July 30, 2009
Exploring mental health in Vienna | BBC NEWS | Health
BBC NEWS | Health | Exploring mental health in ViennaExploring mental health in Vienna
AdvertisementExplore inside the 'Tower of Fools', an 18th Century mental asylum in Vienna (Footage courtesy of David Bickerstaff)
The ominous round, Narrenturm, nicknamed the "Tower of Fools", still stands in Vienna. It is where the city sent their insane during the late 18th Century.
The winding corridors seem to echo with the pain of the 140 inmates who were chained to the walls and provided only with straw mats for sleeping.
"They were treated as animals and were considered dangerous lunatics," said Dr Leslie Top, an architectural historian and curator of Madness and Modernity, a new exhibition at The Wellcome Collection, London.
Anxious Vienna
Model of Steinhof mental asylum, where patients lived parallel livesThe exhibition looks at the relationships between mental illness, the visual arts and architecture in Vienna around 1900.
"While the whole of Europe was interested in mental health during this time, what was different about Vienna, is that it also had a cultural interest explored through the visual arts," said Dr Topp.
The exhibition includes designs for utopian psychiatric spaces, drawings of the patients confined within them and pathological photos used by doctors to indentify a diseased body.
Dr Topp adds: "Vienna acted like a magnet, drawing in people from far and wide to make their way. However, this lead to a widespread cultural anxiety, a lack of rootedness.
"Coupled with this were fears about the modern city and a faster pace of life. There was the perception that people would become mentally unhinged."
Parallel life
An electrotherapeutic cage used in Steinhof mental hospital.A film installation by artist David Bickerstaff, which explores Narrenturm mental asylum, is part of the display. It contrasts with another video of Vienna's mental hospitals, the Steinhof, built approximately 100 years later.
"From the mid 19th Century onwards, there was a strong acceptance that the mentally ill were not inhuman - they had to be confined, but they could enjoy their liberty within the institution.
"There was an enlightenment, which went along with philosophy at the time concerned with human rights and prison reform, a belief that buildings could play a role in transforming lives," said Dr Topp.
Steinhof, partly designed by the father of modern architecture, Otto Wagner, was a kind of model town for the insane.
"Patients lived a parallel life to those in Vienna. There was a farm, theatre, elaborate landscaping, and a chapel.
"A big model of Steinhof from 1907, is my favourite part of the exhibition," said Dr Topp.
"This was used to publicise the institution was now open. The Government of Austria wanted its people to know what it had been doing".
The exhibition
Asylum architecture is just one of the six areas explored in the exhibition.
Others include: The Patient Artist, which is devoted to art made by two patients who were confined to psychiatric institutions, and Pathological Portraits, which exhibits photographs of psychiatric patients in circulation at the time to show a 'diseased' body.
Madness and Modernity is on at the Wellcome Collection, London, from 1 April to 28 June.
Inside the Head: Art and Mental Illness Explored - Globespotters Blog - NYTimes.com
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.
Madness & Modernity | Wellcome Collection
Madness & Modernity | Wellcome Collection'Madness & Modernity'
Three weeks before the exhibition opens, the curators look ahead to the opening and discuss the themes of the exhibition; from the mad body to the influence of psychiatry on modernist architecture.
How to make a wax model, with Eleanor Crook | Wellcome Collection
How to make a wax model, with Eleanor Crook | Wellcome CollectionHow to make a wax model, with Eleanor Crook
Eleanor Crook, a sculptor specialising in wax anatomical and surgical models, demonstrates a few of the techniques employed when making a wax model.
Running time: 9 min 41 s
'Exquisite Bodies': Curator's perspective | Wellcome Collection
'Exquisite Bodies': Curator's perspective | Wellcome CollectionExquisite Bodies: Curator's perspective
Kate Forde, the exhibition's curator, looks at a few of the key exhibits from 'Exquisite Bodies' and discusses one of the exhibition's aims: to show how 2D techniques of representing the body's layers move into 3D form, particularly with the flourishing of waxwork modelling in the 18th century.
Running time: 8 min 11 s
Anatomical entertainment| Audio slideshow: BBC NEWS | Health
BBC NEWS | Health | Audio slideshow: Anatomical entertainmentAudio slideshow: Anatomical entertainment
Intricate wax models of humans - and their internal organs - helped educate medical students during the 19th Century. But they also offered the general public an unusual afternoon's entertainment.
As the Wellcome Collection in central London tells the curious and grotesque story of the anatomical model - take a tour with curator Kate Forde.
Warning: Contains some graphic images.
Some photographs courtesy Wellcome Library. Music courtesy KPM Music.
Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 29 July 2009.