The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

Dear fellow sufferers,

Why, in this moment of compressed time and a feeling of vertigo, do I dwell in the dense pages of a seventeenth-century compendium of sadness? If it is, in part, to turn away from the day’s edicts, it is also to begin to come to terms with an agony I try to bury, and one that surfaces, more insistently, among people I love. Robert Burton’s taxonomy gives me a language for both psychic weather and civic climates that choreograph appearance, lingering, and withdrawal.

Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy was published in 1621 and was then revised across two decades and five separate editions under the pseudonym “Democritus Junior.” Somewhere between a medical textbook and a sufferer’s epistemological investigation, it is divided into three “Partitions”: causes and kinds, cures, and particular species (especially love- and religious-melancholy) each ramifying into sections, members, and subsections. It is a pastiche of authorities, relying heavily on Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and Democritus, spliced with recorded case histories and direct observation. In Burton’s day, melancholy was associated with fear, sudden frights, phobias, and terrors; a physiology that is uncannily current if we read his remedies as practices requiring slower, deliberate attention. The Anatomy can be read as a proto manual for keeping community intact in a time and place when community can become quite unstable, unravelling and reforming in a moment. I want to know what happens when Burton’s manual is read aslant, as if its partitions and regimens were instructions for arranging institutions alongside different forms of social life, a kind of early modern score for the choreography of a city that is trying to balance its humors.

In 2007 I was building a series of photographs under the title “Anatomy of Melancholy” based on specific sites of melancholy: the cold, desolate spaces of deep remorse such as the Titan missile silos and other Cold-War-era leftovers. This world-building imagines all the humors as a balancing act managed by the curatorial organizations that make up a city. As the government here embarks on a new phase of nuclear testing and as public space continues to be under attack, I was compelled to revisit this idea. Returning to Burton, I now read those earlier photographs as sketches for a wider humoral cartography, one in which missile silos, museums, gardens, and shelters all become organs in a melancholic body politic whose future is still, precariously, in motion.

Burton runs through causes, kinds, symptoms, and prognostics of melancholy, from supernatural forces to internal complexion and external air, diet, exercise, sleep, and passions. The non-natural causes he names remain with us: atmospheres suffocated by smoke and artificial light; labor is often isolating while intimacies are digital, producing a glut of information about the psyche and a famine of real world connection. The collapse of a public sphere that might hold us together feeds “a politics of inevitability”: nothing will ever change, so why bother.

While relying on Hippocratic notions of four humors and temperaments, and on Aristotle’s understanding of mesotēs—the balance of opposite energies—Burton recognizes a humoral theory that is already spatial: bodies and climates leak into one another; temperament is co-produced by architecture, weather, and labor. If melancholy is perennial, then our task (yours and mine) is to imagine a civic temperament that can meet it: a choreography of a humoral city that absorbs melancholic states instead of exiling them to the clinic or to the screen.

If there were a missing fourth partition, a set of cures for a community or city, I would ask with you: Where can devotion be embodied without coercion? Where can publics cultivate rituals of mutual recognition? When gathering in public narrows, how might architectures and programs lengthen our breath? For a contemporary reader, my invitation is to translate medieval cures into a curatorial langue for civic life, an index of what a body politic needs to stay balanced and flexible. The humoral city understands space as an active participant in psychic equilibrium, capable of aggravating or easing melancholic states.

In the second partition, Burton’s cures focus on everything from non-natural ones to surgeries; from walks in gardens to potions from plants. Burton promotes regimens of better air, a calibrated diet, sufficient sleep and waking, convivial sociability, moderated study and labor, evacuation and repletion, and the passions of the mind. Here, references to Michel de Montaigne claim the “power of imagination and passions of the mind as a way forward”—a force that in itself can sicken or heal us. Diversions, from time for play to watching theater, counsel and friendship, and a number of environmental therapeutics from water and orchards to cloisters and libraries precede physic (pharmacological and surgical interventions), spiritual and pastoral care. Taken together, these regimens read like a plan for a city of gradients, a civic design brief organized around dose, proportion, and seasonal adjustment instead of efficiency alone. He argues that the same tools that cure the scholar may frenzy the sanguine. In the regimen cures of the non-naturals, medicines were used as either alterative (strengthening) or purgative (voiding). A famous remedy for melancholy, the hellebore plant is a flowering evergreen with purging properties. It was used for a wide variety of ailments (including leprosy and palsy) but above all it was associated with treating melancholy, insanity, and delirium. (Note: I must re-introduce the hellebore to my garden.) Surgeries also played a role in curing melancholy. To remedy the excess of sanguine (blood), some physicians bled, cupped, or cautiously applied leeches. These therapeutics thus imply a built environment that scaffolds healthy regimens and solidarities. To design for love and faith can be to design for belonging, awe, and mourning as these are capacities of civicness in themselves.

