New Exhibition at the Bethlem Gallery by Steph Bates Opens 2 May

On 2 May, a new exhibition opens at the Bethlem Gallery. Steph’s vibrant, illustrative paintings and drawings explore narrative, spontaneity, play and the challenge of living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

“For a long time the disorder called the shots with my art, in what and how I could paint. Sometimes I used art to manage my symptoms, but now I DARE to approach it as having fun, making mistakes and enjoying a looser line, leading me to excitement and hope in going forward.” says Steph.

Steph’s body of work reflects the passion and humour found in her unique perspective on life. She often translates her own experiences into something new, using metaphor and allusion. Her drawings describe, in vivid detail, everyday human quirks and observations that make her audiences both laugh and sigh. She has a talent for communicating with her audiences that gives her a faithful following and enthusiastic collectors.

“Thursday’s Child has Far to Go” was the rhyme engraved on my christening mug, and certainly my obsessional thinking has led me on many an abstract journey.” Steph continues. “For a big chunk of my lifetime, OCD was a bit of a mystery (both medical and social) and was grouped together with superstition and hypochondria. With its crippling fort of fear and anxiety, it would rise and dominate and my lid would become unscrewed. This affected my confidence and my main passion – that of art, drawing and painting. Art was the thing that I loved to do above everything else, the thing that gave me joy. It was the most certain companion, although for many years this joy seemed too good to be true, like a faraway star – but one I kept hoping I’d reach.”

Despite the dominating effects of her illness Steph attended both Chelsea College of Art (now University of the Arts, Chelsea) and Bristol Polytechnic to study Graphic Design and Illustration.

Steph now feels positive about the future. “In attempting to draw anyway, I was offered the most respite of all those distractions I tried. I could, at least in part, focus on something “other” than the current, demanding thought. I used it to mange my symptoms and challenge the absolutes that come with OCD thinking. Nowadays after cognitive therapy, I DARE to think my future may be happier. When making work I give myself permission to play, use my imagination and have fun. There is the liberation of making mistakes – escaping the restrictive zone of attempted perfection; I can enjoy a looser line and celebrate my observational skills. In so doing, I abandon the obsessive and become more curious.”

Although the artist’s work is both personal and anecdotal, it draws on the traditions of western painting and print; stated influences on her work include Velazquez and Goya, but the strength of her drawing calls to mind another daring and figurative artist – Paula Rego.

Opening Event: 2 May, 3 – 6pm

Exhibition continues: 3 May – 11 June

Bethlem Gallery opening times: Wed, Thurs, Friday, 11am – 6pm

Gallery & Museum open Saturdays 5 May and 11 June. On 5 May, Steph will be running a free drawing workshop, from 2 – 4pm.

Curatorial Conversations IX: Challenging History

Our ongoing post series, Curatorial Conversations, has addressed a number of the challenging aspects of displaying and interpreting psychiatric collections. The notion of a challenge incorporates both the concern that such histories are difficult in and of themselves, but also that any interpretation should challenge received ideas of mental health history. The recent Challenging History conference at City University spoke to similar themes, arising from a previous network on the topic. Papers, workshops and keynote speakers addressed a variety of “difficult” histories, as well as sparking debate over the nature of the role held by museums in delivering ideas.

The conference opened to an inspiring address from David Fleming, Director of National Museums Liverpool, questioning the notion that the educational nature of museums requires them both to avoid difficult subjects and concentrate on intellectual ideas. Fleming, drawing on examples of museums as monuments to genocide, political turmoil and war, proposed that challenging subjects open up the opportunity to engage the emotions of audiences. Emotions, he argued, not objects, are at the heart of social history museums: why would any museum desire to be neutral and dispassionate, even if such an approach were possible? Of course, such an ideology contains further concerns. As one participant in the discussion pointed out, emotions can be divisive as well as shared, while attempts to invoke feeling might easily be viewed as manipulative or propagandist. Nonetheless, Fleming’s was an interesting reminder that the idea that a museum might present an entirely “objective” view of history is a widely held myth.  The museum, created by staff, governors and associated organisations and communities with social and political agendas, will certainly reflect the context in which it is created. Opening up discussion of this context, as we have aimed to do around the Bethlem Museum, becomes an important element of determining the content and message of the museum itself.

But who, ultimately, decides on this message? In the most thought-provoking talk of the conference, museum consultant Bernadette Lynch addressed the topic of community participation and consultation in the heritage sector. One interesting analogy, stemming from her recent report for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Whose Cake Is It Anyway?, was that of the “wheels on the bus” model, an easy trap to fall into in museum consultation. In this example, a museum worker designing an exhibition involves a local community group in consultation, asking them to contribute their own designs, adding wheels and windows to the existing bus outline. Such a task clearly leaves little room for interpretation and choice – it is obvious where wheels and windows should be placed. Nonetheless, the group attempt to contribute alternative ideas, which the museum worker receives with some trepidation. Ultimately, however, she discards all those contributions which don’t fit her initial idea, retaining only the few that do: a process that frequently, Dr Lynch argued, leaves external groups with a feeling of having contributed to their own marginalisation. The museum sets the limits of engagement from the outset, disempowering those whose voices it claims to champion.

