Maureen Cummins
A recurring theme in your artist books is the connection between human rights abuse and profit, from slavery to forced labor in mental institutions to torture. What draws you to representing these connections and why do you think it is important to do so today?
There are so many people and powerful organizations glorifying the quest-for-power–and-profit narrative, the idea that that infinite growth, competition, individualism, etc. is the natural order of things, that I consider it to be my job as an artist to counter that narrative, to expose the invisible violence within the system. I say invisible because the harmful results of domination culture—toxic waste, slave laborers, laid-off workers, migrants, refugees, trafficked people, etc, are usually pushed out of the picture. As more money makes its way into the hands of fewer and fewer people, the situation is only increasing. Abuse of power in a capitalist system is often represented as an anomaly, an unfortunate and random side effect, rather than intrinsic to the system itself. In one of my books, Stocks and Bonds, which explores the history of torture, I learned that in England the king had the right to confiscate the land and goods of any “proven lunatic.” What a convenient arrangement! Once a person is given a certain monstrous label, whether that be communist, criminal, crazy, or now, terrorist or illegal immigrant, almost anything can be done to that person, without protest, comment, or even without notice. The more unbalanced the economic system becomes, the more need there is for war and for a class of people who can be labeled and targeted and terrorized, all of which we’re now seeing plenty of in this post-neo-liberal age. My latest project, AlieNation, which is part of Swarthmore College's Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary Project, is based on first-person accounts of Syrian and Iraqi resettlers. I learned a lot about invisible violence hearing these stories. The US is often seen as heroic for taking in refugees, but my impression from interviewing the resettlers is that it’s more much about creating the next underclass. The refugees who are “allowed” in are in debt the second they get off the plane. Everything that’s paid for them to resettle here is simply a loan. They have to start paying the money back within months, often before they’ve even learned to speak English. What draws me to the stories of marginalized people is the story of my mother, who in 1963 was put in a mental hospital for the first two years of my life after she tried to leave my abusive father. So this work isn’t just ideological for me. I lived it.
Many of your books such as Ghost Diary and Salem Lessons tell the stories of people who were controversial during their lifetime and who might still be perceived that way today, whether that be for being gay, an officer in the Revolutionary War, a criminal, or for being involved in the Salem Witch Trials. Which of these books was the most impactful and emotional for you to make, and why did you want to tell this story?
It’s difficult to say which project has been most emotional and impactful for me. I’m drawn to all the stories I work with because they move me. I was deeply affected by the voice of the closeted gay man in Far Rockaway, I felt that I knew him personally, that I was his confidante. I am also, of course, deeply affected by all the work that I’ve done with my mother’s story, especially my most recent project, Secretary, which deconstructs her suicide. My current project, AlieNation, is impactful in an entirely different way. I’m working for the first time with the actual people who lived to tell their tales, in this case Syrian and Iraqi resettlers in Philadelphia who survived wartime in their respective countries. I felt that it was important, as someone in the position of a reporter/interviewer, to keep a kind of professional reserve, but at some point I had to go into the other room to cry. It was fascinating to me to see how, even after all these years of working with stories of people who’ve been through the worst—violence, torture, persecution—I was still in a certain state of denial. When I first met the resettlers, I couldn’t believe that any of them had experienced the worst. When I was working on Salem Lessons, an older woman friend of mine, a very powerful woman who opened abortion clinics in the 80’s, asked me if I was working on a book about the Salem witchcraft scare because I would have been hung as a witch myself. I laughed, but then stopped laughing when I realized that my mother was the modern-day version of a “witch”—someone who is demonized for being different or for standing up against the system. During my research for Salem Lessons, I read hundreds of historical theories about the event, but the ones that resonated most for me tended to analyze the events from a feminist perspective. Most of the women who were targeted were powerful in ways that were unusual for women at that time: they had money or they owned land or they had the kind of authority usually reserved for men. The “afflicted girls,” in contrast, were extremely powerless. One theory, which is so interesting in the wake of the Me Too movement, is that the outbreak of “hysteria” in those girls was the result of sexual abuse. Many of the girls had lost their mothers to Indian raids, and the absence of a mother in the home is a prime marker for sexualized violence. It also makes sense to me that the girls would target powerful women, the symbolic representatives of the mothers who (assuming this theory is true) weren’t there to protect them.
The Business is Suffering, Far Rockaway, and Ghost Diary all involve letters, correspondences, and personal accounts of painful experiences. What draws you to this form of written communication? Can you describe your process of choosing which ones to catalogue, and how to visually display them?
The original first-person account that came into my hands, the “mother-lode” that has inspired all my work, is a diary that my mother kept for two years before her suicide. This 100-page document, and the powerful truths that it contained, changed my sense of what happened during my childhood. It answered the biggest question of my life, which was why my mother had killed herself. Although I keep returning to that diary as source material, it has also propelled me out into the world, in search of other “hidden histories.”
Accounts & Deeds, Far Rockaway, The Business is Suffering, and The Flag Project all draw upon historical documents - how did your interest in these scavenged or archival documents come about? Is there something about the physicality of those documents/artifacts that affects your views of history, and its construction, in a different way than secondary sources? If so, how?
I’m drawn to actual, historical, primary sources because I get to do the interpreting. I get to look and see and decide what’s there. That’s the natural impulse of any writer or artist or historian, to get as close as they can to their material and then come to their own conclusions. There is also a need for control, an impulse to re-create the world. Everyone has these feelings, but artists act upon them. In several altered newspaper projects, I printed my own imagined titles over New York Times headlines. I literally created the newspaper I wanted the world to read. In this way, art can be a transformative, visionary force. In modern times, it serves the function that magic or religion once did. It can be more powerful and effective than politics, because it speaks the truth without trying to force that truth on anyone. Because artists have this power, they also have a responsibility to seek understanding and healing, which means expressing compassion for both the oppressed and the oppressors. With Ghost Diary, for example, I was working with the recollections of a revolutionary war officer, someone who was involved in Indian massacres. But in the letter he writes to his children, his love and devotion to his wife is heartbreaking. I included both descriptions so that the reader has to deal with that complexity, both the beauty of this man, and also his blindness. In The/rapist, I was working with the story of housewives who had been lobotomized in the mid-20th century. I had a copy of a 1950 textbook by Walter Freeman, the infamous lobotomist, which contained Before-and-After portraits of women patients (and several men). The photos, which predated the era of patient rights, were almost certainly published without consent. I wanted to work with these images, but I also wanted to hide them at the same time, to give back to these women their dignity and anonymity. In this way, art becomes a ritual of healing, not only for the dead, but for the living.
One prominent visual theme that appears in Anatomy of Insanity, Accounts & Deeds, and Stocks & Bonds is the layering of text over text, or text over image. This creates an animate, interactive surface that invites readers in but also obscures what is being said or depicted. What inspires you to display your work in this way?
One librarian/collector once asked me—not without a certain impatience—if I cared whether my text was legible or not. He was referring to Accounts and Deeds, in which entire passages are rendered illegible due to overprinting. I told him that my overlaying was intentional, that I wanted parts of the story to be legible, and others not, and that I wanted that process to be somewhat random. So much of any given story—especially when power, politics, and profit is involved—is hidden or impossible to read, while other parts of the story manage to burst through. I’ve been thinking about this in the wake of recent, highly publicized sexual harassment allegations. Many stories can’t be fully told because of non-disclosure contracts. The system protects itself.