Report from Queens: art asylum - the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center's Living Museum; Queens, New York

The Living Museum, an ongoing collaborative throw at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, challenges conventional notions of art-making.

Almost each day, a familiar voice can be heard in Building 75 of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center "Welcome," says the voice. "This is Vincent Price, about to share with you a certain number of of the world's great art treasures." The fact that Vincent Price, the king of late-night horror movies, is in some way associated with New York City's largest and greatest in quantity notorious "insane asylum" is perhaps fitting. Considerably more shocking, however, is his assertion that "great art treasures" are to be fix there. In fact, Price's voice--from the album A Tour of the Louvre through Vincent Price--is part of an art work, individual of the installations in Creedmoor's hold art exhibition space, the Living Museum.

The real tour guide of the museum is Bolek Greczynski, the planter and director of the Living Museum, a hospital employee who also happens to be the museum's curator, artist-in-residence and maintenance man. In 1984 Bolek (who is known by the agency of his first name), along with his friend Janos Marton, a psychologist at the Psychiatric Center conceived the idea of setting up an art program for hospital residents in the stupendous abandoned kitchen building. Their plan was to clean up the 20,000-square-foot space and invite patients to help fill the walls and floors with art work. Since its inception, above 500 patients have worked in the museum at individual time or another.

The Living Museum is the couple studio and museum. Like a museum it is an art space make open to visitors, but like a studio it accommodates the constant production of novel works, and old ones are always there in a state of flow always being refashioned. Several distinct kinds of art throw outs are produced and exhibited at the Living Museum. First, there is the daily work (what the artists call "in-the-meantime art"), for which patients are given materials that they can use to bring out anything they wish, in their be in possession of highly personal styles. Then there are composed of several elements thematic rooms constructed within the museum, elaborate Conceptual art installations that are part of the "Battlefields" shoot forward an ongoing and unfolding series of collaborative art installations. Finally, there are the works prepared especially for outside exhibitions. These are ofttimes extensions of the museum installations, on the other hand are sometimes new projects devised and execut through the "Battlefields Crew," a collection of patients who have been working with Bolek for years at the Living Museum.

Bolek dioceses his role as similar to that of a film director, helping to organize throws while allowing for the creative input of all the participants (thus, as he says, "changing vulnerability into a weapon"). He conceives this throw as a model for other artists, trial that art is possible everywhere and with everyone "It's proving each day the Beuysian statement: 'Everyone is an artist.'" In this regard, Bolek's throw is similar to that of other artists whose goal is to demystify art (particularly the "lone genius" theory) through organizing collective efforts with nonprofessional workers--artists similar as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who works with the of recent origin York City Sanitation Department [see A.i.A., Feb '89] or Tim Rollins, who works with kids from a academy in the South Bronx. Bolek says that the collaborative work of the Battlefields ship's company is also indebted to "early Robert Wilson (A alphabetic character to Queen Victoria or Deafman Glance), the work of David Hammons, the courses of Pina Bausch, the searchs of Tony Kushner, the genre make an efforts of Paul Schrader, and the eclecticism of Jonathan Borofsky."

Implicit in everything Bolek has done, at the Living Museum and previously, has been a critique of the prevailing art combination of parts to form a whole and its market-driven priorities. In 1975 after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, he became affiliated with "WPROST" a clump of political painters and intellectuals who held art exhibitions in the highway He was also a member of the Polish avant-garde theater clump "Theater STU," which traveled through every part of Europe and Latin America, staging performances in a large circus portable lodge Back in Poland, Bolek was given use of a very great building, an abandoned cinema, which he transmuteed into a gallery. For the exhibitions, he invited theater directors, actors, clap singers and poets to exhibit visual work. As he says, "The principal goal of my work was then, as now, to find or create the genuine spectator. With the use of make open structures and nonconventional spaces, I want to meeting those people who have at no time visited a gallery." Of the more than 50000 visitors to the Living Museum above the past nine years, alone a handful have been professional art critics or curators.

Walking up to the next to the first floor of the Living Museum, the exhibition space of the Battlefields shoot forward visitors quite unexpectedly encounter an elaborate indoor forest with real tree lining a winding, art-strewn path. by means of juxtaposing images, nature and beauty in the hospital connection this room, called Landscapes Before the Battle, subserves as a kind of kitsch decompression chamber, a parody of utopia, a tweaking of visitors' expectations. The path leads the visitor to the center of the Living Museum, the workroom, a chaotic studio space furnished with a desk a phone a side table with heated coffee and brownies, and makeshift work tables overlayed with stacks of paper and art materials. From the workroom, a door leads to the mezzanine, a walkway that encircles a bulky central space; giant ducts rise to the ceiling from the institutional-sized oven below, and from the catwalk, spaces open off on all sides.