Probably no other image in Mazur’s series hints at this historical tension more viscerally than the tenth print in this series of fourteen, which depicts an asylum patient whose forearms are bound together in a bandage-like cloth, suggesting that we are seeing a patient in the throes of a technique of hydrotherapy known as wet-packing. One way of understanding the scene is as a kind of degraded version of a therapeutic practice that was, by the time Mazur would have been present to witness it, used for purely custodial or even punitive means. In their account of the history of the Rhode Island state hospital, Golden and Schneider note that even though “the hospital claimed that hydrotherapy cured acutely ill patients, it is obvious that it was used most frequently as a form of restraint, a fact which the hospital tacitly admitted.”⁷

But if the image attests to the uncomfortable fact that such methods of bodily constriction persisted well beyond the time when they were understood to be therapeutically beneficial to the patients who were subjected to them, it’s also clear that Mazur’s etched lines and inky shadings do more than merely document this lamentable fact life on the ward. In Bound Hands Swing, the practice of wet packing is not simply documented as a damning sociological “fact” of reality—a practice that continued to take place out of public view, behind locked hospital doors, long after its medical or therapeutic benefits were debunked—as it might have been in a photograph.⁸ Instead, the scene is moodily evoked by the technique itself. The historical persistence of hydrotherapy as a form of control and restraint is viscerally suggested by the surface of the image: the still discernable traces of the liquidity of the ink hints at the wetness of the scene, drenching the image in an expressive drama that draws us in to look the body’s contorted terrain. The piercing and almost tactile quality of the image is a unique aspect of the mark-making afforded by the medium of lithography. Like the other prints in Mazur’s series, Bound Hands Swing seems to be reaching toward an additional, almost iconographic function, one that evokes a more generalizable experience of human unfreedom. It is an experience that is not just illustrated figuratively, but also evoked subjectively through Mazur’s deft handling of the particular kinds of shading, texture, and saturation that lithography enables.

Attending to the historicity of Mazur’s prints requires grappling with the continuities that link the time of the images’ making to the circumstances in which they are viewed today, as well as with the discontinuities that separate us from them. It is reasonable to ask whether the artistic visions and technical accomplishments that are so evident in these prints conflict with the historical conditions that defined the generalized landscape of suffering and dispossession, luring us into continuing ethical entanglements by virtue of the visual dramas of suffering and confinement they depict.

One way to consider how these images resonate in the present moment is to recognize that the same institution that provided the scene for Mazur’s prints continues to be a problematic and disavowed presence in the contemporary landscape, albeit under a different name. In the early 1960s, the Rhode Island General Hospital and Howard State Hospital for Mental Disease merged to become the Rhode Island Medical Center, and by 1970 vast numbers of long-term patients had been discharged for placement into “community-based care” settings, in line with the impetus of the nationwide movement to deinstitutionalize the large state-run asylums where mentally ill patients were being “warehoused.” In 1994 the institution became one part of the two-campus Eleanor Slater Hospital, named in honor of a state legislator who devoted much of her public service advocating for mental-health care.⁹ Under the auspices of a centralized state behavioral health agency, Slater continues to garner attention in local news for controversies stemming from years of mismanagement and chronic underfunding.

Any attempt to grapple with Mazur’s images must also query the moral status and ethical personhood afforded to the human figures they represent. What do these prints owe to the figures who appear in them, especially in light of the patient-led movements calling for the reform, deinstitutionalization, and eventually the abolishment of the asylum system that emerged in the decades after Mazur made them? After all, Mazur himself was not a patient in the hospital he was using as the basis for his artworks but merely a visitor, free to return home—or anywhere else he wished—once his art therapy sessions concluded. Moreover, while the Locked Ward series is legitimated by Mazur’s formal training (after studying art at Amherst and completing a printmaking apprenticeship in Italy, he earned an MFA with a focus in printmaking from Yale in 1961), artworks created by patients in psychiatric institutions often fail to be recognized, apart from the modernist fixations of art brut and “outsider art,” categorizations that have become inseparable from the fetishization of the “primitive,” the child-like, and other modes of antirationalism in the art market’s furious quest for authentic expression.¹⁰

