One of the latest exhibitions at Toronto’s Power Plant consists of the artwork Sanatorium by Mexico City–based artist Pedro Reyes, a project that comes to Canada with significant pedigree after stops at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, New York’s Guggenheim Museum and Kassel’s Documenta 13. The Power Plant’s website describes Sanatorium as “a transient clinic that provides short, unexpected therapy sessions in an effort to cure ills associated with urban living.” Canadian Art’s editorial resident Natasha Chaykowski and associate editor David Balzer recently decided to participate in the project. Then, in the spirit of Reyes’s therapeutic construct, they talked through their experiences—including their many frustrations and disappointments.
David Balzer: Generally, our consensus is we found the show troublesome and troubling.
Natasha Chaykowski: Yes.
DB: Did you have any expectations going in?
NC: I didn’t because I actually didn’t know what it was. You said, “It’s participatory art; I don’t want to do it.” I hadn’t really started thinking about it, so I had no expectations going in.
DB: But you did have a concern that you had to book a time and that there might be some fussiness around it.
NC: Yes.
DB: I had similar concerns. Yes, I don’t like what is often called “participatory art.” I think art is by nature participatory, so when art is consciously participatory it dispels why art is so engaging to begin with.
We could talk first about the procedure that was involved to take us into the show.
NC: I think it’s interesting that in a very wholesale way, even when you arrive, the artwork mimics the vernacular of a clinic. It’s funny, because that morning we were talking about having to fill out forms—because of your dental work—and discussing the pomp and process around going in for procedures. I thought it was really striking how completely Sanatorium embraces this: forms, the front desk, white lab coats.
We weren’t sure if we should read the statement first or go talk to the people. Also, the language they were using—“Which treatment would you like?”—and the medical terminology and the officiousness surrounding it was notable. We sat down, right?
DB: We sat down and we had to choose our own experience, and the experiences were timed. I felt a real sense of dread. Whenever someone presents you with a clipboard and a piece of paper and asks you to sign or agree to an experience, your whole being changes. The most august, patrician museums would never make you sign a waiver promising away certain aspects of yourself. This is something that immediately struck me as problematic—in the context of open, participatory art practice having something that immediately prompts you to feel closed off, hampered, anxious.
NC: Yes, absolutely. There are also issues of legality around that. When you sign a form, you often relinquish your rights. If something goes wrong, if something happens, those responsible aren’t liable. We signed, right?
DB: You have to sign in order to participate, for those reasons. So, about the installation being called Sanatorium: to me, that’s pejorative. It suggests a place where a woman in a 1950s melodrama would be taken and locked away.
NC: It reminds me of 19th-century European sanatoriums, like in Anna Karenina—these places where the wealthy and aristocratic go for fresh air and to calm their nerves. It also connotes, for me, the inception of modern psychiatry and the birth of medical confinement.
DB: The coddling of the neurotic bourgeoisie. And the white lab coats: in the art world we now associate them with the Abramovic Institute. Why has this become a thing? Why would you present participatory art so clinically?
NC: Reyes wants to use the institutional vernacular: the people who are serving as “analysts” or “therapists” are essentially docents, performing a script. They’re not professionals. They’re found through an open call issued by the gallery. It goes hand-in-hand with the terminology they use, and the procedural aspects like the forms and the signing and the sitting down and the being escorted to the various therapies. The lab coat acts as a costume; it also acts as a way to legitimize or create a cohesive environment that is different than what a usual gallery environment would be.
DB: The theatrical aspect is key and I think we should keep coming back to it.
NC: When you think about it, there’s the stage set, costume, script.
DB: Reyes’s website calls it a “theater of proof,” whatever that means. And the docents are volunteers, another parallel to the Abramovic Institute with its wanton use of free labour. The docents here seem to be working pretty hard to facilitate this project.
NC: It’s a big time commitment plus an intense three-day training period; and it’s for the duration of nearly an entire summer.
DB: Who knows how many volunteers are involved, though?
NC: I’d be interested to know. I read on the Power Plant’s website that the impetus behind having these non-professional volunteers was to challenge the hierarchies of medical institutions or of the institutions of psychology, or of therapy. I think there’s an interesting precedent for that, this concept of the ignorant schoolmaster, this idea of a teacher not being an expert. There’s something compelling about this, but it goes awry in Reyes’s project.
DB: It automatically goes awry when you apply that philosophy to regimented shift work. Real aspects of the capitalist economy and the work process are involved. You can’t pick and choose which elements you want to liberate in terms of deconstructing the idea of labour within an art project, because there are definable, traditional aspects of labour that are still present. But at least volunteers get free TTC tokens to and from the venue!
So, we each chose short therapies. What did you choose?
NC: I chose City Leaks. And we both chose Philosophical Casino. When we were signing up at the check-in table, I remember thinking that I didn’t want to do group therapy. I wasn’t interested in sitting with strangers and talking about things that may or may not be serious or pertinent or personal with a lab-coated volunteer. That’s not something that’s appealing to me. That’s why I chose those two, although I guess the Casino one was a bit like group therapy.
