Yayoi Kusama – Outsider Artist? 2

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Our volunteer writes:

When considering Yayoi Kusama’s art, most critics choose to focus on her lifelong pathological hallucinations. However, Kusama began reflecting on her work in relation to her illness only after returning to Japan in the 1970’s and her subsequent admission into the psychiatric hospital where she continues to reside. Earlier self-analysis showed sharp insight into the creative processes governing her work. During her time in New York she was acutely aware of current artist trends such as Abstract Expressionism but disassociated herself from such trends in an effort to cement her individuality as an artist. She identified childhood visions as inspiration for some of her most dynamic work such as her Infinity Net series, but related these creative sources to her current belief in Mysticism and attributed artistic power to the harnessing of the dark and demonic side of experience, to listening to the undercurrents of life and identifying things that hide in the shadows: “My mind now searches for all attractive splendours which unfold from the shadow of the obscure world.” However, she didn’t illustrate these beliefs with any personal psychopathological experiences. This changed dramatically after her hospitalization in 1977 when accounts of her mental health began to dominate her own artistic story, and renewed the interest of art critics. This switch to a more psychological account of her work could be due to treatment she was receiving making her more self-aware and better able to articulate her past experiences.

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Curatorial Conversations VIII

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Instances of exhibits that function in the way described by Wright and Flis are given not only by them – we will return to their commentary in a future post in this series of conversations – but also by other contributors to the Exhibiting Madness volume. Bronwyn Labrum highlights two antipodean examples of displays that seem to fit Wright and Flis’ description of the “ubiquitous asylum museum”.  In Labrum’s account, these displays are centred on late nineteenth-century ‘seclusion rooms’ and are interpreted by museum labels written from the point of view of the staff who used them to manage patient (mis)behaviour.

“Visitors arrive at the dramatic isolation cell with its peephole, after proceeding through several rooms…It creates an aura of secrecy and dread, and reinforces the stereotypes about lunatics and confinement…The detailed description of the seclusion room continues to resonate… Seclusion Room – used right up until the late 1960’s [sic]. A shutter was placed over the window to prevent violent people from harming themselves. The mattress on the bed and blanket are made of heavy canvas to prevent them from being torn up..” ¹

It seems to us that the common failing of these kind of displays – whether inculcating a “psychiatric establishment” perspective on the history of mental health treatment (as in Labrum’s examples), or an “anti-psychiatric survivor” perspective (which, as we will see when we come to the examples offered by Wright and Flis, is equally vulnerable to the temptation of voyeurism) – lies precisely in their tendency to inculcate. We conceive of the Archives & Museum here at Bethlem as being something other than the “ubiquitous asylum museum”, and to assist in the discharge of the task we have assumed of “recording the lives and experience, and celebrating the achievements of people with mental health problems”, we want our new displays (still only in the planning stage at the moment) to inform, engage, provoke and question…but certainly not to inculcate.

¹ B. Labrum, ‘Always Distinguishable From Outsiders: Materialising Cultures of Clothing from Psychiatric Institutions’, in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), pages 71 and 73.

“Damaging the Body”: New Seminar Series

We may think that the idea of “damage” to the physical body is self-evident, but countless historical, anthropological and social studies have indicated that concepts of damage emerge through a variety of concerns. An ongoing seminar series, funded by the Wellcome Trust, explores such questions from both medical, cultural and individual perspectives. How, the seminars ask, are such modern categories as self-harm, addiction and cosmetic body modification constructed in relation to ideas of body, mind and self? By presenting these topics from a historical perspective, this seminar series encourages reflection on medical and non-medical concepts of damage, which, it will be argued, cannot be regarded as a natural category. The very term “damage” is problematic and unstable, and often defies definition.

