Performing Madness in Vienna: Featuring the problem of representing Madness at all (original) (raw)
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THE PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION OF INSANITY
Michel Foucault elaborates on how the unity which existed between image and verb begins to disentangle during the Renaissance. This creates a gap between the cosmical experience of alienation akin to its fascinating forms and the critical experience of this same folly within the scope of irony. I daresay pictorial art is conveyor of these characteristics. While Brant and Erasmus tackled insanity through the universe of discourse, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel the Elder, Thierry Bouts, and Albrecht Dürer (amongst others) depicted the tragic insanity of the world through their works of art. We shall examine what are the faculties affected by madnesswhether it is reason, memory or imagination -and how this is visually rendered. For this purpose, it is essential to differentiate two kinds of alienation. That is to say, one called 'mania' which refers to a dazed state of mind, and the other 'myria' which pertains to a divine creativity.
Spectacles of Madness: Representing Mental Health from ‘Bedlam’ to Bethlem Museum of the Mind.docx
This paper will investigate and compare the changing treatment of exhibitions of mental illness from Victorian ‘Bedlam’ to the present day Bethlem Museum of Mental Health, critically analysing representations of otherness, spectacle, madness and creative mythos surrounding ‘the artistic temperament’ to better understand the museum’s role in societal, scientific and popular narratives around mental health and relationships between institution, exhibition, society and subject.
Madness, Meaning and Mind. Experiences and Expressions
Madness and art have a lot in common. A look at the biographies of eminent artists like Vincent van Gogh, Robert Schumann or Virginia Woolf is suggestive of this link, but so are particular art forms and movements in modernist art such as Dada or Surrealism. These forms of art reveal an alternative look over the world and one's experience of it, different from the conventional way of perceiving reality and interacting with it. One particular phenomenon that gives this proximity between art and madness a new relevance is art brut, outsider art created beyond the limits of official culture, in particular art produced by people suffering from psychotic pathologies of different kinds. Paintings, texts and sculptures produced by insane asylum patients such as Adolf Wölfli or Ferdinand Cheval are admired as works of art and not as the mere expression of an abnormal inner life. This proximity between madness, in all its possible manifestations, and art raises the question of the significance of each in evolutionary terms. Art consumes a lot of energy and attention both in individuals' private life and in social existence, yet its immediate functional importance is not evident, nor is it clear in evolutionary terms what might have been the advantage of this particular form of cultural adaptation. Madness, on the other hand, is a cognitive dysfunction that evolutionary selective pressure has not eradicated, suggesting that there might also be an adaptive advantage in keeping it along the cognitive development of the species. In this paper we propose to explore the affinities between art (with a special focus on literature) and madness, and how this proximity is suggestive of a deeper connection in evolution, important for the development of human cognition as unique as we know it today.
Beyond these Walls: Confronting Madness in Society, Literature and Art
Beyond These Walls, 2013
Despite its disappearance from the diagnostic manuals and the consulting room, hysteria has had a recent cultural resurgence as films, books, and papers update its meaning for our society, marked by dissent, struggle and uncertainty. Its migration into new, more medically manageable conditions (including dissociation, conversion, or post-traumatic stress disorder) highlights the common elements to all forms of hysteria: a struggle with gender, a manifestation of symptoms in the body, and the asking of a question-Che vuoi, or, 'What do you want from me?' We put forward the idea that hysteria is a process, a state of mind, rather than a condition, and that its relationship to femininity and the body-following Juliet Mitchell's argument-is the reason it has disappeared from the medical vocabulary. Yet, this state captures something inherently human, ambivalent and conflicted. It names, defines and understands something elusive. Our chapter will question hysteria as madness in relation to an epistemology that, according to Christopher Bollas, is depraved. 1 Even though it seems to be a state impairing the mind's judgment as the body takes over, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed the production of knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses. 2 The hysteric knows what the master, the university and the analyst do not. We will argue that hysteria as madness relates to the visionary aspect of the state, to the fact that hysterics articulate and know in the body, that which does not want to be known. In order to safeguard a symbolic universe, hysterics are labeled mad, possessed, delusional, or simply as acting out their symptoms. The outcome of this struggle is visual and performative, so we will draw on visual examples-from our production, and that of others. These implicate the body and the gaze, therefore, a witness, creating a space for discourse.
For a minor art: resonances between art, clinical practice and madness nowadays
Interface - Comunicação, Saúde, Educação, 2007
We discuss the changes that were brought about in Brazil in the 20th century related to the acceptance of works of art produced in clinics or, in any way, other than those conventionally accepted by the artistic community. The enlargement of this field, now including dissenting works of art, seems to indicate a change in contemporary sensibility therefore shifting the relationships between art, clinical practice and madness itself.
2015
The loss of reason, a sense of alienation from the commonsense world we all like to imagine we inhabit, the shattering emotional turmoil that seizes hold and won't let go--these are some of the traits we associate with madness. Today, mental disturbance is most commonly viewed through a medical lens, but societies have also sought to make sense of it through religion or the supernatural, or by constructing psychological or social explanations in an effort to tame the demons of unreason. Madness in Civilization traces the long and complex history of this affliction and our attempts to treat it. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Madness in Civilization takes readers from antiquity to today, painting a vivid and often harrowing portrait of the different ways that cultures around the world have interpreted and responded to the seemingly irrational, psychotic, and insane. From the Bible to Sigmund Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humors to modern pharmacology, the book explores the manifestations and meanings of madness, its challenges and consequences, and our varied responses to it. It also looks at how insanity has haunted the imaginations of artists and writers and describes the profound influence it has had on the arts, from drama, opera, and the novel to drawing, painting, and sculpture. Written by one of the world's preeminent historians of psychiatry, Madness in Civilization is a panoramic history of the human encounter with unreason.
2015
The loss of reason, a sense of alienation from the commonsense world we all like to imagine we inhabit, the shattering emotional turmoil that seizes hold and won't let go--these are some of the traits we associate with madness. Today, mental disturbance is most commonly viewed through a medical lens, but societies have also sought to make sense of it through religion or the supernatural, or by constructing psychological or social explanations in an effort to tame the demons of unreason. Madness in Civilization traces the long and complex history of this affliction and our attempts to treat it. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Madness in Civilization takes readers from antiquity to today, painting a vivid and often harrowing portrait of the different ways that cultures around the world have interpreted and responded to the seemingly irrational, psychotic, and insane. From the Bible to Sigmund Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humors to modern pharmacology, the book explores the manifestations and meanings of madness, its challenges and consequences, and our varied responses to it. It also looks at how insanity has haunted the imaginations of artists and writers and describes the profound influence it has had on the arts, from drama, opera, and the novel to drawing, painting, and sculpture. Written by one of the world's preeminent historians of psychiatry, Madness in Civilization is a panoramic history of the human encounter with unreason.