Coming to the [Prinzhorn] collection now, over seventy years after Prinzhorn published Artistry of the Mentally ill, our reaction to the works is in turn necessarily conditioned by our contemporary aesthetic thought. What was unattractive and lacking in merit for Prinzhorn, we approach with the knowledge of over a half century’s further artistic endeavor. To understand Prinzhorn’s project it is important to have an understanding of the intellectual climate from which it emerged.
Page 35
While the formal impact of the discovery of African sculpture in the first decade of the [Nineteenth] Century was of enormous significance, the discovery must be viewed in tandem with the spiritual power perceived in these works, and although the ethnic focus has ranged wide over the past ninety years, taking in not just African, but Oceanic, Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Arab culture, the important conjunction of formal with spiritual vitality has remained constant.
The flight from Western civilization has been a flight from its exhausted and over-determined formal vocabulary, towards what was seen as a more innocent, spiritual experience of unmediated and uncorrupted expression. A flight inwards to the unconscious to bring back trophies of authenticity. It goes without saying that today the view of non-European cultures as irrational, timeless and innocent is embarrassingly outdated, and indeed the term ‘primitivism’ itself is highly problematic.
It is not, however, coincidental that the nineteenth-century European interest in Ethnography should be coextensive with an upsurge in interest in the art of the insane. A century ago, the insane, along with the non-European, could be regarded as ‘uncivilized’, existing apart from the temporal organizations and evolutionary progressions of Western society. At the very beginning of the nineteenth century Philippe Pinel …effected a revolution in the care of the insane. Pinel’s practice of acute observation, and his consistent humanity towards his patients, render unsurprising the fact that it is in his writings that we find the earliest references to the spontaneous artistic production of the mentally ill. Later, Benjamin Rush writes:
‘From a part of the brain being preternaturally elevated, but not diseased, the mind sometimes discovers not only unusual strength and acuteness, but certain talents it never exhibited before…The disease which thus evolves these new and wonderful talents and operations of the mind may be compared to an earthquake, which, by convulsing the upper strata of our globe, throws upon its surface precious and splendid fossils, the existence of which was unknown to the proprietors of the soil in which they were buried.
(Rush: 1812)
 |
| 'Air-Loom' Influencing Machine of Illustrations of Madness, 1810 |
John Haslam may have been the first to reproduce patient drawings, in his Illustrations of Madness in 1810. For Haslam the drawings were of diagnostic interest, their reproduction designed to illustrate the insanity of his patient, one James Tilly Matthews. Matthews suffered apparently from the common schizophrenic delusion of persecution, and believed that he was being conspired against, and acted against, by a version of the ‘Influencing Machine’. His drawings of the machine, which he termed an ‘air loom’, derive clearly from the mechanical aesthetics of the early industrial age.
Romanticism positioned the madman within nature, uninhibited by social or moral constrains, unfettered by reason; the romantic tendency toward extreme introspection and individualism made of the madman a kind of hero, in touch with a realty somehow more vivid and authentic, who served to underline the epistemic authority of the imagination.
Pages 36 – 37
For the avant-garde of the last century then, the espousal of marginalized values, of the primitive and the irrational, denoted and oppositional stance in relation to established standards and morality. Although the artist has historically been set apart from ‘ordinary mortals’ in society by virtue of the Platonic notion of divine supernatural inspiration, the popular conception of the shamanistic artist as outside of society, living a bohemian and insecure existence, is a product of the last 150 years.
The inward turn to the essential Self, that echoes the perceived hermeticism of the autism of schizophrenia, is simultaneously a retreat from the imposed social order.
Page 39
Emil Kraepelin had observed that mental illness could ‘set free powers which otherwise are constrained by all kinds of inhibition’ and that under certain circumstances artistic creativity could be enhanced by the euphoria and increased sensory activity associated with it. Prinzhorn however appears here to make a significant leap by arguing in favor of superior ‘configurative power’ in the untrained.
Page 42
Karl Gustav Sievers’s obsessive, repeated repeated drawing of the Correctionhauser bei Gottingen always from the same perspective, in the same scale, rather than a mere illustration of compulsive graphic behavior, becomes a psychological exercise in accommodating the symbolic power of the institution and bringing it within his control.
The conviction of being subject mentally to the control of external forces, whether it be an individual, conspiring groups, radio-waves, telepathy, or a variety of ‘influencing machines’, returns with intriguing frequency throughout description of schizophrenia.
Very often the mechanism by which the schizophrenics’ thoughts are broadcast or intercepted is conceived of as an actual machine. In his seminal essay ‘On the origin of the influencing machine in schizophrenia’ (6th January, 1918), Victor Tausk examines the nature of the machines imagined by patients …Tausk, one of the pioneers around Freud, suggest that the explanation for the fantasy of the ‘influencing machine’ is ‘an attempt to project the feelings of the inner world on to the outer world’ (Tausk, op. cit, 525).
 |
| Add caption |
…Tausk concludes, the influencing apparatus is the projection onto the outside world of the dreamers own genetalia: ‘The frequent complaints of the schizophrenic that the apparatus causes erection, drains off semen and weakens potency only confirms this view’.
…At the same time as they promoted the spontaneous artistic creativity of these patients, both men [Prizhorn and Karl Wilmanns] suppressed any mention of materials brought into the asylums to stimulate this activity, or of the education or artistic skills of the patients prior to their admission to the institution. All this was to bolster their conviction that the altered consciousness of mental illness would produce the ‘precious and splendid fossils’ that Benjamin Rush had written over a hundred years before.
Page 42
Nonetheless it is demostratably a fact that certain types of mental illness can produce periods of euphoria, of markedly increased rates of mental activity, ecstatic, visionary and mystical experiences. These are characteristic of manic depression …
What strikes one about so many of the works they do not lack logic or rationale; in many cases there is an emphatic logic evident in the elaborate systems, charts and calculations and a lucidity in the drawings which gainsays notions of a permanent, destructive, disordering of the intellect.
The varying emotional states in manic depressive illness accord also with the idea of multiple personality, a destabilizing of the image of the self as a stable entity. From here it is an easy step to understanding why the condition has been explained in terms of possession, of supernatural of divine inspiration.
Page 46
No comments:
Post a Comment