2011
Drawings

I am so inspired by this new thing now happening at Occupy Wall Street.
In this triptych, the first text is a quote from Foucault’s History of Madness– a book I’m reading for another project– which delineates how madness, poverty, illness, and otherness in general have all been constructed as categories (and then the people assigned to those categories have been confined) throughout European history. Definitions of the mad have fluctuated to include the diseased, the poor, the indebted, the libertines, the irrelegious, the artists, the gay, the “girlish”, and, of course, the genuinely mentally troubled. The subtext of Foucault’s tome is compassion for outsiders, and the tribe of outsiders– representing the 99%– at Occupy Wall Street is now seeming to gather with a force I’ve never seen before. Building on the space of the agora and the occupations of the past, it is perhaps a new thing, more than a demand. It is uncapturable; it is musical.