as part of the project "curated by" the Galerie Steinek proudly presents
GOOD NIGHT, MISTER PROCRUSTES
Francis Alys | Zipora Fried | Jim Shaw | Katrin Sigurdardottir | Kiki Smith | Jana Sterbak | Jeanne Susplugas
Curated by Peter Stastny
Good Night, Mister Procrustes
Procrustes was a blacksmith who kept an inn on the slopes of Mount Korydallos, just outside of Athens. He invited weary travelers to rest on iron beds, where he stretched or cut them down to size. Did he disrupt safe passage along the sacred road to the Eleusinian Mysteries, where they would prepare for the afterlife with the help of the Kykeon, a precursor of LSD? In the end, Theseus gave this evildoer a taste of his own medicine by fitting him into his very own Procrustean bed.
Psychiatry and psychoanalysis also offer such alternatives. Your imagination can be stretched too, sometimes beyond the point of no return, or you can be forced into narrow confines, where you might be bouncing off walls. When you lie on the analyst’s couch, you can associate freely, but you are also embedded in the realm of transference, interminably or not. Should flights of fancy take you beyond shared reality, harsher measures may await you: commitment, physical restraint, and chemical manipulation. We can numb ourselves with Jeanne Susplugas’ remedies or appear free from the strictures of abode, as the people caught surreptitiously on one of Francis Alys’ peregrinations.
Artists are quite familiar with such predicaments: a blank sheet stretched on the floor becomes a receptacle for rage, dreams, pitch-black melancholy and bottomless pain, as in Zipora Fried’s work. Presenting ourselves within the contours of such imaginary spaces, held up on four corners, and supported by fluff or duress, enables us to look inside and to be seen. Or not. Measure for measure, artists in this show have entered and found escape from such spaces. They curl up or travel, as in Jana Sterbak’s cage: Procrustes meets Sysiphos in a naturally explosive match. And Katrin Sigurdardottir’s imagined edifice is promptly reduced to cinders--easy come, easy go. Here is where the mind can take us, where dreams, ideas can take flight. Jim Shaw is far from shy when he lets us into his Orphic land, warts and all, and Kiki Smith’s women rejoice under a seemingly blissful sky.
Peter Stastny
Peter Stastny is a New York based psychiatrist, documentary film-maker, cultural critic who has made contributions to the fields of mental health care, the treatment of psychosis, the representation of madness in film and visual art, among sundry other topics. His interdisciplinary interests have taken many forms and have led to a collection of provocative essays, intersecting visual art, film, subjective experience and the response to altered mental states. Since the early 80s he has been involved as a critic and collector in the intersection between art, madness and psychiatric intervention. His documentary and experimental films have straddled the boundary between topical representation and historical redemption. Currently he is consultant to several federally funded system-transforming mental health projects in New York and Latin America; developing a documentary film on the waning of the Holocaust generation; and building a living archive for his many known and less known interventions. He is a founding member of the International Network of Alternatives toward Recovery (INTAR), which is about to hold its 7th interdisciplinary conference in Liverpool, UK
