Shades of Kurelek 2

In the painting Harvest of Our Mere Humanism Years (currently on display at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s William Kurelek: The Messenger exhibition), the artist weaves several dystopian motifs current at the time of his working (1972) into a composition that is truly fantastical.

The giant hollow grasshopper, pile of books dressed in professorial garb, and green dish containing chocolate replicas of university buildings in the middle distance of this picture express Kurelek’s fear that higher education, though valued so highly by millions of Canadian parents, in fact did not aid their children’s search for individuality and significance. Here are echoes (albeit unconscious) of Ivan Illich’s trenchant criticism of institutional education in Deschooling Society (1971); and a premonition, perhaps, of Neil Postman’s The End of Education (1995), in which the author argues for the necessity of a sustaining narrative to endue education with meaning. The papers and television sets that people are glued to as they wander around the landscape, entirely oblivious to the danger represented by the chasm that has opened up in the ground, reference another motif, important to Kurelek, that was later taken up by Neil Postman in his Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985).

The people queuing around Toronto City Hall, their crowding becoming greater and their burdens heavier the longer they wait, and their waiting simply ending in death, comprise a strong statement of what Kurelek, a faithful Roman Catholic, saw as the futile ‘harvest’ of modern secularism – a restatement, perhaps, of the theme he had taken up in Behold Man Without God (1955). For Kurelek, as we noted last month, the ultimate symbol of this futility was the atomic bomb, here depicted hanging by a thread over City Hall, unnoticed by all bar one person in the throng.

Particularly in its critique of educational institutions, Harvest of Our Mere Humanism Years is reminiscent – to those of a certain age – to the animation sequences of Gerald Scarfe that were incorporated into the 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall, and from there into the music video for Another Brick in the Wall, in which teachers are memorably depicted as hammers marching in serried ranks, and school either as a meat-grinder into which students are pushed, or simply as a high, all-encompassing wall. With due respect to the work of Illich and Postman, Scarfe’s imagery has probably had a wider impact upon the thinking of a generation than any text of educational sociology. Kurelek was aware of the power of pop-art, and this is the idiom in which he chose to communicate his message.

Curatorial Conversations XI

For some time now, we have been using essays published in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon’s 2011 volume Exhibiting Madness in Museums as a sounding board to sustain an online conversation about curatorial practice in museums of psychiatry – a topic of importance for us here at Bethlem, as plans for the relocation of its Archives & Museum and renewal of its display space continue to develop. In recent months, we have devoted particular attention to one of the volume’s most suggestive essays, that written by David Wright and Nathan Flis. Before we move on from it, we want to reflect upon on the contrast drawn there between “the ubiquitous asylum museum” and the “nuanced and balanced” displays, exampled by “the Museum of Brisbane’s Remembering Goodna exhibition in Australia in 2009”, that Wright and Flis think are more rarely achieved. They style the former “museums of madness” which seem to be “voyeuristic in their insistence that the history of madness is one of violence and trauma” and which “implicitly neglect and victimise (and even make invisible) the patient rather than empower him or her”. ¹ To judge from another essay in Exhibiting Madness,² and from a presentation on the Museum of Brisbane exhibition given to members of the UK’s Health Archives and Records Group in 2010, Remembering Goodna was indeed a sensitive and thought-provoking exhibition, employing strategies of community curation and interpretative participation to good effect. We think it is fair – and uncontroversial – to assert that the level of curatorial sophistication available within “the ubiquitous asylum museum run by volunteer staff and patients” is lower than that which can be mobilised elsewhere, and that there are traps associated with the subject matter into which an unwary curator may easily fall.

Despite having recently visited volunteer-led museums in Bristol, Wakefield, and Hamilton, Ontario (the interior of the last of which is pictured below), here at the Archives & Museum we wonder just how ‘ubiquitous’ institutions of this sort actually are, mindful as we are of colleagues in continental Europe who have deliberately crafted psychiatric museum displays which are simultaneously provocative, balanced and open-ended. The particular contrast drawn by Wright and Flis is shaped by a general contrast between museums which are adequately resourced, both professionally and financially, and those that are principally fueled by the enthusiasm of a few.

¹ D. Wright and N. Flis, ‘A Grave Injustice: The Mental Hospital and Shifting Sites of Memory’, in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), pages 102 and 107.

² J. Besley and M. Finnane, ‘Remembering Goodna: Stories from a Queensland Mental Hospital’, in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), pages 116-136.

First Person Narratives 7

Gail Hornstein, Professor of Psychology at Mount Holyoake College and sometime visitor to the Archives & Museum, makes passing reference to our modest displays (though not to her visit) in her recent book Agnes’ Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness. She is also the author of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World, a biography of the psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Fromm-Reichmann is most well-known today for being the real-life “Dr Fried” in Joanne Greenberg’s fictionalised autobiography, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, about which we have previously blogged. A Jewish psychoanalyst, who emigrated to America in the 1930s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann controversially – but apparently, at least in some cases, successfully – treated schizophrenia with psychotherapy (and not medication).

