an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 6,
September-October-November 2009, ISSN 1552-5112
Modernist Asylum Art
and the Contemporary Consideration of Art
Our admiration for painting results from a long process
of adaptation that has taken place over centuries and for reasons that often
have nothing to do with art or the mind. Painting created its receiver. It is
basically a conventional relationship (Gombrowicz to Dubuffet as cited by
Baudrillard, 2005:29)
I. Introduction
The art world has long been haunted by
the absence of madness. Various
movements (including Expressionism and Surrealism) deeply admired the artistic
output of several who were incarcerated in asylums. Some asylum art, whatever
the intention of its makers, falls into well established aesthetic categories
and artistic styles in interesting and often innovative ways. Why then are we
almost always protected, when we visit the collections and temporary
exhibitions of the vast majority of mainstream art museums, from the works of
those who have been officially labeled “insane” or “mentally incompetent”?[1] The modern artist Jean Dubuffet did much to bring
attention to the work of these artists while collecting over 5000 of their
works.[2] As did Nietzsche before him and Rauschenberg after,
Dubuffet understood the work of homo demens to be as important a creative act
as that of homo sapiens.
In this paper I focus on the work of six
artists who were labeled insane and went on to create in asylums (Aloïse
Corbaz, Adolf Wölfli, Carlo Zinelle, Sylvain Fusco, Auguste Forestier, and
Johann Hauser). Each produced works in isolation from the routinized terrorism
of mainstream socialization and formal artistic traditions. While it may be
understandable why, in their time, most of the artists discussed here were
sequestered from society, either for the protection of themselves or other
members of society, there is no good reason why their art should remain
segregated today. I focus on two sound scholarly reasons why this segregation
should end: 1) much of the output of these artists overlaps significantly with
mainstream art movements and styles, and, 2) when placed alongside art produced
outside the asylum these works help to deepen and extend our understanding of
not only movements and styles but of human creation more broadly.
It is important in this assessment to
avoid romanticizing these artists while, at the same time, acknowledging that art
made outside of formal artistic culture does often point to the artificiality
and insincerity of the mainstream art world. Segregation of art works made by
the “insane” also serves to continue the myth that there is an art of madness
as distinct from something like an “art proper”. Dubuffet was helpful here when
he said: “there no more exists an art of madness than an art of bad knees”
(Thévoz, 2001:9).
II. Six
Asylum Artists[3]
a) Aloïse
Corbaz
1. Aloïse Corbaz. Mickens
(1936-64). Collection Art Brut,
The makers of asylum art discussed here
were all, for major portions of their adult lives, inmates in what the great
labeling machinery of early modernity called “insane asylums”. If we understand
their work, as did the important Parallel
Visions exhibition at the
2. Aloïse Corbaz. Lit du train
(c 1955)
Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964) was interned at
the asylum La Rosière (
Aloïse used bold colours in a way that
stress contrast while emphasizing the flatness of the work of art – a concern
of modernism from the late 19th century (Van Gogh, Sérusier), on
down through geometric abstraction in the 1950’s-1960’s. Her work, like a good
deal of early modernism, profits from its “hurried” look but when we examine it
with care we find that she laboured intensely and with great care over many
details (such as the elaborate hand drawn curls in the blonde woman’s hair in Lit du Train). While she was given to
delusions Aloïse’s medical records tell the story of a woman with a strong
memory and high intelligence (Thévoz, 2001;54). It is very unlikely that she
would be incarcerated if she were living today.
Art is not a question of truth but of
illusion and for a work to be considered art it should tell us something about
the power of illusion (Baudrillard, 2005:64). Aloïse used her art to live
vicariously in the lives of those she found in magazine stories, histories, and
the Bible. What some might understand as naïve elements in her art has a good
deal to do with the media available to her (coloured crayons are the media of
most children). We should also keep in mind that, despite the limits imposed by
available media, her work shares characteristics with some of the most
innovative modern trends. Indeed, many of the quasi-human characters which
appear in her art (as in Mickens) are
not only part of the complex and unique symbolic world the artist created but
have something to say to cubism.
