David Byrd and Peter Gallo “The Patients and The Doctors”

Zieher Smith & Horton

poster for David Byrd and Peter Gallo “The Patients and The Doctors”

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“The Patients and The Doctors,” the title of this exhibition, is taken from a short 1947 text by the revolutionary dramatist, writer, and artist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). Artaud’s remarkable life in his own words was “beautiful but hideous” - it was marked by illness, addiction, and psychiatric hospitalizations. His work includes plays, screenplays, manifestos, poems, drawings – as well as letters to his lovers, editors and doctors – all of which comprised a sustained rant against the psychiatric apparatus that treated and confined him. For Artaud Western culture had morphed into a big hospital where all forms of difference and authentic experience, both life affirming and tragic, are suppressed under the sign of the “norm.” Health, says Artaud, is an ideology that is “meaner and pettier” than sickness. His strategy was to affirm his experience, beautiful and hideous: “I have been sick all my life,” he wrote, “and I ask only that it continue…Curing a sickness is a crime. It’s to squash the head of a kid who is much less nasty than life.”

The exhibition features a selection of works by two artists, a generation apart, David Byrd (1926-2013) and Peter Gallo (b. 1959); Byrd and Gallo both maintained, along with their artistic work, careers as attendants and case workers in the field of psychiatric and disability services – the world of day treatment centers, group homes, mental health agencies, psychiatric wards, and rehab programs. In different ways the artists have taken up Artaud’s challenge, and bear witness to the inadequacy and force of the apparatus, and its cultural pervasiveness, but also to the resilience of many of those who live and work there.

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Schedule

from November 19, 2015 to January 02, 2016

Opening Reception on 2015-11-19 from 18:00 to 20:00

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