Collecting Psychosis

This is where the illusion starts to emerge – since it’s a question of understanding, we understand.

                                                                     Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses

 I

 How integral is a collection’s name? In 1996 the Hayward gallery hosted Beyond Reason: Works from the Prinzhorn Collection. Yet the title of Bettina Brand-Claussen’s essay in the exhibition catalogue addresses ‘The Collection of Works of Art in the Psychiatric Clinic, Heidelberg’. This itself is subtly altered from its original French form, which translates as: ‘The Collection of Works of Art by Mental Patients in the Heidelberg University Psychiatric Clinic’. The original essay was written for an exhibition entitled La Beauté Insensée at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Belgium.

            General questions about collecting become particularly significant in relation to Prinzhorn’s collection because the nature of its contents demands that we ask what defines a ‘work of art’, how this might be compatible with the category of ‘mental patient’, and in what ways collecting itself affects an object’s status. Should we define this collection by its institutional origins or, more conventionally, under the name of a collector whose vision it represents? Perhaps, as the titles of both exhibitions allow, we might define the whole according to unique aesthetic principles: ‘beyond reason’, ‘beauté insensée’.

            In this essay I shall explore the way that collecting is one response to problems posed by the art of the mentally ill. Central to the issue is the question of meaning: for a work to be ‘art’ does it have to communicate artistic intent? This leads to broader questions regarding specific categories of mental illness – gathered together as dementia praecox, schizophrenia or the psychoses – all defined, in part, by a perceived failure of communication. This is the story of various forms of collecting as a means of approaching this problem.

 Between 1918 and 1921 the German art historian and psychiatrist Dr Hans Prinzhorn collected around five thousand works made by people in psychiatric institutions over the preceding forty years. These include drawings, paintings, embroideries, texts, sculptures and pieces of calligraphy. No two artists are alike; the collection encompasses everything from works displaying professional draughtsmanship to childlike scrawls. This is the collection now commonly known as the ‘Prinzhorn collection’. But the name of a collection reflects more than just the work of gathering.

            Several years before Prinzhorn joined Heidelberg there had been a ‘museum’ to which works were contributed from other asylums as early as 1909.^[1] As Bettina Brand-Claussen notes, the term ‘museum’ suggests ambitions even at this stage. But it was known internally as ‘the teaching material collection’. In so far as a collection is defined as much by its use and presentation as by its contents, its title is [defining]. It was Prinzhorn who moved the works firmly into the realm of ‘art’, away from the pedagogic and diagnostic. Even ‘museum’ suggests preservative rather than artistic ends. Prinzhorn’s ambitions extended beyond this.             His assertion of value with regards to schizophrenic expression began with the act of preserving these artefacts in portfolios, with selected images protected by passe-partout mounts.^[2] It was, of course, Prinzhorn who decided which works were ‘presentable’, and this selection remained until 1980. The passe-partout mounts have provided a refrain throughout the history of responses to the collection, metonymically standing for the act of collecting itself, the designation of status and imposition of order, but also Prinzhorn’s appropriation and, arguably, misappropriation of the works.

            Ultimately, the most significant ‘home’ for the collection was to be Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei Der Geiteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), published in 1922. Divided broadly into two sections, one arguing for a universal drive to pictorial expression, the other presenting the works of ten schizophrenic ‘masters’, the book was of significant influence on artists in Germany and France between the wars, and later in America and Britain. In arguing, not just for the value of patient art, but its superiority to the over-trained, self-conscious art of the academy, Prinzhorn drew upon ideas of primitivism and the primordial which were already central to Expressionism. The Bildnerei soon found itself a bible for surrealists and, in the hands of Jean Dubuffet, helped define notions of ‘outsider art’ more broadly.