The quasi-human animal and bird like
figures also recall German Expressionism, especially some work by Emile Nolde
and by Otto Dix.[4] Along with Nolde, Dix, and many other
Expressionists, Aloïse used art as a way of reconciling her place in the world.
While it is very close to German Expressionism (we do not know if she ever saw
modern artworks either in illustrations or at a gallery), the artistic
brilliance of her work is to be found in the frequent use of Cubist
representational devices. Such devices are rare in Expressionism and here
Aloïse is especially innovative in synthesizing aesthetics. A good deal of her
work possesses a stylistic quality reminiscent of a famous cubist who also had
his own unique symbolic repertoire – Picasso.
3. Pablo Picasso. Crucifixion
(1930).
In Mickens
(the female figure on the left), we find breasts stacked on top of one another
and other body parts flowing into and out of other figures as we find in
Picasso’s complex visual vocabulary of the 1930s. This figure is separated by
another head from two stacked heads of a bird-like creature. Aloïse’s work
often included collages constructed of several figures sharing a confined space
as in pre-Renaissance Church art and in popular magazine covers.
4. Emile Nolde. The Enthusiast (1919).
There is then a very certain
Expressionism meets Cubism (Nolde meets Picasso) integration of styles at play
in Aloïse’s art. Whether or not she as influenced by images of modern art (it
seems likely she would have seen them in magazines) her work is however unusual
(if not unique) in how it merges the two major styles of early modernism.
Aloïse also left behind an interesting combination of Expressionist colour, Pop
artifacts, and traditionally defined “women’s” art (as she often [e.g. Mickens] sewed the coloured renderings
and pictures onto sheets of paper to make the final work). Jann Haworth’s L.A. Times Bedspread (1965) [on which
she sewed popular images and comic strip names] comes to mind as does the
Expressionistic painting of Canadian artist Joyce Wieland who often deals with
popular figures and the objects of the artist’s erotic imagination.
5. Joyce Wieland. Artist on fire (1983).
Aloïse frequently painted herself
(breasts exposed) in the arms of another – often a famous person. Aloïse, like
many asylum artists of the first half of the twentieth century, made works
which have a good deal in common with late twentieth century Neo-Expressionism
(especially Horst Antes and Mimmo Paladino).
6. Horst Antes. Blue figure: St. Francis of Assisi. Private Collection.
In Cubist, Expressionist, and Pop terms,
Aloïse Corbaz produced art which requires the terminology of the art world to
describe. If we were to make a case for excluding it from “art” because she did
not use oil paint then we would need to exclude all works which rely on pencil.
For her merger of cubist and Expressionist devices, her unique cubist forms,
merging of primitive creatures with human form, and her use of popular images
from magazines, Aloïse is an important innovator in modern art. Whatever her
motivations for making her art, and whatever her mental state, Aloïse’s work
not only overlaps with mainstream modernism in interesting ways but provides
unique insights into the application/merger of modern style. The fact that she
produced these works in the terrible asylum conditions of her day only serves
to make her work all the more amazing. When I attended the Europop exhibition in
b) Adolf
Wölfli
7. Wölfli. Holy
After being found attempting to molest a
three year old girl in 1895, Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) was sent to the Waldau
Mental Asylum in
8. Paul Klee. Landscape with
Yellow Birds (1932)
Private Collection,
The text was from another inner world, Wölfli’s
own, and constitutes on its own an extensive written oeuvre (see Spoerri and
Baumann, 2003:19-25). Wölfli’s drawing participates in a modern concern for
flatness – and shares with Klee a density of figures. Wölfli apparently
detested any unused space on the sheets on which he drew or those on which he
wrote and affixed pop images. Given his seemingly inexhaustible artistic drive
(about 2,000 drawings and illustrations and over 25,000 pages of text), it is
probably the case that the density of his works reflect an unquenchable desire
to be empty of his thoughts. Art performs this function for every artist – a
place of emptying out, that which can no longer be borne within. It is not as
rare as we like to think for modern artists to write – Picasso gave up painting
for poetry for a time in the mid-1930s and wrote one play during World War II (Desire caught by the tail [Désir attrapé par la queue]). Wölfli’s
oeuvre shows us that a kind of internal necessity drives the art of a man
labeled “insane” as it often does any artist. In Wölfli’s case we can
acknowledge that schizophrenia was but one of his diverse “media” and is
fundamental to his efforts. I do not mean to romanticize mental illness but we
should acknowledge that its existence has sometimes led to interesting and
important outcomes – outcomes which may not necessarily be accessible to those
what are not mentally ill. Van Gogh too, was for a period in his life, a mental
patient. We should not deny to Wölfli, and other incarcerated artists, the serious
effort to understand the linkages between mental illness and art we lavish upon
Van Gogh. Even if beauty is not the product of a troubled mind, often,
interesting art is. Perhaps art inspired by madness seems more direct because
to be insane is to have less distance from oneself, yet a far greater distance
from others than so called “sane” people?