DB: The group was the two of us. We should note that there are a lot of things that you have to fill out, a lot of pieces of paper onto which you have to record various mental states, and you have to give those pieces of paper away. On the first piece of paper, you’re meant to record a mental state—how you’re feeling coming in on a scale of one to ten.
NC: It was meant to be filled out before and after the treatment.
DB: In that sense, you’re immediately aware of being a subject around which data is collected. The data might not be used for any majorly nefarious purpose, but you quickly become aware that this data is contributing to an ongoing art project—that your work in this context is building upon something, upon the identity of this project.
NC: After we filled out the forms, and were given a time slot in a gridded schedule, we were escorted by a volunteer to our respective treatment areas. For City Leaks, the process was explained to me: you take a bottle, you write down a secret on a piece of paper, and you roll it up, tie it to a string and leave it in the bottle; the bottle goes on the floor, and then you select another person’s secret, you read it…
DB: So you’re reading a stranger’s secret but you don’t know whose it is; it’s completely anonymous.
NC: Yes. It’s meant to provide some sort of relationship or connection among people in this vulnerability that’s being exposed with you relinquishing one of your secrets and then having the opportunity to see someone else’s. There’s of course a precedent for this kind of project: PostSecret, Too Hard To Keep, Learning to Love You More, etc. But they’re different in that they don’t proclaim to “cure ills” as Reyes’s project does. These other projects provide a sort of venue for people to willingly contribute in an open-ended way that they may or may not find helpful in the end. They’re about human connection—not this contrived performance of therapy that makes bold claims about remedying.
I found out after all this, from a volunteer, that all the secrets are kept and that Reyes is planning to publish them in a book. He takes these secrets.
DB: Were you told this before the City Leaks experience?
NC: No, only after.
DB: This reminds me of a friend who went to a therapist for years, and then found out that he was one of the primary subjects in this therapist’s book on a particular disorder.
NC: The ethics are really suspect. They’re continuous with this idea of consent and signing it away, signing away agency through institutionalized forms.
DB: It’s an unwitting performance.
NC: In the ethics of experimentation—in psychology and medicine, for example—sometimes it’s necessary for experiments to deceive people. In experimental construction, blind participants are occasionally needed to ascertain certain things. But there’s an entire process and debriefing, and a regimented and controlled ethics around the ways in which the debriefing has to happen afterward. It’s a very structured, formal process that ensures that those running the experiments aren’t compromising the well-being of those participating in them. So to have these kinds of things happening willy-nilly in an art gallery, where those organizing the exhibition eschew all responsibility, is disconcerting.
DB: What was your takeaway from City Leaks?
NC: The secret I picked to read was absurd and juvenile, in a way. Something about starting a relationship with their best friend’s little brother. I didn’t take anything away from it, and I don’t think contributing my secret aided my well-being in any way: writing something down on a piece of paper and putting it in a bottle with the knowledge that someone would read it didn’t do anything for me, didn’t feel like a resolution to something, didn’t seem a cathartic gesture.
DB: I’ll describe the therapy I did while you did City Leaks, Vaccine Against Violence. Basically it was intended to be cathartic as well, but related to aggression. It was specifically tagged to urban life and the kinds of frustration that emerge from that. I was supposed to think of something specific, a person or situation. My therapy was very directed by the docent, who took me into a room, sat down with me, and performed the role of a therapist but, for privacy reasons, didn’t ask me any direct questions about the thing I wanted to express my rage about. So she was basically just giving instructions.
First she gave me a balloon, and I had to blow it up—but to a particular size, because the balloon had to fit in this large dummy that I was about to pound the shit out of in an attempt to get out aggression. Then she gave me a marker and asked me to draw the thing or person that was frustrating me on the balloon. On that day, that thing was motorists’ ignorant attitudes toward cyclists, so I drew a reckless driver. Already, I felt super-aware of having to draw something that heightened this effect. I was thinking about how good or bad the drawing was. And I found myself thinking, “This has to be a clever, cute little drawing, and I have to show the docent how great a drawer I am.” This comes back to my hatred of participatory art. I never feel natural or unguarded with it.
So. I drew a reckless motorist and the docent actually didn’t want to see it; it was just for me, which disappointed me a bit because I worked hard at that drawing. And then I went around the corner and stuck the balloon in the head-sized opening of this life-sized figure, made of coarse cloth. I was told that I could have as much time with this figure as I wanted to.
NC: What if you gave it a hug?
DB: I guess I could have, but the end result had to be that the balloon popped. She said I could take as long as I wanted to within reason. Part of me has always wanted to try something like this because it’s a pretty cliché therapeutic activity. I’ve never been in a fistfight in my life; I’ve barely been in any physical altercation at all. And so I was punching the figure and then I kind of nicked my knuckle, and it hurt, and I stopped after about a minute because it wasn’t doing anything for me, and I darted my fingers through the balloon and popped it and walked out. It felt very performative. As much as I had, earlier, been conscious of how well I was drawing, I was conscious then of how well I was fighting. I kept thinking of growing up and not knowing how to fight, how to throw a punch. It felt pretty blocking rather than releasing.