            It was a book about universal principles intended to have universal appeal. On the very first page Prinzhorn complains that ‘most of the reports published to date about the works of the insane were intended only for psychiatrists’.^[3] Prinzhorn aimed for a wider audience, mirroring the general truths he was uncovering: a ‘basic, universal, human process’ of configuration (Gestaltung) – expression in images - that would be found equally in great works and schizophrenic scribbling.^[4] Yet the very language Prinzhorn uses suggests the cultural no man’s land in which he was forced to operate. The term ‘Bildnerei’ is rich with implications: ‘image making’ rather than ‘art’ (kunst). It establishes a distance from inauthentic, academic culture that preserves the ‘masters’ in necessary isolation. The term ‘master’, likewise, creates a category between ‘patient’ and ‘artist’. The term is still used by critics for its semantic convenience even as they question Prinzhorn’s project. A latent condescension on the doctor’s part becomes a silent, subtle irony directed at Prinzhorn himself.

            The question, from the start, was how to look at these items: in relation to what objects were they to be understood? Aligning the art of the mentally ill with Expressionism was a canny move on Prinzhorn’s part. The movement had fought an equivalent battle for aesthetic recognition since the start of the century, but one launched from outside the asylum. John MacGregor, in The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, elaborates the comparison:

The struggle of physicians to impose order on a mass of seemingly chaotic images parallels in many ways the strenuous endeavour of historians of contemporary art in the twentieth century to come to grips with non-objective art in its varied manifestations. Both dealt with material...that was largely rejected as valueless, which they heroically sought to conceptualise.^[5]

MacGregor captures the concurrent workings of fear and categorisation (and suggests what lies behind modernism’s own nosological obsession, the defining of ‘movements’). The ‘heroism’, here, is not that of the artist themselves but the historian. We might extend this to include the critic, the gallery owner and the collector. The first public exhibition of works from Prinzhorn’s collection was held in January 1921 at Zinglers Kabinett in Frankfurt, a venue which was to show work by Paul Klee later that same year. This was followed by a presentation of works in the gallery of Herbert von Garvens, a collector with interest in avant-garde and borderline areas of art. Between 1920 and 1923 a show toured under the title ‘The Art of the Mentally Ill’. In at least one venue, however, ‘Kunst’ was dropped from the title and it became simply the ‘Prinzhorn Collection’.^[6] Gruhle, in a printed introduction to the show, praises the doctor’s ‘tireless activity’ in preserving and presenting works uncorrupted by ‘considerations of contemporary taste and of profit’.

            There was always another view, however. As early as 1921, Prinzhorn mentioned in a letter to his publishers that Willhelm Weygandt – collector, poet and professor with research interests in ‘Idiocy’ and ‘Cretinism’ – was ‘annoyed about our collection’.^[7] The description suggests Prinzhorn’s consciousness of provocation, but also, if a mere ‘collection’ might provoke, quite how much is invested in the work of assembling one. That Weygandt’s objective was the ‘eradication of the Modernist aesthetic’ is similarly revealing of the battles being fought in the process of defining the borders of art. ^[8] These, of course, become all too obvious in 1937 when Carl Schneider became director of the Heidelberg clinic and lent works for the Nazi's Degenerate Art exhibition in order to help it draw its own parallels between madness and modern art. Yet while this in many ways marked a tragic break with Prinzhorn’s enlightened vision, the Nazi project is not so much its opposite as an equivalent attempt to confront the chaos by gathering it up, and hanging it next to self-consciously experimental artists. Both seek context in response to a resistance by the art itself.

 II

There he was for months on end, heaping up, stone by stone, the crude rocks that for him were affected with the greatest good. Now, because he has stacked them up on a plank, the plank breaks, there’s a great din in the room, everything is swept out, and the character who seemed to attach such importance to these rocks doesn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to what is going on, doesn’t raise the slightest bit of protest before the general evacuation of the objects of his desires. He simply starts again, accumulating others. And that is dementia praecox.