Images taken from magazines (especially
advertising) which find their way into Wölfli’s work are especially
interesting. Many aficionados of Andy Warhol’s work may be surprised to learn
that the first use of a Campbell’s Soup can (Tomato) was by Wölfli who inserted
a Campbell’s advertisement into his Campbell’s
Tomato Soup (Funeral March) of 1929.
9. Adolf Wölfli.
Advertisements clipped from magazines for
Kraft Cheese, Monarch Coffee, Suchard Chocolates, Bon Ami cleaner and many
other products appear in Wölfli’s work as do reproductions of famous popular
singers, actors, explorers, and politicians (see Spoerri and Baumann,
2003:83-93). Looking at Wölfli’s art on display in
10. Peter Blake. Love Wall
(1961). Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,
As with the work of Aloïse we can only
wonder about the absence of Wölfli’s very early use of popular images from the Europop show in Zurich which,
ironically, prided itself on its inclusivity, diversity, and effort to mine the
earliest uses of popular images in art (Bezzola and Lentzsch, 2008: [English
section of catalogue]:i).
Why might Wölfli (and Aloïse) be excluded
from Europop given its interest in early use of popular images in European art
making? Perhaps American Andy Warhol’s unspecified position in relation to his
own work is of some help in answering this question. There continues to be a
lively debate as to whether Warhol’s intentions, when he painted one of his
Campbell’s cans or Coca Cola bottles, were motivated by ironic parody, subtle
critical subversion, cynical exploitation, or naïve admiration and imitation (Ibid.:vi). Wölfli certainly could be fit
into the category of “naïve admiration and imitation” if not “critical
subversion”. A good deal may be at stake for the proponents of Pop art in
keeping Wölfli’s work (and that of other asylum inmates who used popular images
in making art) out of what the art world considers ‘official’ Pop art. This has
to do with the fact that the art world, for many years, found it difficult to
include Pop (which came under incredible ridicule in its early days from the
mainstream art world and abstract artists), because Pop, as practiced by Warhol
and others, signals the end of the artificial category of “high art”. It is
ironic indeed to see several shows and dozens of curators and authors struggle
for the past half-century to stress the intellectual and artistic seriousness
of Pop as a mainstream movement. Jean Baudrillard understood Pop precisely
because he worked without commitments to see the movement enshrined as art. For
Baudrillard all art is kitsch after Pop appears:
Abstract Expressionism was still a kind of
avant-garde. Avant-gardes are subversive, and Abstract Expressionism was still
a form of gestural subversion of painting and representation. After that, we’re
no longer talking about the avant-garde. It’s still possible to come up with
something new, but this is merely ‘posthumous representation’. It’s beyond the
destruction of representation. What’s more, this creates a very confused world,
because all forms are possible. In this sense it may be true that beyond the
avant-garde you simply have kitsch. (Baudrillard in Genosko, 2001:144)
Wölfli’s exclusion can be understood, in
light of this line of thought, as a product of the efforts of supporters of
Pop. Supporters of Pop continue to see it included in the new museal and aesthetic
academicism wherein contemporary art continues the modernist trajectory of a
movement from “ism” to “ism”. Pop’s status in the official art world has become
so dependent upon its intellectual status (cynicism, ironic, critical) at the
expense of categories such as naïve and affirmative, that the inclusion of
Wölfli’s work in a contemporary showing of the origins and development of Pop
could be seen as potentially devastating to fifty years of hard work to
establish the artistic seriousness and intellectual credibility of the
movement. Wölfli, it should be noted, considered himself to be an important
artist and sold many of his works while he was alive (Thévoz, 2001:122).