Mazur’s status as a privileged outsider granted rare access to the closed spaces of the mental institution, allowing his series to attain a kind of testimonial function that stands outside the typical positions of patient, medical authority, or warden. Many of these images seem imbued with something like the cosmic, tragic vision of madness in the premodern world, which came to be eclipsed as “madness was appropriated by reason” through the emerging modern science of psychiatry, as described by Michel Foucault in The History of Madness—a text that was first published in French and translated into English during the years that Mazur’s lithographs were made. Yet even as modern psychiatry succeeded in inscribing madness into a medical discourse of mental illness—and as institutions were designed and rebuilt to keep pace with each new and seemingly more enlightened advancement in asylum medicine—Foucault maintains that “behind the critical consciousness of madness in all its philosophical, scientific, moral and medicinal guises lurks a second, tragic consciousness of madness, which has never really gone away.” This view sees madness as imbued with a “prophetic force, revealing that the dream-like is real and that a thin surface of illusion opens onto bottomless depths.”¹¹

It can’t really be denied that Mazur’s prints leave behind the overdetermined and admittedly retrograde habit of aesthetically staging scenes of madness and confinement as elementally tragic tableaus of suffering. But they aren’t just providing a novel variation on a familiar tragic theme, either. In Asylums, his 1961 study of the mental hospital as a “total institution,” sociologist Erving Goffman describes the mechanisms by which psychiatric wards enact forms of mortification on the patient’s sense of self. Drawing from fieldwork conducted at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC, Goffman suggests that a defining feature of the total institution is the way that it violates the “territories of the self” and “objects of self-feeling—such as his body, his immediate actions, his thoughts, and some of his possessions.” In total institutions, Goffman observed, “the boundary that the individual places between his being and the environment is invaded and the embodiments of self profaned.”¹² Perhaps in the turning our gaze from the stage-set-like scene of The Corridor, we can glimpse something akin to what Goffman observed about the constant, low-grade forms of refusal and resistance that were an ever-present, indeed necessary, corollary of the asylum system’s attempt to institutionalize total control—the fact that it is always and inevitably doomed to fail. As Goffman contended, “We always find the individual employing methods to keep some distance, some elbow room, between himself and that with which others assume he should be identified.” In this small distance, however miniscule, Goffman saw a tiny, glimmering and perpetually imminent of possibility of defiance, of holding on to the “embodiments of self” that the institution is designed to violate.¹³

Mazur’s lithographs now look back at us too, compelling us to ask about the ways in which looking at them renders palpable our own complicity in systems that constrain the freedom and autonomy of others. Writer Trudy V. Hansen describes the Locked Ward and Closed Ward prints as “dense and tortured,” suggesting that they “present haunting images of humans existing outside the civilized world, individuals who have lost their humanity and are left with only loneliness and desperation.” In the 1950s and early 1960s, Goffman perceived that “the practice of reserving something of oneself from the clutch of an institution is very visible in mental hospitals and prisons but can be found in more benign and less totalistic institutions too.” Goffman went on to insist that “this recalcitrance is not an incidental mechanism of defense but rather an essential constituent of the self.” If Mazur’s Locked Ward prints remain imbued with a certain tragic theatricality that may make viewers queasy, they also doubtless contain the traces of this sort of everyday low-grade recalcitrance, suggesting if we look long enough, we will find something about the persistence of the desire for individuality even in conditions that make it all but impossible to sustain.

In October 2020, while looking for information about a relative who had been institutionalized at the Howard Hospital in the 1930s, Cranston resident Maria da Graca discovered that in 1975, a state highway had been constructed over the area where thousands of patients in the Howard facility were buried.¹⁴ While state officials have now begrudgingly acknowledged this decades-old decision to secretly pave over the hospital’s mass internment site as a “mistake,” they have thus far failed to offer a solution that would adequately redress the long history of denying the personhood of institutionalized patients that this forgotten and paved over mass burial site so exemplifies. Instead, how might we look again at Mazur’s prints, seeing in their strange and unsettling hapticality—the switch point where sight meets touch, hand becomes eye—the grounds for another mode of witnessing, reflection, and, perhaps, repair?