The Cuckoo Trail
The anodyne pastel colours that were supposed to lend a gentle, pacifying air to the institution now peel off the walls. Shards and scraps of crinkled house paint collect in flaky piles on the floor. Doors are ajar, opening onto views down the corridors along which patients were once led, and into the rooms in which they were once confined. The old asylums have long been disused, and their empty spaces, presented with an intense psychological charge by Lloyd Lewis, bristle with a disturbing and disquietening tension. Past experience, of which these dilapidated shells become repositories, is here evoked by what Kant called ‘negative presentation.’
Used to powerful and traumatic effect at the sites of Nazi concentration camps, and mobilised by artists such as Christian Boltanski and Joseph Beuys, scarred and impoverished objects reference personal traces and absent victims. Lewis presents these wasted remnants of 19th century disciplinary institutions, distressed and abandoned, as physical instantiations of an oppressive and frequently cruel medical discourse which still haunts contemporary dealings with the mentally ill.
Text by Ed Kr
Burlington
Burlington, a 35 acre subterranean Cold War City, over a kilometer in length and boasting over 60 miles of roads, this secret underground bunker was to be the main emergency government headquarters in the wake of thermonuclear war, the hub of the country's alternative seat of power it would house the Prime Minister, Royal Family, crown jewels and a staff of 6000 soldiers and selected civil servants for a period of 3 months. It was at Burlington where the War Office would plan and initiate the countries retaliation, or what was left of it.