Follow the progress of This mess is a place

There are a few seats left for the Barbican’s screening of ‘Grey Gardens’ (1976, dir. Maysles Brothers) for which I’m going to be presenting an introduction.

You can hear me (much edited) in discussion of the film on the Barbican’s podcast here.

THE PILES

Zoë Mendelson will be working in Studio 4 at Chisenhale Art Place between

2nd and 10th June to document and evolve works for This Mess is a Place, her Wellcome Trust funded project, which examines the psychopathology of Hoarding Disorder.

Read more about the project and its various branches at: www.thismessisaplace.co.uk

  Studio 4 is an artist-led project space, funded & programmed by artists at Chisenhale Studios

Chisenhale Art Place is at 64 – 84 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ.

Please use Studios Entrance

This Mess is a Place is interdisciplinary (hovering precariously within the arts, psychology, anthropology, museology...), and explores the borders of Hoarding and Collecting, questions their connections and asks what makes one normative and the other pathological. Zoë Mendelson has been working with clinicians, archivists and anthropologists, among others, looking into how relationships to cumulative objects in space inform a number of fields in ways that can be seen to interrelate and impact upon each other. This Mess is a Place includes large-scale installation, a publication (2013, And Publishing), interdisciplinary public events and fiction writing.

    Timetabled public events

These events are open to all

  Saturday 7th June: Hourly readings 

Short readings from The Detroit Project (Zoë's novel in progress) 1 - 5 pm. 6:00 pm: Drawing to Zelig 

A discussion of hysteria as cultural collage followed by a screening of Woody Allen's Zelig. You are encouraged to draw during the screening & assist in the creation of a lost clinical document. Sunday 8th June: 6 pm: Trash-talking: Projections of waste

Presentations & discussion of the making & contents of This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter with some of its contributors.

The publication includes essays, texts and artworks from 30 varied & international voices.

More details are at www.thismessisaplace.co.uk/book

Tuesday 10th June from 6 pm:

The Piles Drinks & interaction with works at the end of Zoë Mendelson's week in Studio 4 Projections & performance at 7 pm

    Studio 4 will be open to visits from members of CAP only between 1 and 3 pm each day between

...An evening of collective nouns and clutter.

Following the publication of 'This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter', Zoë Mendelson presented an evening dedicated to objects en masse and coagulated, including books themselves. Negotiating the nebulous boundaries between collecting and hoarding, Mendelson's art practice and writing questions the locations and languages of the onset of a pathology.

Calling upon two contributors to the book, artists Daniel Rourke and Cecilie Gravesen, the evening was a chance to explore how museology, installation practice and critical readings of the object relate to the coagulated heap of the hoard. There was discussion of the visual diagnostic tools used by psychiatry to assess hoarding/hoarders developed with the support of psychiatrist, Dr Alberto Pertusa. Lynn Harris from AND Publishing  created a slide show depicting metaphorical innovations in the book as object.

Zoë Mendelson  performed sections of her novel-in-progress 'The Detroit Project' as well as showing an animation with an accompanying performance, alluding to ways of disposing of 250 misprints of Italo Calvino's essay on taking out the rubbish, 'La Poubelle Agréée' (1974-6), as they were left over from the printing of the book.

Here are some images from the evening.

Zoë Mendelson shows and performs with her animation Appropriated Mishap 20.02.14

Zoë Mendelson interviews Dr Alberto Pertusa 20.02.14

Coming up in 2014

25 January: The Art School: The Future for ‘Theory’? Panel discussion at the ICA, London between 11am and 1pm. See: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/art-school-future-theory for details.

12 February evening: The Play List, presented live by Zoë at Camden Arts Centre. ‘The Café opens until 10.00pm on Wednesdays and selected artists put together the soundtrack for the evening. Sometimes live, always interesting, the Play List is the best jukebox there is.’

20 February: Event hosted by Zoë in the Café at Artsadmin, Toynbee Studios, Commercial Street, London E1. See www.artsadmin.co.uk nearer the time for more details.

A Slip of Freuds An evening of collective nouns and clutter.

