Center for MAD Culture: Dunning: an exploration by artists and poets of the history of Dunning

On a temperate November evening in Chicago’s Fine Arts building, the Center for Mad Culture is buzzing with people. It is the opening of the Center’s show entitled Dunning, an exploration by artists and poets of the history of Dunning, a Cook county “insane asylum” that was first built in 1854. The show features 10 visual artists and 10 poets engaging with themes of institutionalization, madness, and marginalization. Each visual artist was given the same piece of wood, each with the same proportions as the cells of the Dunning institution. The artists’ engagement with the wood varied widely, with artists like Bri Noonan using photo emulsion lifts collaged on the wood, whereas artists like Joshua Mangis With created a 3D art installation utilizing the wood as a holder for candles made from pill bottles. The artists’ work seemed to echo what disability theorist Tobin Siebers calls “disability signposts.” Siebers writes, “Signposts are often crossing points where historical forces mingle. They are at once deeply chronological and anachronistic, simultaneously historical and non-historical. They make evident that disability as a concept bears weight backwards in time, giving meaning retroactively to images and ideas for the advancement of disability aesthetics” (331). We can understand these artists’ work as “crossing points where historical forces mingle” precisely because they engage with concepts of institutionalization, madness, and marginalization related to Dunning in some form. The history of Dunning, and of other “insane asylums” and incarceration centers, provides a backdrop to the ways that these artists conceptualize their own engagement with madness. The art then becomes a “crossing point” for these two histories, both personal and institutional. These artists’ engagement with conceptions of madness and institutionalization becomes “simultaneously historical and non-historical,” both a personal narrative of madness and disability and a part of the institutional history (and non-history) of Dunning.

The Dunning project also features 10 poets who wrote in response to these same themes of institutionalization, madness, and marginalization. The poems varied widely in content, but even more notably, in form. Some poems, like Stephanie Heit’s “Mad Conductors,” followed a more traditional form, whereas others, like Joy Young’s “Intrusive Thought Process,” integrated historical documents on Dunning with handwritten sticky notes meditating on elements of their own relationship to madness, family, and queerness. The poems, like the visual art, seem to echo Siebers’ “disability signposts,”, notably challenging the expectations of what a reader conceptualizes as poetry through reimagined forms. In doing so, they are putting forward what seems to be a version of crip/mad poetics, echoing and paralleling the “simultaneously historical and non-historical” elements of Siebers’ “disability signposts.”

Alongside the visual art and poems, the Dunning opening featured an interactive poetry event with Stephanie Heit and Alexis Riley called Mad Conductors, as well as a screening of a dance performance entitled Crip/Mad Archive Dances with Petra Kuppers. The small, warm room became more and more full over the course of the performances as community members trickled in. Throughout the performance, the space was full of constant subtle movement as people shifted, moved, stretched, and engaged in ways that felt good to them. Heit and Riley invited this kind of engagement, emphasizing that they wanted people to engage in ways that worked for them. Heit and Riley’s performance seems, too, to echo Siebers’ interest in the “crossing point where historical forces mingle” (331). The performance began with a reading by Heit of her poem, “Mad Conductors,” followed by Heit and Riley asking participants to share how they remember things. The answers varied from “writing it down,” to “text myself,” to “do something weird.” The reasoning for this last one was that, if you twirl in a circle after you lock the door, you are more likely to remember that you twirled than if you had just locked the door and left. After this communal knowledge-gathering, Heit and Riley began leading a memory-visualization activity. They asked the audience to imagine a place where we felt safe. We then asked the person next to us, “Will you hold my memory?” before sharing what our memory of our safe place was, including some descriptors of the senses that we experienced when in that memory. Across the room, snippets of memories could be heard. This wall of sound echoes what followed the memory-sharing, which was a conducting of music inspired by the memories that we shared. From the room rose a new form of music–and with it, the feelings captured in the memories became dispersed among each participant.

This brings us back to Dunning, and to the artists and poets who engage with it in the show. Each piece in the show asks, in its own way, for the viewer to “hold” the memory of the artist, or of Dunning, or both. The show becomes a site of memory creation and memory reflection, building off of the histories of those incarcerated at Dunning and those who would or could have been incarcerated had the timing been different. This demonstrates the show’s commitment to memory and time, and how these things are much more permeable than we may think. After all, who is institutionalized and who is not often depends on one’s race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or disability. These categories in themselves are also not clearly set. This permeability of identity parallels the permeability of madness itself, “Dunning” seems to say, for it was only privilege that kept some folks away from institutions like Dunning, whereas many were not so lucky. These artists and poets take the history of Dunning and create new narratives. They speculate, in their own ways, about their own relationship with madness and the institution. The artists and poets, like Heit and Riley, also ask viewers to speculate alongside them, asking what does madness mean for you, and what might it mean to reimagine our cultural relationship with madness?

You can catch “Dunning” at the Center for Mad Culture through December 31st.

Works Cited

Siebers, Tobin. “Disability aesthetics and the body beautiful: Signposts in the history of art.”

Alter, vol. 2, no. 4, Oct. 2008, pp. 329–336, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alter.2008.08.002.

BIO

Sam Weiss (they/them) is a white, queer, trans, disabled PhD student in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Their research interests are in queer, trans, speculative disability narratives, speculative embodiment, and queer crip time. They are particularly interested in how queer crip speculation can be used as a pedagogical tool in the classroom. They hold a MA in English with a Teaching Certificate from Georgetown University, and a BA in English with honors from Lewis & Clark College. Prior to coming to UIC, they taught high school English at a school for dyslexic students in Maryland.