This picture may seem unduly negative but, incorporated into the overall debate of the conference, it becomes a very positive reminder. It is all too easy, particularly for those working within “challenging” historical fields, to assume that their work is unquestionably worthy, due simply to its subject matter. Challenging History reminds us that what we ultimately need to challenge is ourselves: our opinions, ideas and - most importantly - our practice.

You can join the new Challenging History discussion list here. A forthcoming book will also further address the themes of the conference.

Yayoi Kusama – Outsider Artist? 3

( continued from previous post )

Our volunteer continues:

The retrospective reinterpretation of Kusama’s work by critics was fuelled by an interest at the time in psychiatric art in Japan and Kusama became a poster child for ‘Outsider Art’. However, whilst she fits into this category if you consider her ‘untrained’ due to only 18 months studying nihonga (Japanese-style painting) in her early twenties, Kusama has never been excluded from influential artistic circles, but was in fact an extremely active participant in the artistic infrastructure dominating both New York and Tokyo at the times she lived there. A morbid fascination with pathology along with the simplified idea that madness is a direct source of creativity often leads to individuals being too enthusiastically labelled as ‘outsider artists’. Art critic Abe Nobuo has made the telling point that although hallucinations may provide rich sensory experiences for artists to draw from, it is not enough for the artist to merely reproduce the hallucinatory experience: the artist needs to connect their own personal experience of the hallucination with specific artistic intent, for that painting to become a work of art. ‘The greatest appeal in Kusama’s work is that she seizes the devilish malice which comes sprouting up from the unconscious darkness, and turns it into art.’¹

Some of the more revealing interpretations of Kusama’s work come from looking at her artistic intentions in relation to the current artistic climate. The current exhibition of her work at Tate Modern doesn’t focus on her mental health as much as does the publicity surrounding it. In fact the only reference to her as an outsider within the exhibition is in Walking Piece, a series of colour slides of Kusama from 1966 dressed in Kimono and flowers wandering the streets of New York, which explores her position as a female, Asian artist in a predominantly white, male New York art world, exemplifying a theme of patriarchal defiance which runs throughout her work.

The Yayoi Kusama exhibition continues at Tate Modern until 5 June 2012.

¹ Cited in G. Borggreen, “The Myth of the Mad Artist: Works and Writings by Kusama Yayoi” in Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies vol 15 (2001), pp. 39-40.

A Sporting Chance 2

Fifty years ago the late lamented journalist Alistair Cooke used one of his Letter from America broadcasts to argue for the English origins of baseball, a thesis that relied in part on a passing reference to the sport in one of the novels of Jane Austen.¹ We have no interest in advancing that thesis here, or doing anything other than noting the fact, mournful for baseball aficionados, of its withdrawal from the Olympic programme as of this year. Yet perhaps the recent runaway success of Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding will prompt a rethink on the part of the International Olympic Committee in time for Rio 2016?

Baseball was never played at Bethlem; but the indistinct photograph accompanying this post is contained within the Archives & Museum’s collections. It is of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital team in Baltimore, Maryland. A published history of that psychiatric hospital records that “many baseball games were played between…patients and attendants, and with outside teams such as the Towson YMCA, policemen and firemen” in the late nineteenth century, and that “at one period the Sheppard Pratt team was even strengthened by the employment of semi-professionals”.²

The team photograph shows that players had ‘SP’ emblazoned on their uniforms at around the time of the First World War. Another (possibly earlier) photograph, reproduced in the abovementioned history, shows two teams assembled side by side, one with ‘Sheppard’ on their strip, the other with ‘Pratt’.

Photographs of this Baltimore hospital reached Bethlem via Dr Edward Brush, Sheppard Pratt’s Superintendent from 1891 to 1919, who enjoyed good collegiate relations across the Atlantic and sent effusive greetings to Bethlem on the occasion of its 670th anniversary in 1917, together with photographs later used by Geoffrey O’Donoghue, Bethlem’s chaplain in his lantern slide show which was absorbed in due course into the Archives & Museum’s collections.

¹ Alistair Cooke, Letter from America 1946-2004 (Penguin 2005), p. 107.

² Forbush and Forbush, Gatehouse: The Evolution of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, 1853-1986 (1986), p. 42.

Latest News on Richard Dadd

Last month we alerted blog readers to the mini-exhibition of works by Dadd at the Archives & Museum here at Bethlem, and to a talk given by author Nicholas Tromans at its opening. Dadd aficionados will be interested to learn that Nicholas has just published an article on Dadd in the online journal The Public Domain Review; and that Bethlem’s Dadd exhibition has been extended to Saturday 5 May (when the Archives & Museum and the Bethlem Gallery will be open from 11am to 5pm).