Yayoi Kusama – Outsider Artist? 2

( continued from previous post )

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.

( to be continued )

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 )

Curatorial Conversations II

We are grateful for the response received to the first of our posts in our series on Curatorial Conversations, which we hope will inform thinking and practice here at the Archives & Museum as we look toward our intended relocation.

With this series we hope to stimulate an ongoing discussion with as wide a range of our stakeholders as possible. Another of our ‘conversation partners’ is Coleborne and MacKinnon’s recently published Exhibiting Madness in Museums, which, as we mentioned in our previous post, raises a number of insistent questions about exhibitions on psychiatric history. Coleborne and MacKinnon’s work is most relevant to our concerns when it addresses the issue of how psychiatric collections may best be exhibited.

The limited number of psychiatric collections that have been open to the public have met a number of standard responses: large percentages of the viewing public decide to stay away from exhibitions that focus on mental health history; a voyeuristic proportion of the public simply want to gaze at the mad; and finally, former patients, family members, friends and staff, as well as some members of the general public, are interested in attempting to gain a clearer understanding of the experiences of patients and practitioners in psychiatric institutions.

The authors go on to touch upon the issue (hotly contested among museum professionals) of whether there may be some things that are simply unexhibitable.

Sensitive and compassionate exhibitions about specific institutions have found critical acclaim from sections of the viewing public… However, these successes have been complicated and far outweighed by the large proportion of the general public who voraciously consume the private, fee-entry, worldwide travelling collections, such as Gunther von Hagens’ plastination body part shows, as well as his live autopsy shows, some of which have made use of former psychiatric patients’ bodies.¹

[to be continued]

¹ Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), pages 8-9.

Curatorial Conversations I

Long-time blog readers may remember the review we published exactly one year ago of Nell Leyshon’s play Bedlam, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre last year. It is fair to say that the play attracted mixed reviews at the time. Here at the Archives & Museum, as we are beginning to turn our minds to the renewal and development of our display space that will accompany our intended relocation, we continue to mull over comments made in one of the most trenchant reviews of the play:

It is telling that Nell Leyshon’s script was researched in the company of medical professionals at the modern Bethlehem hospital. The way in which a transition from “archaic” to “modern” medicine is set up and handled, is so benign and uncomplicated that it could have come from a flyer she absent-mindedly picked up on the ward. The unproblematic figure of Dr Maynard, played as a clear-thinking moderniser by Phil Cheadle, struts his enlightened changes, his safe hands delivering us into the dawn of surveillance and incarceration as if it were simply liberation into a new professional era. That the confinement of the mentally disordered is again in vogue today, not just in Russia and China, but in the UK where successive decades of community-focused care are being reversed in an atmosphere of tabloid hysteria and the strengthening of pharmacological interests, seems to leave this play untroubled.

We are not in a position to say what may have been gleaned from medical professionals in the course of the research that underpinned this play, but certainly Archives & Museum staff did not use their own limited contact with those responsible for the play to encourage or endorse a straightforward evolutionary narrative in which past custodial horrors are simply contrasted with the enlightened psychiatric practice of the present.

The play has come and gone, of course, but the reviewer’s comments have stayed with us. The Archives & Museum has a long-standing commitment to recording the lives and experience, and celebrating the achievements, of people with mental health problems. It is anticipated that the relocation and renewal of its displays will bring closer the realisation of that aspiration. Yet contributors to a recently-published book on museums of psychiatry in Australasia, Canada and the UK, (called Exhibiting Madness in Museums) have challenged the very raison d’être of psychiatric collections in terms that are reminiscent of the reviewer’s criticism of the Bedlam play.

First, should such collections be maintained at all, given that (according to the book’s editors) ‘there are two violently opposed schools of thought: those that wish to preserve a form of history, and those who would be happy to see no trace left of the former psychiatric regimes, the buildings and landscape that housed them, as well as any artefacts that relate to these practices’? Are collectors and curators inevitably compromised by the very act of collecting and curating? In their attempts to ‘represent some past actors’, are they fated to ‘obfuscate and obliterate the voices of the majority…through processes of selection, omission and oversight’?¹

Second, who may be trusted to maintain, display and interpret such collections? Do the institutional affiliations of most psychiatric museums implicate them in a partisan ‘appropriation’ of mental health service users’ past by ‘medical and state bodies’? Is the construction of ‘a survivor-controlled museum of madness and the psychiatric system’ the only viable alternative?²

Third, and perhaps most importantly, how may psychiatric collections be exhibited most appropriately? What narrative will they be asked to sustain, if not a Whiggish one of uninterrupted progress and enlightenment? In an occasional series of blog posts called Curatorial Conversations, we will be addressing some of these questions from time to time, and asking our readers to contribute their comments as well. After all, answers to these questions will be required in time for the development of a new museum of the mind.

1 Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), page 5.

2 ibid., page 6.

Louis Wain and the Summer Cat Show

While the Bethlem Louis Wain collection is out on loan, there is another opportunity to see some of his well-known cat illustrations at the Chris Beetles Gallery, from Saturday 20 August until 10 September.   This entertaining show has over 250 pictures, including great new works from Chris Beetles’ living artists – Lesley Fotherby, Susan Herbert, Lesley Anne Ivory – and a selection of contributions from Norman Thelwell, as well as the naughty cats of the great Ronald Searle. The exhibition can be viewed online, at the Chris Beetles website, as well as details of a new book on Louis Wain’s Cats.

Louis Wain (1860-1939) is one of the most well-known of Bethlem’s former patients (along with fellow artist Richard Dadd). The “Louis Wain Cat” was hugely popular from the 1880s until the outbreak of the First World War, although Wain continued to draw until near the end of his life, including while a patient in Bethlem and other hospitals. Wain was certified insane in June 1924, and committed to Springfield Hospital at Tooting. His admirers discovered him there in 1925 and started a campaign to move him, to which Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, contributed. This resulted in Wain’s transfer to Bethlem Hospital, where he stayed until 1930 (when the Hospital moved site). Transferred to Napsbury Hospital, near St Albans, Wain remained there for the remainder of his life.

And the Band Plays on, Chris Beetles Gallery (click image for details)