Escapism, Colour & Light: New Exhibition at the Bethlem Gallery opens this week

Escapism, Colour & Light is a new exhibition by Matthew at the Bethlem Gallery, opening this week (Wednesday 27 March). Matthew, a current Bethlem Royal Hospital resident, exhibits vibrant landscapes and abstracted forms, which engage the viewer in imagined terrains and simplified colourful shapes. His work reinvents familiar objects and visions through a sophisticated and playful artistic process.

Opening: 27th March, 3 – 6pm

Exhibition continues: 28th March – 19th April

Wednesday – Friday 11am – 6pm

Museum and Gallery open Saturday 6th April, 11am – 5pm

At 2pm on 6th April, there will be a final opportunity to tour the historic hospital boardroom, before the administration block is closed for building works. The Boardroom at Bethlem is located in the Art Deco administration block, soon to be temporarily closed for construction work on the new museum. It is something of a time capsule, with displays including heraldic crests dating back to 1547, the Bridewell Chandelier of 1757 and portraits from the art collection. This guided tour, starting at the Bethlem Museum, will offer visitors a history of the ancient hospital.

 

Village in Yellow by Matthew

Art History in the Pub

This year’s Art History in the Pub has so far focused on psychiatric history, and next week’s (Monday 25 February) will look at Bethlem in particular. Art History in the Pub is a series of events run by the Association of Art Historians (AAH): a series of relaxed yet informative talks held in The Monarch Pub in Camden. January’s talk, by Jennifer Wallis from Queen Mary, University of London, explored an unusual series of images: the photographs collected by asylum medical officers in the late nineteenth century. Jennifer works with the archives of the West Riding Asylum in Wakefield, which was well-known in the Victorian period as a hub for “asylum science”. The hospital had a pathology laboratory, and staff took regular photographs of what Wallis called “fragments of the insane body”, focusing in on growths or bone deformities with the use of fabric screens and close framing. These fragments, also including pulse tracings, microscope slides and post-mortem dissections, were all incorporated into a “visual record of bodily anomalies”.

Next week’s talk moves away from photography to look at the Bethlem art collections, focusing on a public exhibition of patient art organised by physician Theo Hyslop in 1900. Hyslop has often been dismissed by historians as, at best, the “representative of the psychiatry of degeneration in Britain”. Nicholas Tromans and Sarah Chaney challenge this view, by settings Hyslop’s work in the context of turn-of-the-century psychiatric practice – in particular, that at Bethlem. Historians of Outsider Art agree that the 1900 exhibition was the earliest recorded public display of psychiatric art, yet virtually nothing seems to be known of it. The exhibition, which comprised no fewer than 600 works, was curated by Hyslop, who had evidently been collecting patient art for some time. But why did psychiatrists of this period collect the art of their patients, and what did they expect to learn from it? And what was the place of art at Bethlem at the turn of the twentieth century?

Art, the Archive and the Avant-Garde Asylum, c. 1890 – 1914 takes place on Monday February 25, at 7.30pm at the Monarch, 40-42 Chalk Farm Road, NW1 8BG (Camden Town or Chalk Farm tube). For more information on Art History in the Pub, visit the AAH website or Facebook page.

Events: Anti-Psychiatry and Psychical Research

It’s already shaping up to be a good year for events and exhibitions in the history of psychiatry and psychology. First up is a conference at UCL at the end of this month, on the topic of Psychical Research and Parapsychology in the History of Medicine and the Sciences. As we have previously mentioned in this blog, physicians at Bethlem in the late nineteenth century were optimistic about the possibilities for hypnosis and suggestion in the treatment of mental illness, and many of them experimented in this field. Daniel Hack Tuke, a long-term governor of the hospital, was particularly interested in the connections between mind and body, and how the physician might make use of these in the cure of physical (as well as mental) illness. Tuke appears to have coined the term ‘psycho-therapeutics’ to describe these effects in his 1872 Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind and Body in Health and Disease (expanded in 1884). As this conference will demonstrate, research in experimental psychology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has often been closely associated with the investigation of phenomena perceived to be supernatural (many, but not all, of which were explained in psychological terms by members of organisations devoted to the study of the paranormal). The conference costs just £90 (£60 for students) for three days. The full conference programme is available online here, and tickets can be booked in the UCL Online Shop.

