French video artist François Pain, a founding member of the post-1968 Free Radio Movement, interned at the La Borde psychiatry clinic in Cour-Cheverny while a medical student in the 1960s and stayed on long after. This experience served as the primary catalyst for the work on view in “Psychiatry is what Psychiatrists do,” his first solo show in the United States. With the clinic’s director, Jean Oury; educator Fernand Deligny; and psychiatrist and philosopher Félix Guattari, Pain came to find shared political cause with Institutional Psychotherapy, or IP, a radically anti-asylum and unhierarchical mode of care developed initially by Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles during World War II. At Saint-Alban, Tosquelles saw the hospital as a determining structure, understanding the emancipation of the subject to be contingent on the transformation of the institution into a participatory community for staff (doctors, nurses, groundskeepers) and ostensible patients alike. At JOAN, this history was invoked in an appropriately tautological constructivist title, a description that effectively dodges the definition it purports to offer. According to this formulation, psychiatry is not an independent object but a field continually shaped and redefined by those who enact it. IP is in this context, too, legible as a contingent, necessarily social practice.
A tight survey stewarded by researcher and guest curator Perwana Nazif, the exhibition retold this sometimes emancipatory history of alignment through a variety of media that included a vitrine of archival materials and two of Pain’s now-digitized films, Le cahier vert (The Green Notebook), 1980, wherein the author reads a monologue written by Guattari, and La vague de cristal (The Crystal Wave), 1985, based on a story by Deligny. The vitrine also held an accompanying volume published on the occasion by Semiotext(e). Most prominent in scale and ambition was the new, nine-screen video installation De la psychothérapie institutionnelle considérée comme l’un des beaux-arts (Institutional Psychotherapy as One of the Fine Arts), 2025. In it, Pain splices footage from the past decades into an epic cacophonic score comprising interviews with Oury and others; footage of La Borde; shots of inhabitants wandering amid what has become an environment porous to the world beyond it; and scenes depicting seminars, protests, and soldiers shouldering the dead. Such fleeting imagery hopscotches across the three-by-three grid of screens, where it does not really assemble but nevertheless holds together, with one scene reframing the last and in turn the next.
Indeed, the presentation’s point seemed to be not only to figure a historical accounting of the theorizations motivating Pain’s work in and out of the clinic, but also to render such anti-fascist work urgently contemporary. (One vignette of De la psychothérapie institutionnelle features Oury remarking of the postwar period that war “never really ends.”) This exhibition came on the heels of a wave of renewed curatorial interest in IP following both the group show “Approaching Reason” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2024, in which Pain figured prominently, and “Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut” at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, also in 2024. The latter exhibition stressed the role of Saint-Alban as a haven for political dissidents and intellectuals, not least Tosquelles—having arrived in southern France after fleeing the nationalist government of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War—and the art residents (artists and otherwise) made on its grounds. At JOAN, Pain channeled aspects of this record through the aforementioned interviews with Tosquelles and others as an exercise in genealogy and auto-ethnography. Yet the video work was less documentarian than expressionistic, representing in the space of the gallery declaratively performative art as psychic work of his own making.