                                                                              Lacan, The Psychoses, p.20

 Jacques Lacan describes an article from 1908 in which Karl Abrahams reports the behaviour of a case of dementia praecox and his supposed ‘lack of affectivity’. It is a truism, as Lacan suggests, that genuine collecting - an assignation of meaning, value and order - distinguishes us from madness itself. But if there is any truth in this perception of schizophrenia, how did Prinzhorn’s artists regard their own ‘art works’? And should it make any difference to the viewer?

            The category of dementia praecox is normally dated back to a lecture given in Heidelberg by Emil Kraepelin over 26 and 27 November 1898. Kraepelin was director of the Heidelberg clinic from 1890 to 1903, and it was probably Kraepelin who assembled the original ‘Museum’. In the lecture of 1898 Kraepelin collected together several ‘Bilder’ or concepts of madness that had until then been described separately. Kraepelin’s application of contemporary scientific methodology to the problem of insanity – strict observation, description and classification – allowed him to construct the unifying concept of dementia praecox, whose subsidiary groups of schizophrenic types still form the basis of diagnosis today.^[9]

            Any definition of an illness responds to a need to isolate it from others, but this is felt especially keenly in the case of dementia praecox. Kraepelin was responsible for the sharp distinction between the schizophrenias and disorders of affect such as manic-depressive psychosis and melancholia. Yet, like outsider art, schizophrenia functions as something like a set for those terms that have no set, collecting symptoms that fail to replicate the structure of neuroses. It is an ‘essentially contested concept’ from the start.^[10] Competing with Kraepelin’s nosology was Eugen Bleuler, whose coining of ‘schizophrenia’ in 1911 firmly associated the disorder with a disruption of subjectivity and fragmentation of experience.^[11] This itself is influenced by the notion of ‘spaltung’ that runs through Freud’s discussions of psychosis, although Freud proposed the term ‘paraphrenia’.[12] As ever it is interesting to see which name gains prominence. Bleuler’s ‘schizophrenia’, etymologically suggesting ‘split mind’, communicates a sense of otherness beyond the merely degenerative ‘dementia praecox’ (literally premature senile dementia).

             This radical otherness of schizophrenia presented problems early in the Prinzhorn collection’s history, and Prinzhorn himself was most aware of it:

It is essential to all art to seek resonance in other men. The certainty of such a resonance supports every artist and nourishes his creative urge.... The schizophrenic, on the other hand, is detached from humanity, and by definition is neither willing nor able to re-establish contact with it. If he were he would be healed. We sense in our pictures the complete autistic isolation and the gruesome solipsism which far exceeds the limits of psychopathic alienation, and believe that in it we have found the essence of schizophrenic configuration.^[13]

It is a remarkable turn - from complete isolation to universal expression - hanging on the thread of ‘configuration’. In 1933, in a review of one of the last ‘Prinzhorn’ exhibitions for some time, the journalist Hans Nachod questioned this rescue of meaning:

 Whether works such as these, made without the control of an organised and purposive will, are to be judged as art in our sense of the word, will always have a number of widely divergent answers. Under the hegemony of radical Expressionism, which does not now govern our view of artistic activity as it did a decade ago, some were no doubt more inclined to reply in the affirmative than they are today...^[14]

 The collection’s dependency on relating to artistic experimentation to cohere is never more obvious than when that experimentation moves on and we must decide how to respond without reference to that greater collection entitled ‘modern art’. Without objective sources of comparison we are left with the artist’s subjective involvement. ‘It is impossible to approach these works of art via the accepted canon of art history, to situate them within artistic movements or unpick influences and intellectual trends,’ Caroline Douglas complains. But ‘we can still appreciate the works of Prinzhorn’s masters as a new view of reality, born out of extremes of emotion and experience.’^[15] Colin Rhodes, in his essay ‘Exquisite Vistas’, confronts the absence of contact ‘with the subjectivity and intentionality of the one who creates’ when faced with art by schizophrenic patients. Yet,

 whilst it might be argued that their ‘difference’ should be recognised, it is surely also true that viewers of visionary and outsider work may gain much from the attempt to open themselves up to the singularity of the other’s vision.^[16]