Meanwhile, a series of events at Nottingham Contemporary on 12-13 February explores Anti-Psychiatry and its legacies. Those who visited the recent Turner Prize Exhibition at the Tate will already be familiar with the work of Luke Fowler, whose film exploring the life of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing was nominated for the prize. All Divided Selves combined archive footage with new material, to create an evocative portrait of the doctor whose The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960) was influential in the anti-psychiatry movement. Another of Fowler’s films, Bogman Palmjaguar, will be screened on the second evening, following the legal battle of a trained conservationist and certified paranoid schizophrenic against this diagnosis. As with the previous evening’s film (Dora Garcia’s The Deviant Majority, From Basaglia to Brazil), the screening will be followed by a panel discussion with clinicians, philosophers and historians. The events are free, and can be booked online at the Nottingham Contemporary website.

Rhythm is a Dancer: Psychology and Physiology of Dance

As we prepare to celebrate the New Year, we might wonder about the different uses of dance in modern and historical healthcare. In November, our Friends Secretary participated in an event at the Wellcome Collection, which explored the relation of dance to mental health and illness. The evening was part of the Rhythm is a Dancer event series, in which dance performances and discussions take place side by side, offering new perspectives on the physiology and psychology of dance. Two events are yet to take place, in January 2013 – keep an eye on the website for tickets, as they book out rapidly!

November’s event explored the way in which dance has been characterised as both illness and cure in the realm of mental health. From a historical perspective, both ideas often emerged side by side: asylum balls, thought to improve the quality of life and the self-control of the individual, existed alongside widespread concern over the wild movements and fits exhibited in diagnoses like hysteria. Art historian Nancy Ireson, for example, told the audience all about the life of Jane Avril, the French Can Can dancer made famous in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. Jane was admitted to the famous Salpêtrière Hospital as a teenager, under the care of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Suffering from a movement disorder, she claimed that the hospital dances contributed to her cure: an idea picked up in contemporary healthcare by Sara Houston, a dance lecturer (and former dancer), researching the use of dance in Parkinson’s Disease.

Dance was certainly an important part of Victorian asylum life, as described in Charles Dickens’ article on the Christmas Ball at St Luke’s Hospital: A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree. Yet conditions such as hysteria might also incorporate an element of performance within the symptoms exhibited by patients. Charcot claimed the disease had four distinct stages, which his star patients could produce on cue in weekly lectures. Thus, within nineteenth-century mental healthcare, dance could be represented as both curative (restoring the self-control thought to have been lost during madness) and pathological (representative of a neurological condition resulting in a failure to control impulses). Thus, throughout the event, it was made apparent that dance can function both as a form of freedom and a means of control: sometimes, perhaps, both at the same time.

Image copyright: Mike Massaro

held: Guy’s Hospital Exhibition by Jane Fradgley

This week, a special exhibition by artist Jane Fradgley opens at Guy’s Hospital. held is funded by the Guy’s and St Thomas’s Charity, and is informed by the historical collection of restraining garments housed at the Bethlem Royal Hospital Archive & Museum, and investigates a largely unexplored area of mental health history.

During the “non-restraint movement” of the 1840s, the vast majority of asylums in England and Wales abandoned all forms of mechanical restraint. “Strong clothing” was a term used in the late 1800s to describe certain forms of protection or restraint which were reintroduced to asylums, and claimed not to be “strait-waistcoats, handcuffs, or what may be called true instruments of restraint”. The terms, descriptions and types of garment used were fraught with meaning for contemporaries, many of whom saw themselves as enlightened humanitarians.

With a background as a fashion designer, and a passionate interest in functional and tailored garments, Fradgley was inspired to delve into the archive after seeing Victorian portrait photographs of patients at Bethlem wearing unusual quilted dresses. By exploring this powerful and poignant subject, the artist’s intention is to open new dialogue and debate around restraint and protection, by setting a historical perspective alongside today’s treatments of chemical intervention and sedation.

She recalls:

“I was fascinated by the seemingly comforting strong dresses, and related this form of protective care to my own experiences in hospital and encounters with modern day psychiatric care.

“For me, the purpose of the strong clothing was not to invoke or exacerbate fear or anxiety in the patient; rather, the attention to detail in creating such well-constructed garments was to bring some dignity, serenity, peace and tranquillity to the wearer as an antidote to their anguish.”

It is easy for us to assume that such garments are relics of a brutal past, but in making such judgments we may miss many concerns that remain very relevant today. As Fradgley’s haunting images indicate, the line between freedom and constraint, care and control, safety and coercion remain hard to draw.

held runs until 8 March 2012, in Atrium 2, Guy’s Hospital, Great Maze Pond, London SE1 9RT.

Readers who are interested in discussing the topic of strong clothing and restraint further are invited to respond to this blog in the comments section.