I came across a book that could be termed disturbing by some (most) measures.
Though This be Madness a study in psychotic art
-Georg Schmidt | Hans Steck | Alfred Bader
devised by Alfred Bader (strange credit, I thought…)
The copy I have here with me is owned by an institutional library and seems to have been printed in 1961.
“it is not the purpose of this book to prove anything, but to afford an insight into the wonders hidden in the depth of the human soul. The remarkable gifts displayed here by three psychotic patients open us a realm of weird poetry- a realm which the poet and the scientist, the art historian and the physician each strives in his own way to make accessible. Disease itself then fades into insignificance before man’s astonishing creative energy. To bear witness to the primaeval spirit of humanity is the sole aim of this pictorial album”
“ALL WRITING AND PAINTING, ALL SCULPTURE, BUILDING AND INVENTION IS IN FACT A FORM OF ESCAPE FROM HELL” – Antonin Artaud
This book reminds of two other books, actually one other book and a student project document I came across. The first is a book called Outsider Art by Roger Cardinal. I’d like to type out the brief introduction that describes this book as well, as both these books are looking at the margins of art.
Both these books look at artists that seemingly bear no influence from their surroundings and society.
” ‘The characteristic property of an inventive art’, writes Dubuffet,’is that it bears no resemblance to art as it is generally recognized and in consequence…does not seem like art at all.’ In this book, Roger Cardinal examines perhaps the only art which can truly be described as inventive, the art engendered outside the influence of society: by those certified insane; by those who claim inspiration from
the spirit world; and by the innocent, upon whom the stamp of stereotyped culture has failed to make an impression. In doing so, the author challenges the accepted definitions of art, and the validity of the bases from which we judge it. In a society where artistic activity is all too often a by-product of professional publicity and the commercial juggernaut, he demands that we consider ‘outsider art’ as a real alternative. “
Minor Masters Of Madness …….(foreword to ‘though this be madness’, by Jean Cocteau)
‘In this age of monstrous vulgarity, of education without culture, when words have lost their meaning through being wrongly or loosely used, perhaps we should restore its true meaning to the word “realism”.
Realism consists in faithfully copying the features of a world which belongs to the artist. Thus it has no connection with what usually goes under the name of “reality”.
It follows that the artist must, to a certain extent, be a schizophrenic (I). Like a child or a madman, he can make no claim but to genius.
There was a time when a spiritless paraphrase of genius had cultural and scholastic authority, but talent in our time-the sort of talent that might stem from healing, from family pressures, or from mere habit-no longer has that degree of popular acceptance that would permit, for example, a mediocre painting t…
(i hate to write this but I lost what i had originally typed due to a connectivity glitch, and I cannot , for the life of me, locate this book again. It seems to have mysteriously disappeared!! and the librarians seem to be no help to try and locate it for me. It seems the disappearance of a book is really no big deal in this library.)
Anyway, I mentioned that there is one other book/document that I an reminded of here. That’d be a student project by Prachi Kamdar. There are only a few student projects that are worth looking upto at the institute where I study. This is one of those few. It is dedicated to studying the pocketed deviancy in society and the publication she has come up with is a celebration of that. “The commoness of the uncommons”, that I think is the title of this project if I remember correctly. I found that not only has Prachi Kamdar studied the subject thoroughly (and it is clear that she has enjoyed every bit of the same), but she has also translated that big chunk of learning into a very minimalistic publication which is interesting/ simple / subtle but heavily laden with meaning and intention. It shows that she has not only enjoyed making the visual graphic design during her educational experience but really managed to acquire an intuitive design sensibility, which is an increasing rarity at this institution. There is a sense of disappointment when one looks at the quality of the body of work produced in this space. All talk, hardly any walk.