Following the publication of This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter, Zoë Mendelson presents an evening dedicated to objects en masse and coagulated, including books themselves. Negotiating the nebulous boundaries between collecting and hoarding, Mendelson’s art practice and writing questions the locations and languages of the onset of a pathology.

Calling upon contributors to the book, artists Daniel Rourke and Cecilie Gravesen, the evening will be a chance to explore how museology, installation practice and critical readings of the object relate to the coagulated heap of the hoard. There will be discussion of the visual diagnostic tools used by psychiatry to assess hoarding/hoarders developed with the support of psychiatrist, Dr Alberto Pertusa. Lynn Harris from AND Publishing will discuss innovations in the book as object.

Zoë Mendelson will perform sections of her novel-in-progress The Detroit Project as well as making a public display of getting rid of 250 misprints of Italo Calvino’s essay on taking out the rubbish, La Poubelle Agréée (1974-6), as it has been left over from the printing of the book.

Here is a visual record of This Mess is a Place's book launch event. The event took place at Chase & Sorensen on Dalston Lane on 26 October and included performance  and video works by Jefford Horrigan, an interactive projection by Nat Goodden and text/object works by Zoë Mendelson. The launch was in a retail space - in the images you will see dangling price tags and the pseudo-domestic environs of a boutique furniture store laid out to replicate living space. The publication was spread out throughout and discussed around cluttered coffee tables.

This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter is a limited edition publication, edited/curated by Zoë Mendelson and published by And Publishing. It includes articles, artworks, interviews and fiction. AlongsideThis Mess is a Place's own collaborators from psychiatric and archival fields there are contributions of artistic projects from Jim Bay (UK); Michel Blazy (FR); Carrie M Becker (USA); Marjolijn Dijkman (NL); Nat Goodden (UK), Jefford Horrigan (UK); Dean Hughes (UK); Mierle Laderman Ukeles (USA); Robert Melee (USA); Zoë Mendelson (UK); Florence Peake (UK); Michael Samuels (UK); Kathryn Spence (USA); Tomoko Takahashi; Robin Waart (NL); Julian Walker (UK) and Laura White (UK). The publication contains essays and documents by Dr. Colin Jones (Senior Lecturer/Researcher in Applied Health and Social Sciences, UK); Dr. Haidy Geismar (lecturer in digital anthropology and material culture, US/UK); Jeremy Gill (urban planner and theorist, AUS); Cecilie Gravesen (artist, curator and writer, UK/Den); Dr. Alberto Pertusa(consultant psychiatrist, UK); Daniel Rourke (artist and researcher, UK); Isobel Hunter (archivist and Head of Engagement at the National Archives, UK); Satwant Singh (nurse practitioner and cognitive behavourial therapist, UK); Nina Folkersma (curator and critic, NL); Alberto Duman (artist, writer, UK). A full list of essay titles can be seen here. The publication also includes documentary photography by Paula Salischiker (ARG) and an interview with an anonymous hoarder's daughter. The publication includes a newly designed reprint of Italo Calvino's essay of 1974-76, La Poubelle Agréée. This publication looks at the onset of hoarding through the voices of clinicians and expands the theme to examine how relationships to objects in space inform a number of fields in ways that can be seen to interrelate and impact upon each other. The idea behind the form of this anthology is that practice and artistic research can co-exist with more clinical and scientific research. It is hoped this will create overlaps and crises of ‘usefulness’ akin to the submersion of materials within a hoard or the pursuit of order within a collection. The publication itself is unbound – illogical and precarious as an object, containing loose leaves, pamphlets and nominal filing systems, gathered together in no particular order. The reader is ultimately responsible for the order (or dis-order) of the piece.

More at: www.thismessisaplace.co.uk/book

 If you missed last Monday's panel discussion with Zoë Mendelson, Ele Carpenter and Dr Gillian Ragsdale on The Thread (see below) you can catch up with it again here: 

Avarice - The Thread 

You are invited to submit potential contributions to the accompanying 70 page publication to This Mess is a Place (to be published by And Publishing, London).

  Taking hoarding as a model for amassing materials within art practice(s), this project questions the borders of a productive or rational relationship to collation and the development of compulsions/pathologies.  