The first seminar takes place at the Wellcome Library this evening, at 6pm. Historian Åsa Jansson will discuss the way in which the concept “suicidal” emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, and was differentiated from “suicide” itself. How did Victorian asylum psychiatrists determine “suicidal” as a medical concept, and what was its perceived relation to the diagnosis of “melancholia”? Further seminars, in April and May, will give similarly challenging perspectives on changing models of alcohol harm, and debate around “vitriol” (acid) throwing in Victorian Britain. Two further panel sessions in London and Bristol will encourage increased debate in the topic. On 21 May in London, the anatomical specimens of the St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum will provide an intriguing background to the topic of the relation of the “foreign body” to the human body: anatomically, surgically and in individual experience. In Bristol,on 28 June, a panel of experts will offer varying perspectives on the way in which ideas of “eating disorders” are, and have been, expressed in gender-specific terms.

For full details of seminars, and to join the mailing list to receive full details of the panel sessions when available, visit the Damaging the Body website. All events are free of charge.

Yayoi Kusama – Outsider Artist? 1

The moving story of artist Yayoi Kusama’s lifelong battle against nightmares of obliteration – hallucinations of polka-dot patterns pervading and threatening to destroy not only her, but her family, her home and her world (a battle she fights precisely by deploying her artistic talents to depict these patterns) – is one often told in exhibition publicity, frequently under the rubric of the widely-supposed yet unexamined assumption of a link between ‘madness’ and ‘creativity’. In 2009 our Archivist saw Kusama’s work in Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and London’s Hayward Gallery, and came away impressed by the scale, accessibility and sheer joie de vivre of her output. The photograph below is of Dots Obsession, as displayed at the Hayward. Now that her work has returned to London (in a retrospective at Tate Modern), the ‘myth of the mad artist’ is likely to put in a renewed appearance, at least according to one of our volunteers here at the Archives & Museum, who has written a review of the exhibition.

( to be continued )

Just Visiting 2: Samuel Beckett

Next Monday (19 March 2012), the Archivist will give a Gresham lecture at the Museum of London on the subject of unrestricted public visiting to Bethlem, a phenomenon which effectively ceased in 1770. In contrast, this series of blog posts will concentrate on visitors to the Hospital from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Having profiled Queen Mary in January, this month we feature the Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, who drew inspiration from visits he made to Bethlem in the composition of his first novel, Murphy (1938).

A friend of his, Dr Geoffrey Thompson, was Bethlem’s Junior House Physician from February 1935, and Acting Senior House Physician from May of the same year, until his resignation that October. “This gave Beckett the chance to come to Bethlem, where he walked in the grounds, visited the wards and played chess with Dr Thompson”, according to the author of a published history of the Hospital. “Beckett himself acknowledged that he used Bethlem as a point of departure for his novel Murphy, which had as its setting a sanatorium for the mentally ill, called the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat”.¹

An acknowledged point of departure is one thing; a recoverable string of point-by-point correspondences between Bethlem and Beckett’s Mercyseat is quite another. It has been said that “the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel” and that “a novelist’s biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undid” but “all their labour cannot illuminate either the value or the meaning of a novel, can scarcely even identify a few of the bricks”.²

Attempts at tracing the sources of Beckett’s inspiration have been made nonetheless, most notably in Chris Ackerley’s Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Edinburgh, 2004), in which identifications of varying degrees of plausibility are advanced: between ‘Dr Killiecrankie’ and Murdo Mackenzie, Bethlem’s Senior Assistant Physician, between Beckett’s county coroner and John Porter-Phillips, the Physician Superintendent, and between ‘Bim Clinch’ and Kenneth Cantle, deputy chief male attendant at the time of Beckett’s visits.

To these proposals we venture to add our own simple suggestion: that criticism should accord ample space to Samuel Becket’s storytelling powers, not to mention his caustic wit. Reading that no female nurse at the Mercyseat ‘had taken a male nurse to husband within living memory, though one had once been almost obliged to’,³ for example, is not meant to send us scurrying to Bethlem’s staff records looking for real-life scandal. It is meant to make us laugh, while simultaneously discomforting us.

¹ David Russell, Scenes from Bedlam (London, 1997), pp. 142-143.
² M. Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1986).
³ Samuel Beckett, Murphy (Calder, 1993), p. 93.