Madmen in Art
Madmen in Art
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, May 23, 1987
IN his Creative Writing classes in the La Salle of the mid-70’s, the poet Cirilo Bautista liked to quote Picasso as saying that “the only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad.”
At any rate, the myth of the artist as madman has always appealed to the popular imagination. For instance, the fitful Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh now enjoys a following probably as much for his derangement as for the wealth of his creative produce – best remembered even today as the tormented soul who cut off his own ear in a fit of rage.
While artists, as a breed are generally thought to be at least wildly eccentric, Van Gogh was in fact clinically deranged for much of his productive life. Haunted by a history of emotional imbalance from an early age, he spent his adult life weaving from one mental institution to another, invariably diagnosed as dangerous both to himself and to others. A dismal failure in virtually everything he had tried – from salesmanship, to religious evangelism, to painting – he was driven deeper into dementia by a psychotic love-life, constant ridicule from his peers, and an overwhelming sense of guilt and inadequacy. Unable to sell his paintings, he lived entirely on his devoted brother’s meager income. In the end, thinking himself a burden even to his loved ones, Van Gogh commited suicide with a single bullet in the belly.
Ironically, it was his obsessive nature that propelled him to greatness, though sadly, Vincent’s true worth as an artist would be acknowledged only after his death. It seems altogether remarkable that he had been painting only for ten years, achieving in a single decade what more talented men could not do in a lifetime. The turbulence of his psyche, his “wretched illness”, had contributed in no small way to his success – not only as an artist, but also as one of the most revered and romanticized figures of this century.
A great deal has already been written about the so-called creative freedom of the insane, particularly with regard to their liberation from social inhibitions and contemporary mores. Scholarly volume outside the realm of esthetics have been devoted to the “fine madness” of such creative giants as Franz Kafka, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Edvard Munch, and others, as well as to the habitually altered states of Poe, Cocteau, and Malcolm Lowry. The surrealist Joan Miro had said many times that his otherworldly mindscapes were initially inspired by vivid hallucinations he had experienced due to hunger as a fledgeling young artist. And we have all seen the nightmarish progression of works by Louis Wain, the turn-of-the-century English painter whose charming interpretations of cats grew more fiendishly elaborate even as his schizophrenia developed.
It was precisely in this context that an exhibition of the work of Adolph Wolfi (1864-1930) was presented some years ago by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, installing it at the center of panel discussions on “Art of the Insane”. Wolfi was a convicted child-molester who spent the last 35 years of his life in the Waldau Asylum in Berne, Switzerland. The bulk of his exhibited produce was derived from his 19,500-page epic saga entitled “From the Cradle to the Grave. Or, Through Work and Sweat, Suffering and Ordeals, Even Through Prayer into Damnation”. Largely autobiographical in a psychopathic sort of way, it concerns fragments of his personal experience and the fictitious exploits of a central character named St. Adolph II. A veritable patchwork of scribbled text, transcribed music, portraits of animals and distorted people, notations and composite scenes, all bloom in the manner of illuminated scripture, interrupted on occasion by tables of names and numbers recounting the profits of his imaginary estates until the year 2000.
American critics C. L. Morrison had written in reaction to this exhibit that “one reason all (this) talk of art of the insane sounds oddly anachronistic is that Wolfi’s sort of strangeness – repetitive images, flat space, variable perspective, mixing of disciplines, diaristic subjects, automatism – are now a very acceptable part of much contemporary “sane” art.
Given our history of Dada and Surrealism uniting dream and waking states and imitating those formal elements which psychiatrists still attribute to art of the insane, divisions between “normal artist” and “insane artist” lead to great confusion.
That so much contemporary art idealizes the outpouring of the brain’s contents and the baring of the troubled psyche, does say something about its dangerous affinity to the meanderings of the lost. For better or for worse, we seem increasingly hell-bent on taking that proverbial plunge.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Madmen in Art” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, May 23, 1987
