The Traumatic Arts

People who lose somebody close to them describe two worlds: the
normal one they can’t reenter and an unreal one of extreme grief. Being
in a hospital room with a dead friend or relative is similarly mentally impossible: The person is there;
the person is gone. It isn’t easy adorning the rooms that contain these
truths.

There is a room at the Hassenfeld Children’s Center for Cancer and
Blood Disorders in New York where the patients and their parents get
bad news, and on the wall there is a painting, but it looks like no
painting at all. The wall is a dusty green, and it looks like leafy
trees have cast their shadows on it. Those “shadows” are a humble but
transporting painting by New York–based artist Mary Temple.
Temple has just finished a huge painting like this at the Seattle
contemporary-art space Western Bridge. At first, it looks like there’s
nothing in the room but the light filtering in from the windows and the
shadows of the trees outside. But there are no trees outside. And when
you walk next to the painted shadows, you don’t block them out with
your body. An imaginary world has been laid down on top of the real
one, and somehow you’re in neither of them.

Temple’s paintings are good hospital art because they are good art
that naturally addresses the emotional situations that arise in a
hospital. It sounds like a simple formula, but bad hospital art is
rampant. (A nonprofit corporation in New York called RxArt has arisen
to address the problem—that’s the group that placed Temple’s
painting.) See for yourself at an art opening this week at Harborview
Medical Center.

The new Norm Maleng Building at the First Hill hospital has
operating rooms, inpatient beds, a psychiatric ward, an intensive care
unit, and 60 newly installed works of art. The theme is landscape,
because studies have shown that patients in rooms with views heal
faster. Unfortunately, this means many small and forgettable paintings
and photographs that barely register except as dots to be passed by or
sat under.

There are two exceptions in the new Harborview building—both
in places you don’t want to find yourself.

Early on a bright morning last week, the intensive-care waiting area
was messy with slept-in makeshift beds of hospital-issue pillows and
blankets spread on couches. An older woman held her head in her hands
on one side of the room; across it a red-eyed younger woman told a
phone, “She died last night.” The art in here is by Anne Appleby, a
Montana artist who paints dusty colored panels that seem to have light
inside them. Three tall paintings in an almost alien yellow-green hue
hang at one end of the waiting room, beaming almost too
brightly—they’re both easy and hard to look at—and a square
of four of them in dark greens and sturdy pinks hangs at the other end.
In between, a giant window-wall showcases the real landscape outside
facing south, toward Mount Rainier.

This intensive-care unit, where souls just slip off and up, is on
the top floor. Down a few is the psychiatric ward, for trapped minds.
As you exit the elevator, you see the other exception, a photograph by
Richard Barnes of a display of real-looking buffalo and a white wolf on
a snowy landscape behind an incomplete plywood proscenium. Barnes took
the picture in a natural-history museum as the display was being built.
Caged lights and workers’ tools deconstruct what’s being constructed.
The truths of nature and history are in the midst of being put
together, and the mind is made to tunnel along, but in a calm way.

It’s not only Harborview that has an art program; there are acres of
art that’s publicly accessible in all the hospitals on Pill Hill. Signs
posted inside Swedish Medical Center explain that the art collection
there dates back to the 1960s and includes more than 2,000 pieces. On a
recent visit, I noticed a vintage street sign cut up and put back
together wrong, but better, cleverly located behind the desk for
surgery sign-ins. (It’s by Seattle’s Robert Yoder.) Nurses and hospital
workers often help select the art—pointing out when it looks too
much like blood or is too upsetting. I couldn’t help but think of that
when, a few chairs away from the surgery desk at Swedish, I noticed an
older man rapt as Tom Cruise stabbed all comers to death for several
minutes in a scene from The Last Samurai showing on
television.

In my own experience, the art at hospitals is a kind gesture, but
not much more, and it’s hard to maintain the attitude that it’s the
thought that counts when you’re miserable. Once, awaiting a sad surgery
at Swedish, I was infuriated by a screamingly cheerful painting of
garish red tulips. Another time, also at Swedish, I was in the
pediatric-intensive-
care-unit waiting room, where all that’s on
the wall is a large framed poster. The poster is of a painting that
shows a gateway out to a beachfront under a blue sky. The thick strokes
of white paint had been reduced to nothing in the process of turning
the painting into a poster. In the next room over, nurses were
preparing to take away the body of a friend of mine; it made me feel
worse that this body of paint had been done away with, too.

At Harborview’s Maleng Building, which is owned by King County, the
art-selection process was overseen by the county’s arts office,
4Culture. Its total art budget was $320,000, derived from the Percent
for Art program. All the intentions here are good. But I don’t remember
most of the art. A little more ambition wouldn’t kill anybody.