Despite the reluctance of most proponents
of Pop to engage with it, Wölfli’s work has come to be embraced by the broader
art world, especially his work which does not include popular images. This no
doubt has something to do with the reappraisal of Klee’s work which was itself
very difficult to fit into the narrative of modernism. Klee’s art is alive with
primitive masks, totemic symbols flowing quasi-abstract life forms (birds,
insects, humans) as is that of Wölfli as we see in his Holy St.
c)
Carlo Zinelle
On the horizon, in the most distant fog, one always
sees faces. …You see in my eyes nature’s altar, blossoms on stumps and roots,
cartilage, negative forms, shadow stains. Marching up of the epileptics,
orchestrations of the bloated, warted, gruel-like, and jellyfish creatures,
limbs interlaced with erectile tissue (Georg Baselitz (1961).
11. Carlo Zinelle. Composition (1964). Collection Art Brut,
Carlo Zinelle (1916-74) returned from
front line action in World War II mentally depleted. Doctor’s concluded that he
suffered from paranoia and he was committed to the
12. Carlo Zinelle. Yellow Animal
(1964). Collection Art Brut,
Gouache on paper.
Carlo’s art anticipates that of Romare
Reardon[5] in the 1960’s as well as the Neo-Expressionists of
the 1980s (Jean-Marie Basquiat and Georg Baselitz[6] in particular). Jean Dubuffet’s own primitive period
(1940s) also comes to mind such as his Nuance
d’Abricot (1947, Pompidou Centre, Paris)[7].
13. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Flexible
(1984)
The presence of Zinelle forces us to reconsider
the appearance of Neo-Expressionism as a 1970’s phenomenon. Ironically, these
Neo-Expressionists were called the “new wild ones” in the 1970s. Zinelle’s art
falls at the core of Neo-Expressionism because it is, as Donald Kuspit said of
1970s Neo-Expressionists: “a revival of traditional themes of self-expression
in European art after decades” (Kuspit, 2006). As much as any other
Neo-Expressionist, Zinelle’s work anticipates that of A. R. Penck who was
himself considered to be nearly insane by members of the old East German party
elite in the former German Democratic Republic. Penck has said that one of his
formative influences was Paul Klee.
14. A. R. Penck. Me, in
Zinelle (like Penck in particular)
favoured a pictographic idiom of archetypal figures and forms. For Zinelle, as
for most Neo-Expressionists, the subject matter of the work reflects interests
directly connected to the emotive life of the artist. Zinelle’s symbolism seems
to be a kind of fusing of rational and irrational forms and this makes it
especially Neo-Expressionist. Indeed, what seems to arrive “naturally” to
Zinelle is the product of great effort on the part of a painter like Penck.
There is also a decorative quality to much mature Neo-Expressionism which is
also part of Zinelle’s work, especially in his selection and arrangement of
colour.
15. Carlo Zinelle. Composition, c 1964. Location unknown.
Like Wölfli, Zinelle made use of most of the
entire sheet of paper. Zinelle’s paintings also possess a primordial quality
reminiscent of aboriginal archetypes found in caves and, in many cases, still
part of artistic traditions around the world. Ironically the exclusion of
Zinelle’s art from an assessment of Expressionism places him (like other
Western-based asylum artists), in the position of the colonial Other, whose
work has been forever detained at the gates of modernism (which nonetheless
delighted in looting it). Zinelle deserves more attention from the mainstream
art world because, if for no other reason, at the peak of Abstract
Expressionism and Pop he represents a bridge between Expressionism and
Neo-Expressionism that would come into prominence in mainstream Western art in
another twenty years. Zinelle’s work was fed by a mind made ambivalent in the
extreme from the experience of war and this too has been a defining
characteristic of post-war German Neo-Expressionism.
d) Sylvain
Fusco
16. Sylvain Fusco. Queen
(1935). Collection Art Brut,
Sylvain Fusco (1903-40) was interned at
the
17. Marc Chagall. The
Fusco’s art also deepens our
understanding of Surrealism in that it often fragments the body in a way
Surrealism, with its reluctance to go past distorting the body, usually did
not. In doing so this “insane” artist may show us a key to some of the internal
and unrecognized conflicts of the “sane” Surrealist artist unable to step over
the divide into the insanity they so envied. Mainstream Surrealism’s “sanity”
may hinge on this concern for not fragmenting the body and for maintaining
unity even in the more distorted bodily forms represented in Surrealist art.