 The category of the mystical and visionary provides a way out of the impasse. ‘There is a possibility,’ Prinzhorn asserts, ‘that our patients are in contact, in a totally irrational way, with the most profound truths, and have produced, unconsciously, pictures of transcendence as they perceive it’.^[17] The categories of the ‘universal’ and the ‘transcendental’, in subtly different ways, both escape the demand of communicating an individual ego. It is one way of dealing with material that seems profoundly meaningful while meaning nothing to us. As Douglas recognises, if the schizophrenic is characterised by an ‘erosion of ego-boundaries’ their appropriation as artists comes ‘to hinge upon the issue of spontaneity...The spontaneous act of creation, whether of writing, drawing, sculpting or embroidering, thus becomes an assertion of selfhood in itself’.^[18]     

            Against this assertion of the spontaneous and transcendental, much recent work on Prinzhorn’s collection has sought to return the works to their social context, recovering the biographies of individual artists and aligning their work, if not with modern art, then with the culture of their times more broadly. Restoration work has involved the careful, symbolic removal of images from the pasteboard to which they had been clumsily affixed. Meanwhile, exhibitions such as the Hayward’s circumvent the challenge of the works themselves somewhat by foregrounding the act of collecting – inevitably making Prinzhorn central even as he is questioned. Brand-Claussen carefully compiles archival research that suggests that, far from being entirely spontaneous, artistic production was stimulated by suggestion and reward.^[19] This was consciously suppressed because

only the assertion that the patients worked spontaneously and unconsciously could corroborate Prinzhorn’s principle of ‘authentic’ production, which he summed up in the formula ‘instinctive, non-purposive – they do not know what they are doing.’^[20]

 In the same way, her subsequent essay on one of the ‘masters’, August Natterer, addresses Prinzhorn’s selectivity in compiling the Bildnerei. He reproduced ‘poetically loaded works that were replete with the desired mystery’, such as Natterer’s Antichrist or Miraculous Shepherd, but failed to include a reproduction of the same artist’s Witch’s Head-Landscape, ‘presumably because he considered it too grotesque and banal’ (Fig 1).

            Brand-Claussen’s analysis of the complex optical effects of the Witch’s Head transparency, evident only when it is removed from its mounting, becomes a means for reinserting Natterer into a social context: his background as an ‘electro-technician’, his travels, training and work across Switzerland and Germany etc.^[21] Most of all, the image is shown to have a depth of meaning rather than purely mystical appeal. The symbolism is opened up to more conventional art-historical investigation that Prinzhorn, uninterested in ‘a rational decoding of their messages’, had resisted.^[22]

            Hal Foster uses a parallel approach to criticise the idealisation and mystification of patient art in his essay, Blinded Insights: On the Modernist Reception of the Art of the Mentally Ill.^[23] He addresses a functionality that the work possesses for its creator, at odds with any supposedly mystical content. For Foster, the patients’ will to structure their troubling experience is the determinant need, not raw ‘expression’. It is a suggestion heard as early as 1936, when Ernst Kris argued that Prinzhorn’s masters did not manifest universal forces but a ‘psychodynamically organized attempt at self-rescue on the part of the foundering ego.’^[24] Foster describes it in terms of the need to ‘restabilise the symbolic order’: 

To put it as simply as possible: more than attack artistic convention and symbolic order, the art of the mentally ill seems concerned to find such law again, perhaps to found it again, at the very least to ‘recompose its empty form, its absence.’ For to their horror this is what these artists often see - not a symbolic order that is too stable, that they wish to contest as such (again as posited by avant-gardist logic), but rather a symbolic order that is not stable at all, that is in crisis, even corruption.^[25]

 He refers to the work of Josef Heinrich Grebing, a commercial clerk diagnosed with dementia praecox who ‘reassembled a symbolic order out of the perceived debris of the official one’, issuing financial certificates, painting religious icons, world maps and an entire calendar of the twentieth century - ‘a chronology for Catholic youths and maidens’ - replete with astrological tables (Fig 2).  Foster cites Freud’s remarks on the paranoid system of Judge Schreber: ‘The delusion-formation, which we take to be a pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction.’^[26] In the same way Kris, drawing upon the theories of ego-psychology, attempted to make hallucination more accessible as an encoded fulfilment of unconscious wishes, drawing analogies between dreams, hallucinations and art.

