Inside the Head: Art and Mental Illness Explored - Globespotters Blog - NYTimes.comInside the Head: Art and Mental Illness Explored
By Gary MoskowitzWellcome Collection The “Madness & Modernity” exhibit at the Wellcome Collection.
LONDON | Emaciated self-portraits, an electro-therapeutic cage, photo journals of extreme conditions like gigantism: welcome to the Wellcome Collection’s exploration of the relationship between mental illness and the arts.
The “Art & Mental Illness” exhibit, open now through June 28 at the Wellcome Collection gallery (183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE, Euston tube top, Victoria Line and Northern Line, 02-07-611-2222), is broken up into two distinctly different sections.
The first is “Madness & Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900,” a quirky history lesson that aims to deconstruct the intersection of how Viennese people at that time understood and clinically treated the mentally ill, and the evolving modernism in art and architecture that was underway in Vienna at that time.
Wien Museum, Vienna A “Character Head” by Franz-Xaver Messerschmidt, circa 1770.
Film footage shot recently at Vienna’s late 18th-century “Tower of Fools” institution leads the viewer through thick, prison-like doors and the rounded corridors at a facility initially built to confine those deemed “dangerous lunatics” in their day. A large model and floor plans show what the “Am Steinof” psychiatric hospital looked like when it opened in 1907. An old electro-therapeutic cage, which used strong electric currents to increase metabolism to calm hysterics, is also on display. Photo journals of patients with hereditary myopathy, gigantism, and infantilism are on display, as are wax “character studies” of exaggerated facial expressions (“ultimate simpleton,” a “lecherous and careworn fop”).
Self-portraits by the artist Egon Schiele, consisting of paintings of his emaciated body lead, in turn, to a series of dark, earth-toned “psychological portraits” created by young artists in Vienna, all depicting their subjects looking withered, unhealthy, twitchy, and nervous.
Next to antiquated pieces of patient exercise equipment from the Am Steinoff ward are small bronze and copper statues of human (plus a baboon) that once lined the shelves of Freud’s Vienna apartment during the same time period.
The final portion of the exhibit contains a series of watercolors by Karl Radler, who spent his adult life in two institutions in and near Vienna. Many of his portraits show daily hospital life happening all around his blank-stare subjects, with intricately-drawn borders around each painting
THE second part of the Art & Mental Illness exhibit is “Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings: Mental illness and me, 1997-2008.” Baker, whose performance work has previously been funded by the Wellcome Trust, provides a contemporary viewpoint on the subject of art and mental illness, from the perspective of the patient.
A large collection of her journal entries show a linear story of Baker’s journey through 11 years of counseling sessions, behavior therapy, mixing tranquilizers with alcohol, her family get-togethers, and tendencies to self-harm. Underneath many of the images are brief descriptions about what Baker was dealing with when she made a particular journal sketch or painting.
Baker’s sketches are simple in technique, but completely revealing. In one, her body is ripped in two; in another, mental health professionals are digging inside of her head, and blood drips onto the floor. In one sketch, Baker depicts what she assumes her fellow patients might be texting each other after her arrival back at a mental health center for treatment: “Bobby is here. She’s a nightmare. Yuk! Bobby Baker is a liar!” The often (darkly) humorous drawings offer equal amounts of praise and critique of today’s mental healthcare system.
During a recent visit, a group of middle-aged women meandering through the exhibit broke into a fairly loud debate at one point, and minutes later were chuckling about some of the out-of-date contraptions used to treat mentally ill patients. Luckily, reacting openly to the exhibit is perfectly acceptable at this particular gallery. Based on the hundreds of notes left in the gallery’s comment book, a written debate is taking place as well.