Mainstream surrealism, we may discover, have more difficulty than we have
recognized in removing its mask, and in doing so, approaching more closely the
directness of the art of children and the insane it so admired. If we conclude
that Surrealism did not wear such a mask, then we might conclude that
mainstream “sane” Surrealist artists at least tended to uphold a certain
posture that is not present in Fusco’s surreal art. This applies, I think,
across the artistic universe where asylum art is considered. To put it another
way, sane artists have to struggle very hard to accomplish the formal qualities
of the art of the “insane”. So much of the history of Dada is also contained in
this thought. Looking at Fusco alongside of mainstream modernism opens
questions and pathways of enquiry of its own as does the art of the other
asylum artists examined in this essay.
e)
Auguste Forestier
Writing on Duchamp, Schwitters, Cornell
and various other mainstream artists records the story of the found object
entering into the arts. We do not however hear the story of Auguste Forestier
(1887-1958) among these artists who turned trash into art. Forestier’s
obsession with trains led him to accidentally derail one when he was
twenty-seven. Thereafter he was interred at the psychiatric hospital in
18. Auguste Forestier. Figure With
Bird’s Head (1935-49)
Collection Art Brut,
I am also reminded of some of Picasso’s
smaller figurative sculptures when assessing the plastic qualities of
Forestier. It is often forgotten today that Picasso, who worked with
traditional media such as bronze, also made works from fashioning found pieces
of wood to which he applied paint. Forestier, like Rauschenberg or Picasso,
made no effort to hide how his work was made emphasizing the presence of the
artists hand.
19. Pablo Picasso. Figure (1935)
MOMA,
(Photograph: Life Magazine)
In sculpture as elsewhere in modernism,
the inclusion of asylum artists like Forestier alongside of mainstream art,
opens a series of insights we have previously been denied.
Picasso, who was very close to Andre
Breton (while strategically avoiding official membership among the
surrealists), was well aware of the work of asylum artists by the early 1930s
and accepted it as art in its own right (Breton, 1953:225). An interesting
footnote in the history of twentieth century art is that Picasso and many
Surrealists embraced what they considered to be the “naturalness” and
“authenticity” of asylum art. It is interesting that it was the art of
schizophrenics and their world view that was so admired as capitalism itself
would soon come to be understood by psychologists and philosophers as
schizophrenic. Today we need not resort to romanticism for this view (as
Picasso and the surrealists may have) but rather to Deleuze and Guattari’s
understanding that capital accumulation is dependent upon the sadness and ressentiment peculiar to schizophrenics
(1987; 2001:215-20). Interestingly, Picasso himself was judged to be a
schizophrenic by no less a psychiatrist than Carl Jung (1967:138). Picasso’s
dependable and somewhat sympathetic biographer, John Richardson, says Jung’s
diagnosis does not seem all that egregious. For all his moralizing, Jung was
the first non-poet to shine a fresh light on Picasso’s dark side” (2007:485).
f)
Johann Hauser
…is it not essential that in a movement of amused
intelligence, a person of unreason is allowed back into daylight at the very
moment he was believed to be most
profoundly hidden in the space of confinement? …As if, at the moment of its
triumph, reason revived and permitted to drift on the margins of order a
character whose mask it had fashioned in derision – a sort of double in which
it both recognized and revoked itself (Foucault, [1961] 1973:201-2).
Johann Hauser (1926-1996) has received a
good deal of attention over the past forty years in Europe and the
20. Johann Hauser. Woman
(1969). Musée Art Brut,
Hauser’s women are his own take on the
highly sexualized images appearing in popular magazines of the day to which he
had access. His inspiration was thus that of many other artists working with
the same Pop imagery, such as that of Mel Ramos, Peter Philips, or Alan Jones.