  You can see more about the scope of the project and its various branches including the publication (as well as my work/practice in general) at www.thismessisaplace.co.uk

  This Mess is a Place is funded by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award and is executive produced by Artsadmin (www.artsadmin.co.uk) who have a 30-year history of working with artists on live and visual arts events.

  It is intended that a one-day public event in London, curated by myself and produced by Artsadmin, will bring together artists, archivists, clinicians, de-clutterers and collectors/hoarders to perform, present and discuss relationships to collating and amassing ‘stuff’ within their work, fictively and wider afield. The publication will be available at the event and subsequently, including artists’ pages and related texts with a relationship to the event and functioning as a proposal for a potential future exhibition. And Publishing have a wide network of dissemination internationally, as does Artsadmin, and there is much scope for the publication attracting an audience.

  The idea behind the event/publication is that practice/artistic research will co-exist with more clinical and scientific research. We are hoping this will create overlaps and crises of ‘usefulness’ akin to the submersion of materials within a hoard or the pursuit of order within a collection. The publication itself will be unbound – illogical and precarious as an object. Artists will be free, therefore, to propose their own contribution in a form related to their practice with restrictions applied only to a maximum paper size/shape and the economics of print processes. Text contributions would be no more than 2000 words (including title and any footnotes). For now, please send ideas/proposals for texts (300 word max. proposals) and/or visual submissions (no more than 3MB) to [email protected] 

The deadline for proposals is 31 March (although if I receive earlier proposals I will respond to them within a couple of days) and, following selection, the submission date for actual works/texts is 30 April.

  Confirmed contributors from non-Fine Art fields include:

  Dr. Alberto Pertusa, clinical psychologist (under Dr. David Mataix-Cols) at the Institute of Psychiatry, working in research and clinical care of patients with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Dr. Pertusa specialises in compulsive hoarding and has extensively published on the subject.

  Isobel Hunter, archivist and Head of Engagement at the National Archives, leading a team to support the development of local authority archives services across England.

  Satwant Singh, nurse consultant and cognitive behavioural therapist who runs the only treatment group for hoarders in the UK.

  Dr. Haidy Geismar, lecturer in Digital Anthropology and Material Culture, University College London.

  Dr. Colin Jones, is a lecturer and practitioner in the Faculty of Health and Applied Social Science at Liverpool John Moore's University. He works with Satwant Singh developing methods to support hoarders and researches using narrative and visual techniques to understand patient experience.

  I am only now approaching artists to participate but confirmed contributors from Fine Art fields include:

  Marjolijn Dijkman (NL)

Nat Goodden (UK)

Jefford Horrigan (UK)

Dean Hughes (UK)

Michael Samuels (UK)

Kathryn Spence (US)

Robin Waart (NL)

  With regards,

If I draw everything currently on the floor in my home then organise those drawings into an archive does that count as a kind of 'clearing up'?

What I have been asking myself this month is how, within the scope of this project, to establish a methodology which comprises of both archival and hoarding tendencies. In order to negotiate overlaps between these territories I am acutely very aware of needing to subsume aspects of both into my practice.

One of the focuses of the This Mess is a Place project is in examining where the borders of a pathological condition can be said to be drawn - assuming a collection to be one thing and a hoard another. Through my research I am discovering that psychologists and clinicians looking into this are facing the problem that those hoarders who present for treatment are very often at an advanced stage of living with the condition. Most frequently they are seeking help with the encouragement or insistence of desperate partners or family members, or are brought for help by social services who note that they may be at risk. 

Hoarders rarely present for treatment or psychological support at an early stage, meaning that direct clinical insights into hoarding come later. Without witnessing its onset firsthand clinicians rely on hoarders' retrospective accounts at a point when they are most vulnerable or subsumed in amassing stuff or cycles of clutter. Hoarding disorder is secretive, stigmatised and is a low insight condition, meaning sufferers may have very little ability to reflect on or acknowledge their behaviours. This, again, presents problems for researchers in investigating how and where hoarding begins.

Talking to Chrystine Bennett from Cluttergone I learn how she has worked with a few children who demonstrate some traits of hoarding, implying that childhood onset - an under-researched area - 'should be a site for continued study'. Bennett noted, however, that these behaviours were much harder to notice in children because parents would usually organise their rooms and throw things away on a child's behalf. It is also not unusual, of course, for children to keep messy rooms.

