The term Aesthetic was first coined in 1735 to mean “the science of how things are known via the senses.” Another way to describe it would be to say that it deals with an individual’s understanding of what seems right or appealing. One person’s strange is another person’s normal. While we think of these places we call asylums as strange and foreign, for those who inhabited them this was their normal. This was the world that they had to learn to cope and function within. And just as each of our minds is a structure that consists of a series of corridors, rooms, walls, and passageways, these asylums that these patients had to learn to navigate and negotiate their lives to, were just as dynamically diverse and individually intricate. While there was certainly overlap in their mission mandate and functions collectively, respectively they varied in their resources and the ways in which they used them. The following link: http://www.designboom.com/art/jeremy-harris-the-architecture-of-abandoned-american-asylums/ offers a collage of images that show the now quiet and abandoned halls of these once thriving institutions. Now they seem to be nothing more than just a shells of their former selves. Much like the lives of many whom walked their halls, I would imagine. Thinking of nothing but the lives they once had. Hollow. Worn. Damaged. Empty. And Sad!
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