From here, I begin three small “investigations” that I offer to you as proposals.

The First Investigation proposes to expand the contingencies of public space by examining how spaces relate to the four humors of the body.

In Burton’s time, the body is also the world: blood is to air as phlegm is to water as choler is to fire and as melancholy is to earth.

The sanguine (air/circulation: warm, moist, circulatory). The waterfront winds disperse and carry the sanguine across the city. The sanguine humor re-oxygenates overworked and atomized corridors. Free buses disperse us, while night markets or open-street evenings allow streets to “breathe” without cars. Cadence in a neighborhood is learned from regular processions. Economic circulation is employed through participatory budgeting, and rotating savings associations can turn community ties into insurance against exclusion. City blocks can fund micro-repairs and emergent care.

The phlegmatic (the watery: cold, moist). Shade structures and water features are abundant along hot corridors, floodable pocket parks, rec centers, and an honoring of slow-time pauses allow digestion. Blue-hour assemblies convene outdoor readings, and meals and stipends are available for the caretaking of listening. Public bath–laundry hybrids (hammam/laundromat) as slow-time infrastructures where care work is collective. The phlegmatic establishes the attentiveness of the apartment salon, smaller-scale, dispersed and recurring gatherings in open living rooms.

The choleric (the fiery, the hot, dry, and prone to combustion). Prototyping studios are embedded in libraries; restorative rooms travel to sites of injury; a public grievance board with a quick rebuild period is based on a majority vote. Civic mediation centers co-located within courtyards are designed as de-escalation spaces. Museums and libraries become porous to daily necessities, from legal clinics to cooperative boards. The appliance of poetry produces neighborhood handbooks that travel hand-to-hand.

The cold (dry, depth-risking petrifaction of the earthy melancholic). Rooms for sorrow: sky observatories on rooftops; grief gardens; silent reading spaces that lend books; dusk and dawn programming; a public dream archive that is also an arpillera ledger of loss and mending. Walking paths that trace buried rivers are recognized by brick-lined pathways. Damage would not be hidden, and repair would be visible; “ghost outlines” of former structures would abound; fecund gardens planted in the cracks, flood lines marked on walls and makeshift memorials in parks. Public interiors would set aside space for slowness and withdrawal, where benches invite lingering, and quiet rooms and noticeboards acknowledge personal and collective grief.

The shared passions (fear, sorrow, joy, hope) are embodied, and they alter humoral balance as surely as corrupted fluids will cloud the brain. Burton warns against measuring another’s pain by our own resilience, and he records public catastrophes, like the Bologna earthquake, where private “madness” becomes social. This is why I keep asking how we host collective grief and fear as conditions our spaces are built to dialogue with.

The second investigation is with the artist.

Burton held himself together in the midst of his melancholy by naming the variations and complexities of his ailment: a compulsion to bring order to disorder, or (in Freud’s terms) to turn neurotic melancholy into healthy mourning. Agnes Martin undertakes a parallel operation focused on attention and perception. Her horizons reduce stimulation to near-nothing, converting my own agitation into steadiness so that in the visual fields of her paintings, my disquiet is regulated into focus. Her practice was a regimen of limited means and daily routine that models repeatable, non-dramatic cures. Her paintings can be a humoral medicine: they lower my psychic temperature and act as a tonic, letting me dry out.

In a way, artists like Ernesto Pujol take the constitution of Martin to the metabolism of the city where it belongs. Pujo's durational walks are a form of collective listening. Artists Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s motorcade In Mourning and in Rage (1977) recalls collective acts of necessity such as those by mothers in Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo who first gathered as a “walk” of grieving parents. Lacy and Labowitz used the language of mourning rather than overt opposition to hold space and make disappearances visible. Ann Hamilton’s breath, tears, textile, and reading rooms model curative sense experience by addressing emotional connections to often violent histories. These artwork regimens hold melancholy until it becomes porous and pedagogical. Many of these works train different habits of attention that can leak back into daily life. And when institutions acknowledge their own melancholia, I wonder, can it be received as a common inheritance, or even as some form of a gift? Repurposing empty cathedrals and other reverberant spaces, Pauline Oliveros allows architecture and sound to hold resonant histories. And collective Harriet’s Apothecary works to release often deep-seated harms through organizing ongoing pop-up healing and wellness programs in communities often overlooked by the larger medical industrial complex.