Clinical research indicates that hoarding in the very young is less likely to follow a trauma or stressful event (unlike later onset hoarding) indicating 'lifelong characterological phenomenon'. (Grisham, J., Frost, R.O., Steketee, G., & Hood, S. (2006). Age of onset in compulsive hoarding. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 20, 675-786)

This month has seen me fixate on the archiving of the project to date, seeking a container or containers through which to interpret the rapidly growing documents it is gathering. 

Both Dr Alberto Pertusa and Satwant Singh have talked to me about the attempts to clear up which are so often present in a hoard. Visually and aesthetically this could include the presence of cardboard boxes, storage, bags etc. These efforts to contain stuff then often embed themselves in the chaos, underlying for hoarders how they have tried and failed. Clear-up attempts can become echoed in the space and are therefore themselves problematised.

I met with Isobel Siddons to garner a counterpoint to this. We talked at length about the materials used by archivists and systematised uses of various tools or methods. I presented her with the challenge of archiving this project after its completion and now look forward to how this will manifest.

                              Image from The Detroit Project

This June at This Mess is a Place I have been attempting to line up the information I am gathering about hoarding and attachments with the development of appropriately layered and complex characters in my fictive work The Detroit Project.

Through meeting with Dr Alberto Pertusa I am gaining a real sense of how criteria are being clinically applied to hoarding as a disorder and the aspects of impairment which allow it to become problematised, thus separating it from collection. The forming of the definition for the DSM-5 has been at the focus of our discussions.

I am creating characters who struggle with accumulation of belongings within their homes and am attempting to align these issues with wider social implications and communal urban  concerns. I asked Dr Pertusa whether hoarding was more prevalent in urban areas, my own associations of clutter and disorder being intrinsically linked (through Anthony Vidler's architectural research) to the development of the Modern city. He answered that, there would be no clinical reason for more hoarders to present in urban areas other than that urbanity attracts larger populations generally. He expanded on this, saying that,

'There's a study showing that, more or less, there's a hoarder on every street on average. It's a calculation whereby an average is found through  dividing the prevalence of hoarding and the number of streets.'

The Detroit Project is set between London and several fictive, future versions of Detroit. It examines the distinctions between life outside and inside the home for two women whose relationships to stuff become increasingly complex and chaotic. In this context, I asked Dr. Pertusa whether the home was always the site of the hoard as implied by the DSM's description. Could it ever spill over to the office or workplace, for example? It was explained to me that for the clutter to be sufficiently impairing (in order for diagnosis)  it needed to encompass/encumber domestic space, even if it also affected workspace.

The Clinical Psychology Review recently published an article by Ashley E. Nordsletten and David Mataix-Cols entitled, Hoarding versus Collecting: Where does pathology diverge from play? The article (Clinical Psychology Review 32 (2012) pp: 165 - 176) sets out to underline differences between hoarding and collecting, from a clinical angle. (In parallel to my own research project which examines these issues and their distinctions culturally, psychologically, socially and through interpretive means). I have read the article with much interest and feel it is of huge importance to open up a dialogue here about its content, in particular some of the cultural and object-value related assumptions made.

A criticism of the article from my standpoint - as a researcher with an investment in the values and status applied to materials as related to psychology and attachment - is that, whilst the research and knowledge in regard to hoarding is, of course, beyond my criticism and must be assumed (by me) to be academically upheld, there are  generalisations made on a cultural level with regard to collection which are outmoded and highly problematic. These imply that the crossover between the scientific and visual cultures areas may not have been as invested as perhaps they could have been. For my own part, I am working with practitioners and experts across disciplines as it is of paramount importance to my study that I cannot and do not assume knowledge from within the psych-professions. This would be unethical and I acknowledge my own field of reference as lying distinctly within the arts and cultural studies areas of focus. Collaboration is therefore key to the work undertaken on This Mess is a Place.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain

In terms of a critique of the cultural stance of the article with regard to collection, I want to focus on the subject of value. Most worryingly, with regard to value systems within collection and the arts, the Clinical Psychology Review article professes that 'a piece of fine art, for example, is generally wrought of high-grade materials, often unique, inherently authentic.' As Warhol and Duchamp turn in their graves, I am inclined to briefly make the, incredibly obvious, statement that the grade of materials within an artwork is not in correlation with its economic, social, visual or commercial value. (And, of course, rather redundantly note that the invention of photography and the printing press before it rather put a stop to the argument for uniqueness.) Examples of works referred to within a contemporary discourse of 'collection' may be as diverse as installations by Jason Rhoades (featuring poles, brackets, cheap printer images and other low-fidelity or found materials); Sarah Sze; Noble and Webster and Song Dong (whose installation 'Waste Not' was recently shown at the Barbican's Curve gallery). Fine Art embraces clutter and disorder as a tendency within practice (across media - from collage to performance to installation) and exploits it both commercially and critically.

                 Jason Rhoades, 2006, Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé 

Regardless of an expansive dialogue on 'authenticity', which would melt this blog post, Fine Art has never, in fact been limited to 'high-grade materials'. Paint and clay (and drawing a line in the rock or sand) being fairly low-grade methods of mark-making available to art-makers since the dawn of time. Neither is collection (or the tendencies of the 'collector') limited to the domestic, a factor which, in itself potentially excites distinctions from hoarding (although the definition also mentions the 'workplace'). To call collection 'play' (albeit possibly knowingly) in the article's title negates the potential in exploring both the value and cross-over tendencies of museology and the creation of social and political histories on behalf of others, the nation or the creation of archives and records of now or times once lived. 

The chart included in the article (cited as 'Adapted from Pearce, 1998a,b, p:41) that implicates that non-Fine Art objects or functional items such as mass-produced tourist-ware or tea-towels can be filed under the heading 'Rubbish' is most worrying. These items have not only formed the basis for and been included within commercially valuable artworks for generations (see Sophie Calle's The Birthday Ceremony below as an example of a contemporary piece) but have also, in their own right, and through (often domestic) donation, found their way into such collections as The British Museum, the V&A, the Geffrye Museum or other publicly valued records of how we have lived, worked and tastes have developed. It goes without saying that over centuries, of course, the simple earthenware pot or shaped flint may tell us much about how whole dynasties lived and worked. Importantly, the act of donation or, perhaps, the discovery posthumously of a collection could be said to tie in with the proposed definition of Hoarding Disorder in the DSM-5 with regard to 'the interventions of third parties (e.g., family members, cleaners, authorities).' Can a museum potentially intervene (or clean up) to apply value to a hoard, for example? The Wellcome Collection houses a carefully, methodically sieved version of the obsessions of Henry Wellcome and, as such, gives rise - in this context - to questions about third parties implicated in attribution of value.

Sophie Calle, The Birthday Ceremony, detail, 1980 - 1993

Intriguingly, the art collecting tendencies of New Yorkers Herb and Dorothy Vogel could be said to sit between the camps of collecting and hoarding with regard to both the intrinsic (commercial and critical) value of their art collection and its impairment of their domestic space through (potentially) excessive accumulation and storage issues. Ultimately, their extraordinary art collection was 'cleaned up' by a third party - namely the National Gallery of Art, Washington. There is a conversation to be had here, perhaps, about the (always potentially pathological) individual and (an assumed legitimacy of) the 'collective' - such as the Museum.

There is so much more to be shared between the fields of critical and cultural studies and the psychological sciences on the issues of hoarding and collection as interrelated. I would welcome collaboration(s) and continued dialogue towards expansion of how notions of object value, status and function are at the heart of these correlations.

What is clear from the Clinical Psychology Review article is that impairment is at the heart of the distinctions drawn between hoarding and collecting. My own criticisms are not of this finding but of the language applied to value within the argument sustained and of a fairly pedestrian approach to talking about object status, materials, Collection as a field of research and the implications of third parties. These factors cannot dissuade from the importance of this research into the effects of hoarding on a sufferer and of the potential of articles such as this one to further debate. What I am making a case for, however, is that if definitions within mental health are attaching themselves (through the particularity of this condition) to object relations, that they are sufficiently informed and cross-disciplinary in method.