the architecture of the institution in its historical and aesthetic dimensions.