PROJECT 3: MENTAL HANDICAP.

Barbara and Carol.
Oil on canvas. 60 inches x 54 inches. 1975

In 1976 Lenkiewicz produced a small book titled: Mental Handicap Survey Plymouth. He asked several hundred families for permission to paint children and adults, representing a variety of mentally disadvantaged conditions.
The Exhibition was presented in the same derelict warehouse that had housed the Vagrancy project on the Barbican. Massive though the project was, it fell on deaf ears. Though some degree of social insight had developed - and it had been a long time coming - it was still far from satisfactory at the time of this project. Today, complacency is fast replacing ignorance. At the end of her contribution to Lenkiewicz's published survey, Baroness Vickers of Devonport and Life President of the Plymouth Society for Mental Handicap, noted: "five hundred parents of those depicted (in Project 3) have had great courage in allowing these portraits to be shown because they realised that this Exhibition may make a major change in the whole of the general public to the mentally retarded in Britain."
Lenkiewicz's somewhat harsh preface to the Mental Handicap Survey observed that:

"A handicapped child means a handicapped parent .. complaint has produced most of our art and literature, and most of our social and educational patterns. We say "Why me? I did not deliberately inflict this problem upon myself. " And here is where we miss the point, for we assume that we do anything, anything at all deliberately .. Over the last eight months, four hundred persons and myself have been engaged upon an act of complaint. "

Lenkiewicz proceeds with the observation that 'parents' versus 'society' has always operated upon a basis of certain rules, and that this ritual of maudlin altruism is unproductive.

"The paradox consists of two kinds of brain damage running parallel; the mentally handicapped childl adult and the 'normal' member of Society. "

A thread runs through even the earliest projects, linking the two issues of ethics and aesthetics, and they certainly surface in both Project I and Project 3.