Writer Gregory Sholette describes the creation of “counter-institutions” as art projects in themselves, while also noting how many experimental educational projects are brief or fold under funding cuts, volunteer exhaustion, or co-option by the very institutions they sought to counter. These projects succeed conceptually, but not always metabolically.

In a humoral city, this type of art can’t be rareified; it must be a circulatory practice that disperses risk, care, and attention, so that it is not confined to a single designated “art space,” but acknowledged, metabolized, and partly held at the scale of the city’s whole body. It also should be maintained, as maintenance is often more important than the initial impulse. The co-maintenance of communal care must more deliberately include institutions and public spaces—they are effectively the memories, cultures, humors, and anatomy.

The Third Investigation is with the heterotopia.

Here civic space suffers, curtailed through overlapping strictures. Permit regimes require advance approval for gatherings, backed by enforcement and the constant threat of arrest, effectively teaching people not to assemble. Facial recognition and design focused on circulation fragment plazas into traffic islands and over-managed corridors where crowds cannot physically form or linger. Controls like curfews, park closures, and other emergency laws further strip away the spontaneity that makes a space truly open.

Unlike the no-place of utopia, Michel Foucault’s heterotopia is a real “counter-site” in which a society sets apart and manages spaces that are both inside and outside a dominant order. Heterotopias find important use in the humoral city as autonomous zones that build difference. But popular examples like cinemas, museums, houses of worship, and the garden (according to Foucault, the garden is “the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world”), almost always sit inside of property regimes, policing, and classed access, reminding me that their “otherness” is produced and managed by the very forces they seem to escape.

New York’s High Line, often read as a paradigmatic heterotopia, transforms a section of derelict rail into a spectacular elevated garden. It’s celebrated as an urban “third space,” yet also widely described as a “monument to gentrification” and a hyper-efficient tool for nearby luxury development. In humoral terms: a “green” melancholic/sanguine corridor whose cooling and consolation are funded by displacing neighbors elsewhere is also a branded difference that exercises the potential of real-estate capital instead of interrupting it.

By contrast, projects like Swale (2015–20), a floating project I co-built on a 130-by-40-foot barge planted as a floating food forest, attempted to activate heterotopia as a commons rather than an amenity, organizing “other space” around shared access to plants for food and medicine instead of property ownership. By placing foraging, a banned activity in New York City parks, onto the water, Swale temporarily loosened the legal and spatial logics that keep public land “pristine” but nutritionally inert. It displaced seawater with soil, trees, and edible plants and displaced an everyday act of sustenance from the regulated ground of the city to a platform moored just outside its jurisdiction. At the scale of policy, Swale contributed to the creation of New York City’s first public foodway, making it legally possible to harvest food from one parcel of public land and shifting what could be imagined as a commons. At the same time, Swale was never fully outside the systems it questioned: it relied on permits, philanthropy, and spectacular waterfront views that brush up against the same real-estate forces that convert “green” amenities into value extraction. As a heterotopia, it both inhabited and troubled the residual spaces of “Manhattanism,” using the barge (Foucault referred to the boat as a “heterotopia par excellence”) to stage a fragile commons that was always at risk of being folded back into the very urban metabolism it tried to reimagine.

Foucault expands on heterotopias with what he calls “crisis heterotopias”:

privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc. In our society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found.

Can the “crisis heterotopias” now also include the stage, the independent art space, the museum, the public artwork, or the garden when faced with lack of access to space for certain innate life-giving activities? If so, we must also ask when such spaces reproduce austerity by asking artists and publics to improvise care inside shrinking, surveilled public space, and when they instead re-open the conditions of appearance for those most targeted by policies. Swale, like many artist-initiated heterotopias, sat uneasily between these poles: both a stopgap infrastructure of care inside a diminishing commons and a pressure point on the policies that produced that depletion. In a humoral city, heterotopias, like art, would not be rarefied islands but circulating practices that redistribute exposure to risk and relief, complicating the everyday rather than floating beside it.

If a humoral map is to mean anything, it should signify a city remembering how to be a body. Corridors of sanguine breath cooled by phlegmatic pools; choleric hotspots tempered by melancholic withdrawals. Equalizing measures that disperse centrality and multiply publics through smaller sites and shorter distances, in the process building a fabric that’s quick to regrow after damage. History has already taught us that when instability spreads, our breath must lengthen; where squares are surveilled, rooms must remain sovereign; where decrees harden, knowledge must find ways to be read between the lines. Burton insists that if we remain curious, we have not lost all hope. Simone Weil adds, “It is better to say, ‘I am suffering,’ than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’” I’m trying, with you, to stay with the suffering long enough that our landscapes might change.

Yours,
Mary