Like much of this imagery Hauser’s figures are often incomplete (
21. Alan Jones. Perfect Match
(1967). Museum Ludwig, Köln
22. Johann Hauser. Woman
(1983)
Like Picasso his women often have extra
digits (young girl in a yellow dress has six fingers and a thumb while
Picasso’s masterpiece Dream (1932)
has five fingers and a thumb on each hand[8]. As such Hauser takes Pop into Cubist, Surrealist,
and Expressionist territories, where it normally was reluctant to tread. In
this, Hauser’s “limited” mental age, which protected him from regimes of
artistic socialization, affords him a Mannerist quality so rare in mainstream
Pop with its concern for slick and polished surfaces. Hauser’s work exudes a
visceral and tactile gesture that we also see in the works of Aloïse, Wölfli,
Zinelle, Fusco, and Forestier as reproduced in this paper.
In 1997 Hauser’s work was among that of
several “Gugging” artists (inmates of the
The St. Etienne Gallery show also noted
many perceptual linkages between the asylum art and early modernism, including:
an attraction to geometric patterns, elaborate distortions of figures from “reality”,
the use of vivid colours in original ways, as well as the juxtaposition of
objects not normally found together. We were also reminded by this show that
many of the Expressionists themselves experienced mental breakdowns at some
point in their life, including Kokoschka, Kirchner, and Beckmann.
The St. Etienne show deeply blurred the
lines of demarcation which had previously separated the art of mental patients
from the mainstream. Hauser is especially important in this reappraisal as his
work straddles the boundaries of Pop and Neo-Expressionism. Hauser shows us
that art drawing on popular imagery can now be viewed as a deeper, richer,
Mannerist and Expressionist phenomenon than simply a cool analytical event in
art history. Popular images in the hands of some labeled “insane” often lead to
very “hot” (Aloïse and Hauser) images which are anything but cool and detached.
III.
Conclusion
It seems certain that each of the
practitioners of asylum art discussed in this paper, as with many other interesting
artists, made art in response to an inner necessity. It is important however to
understand that these artists, while institutionalized, did not create in
isolation and many were initiated into art as part of their treatment. Each
was, at some point (before or after) exhibiting a desire to create, encouraged
to do so and supplied with various media by doctors. Their art is what all art
is – a means of communication which (usually) responds positively to the
recognition of others. The mental hospital is anything but a social vacuum.
What makes these asylum artists (and no doubt many others not discussed in this
paper), interesting is the way in which their work overlaps with, and can help
us to a deeper understanding of, mainstream art movements.
Whether or not labeled “insane”, many
artists live at odds with society. To exclude Wölfli from our understanding of
the emergence of Pop because he suffered mental problems is akin to wiping the
works of Antonin Artaud from the history of theatre because he was a delusional
psychotic given to hallucinations the kind of which are associated with
schizophrenia (Kuspit, 1997). Is it Artaud’s ability to live outside of the
mental asylum [following an incarceration of two years during which time he
received electric shock treatment for 18 months] which qualifies him as an
artist? Insanity does not necessarily make one an artist, or merit privileged
status in the arts – yet many artists who were institutionalized made art which
can continue to make interesting and important contributions to how we
understand art. Artists like Aloïse and Wölfli qualify not merely because they
“look like” Expressionist art or Pop art, but because when their works are
included, they expand our understanding of these (and other) movements. Aloïse
produced a highly unique and personal fusion of Cubism, Expressionism and Pop
images while Wölfli pioneered in the use of Pop images. Art is very much the
product of the human nervous system and the artistic efforts of the “insane”
only serve to expand the complexity of the functioning of art in this system.
Asylum art reminds us that madness should not always be considered as a
negative value as it tends to be in the West. As such, asylum art is very
important in our effort to reappraise not only what is considered “art” but
what is understood as “mad”.
