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PANEL

Mary Patten

2014 00:24:40 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video

Description

PANEL originated as a performance-based, multi-channel video/sound installation, drawn from a transcript of a discussion at “Schizo Culture,” the notorious conference on schizophrenia and radical politics organized by Sylvère Lotringer at Columbia University in 1975.

The panel at “Schizo Culture” addressed the relationship between doctors, the medical profession, and torture, and coercive uses of therapy in prisons and mental institutions. Speakers included philosopher Michel Foucault, radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing, the Insane Liberation Front’s Howie Harp, and revolutionary prisoners’ advocate Judith Clark. PANEL re-imagines the architecture of academic and political conferences, where discourse is shaped by such things as panel, podium, microphone and stage. The installation conjures the spaces of incarceration and repressive institutionalization, then and now, and an imagined 1975 audience of intellectuals, artists, and political activists. Video projection, digital imaging, and audio re-vivify an obscure, yet potent 1970s text whose contents are eerily relevant to the torture “debates” of the present moment.

CAST 

  • Darrell Moore as Michel Foucault
  • Mikal Shapiro as Judy Clark
  • Matthias Regan as Howie Harp
  • Mark Jeffery as Ronald Laing
  • Sylvère Lotringer as himself

PRODUCTION CREDITS 

  • Mary Patten - Director, Producer, Editor
  • Joseph Carr - Co-Producer, Compositor
  • Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke - Cinematography and Lighting Design
  • Mathew Paul Jinks - Audio Engineer
  • Casey Puccini - Assistant Editor
  • Alex Brown - Assistant Camera
  • Dana Duff - Additional Cinematography (footage of Sylvère Lotringer)

Special thanks to: 

  • Sylvère Lotringer and Judith Clark

Bonus Track on DVD and BluRay Discs

The “bonus track” is a re-imagining of one of several undocumented eruptions during the Schizo Culture conference. When Foucault delivered his paper on infantile sexuality (later to be developed in The History of Sexuality v. 1), he was interrupted by a member of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, a proto-fascist group associated with Lyndon LaRouche. The next morning, during the “Prisons and Asylums” panel with R.D. Laing, Judith Clark and Howie Harp, Foucault was again accused by a heckler in the audience of being in the CIA. This time he was prepared: “You're right. I am paid by the CIA. Roland Laing is paid by the CIA. Sylvère Lotringer is paid by the CIA. The only one in this room not paid by the CIA is you, since you’re paid by the KGB!” Everyone, including the man from LaRouche’s organization, burst out laughing. (Source: Sylvère Lotringer, Introduction to Schizo Culture: The Event, part of a 2-volume set published by MIT Press, 2014)

 

About Mary Patten

Mary Patten has exhibited and screened video installations, videos, artists’ books, and mixed-media projects for over thirty years in alternative spaces, university museums, and film/video festivals, including threewalls, the Chicago Cultural Center, N.I.U. Art Museum, Gallery 400, Randolph St. Gallery, Creative Time (with Feel Tank Chicago), Art in General, The Cooper Union, the New Museum/NYC, University of Memphis Art Museum, Shedhalle/Zürich, Kunstverein and Kunsthaus (Hamburg), artMbassy (Berlin), Rotterdam International Film Festival, London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, The New Festival, MIX, Frameline, Women in the Director’s Chair, and many others. Online projects include “TERROR-ist?", "Experiments in Living”–qunstmag5, and “Pointing to Prisoners”.

Writing plays a significant role in her interdisciplinary art and media projects, as well as autonomously. Her book-length pictorial essay, Revolution as an Eternal Dream: the Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, was published by Half Letter Press in 2011. She has also published writings and visual/text projects in Radical Teacher, AREA Chicago, Whitewalls, and The Passionate Camera (Ed. Deborah Bright, Routledge, 1998).

She has also devoted a lot of energy to ambitious collaborative, curatorial, and public projects. Currently she collaborates with the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project, and with Feel Tank Chicago. She continues to be drawn to collective forms of art and cultural production to re-claim language, feeling, and political passions from fundamentalist thinking, to reclaim a utopia of the everyday, a way of being together in the world that allows for anger, joy, and reparative visions. 

She has received five fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, an Artadia Fellowship, one of the last Individual Artist’s Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and many other grants and awards. Her work has been reviewed and discussed in numerous publications, including Art in America, Afterimage, Bad at Sports, The Brooklyn Rail, CAA Reviews, and The New Art Examiner. She is a featured artist in Harmony Hammond’s Lesbian Art in America (Rizzoli International Publishers, 2000). Since 1993 she has been teaching in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism Department.