{"id":15029,"date":"2025-04-12T23:42:15","date_gmt":"2025-04-12T23:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/15029\/"},"modified":"2025-04-12T23:42:15","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T23:42:15","slug":"francois-pains-art-as-salvation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/15029\/","title":{"rendered":"Fran\u00e7ois Pain\u2019s Art as Salvation"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Fran\u00e7ois Pain\u2019s 1985 film, \u201cLa Vague de Cristal\u201d (The Crystal Wave), a group prepares for the arrival of the titular occurrence \u2014 a conceivably apocalyptic event that prompts one man to remark that they \u201cneed shields and armor.\u201d Instead, the video detours \u2014 and cuts to an art class. The film\u2019s existentialist premise offers, at least briefly, one form of salvation: creative production. The video, attributed to Pain, was actually the product of the artist\u2019s film workshop at La Borde, an experimental psychiatric hospital in France where he worked as a psychiatrist from 1965 to 1972. At JOAN, Pain\u2019s newest exhibition of avant-garde video works, Psychiatry is what psychiatrists do, offers a window into one radical approach to mental healthcare \u2014 and the ways it can shape an art practice.<\/p>\n

La Borde, along with another clinic called Saint-Alban, were the first hospitals to utilize Institutional Psychotherapy, or IP: a treatment plan derived from Lacanian and Marxist schools of thought that argued for the deconstruction of oppressive hierarchies in psychiatric care. Pain\u2019s films, composed from footage shot during his time at the clinics, illustrate the results of these efforts, rendering the worlds of Saint-Alban and La Borde nearly unrecognizable as mental institutions. It is often difficult to distinguish between patient and clinician: A small television with a wooden chair near the gallery\u2019s entrance displays Le cahier vert<\/a> (The Green Notebook, 1980), in which an actor searches for a lost notebook, mingling with several presumable hospital patients along the way. Likewise, in \u201cThe Crystal Wave,\u201d doctors and psychiatric residents are rendered equal \u2014 even indistinguishable \u2014 both onscreen and in the film\u2019s production, which was made as a collective effort.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\"\"Installation view of Fran\u00e7ois Pain, \u201cInstitutional Psychotherapy as one of the fine arts\u2026\u201d (2025) (photo by Evan Walsh)<\/p>\n

Pain\u2019s new art installation, \u201cInstitutional Psychotherapy as one of the fine arts\u2026\u201d (2025), captures the communal goals of La Borde and Saint-Alban founders Jean Oury and Fran\u00e7ois Tosquelles in a nine-channel, nearly 25-minute montage of previously disparate footage, most shot during Pain\u2019s time at the clinics. In one poignant section, Oury describes the \u201cdouble alienation\u201d of many individuals prior to their arrival at the hospital, one that is both \u201cpsychotic \u2026 the alienation of the mad\u201d and \u201csocial.\u201d In order to \u201ccure the mad,\u201d Oury implies, one must first \u201ccure the hospital\u201d of its socially alienating qualities. Pain\u2019s frenetic artwork, like La Borde and Saint-Alban, forces collectivity to form from scenes of disenfranchisement: Oury\u2019s interview appears alongside black-and-white footage of soldiers carrying dead bodies, solitary figures navigating a crowded subway car, and police officers arresting a civilian. Projected next to each other in a nine-part grid, the video\u2019s stream turns these isolated, often violent scenes into a unified experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Pain\u2019s\u00a0experimental films, this innovative psychiatric mode becomes art, and vice versa. While some of these videos feel more didactic than invigorating, Pain\u2019s artwork offers one jumping off point to imagining a more just world \u2014 either at the hospital or in the art gallery.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tInstallation view of Fran\u00e7ois Pain, Le cahier vert (The Green Notebook, 1980) (photograph by Evan Walsh)<\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s Note, 04\/08\/2025 8:15am EDT: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that F\u00e9lix Guattari appeared in one of the mentioned films.<\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Pain: Psychiatry is what Psychiatrists do<\/a> continues at Joan (Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Avenue # 715, Los Angeles, California) through April 26. The exhibition was curated by Perwana Nazif.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Fran\u00e7ois Pain\u2019s 1985 film, \u201cLa Vague de Cristal\u201d (The Crystal Wave), a group prepares for the arrival…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15030,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4317],"tags":[105,556,218,6082,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-15029","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-los-angeles","10":"tag-mental-health","11":"tag-reviews","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114327648647443669","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}