Publication news: Michael Mazur’s “Images from a Locked Ward” in Manual Magazine’s Spring 2022 Issue
“Territories of the Self,” On Michael Mazur’s Images from a Locked Ward
by Leon J. Hilton
Michael Mazur (RISD faculty, ca. 1961)
American, 1935–2009
Impressions Graphic Workshop, Inc., publisher
The Corridor, from the portfolio Images From A Locked Ward, 1965
Lithograph on paper
Plate/sheet: 50.8 × 65.4 cm. (20 × 25 3/4 in.)
Gift of Jim Dine 80.266.2
© Michael Mazur; Courtesy of the estate of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
If we did not know from the title of the series that we are viewing images from a locked mental-hospital ward, The Corridor [Fig. 1] might suggest another setting, namely a perspectival view of a proscenium stage as seen by someone sitting in the audience of a theater. Proscenium wings are suggested by the curtain-like “legs” framing the stage, stretching back into the further distance. Abrasively sketched figures are perhaps walking, but more likely standing.
The Corridor is the second lithograph in Images from a Locked Ward, Michael Mazur’s series of fourteen lithographs printed in 1965 and published as a limited edition in collaboration with the eminent Boston lithographer George Lockwood. The lithographs are the culmination of a period of image-making shaped by Mazur’s firsthand observations of life in the psychiatric ward of the Howard State Institute of Mental Health in Cranston, Rhode Island, where starting in 1962 Mazur worked alongside his RISD students as a volunteer instructor in the art therapy program. The Corridor presents a view of asylum architecture’s orderly segmentation of space, designed to maximize the visibility of the human beings inhabiting it. The architectural elements function as instruments that are used therapeutically to manipulate the human beings. Yet the theatricality of the setting also enhances the sense of something chimerical, even ghostly, about the several seemingly human forms that flitter across the horizontal plane. Spectral and desubjectized, their faces are turned away from us or obscured by shadows.
If The Corridor presents the asylum as a stage set, the image that follows in the Locked Ward series, The Occupant [Fig. 2], gives us a portrait of sorts: a medium-length shot that takes us closer to one of the figures. Here a figure sits slouched in wheelchair, body contorted at an uncomfortable angle as if to meet the gaze of the viewer head-on: the facial expression is intensely rendered but also difficult to interpret. It is a face that might be looking out at us with curiosity, smiling with a friendly greeting, or perhaps grimacing.
The Occupant reiterates in lithographic form a composition that Mazur first used in 1962 in an aquatint etching in his Closed Ward series. In it, finely cut swatches of shadowy ink made up of thin straight bands emanates diagonally from the back of the seated figure’s head to the upper right corner of the page. Contrasted with the rigid verticality of the lines used to designate the background walls and horizontal lines indicating the floor, this diagonal swoop suggests the movement of the patient’s head as he turns in his wheelchair in the direction of the viewer, in curiosity or surprise at the arrival of an unexpected visitor. In both the 1962 and 1965 iterations of The Occupant, the most predominant shape, and the source of the composition’s strangely radiant energy, is the wheelchair in which the subject is seated.
