[ ellen driscoll ]

Letter From The Director Hartford, Connecticut, home in more prosperous days to the poet Wallace Stevens, is a city beleagured by economic dislocation. Reduced defense spending, industrial relocation, insurance restructuring and bank consolidation have reduced jobs, and suburbanization has lured shoppers to malls. The department store which for years was the heart of the downtown district stands empty, its displays of seasonal merchandise replaced by dark panels blocking empty street front windows.

Ellen Driscoll chose three display windows as one of their sites for Passionate Attitudes. Her work temporarily transformed a forlorn space into a site of vivid, elegant and mysterious symbolic meditation.

The other “site” for Passionate Attitudes was Real Art Ways’ new home, an old warehouse where the renowned Underwood typewriters were developed. Driscoll’s walk-in camera obscuras allowed viewers entry to a dark, dreamlike world illuminated by elusive, ineffable images, prompted reflections on knowledge and knowing, sanity and certainty, and evoked the essential elusiveness of psychological and perceptual certitude.

We were fortunate to have Ellen Driscoll’s work in Real Art Ways’ continuing series of public projects, RAW Specifics, and to have our new gallery begin with such a complex and evocative installation.

Will K. Wilkins
Real Art Ways


Curator's Notes Passionate Attitudes was sponsored by Real Art Ways of Hartford, CT as part of RAW’s public art program, RAW Specifics, which facilitates the creation of new works of art connected with the culture of the region. Previous RAW Specifics projects have included: Group Material’s Bus Poster project, Mel Chin’s Ghost, Mark Dion’s Art…Not News, Lillian Hsu-Flanders’ Red Sweater Project, James Luna’s Sacred Colors, Yong Soon Min’s DMZ XING, Bumper Crop, Pepón Osorio’s En La Barbaeria No Se Llora, Danny Tisdales’ An Artist For a Change, and most recently, Karin Giusti’s The Green White House.

J. Anderson, Vis Arts Curator


Essay by Eleanor Heartney

Despite remarkable advances in fields like gene theory, neurochemistry and artificial intelligence, the link between body and mind remains as mysterious today as it was in the 19th-century. We have replaced widespread diagnoses of hysteria, and recourse to magnetism, mesmerism and electricity with more up-to-date notions and therapies, but we seem no closer to determining the biological basis of consciousness. As a result, discussions relationg to matters of mind always contain an element of the fantastical.

In her installation Passionate Attitudes, Ellen Driscoll embraces this elusive territory in order to suggest a metaphor for the equally mysterious nature of the creative process. She takes as her springboard the studies of the celebrated 19th century French physician, J.M. Charcot, who conducted extensive studies of female hysteria during his tenure at Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. Following a reorganization of the asylum which separated criminals from thos ewith mental disturbances and housed epileptics with so called “hysterics”, Charcot noticed tht the hysterics began to mimic the symptoms of the epileptics. This led him to an investigation of the causes and manifestations of hysteria. Believing that scientific observation would allow him to codify the symptoms of hysteria, he employed such then advanced techniques as magnetism, hypnosis, electrical stimulation and physical probing to induce fits of hysteria for study. his female patients (since the time of the Egyptians, hysteria had been viewed as a female malady related to a now-repudiated condition known as “wandering womb”) responded to these probes by assuming the states which Charcot expected to find. Charcot documented his results in photographs in which the sense of collusion between doctor and patient is obvious to modern eyes. It is generally accepted today that Charcot’s scientific demonstrations are actually something more akin to performance and theater. The title of this installation- “passionate attitudes”- is taken from the name Charcot gave to the hallucinatory state of hysteria.

The codification and widespread application of the category “hysteric” to women from the lower classes who formed the majority of Salpetriere’s inhabitants has sparked debate in feminist circles over the evidence it provides of the lengths to which society will go to exert control over women’s bodies. While informed by that debate, Driscoll is equally interested in creating what she refers to as a “dangerous sympathy” for the doctor faced with making sense of the opaque symptoms which governed the behavior of vulnerable women under his care. In unconsciously directing them to create the behaviors which he hoped to find, he operates less among to model of the scientist than that of the artist.

The core of this work consists of four large camera obscura mimicking the shape of hospital beds. A series of gently moving objects suspended outside the boxes are transformed within by means of pinhole projection into shifting, ghostly shadows. on one level, these nebulous forms bring to mind Plato’s Cave, and its cautionary tale of the dangers of mistaking illusions for reality. on another, they conjure the world of dreams, an association made explicit by the fact that inside the camera obscura the shadows drift over a small white pillow.

And finally, the objects from which these images emerge refer to the Charcot story. A fools cap is based in the hat worn by the French court jester and makes reference to the hysteric state Charcot referred to as “clowning”. Winger forms recall the role played by birds in mesmerism. Eggs refer to the ancient “wandering womb” theory of hysteria. Fans invoke, on one hand, fits of fainting to which hysterics were prone, and on the other the notion of a precinematic form of representation in which time is suggested by the unrolling of successive images. Shoes recall the doll-like condition of Charcot’s patients. And finally, a twisting braid both celebrates the female hysterics, by its slow repeptitive motion, to induce a similar hypnosis in the viewer.

These same elements reappear in separate installation works installed in four abandoned display windows along Main Street in downtown Hartford. A large revolving fan is inlaid with photographic images of Charcot’s hysterics. Two other smaller fans drop flowerlike from a suspended chair. Three braids spin at different rates. Isolated subjects- a series of fools caps, pairs of shoes wrapped in copper wire (electromagnets which continuously attract then repel), butterfly like pairs of fans- hang from the ceiling, as if suspended in the space between dream and fantasy.

Tying the entire work together is a poem by Hartford’s Wallace Stevens. Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks consists of a dialogue between an unnamed speaker and Berserk. Berserk’s response to a question about his deviant construction of reality speaks both to the creative interplay between Charcot and his patients and to the workings of imagination. Berserk remarks: “You that wander,”/So he said,/”Upon the buy plain,/Forget so soon./But I set my traps/In the midst of dreams.”

In Passionate Attitudes Driscoll reminds us that the imagination is a dangerous place where discovery and creation intermingle and may be confused with each other. We are all, in essence, simultaneously Charcot and his patients-seeking answers which we may have set in place ourselves and responding in a region beyond consciousness to the signals which an elusive universe lays before us.


Acknowledgments Passionate Attidues was made possible by Maria DeMarco Miles and Murphy for her continuing support of this program and her assistance in providing exhibition space in the G. Fox building, and to Eileen Curtain, John Groo and Rusty Warner Communications for their significant contributions to this project.