NC: I should disclose that I did my undergrad in psychology. Something we were taught was that violent catharsis is not actually a viable form of therapy. This idea of screaming into a pillow or punching something, an archetypal catharsis, isn’t effective—it exacerbates anger and aggression. There are so many studies that found that these expressions of violence increase the kind of neural activity that compels such aggression in the first place. I think your anecdotal experience here really speaks to the irresponsibility of this exhibition—how in employing a kind of facsimile institution that has no obligation to be answerable, it could possibly harm people. Of course not everyone who comes into this exhibition is going to be anxious or angry, or have some lapse in mental health. But feasibly there are people who might be. So it speaks to the complete disregard of ethics inherent in promising to cure something, or promising to help with these ills of urban living or whatever other things the exhibition promises to do.
DB: This brings up how the project is endemic of ways in which certain big-name contemporary-art projects use complex theories and philosophies in flattened and facile ways. We can think of any number of projects coming out of, say, Documenta 13, which was tied to post-humanism and the philosophies of Agamben, and also was very Marxist or post-Marxist, post-materialist, but when we look at this project, which was actually at that Documenta, all we’re seeing is Psychology 101. We’re not even seeing Psychology 101. We’re seeing a TV-movie version of psychotherapy.
That’s a good segue to Philosopher’s Casino, which literalizes the art world’s put-it-on-a-T-shirt relationship with complicated thinkers and theories. Refresh my memory: you first write down three things that you have questions about?
NC: Things that you’re struggling with. Questions.
DB: Ones you want answered by world history’s greatest philosophers.
NC: We were encouraged to be sincere and serious as opposed to playful. We were advised by the volunteer that it would be an unsuccessful treatment if we didn’t take it seriously.
DB: These cards we were writing on were also part of an installation of cards. That was a big visual aspect of the show. You could tell the docent was really eager to take these cards and put them up on the wall after we were done. Here’s another aspect of how we’re doing work that’s contributing to the installation and our therapy is becoming a building block for this artwork.
NC: Framing it like that really exposes the insidious nature of Sanatorium; the entire project is framed around “What can we do to help you?” “How can we cure your ills?” “How can we ease the pain, the everyday malaise, of living in the city?” When actually we’re working for the project in a way, compiling an expansive archive of material that can be used by the artist for whatever endeavours moving forward, whether that’s a book or future projects.
DB: There’s that moment when the moral glow that we tend to cast around the activity of the archivist in the art world—and the art world is obsessed with archivalism right now—becomes possessive and hoarding. It becomes a product.
So, we’re writing these questions, and that, because we were both doing it together, becomes theatrical. Because you have to share them. I thought of being in class and forced to think of a question when you don’t have one, and then trying to think of a really awesome one that shows just how smart you are. So you have a question card in your hand right now. How did you manage to get your card away from those people?
NC: I wrote down the answer on the back of it to think about later. So there are these giant dice, and each die pertains to a particular field in the history of philosophy. One field is “Far East,” the other is “Nineteenth Century Philosophy in German” and the other is “Mid-Twentieth Century Philosophers.”
DB: So it was temporally and geographically reductive. Reductive in all senses. It felt like a game show.
NC: Yes, it all took place on a big carpet.
DB: It was The Price Is Right.
NC: I was talking to a friend of mine about the show and my frustration with it. She has a degree in philosophy and said that when she went to the opening, one of the most infuriating aspects was that these philosophers addressed very intricate, very historically and philosophically particular things, and to just pick out a line of theirs is so wild. It completely decontextualizes the idea and unmoors it from any cohesive meaning. They might sound like good one-liners, but decontextualized, they lose all their traction. They become just a string of nice-sounding words.
DB: In that sense, I find that some of the sentiments divorced from their contexts are very simple. And yet you have the attribution, which fetishizes the thinker and contributes to this weird I-went-to-university understanding of the history and usefulness of ideas. Like, “That’s Wittgenstein” or “That’s Hannah Arendt.” But it’s also just a human truth. Reduced to such a point, why do you even need an attribution?
NC: It’s indicative of art’s self-consciousness and need to constantly intellectualize, contextualize and justify.
DB: To perform the highbrow within the context of the populist.
NC: And isn’t that precisely what the installation did? It’s so empty, patronizing, infantilizing. I can’t imagine an experience with this treatment being enlightening or helpful.
DB: Lately, I read statements by contemporary curators and artists in which they use words like “utopian” and put forth self-described manifestos and I think, How can it not be a joke? The ambitions are so high.
NC: I don’t get the sense that it’s a joke. And it shouldn’t be a joke, at the end of the day. There are people who rely on these kinds of institutions in a lot of different ways. To employ knock-off spaces and processes of mental health for these lofty, utopian ends is kind of careless. It’s insensitive. Because, you know, Robin Williams is dead. People live and struggle with anxiety and depression every day. I think there’s a lot of intelligent institutional critique that really addresses the ways in which these institutions—like medicine and psychology—seek to do good but have historically harmed or continue to harm people. These critiques are so important and point to the ways in which things need to be revised or amended or rethought. But many still rely on the help institutions can provide. So to just take something that is a reality for some, and has helped people, and employ it for a gimmicky art project is ultimately irresponsible.
