Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
III. Placements in the 1970s and After
After ‘Inno70’, Steveni sought to avoid accusations of collaborating with
business by redirecting her attention towards securing placements in
government departments, placing artists alongside civil servants. The best
known of these is Ian Breakwell’s residency at the Department of Health
and Social Security in 1976, during which time he focused on the high-
security hospitals Broadmoor and Rampton, and worked with a team of
specialists to initiate minor reforms within the healthcare system. Prior to
working at the DHSS, Breakwell’s work had revolved around the representation
of so- called ‘normal’ life in his Continuous Diary (1965 onwards);
in the eyes of APG this made him eminently suitable to comment on the
‘abnormal’ within the healthcare system. 40 The fi rst phase of Breakwell’s
research was based at the DHSS Mental Health Group (Architects Division)
at Euston Tower, from which he visited different types of hostels and
hospitals. For the next phase he proposed working at Broadmoor Special
Hospital, where he collaborated with an interdisciplinary team who had
been asked to prepare a report on how to improve conditions there; Breakwell
was recruited as a professional observer, the team making use of his
‘Diary’ to introduce a consultative approach in which patients were asked
for their views. The results angered the Broadmoor administration, who
felt that the team had stepped ‘outside their brief as architects’ and ‘embarrassed
the higher level of the DHSS hierarchy’; as such, the research was
restricted by the Official Secrets Act. 41 However, the Architects Division
saw the outcome positively:
Ian has succeeded in giving us a real and lasting image, from his point of
view, of the insanity surrounding insanity. This work should be reproduced
and distributed to all our contacts, especially those who deceive
themselves that all is right in the Mental Health world. We should also
keep it on hand and read it ourselves periodically ‘lest we forget’. 42
Breakwell thus concluded that on the fi rst host level (the DHSS) the placement
had been successful, while on the second host level (Broadmoor), ‘the
end result was “failure” ’. 43
In terms of concrete outcomes, Breakwell’s placement yielded slides of
the squalid conditions at Rampton which were used in a Yorkshire Television
documentary on high- security hospitals (‘The Secret Hospital’,
1979); in turn, this led to media coverage, public outcry, and a government
enquiry. Artistically, the placement resulted in a notebook of his time there,
and a fi lm called The Institution (1978), made in collaboration with the
recording artist and former nurse Kevin Coyne. The connecting thread
between all aspects of the project was Breakwell’s ongoing interest in the
environmental nature of institutions. As Katherine Dodd points out,
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