Dr Hornstein has recently made the latest edition of her bibliography of ‘first person narratives of madness’ available on her website. We think we have spotted at least one unchecked (and uncheckable!) reference in this bibliography. Alas, as far as we know the existence of a 1620 Petition of the Poor Distracted Folk of Bedlam is no more than a rumour. Naturally, we would be delighted to be proved wrong about this! The bibliography is nevertheless an extremely valuable resource for those interested in first person narratives of mental distress.

Moving from first to third person narratives, we are glad to say that a short e-book entitled Illustrious Company: Authors, Artists and Other Adventurers in Bethlem Hospital is now available for download onto Kindle e-readers at Amazon and Amazon UK. It has been written by our Archivist with contributions from Canadian authors Aislinn Hunter and Lesley Krueger. Regular readers of this blog may recognise some but not all of its text. The book is already cheap to download, but watch out for special promotions to make it even cheaper over the summer.

‘Psychiatric Tales’ by Darryl Cunningham

Whilst cartoons have been used to provoke and challenge popular opinions for centuries, comic books are largely associated with super heroes and light entertainment. They do address non fiction as well as fiction though, tackling serious subjects and personal experiences. The comic book or graphic novel format has been used to explore the Holocaust (Art Spiegelman’s Maus), the war in Eastern Bosnia (journalist Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde) and suffering from cancer (Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner). Marjane Satrapi described her youth during and after the Islamic revolution in Iran in the beautifully funny and moving book Persepolis, and her work is a particular influence on graphic novelist Darryl Cunningham.

Taking a place amongst these acclaimed graphic novels is Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales, published by Blank Slate in 2010. The book leads the reader, in Cunningham’s distinctive style, through his experiences working as a mental health nurse, his reflections on mental illness, high-profile sufferers and his own mental health problems.

The descriptions of hospital conditions, illnesses and specific patients are simple and straight talking, making sometimes challenging accounts brilliantly accessible.

© Darryl Cunningham

Some of this accessibility must be attributed to the graphic format; sometimes an image can summarise a thought or convey an impression or feeling so much more effectively than words. But Cunningham must be credited for his thoughtful, honest and carefully constructed narrative.

A section mid way through the book entitled ‘People with mental illness enrich our lives’ discusses the problems of a number of well-known individuals including Winston Churchill and Nick Drake. By focussing on people familiar to readers in another context, Cunningham explores some of the ways mental illness can affect and shape people’s lives.

Cunningham’s description of his own mental illness at the end of the book explains his motivation to begin creating and promoting graphic novels, which contributed towards his recovery. It is an immensely personal and honest account of how his life was affected by mental health problems.

© Darryl Cunningham

Psychiatric Tales is a graphic novel that deals with sensitive subjects head on, and certainly leaves the reader with a personal and educational perspective on mental illness.

Darryl Cunningham has spoken at the annual Graphic Medicine conference, which focuses on medicine in graphic novels, and had a strip about the MMR vaccination published by the British Medical Journal’s student publication in March. Science Tales, (Myriad Editions, 2012) Cunningham’s recent graphic publication, contains a chapter on Electro Convulsive Therapy.

A Sporting Chance 3

We fear that our occasional posts on asylum-inspired sports and pastimes have yet to attract the interest of the International Olympic Committee. There will be no billiards and no baseball at London 2012. Undeterred, we persevere with our suggestions, and this month highlight an Olympic sport discontinued after the 1900 Games. Croquet was a popular pursuit at Bethlem Hospital in the Victorian and Edwardian eras and beyond (as evidenced by the photograph that accompanies this post). In a novel based on her experience as a patient in the 1920s, Antonia White relates a moment of fearful insight precipitated by a match played in the company of strangers with little regard to the rules:

‘In vain Clara tried to explain the rules of croquet…But it was hopeless. No-one could understand. In the end she left them running gaily about the lawn, hitting any ball they saw and usually all playing at once…the next moment, it came to her. These women were mad. All the women she saw at mealtimes were mad. No wonder she could make no contact with them. She was imprisoned in a place full of mad people.’¹

Taken in isolation, and with too much seriousness, a quotation like this one might seem to support a stigmatising dichotomy between ‘them’ and ‘us’, the mad and the sane, as well as an unsupportable shortcut in mental diagnostics whereby disregard of sporting rules was a positive indicator of insanity. Yet what we have in Clara is not an omniscient, inerrant narrator, but a character whose grasp of the rules of croquet may have been impeccable but whose purchase on her own memories and perceptions sometimes proved faulty.

¹ Antonia White, Beyond the Glass (London, 1979), p. 243.