If there is no good reason for the
separation of certain works of asylum art from our understanding of art
movements more generally, why then does it still take place? There are many
reasons not the least of which has been a very well intended effort on the part
of some important supporters of asylum inmates to protect the works and their
makers from the official art world. Jean Dubuffet, at the time of his gift of
5,000 works to
The works examined above do provide
sufficient evidence to lead a continued effort to reassess the artistic value
of the work of asylum artists. Indeed, it is time to stop protecting the works
of asylum art because doing so only protects an art world from an a deeper
consideration of itself. Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Pop have very
deep veins to mine in this regard. This reassessment, I believe, will continue
because, as we see in this paper, the art world will emerge richer for the
experience if somewhat demythologized. Deconstruction and demythologization
have not harmed the art world since the 1970s – indeed, they have made it more
self aware.
Another thing, contra Dubuffet (see Thévoz,
2001:9), that we learn from this assessment is that asylum art is anything but
an ahistorical art. It is very interesting, and will no doubt be the subject of
several future enquiries, that this art, which looks as it does, took place in
a particular time (the twentieth century) in a particular place (
Whether the
well intentioned self proclaimed protectors of asylum art like it or not, it
seems that the works by those labeled “insane” deserve to be recognized fully
as art in its own right. Including them and their works in our assessment of
art full and proper can only add to our collective conversation concerning
human creativity. What is most appealing perhaps about asylum art is that it
adds layers of complexity to the story of art. Hans Prinzhorn realized almost a
century ago that: “The differentiation of our pictures [asylum art] from those
of the fine arts is possible today only because of obsolete dogmatism.
Otherwise there are no demarcation lines (1922 [1972:271]). Prinzhorn held a
degree in art history from the
We live in a time when many people who would have been confined to asylums in the past now live as part of greater society due to drugs and outpatient therapies. Despite the powerful institutional forces working to protect us from asylum art it is time to release it as well. Surely these forces are not as powerful as those which once incarcerated its makers?
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 6,
September-October-November 2009, ISSN 1552-5112
References
Georg Baselitz (1961). “Pandemonic Manifesto I” [2nd
Version]. In Stiles and Selz, Theories
and Documents of Contemporary Art.
Jean Baudrillard (1993). The Transparency of Evil (c1990),
Jean Baudrillard (2002) [with
Jean Nouvel]. The Singular Objects of
Architecture (c 2000),
Jean Baudrillard (2005). The Conspiracy of Art. Edited by Sylvere Lotringer.
André Breton (1953). “L’Art de
focus” in Les Clé des Champs.
Tobia Bezzola and Franiska Lentzsch (2008). Europop (Exhibition Catalogue, 15
February – 12 May, Kunsthaus Zurich). Köln:
Anne Bowler (1997). “Asylum Art: The Social
Construction of an Aesthetic Category” in Vera Zolberg and Joni Maya Cherbo. Outsider Art.
Gerry Coulter (2008). “Painting As A Radical Act:
Enrico Baj and Jean Baudrillard” in Izinsiz
Gosteri. Number 179 (July-August): http://www.izinsizgosteri.net/asalsayi179/gerry.coulter_eng.179.html
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2001).
“Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium” in Sylvere Lotringer. Hatred of Capitalism.
Michel Foucault ([1961]1973). Madness and
Civilization.
Gary Genosko (Editor, 2001). The Uncollected Baudrillard,
Robert Goldwater (1986). Primitivism in Modern Art.
Walter Goodman (1987). “Art’s anguish is a constant
joy to behold”. New York Times
(August 9):H19-20.
Carl Jung (1967). Collected Works, Volume 15: Psychology and Alchemy.
Donald Kuspit (1997). “Antonin Artaud – Works on
Paper”. Artforum International
(January): http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n5_v35/ai_19225285/
Donald Kuspit (2006). A Critical History of Twentieth Century Art (see especially
chapters 8 and 9). Available at: Artnet.com: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit7-28-06.asp
[Accessed July 14, 2009].
John MacGregor (1989). The Discovery of the Art of the Insane.
Pablo Picasso ([1941] 2000). Play: Désir attrapé par la queue (Desire Caught By The Tail).
Hans Prinzhorn ([1922] 1972). Artistry of the Mentally
John Richardson (2007). A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years – 1917-32.
Elka Spoerri and Daniel Bauman (2003). The Art of Adolf Wölfli.
Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (1996). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art.
Michel Thévoz (2001). The Art Brut Collection
Endnotes