            Kris, Brand-Claussen and Foster all, in their own ways, hold out the promise of an equivalence between schizophrenic art and other forms of experience. Psychoanalysis especially seems to offer a bridge. But are these works something we can approach like a dream? Is there a ‘message’ to be decoded? Psychosis has always posed a challenge to psychoanalysis, a science of meaning, and, as with psychiatry, there is a structural demand that the neuroses and psychoses are divided absolutely. It is telling that when Freud approaches the question of psychosis he does through a written, retrospective memoir.^[27] Prinzhorn, well-read in psychoanalytic theory, purposefully chose to exclude psychoanalysis from the Bildenerei in favour of his theory of spontaneous self-expression.^[28] Yet, again, the notion of selfhood, inextricable from ego, gives us pause. This is the problem that Martin Golding is led to in Modern Painters as he attempts to pin down the ‘disquieting feeling of strangeness’ with which Prinzhorn identified his own collection:

It is the intense literalness which precludes symbol – a literalness of depiction and of context which seeks to instate each object...not as the transformation of an inner state but as its concrete representative, in a newly created world.^[29]

This representation, rather than transformation, is what, for Jacques Lacan, defines the psychotic delusion:

Delusions are indeed legible, but they...occur in a completely different register. They are legible, but there is no way out.^[30]

The register is that of the real, in which rejected content reappears as a delusion. Freud, Lacan asserts, ‘never defined hallucinatory psychosis on the simple model of fantasy...A delusion in no way serves such an end.’^[31] Lacan’s projection of a subject spoken by language, his inversion of the expected model of communication, provides one way of approaching the unsettling ‘literalness’ of schizophrenic art, at once ‘revelatory and hermetic’ in Colin Rhodes’s words. For Lacan it is precisely the fact that it can be understood, that it does speak to us, which causes the confusion. The question, as he reminds us throughout The Psychoses, is ‘who speaks?’^[32] His answer is that in psychosis it is not the ego speaking - not even through the mask of repression - but the symbolic order itself. Schizophrenic expression reflects the structural logic of the unconscious rather than any selfhood beyond it. It is in these seminars that we are presented with an unconscious fundamentally ‘structured, woven, chained, meshed, by language’.^[33]

            Lacan’s turn to metaphors of weaving and embroidery are resonant of the fraught, involved examples from Heidelberg (fig 3): 

If we imagine experience to be a piece of material made up of criss-crossing threads, we could say that repression would figure in it as a rent or a tear, which can still be repaired, whereas foreclosure would figure in it as a béance due to the weaving itself, in short a primal hole which will never again be able to find its substance since it has never been anything other than the substance of a hole and can only be filled, and even then imperfectly, by a patch.^[34]

 We sense a desperate attempt at restoration, as Foster asserts, but not one that will open to us. Jean Baudrillard writes: ‘The point where a collection closes in on itself and ceases to be oriented towards an unfilled gap is the point where madness begins.’^[35] The unfilled gap opens on to the rest of the world. The gap that Prinzhorn’s collection fails to provide is one where we might enter as viewers, one that would reflect a gap in the works themselves between the image and the controlling ego behind it. This is the depth which usually structures our experience of art, just as the gap between symptom and repressed content structures the psychoanalytic encounter.

 So should we, finally, accept the collection’s disarray – its ‘madness’, in the term’s conventional and pejorative sense? Inge Jádi describes taking charge of the collection in 1971, and being faced with

 a swirling chaos in which such minimal outward order as had been imposed was simply swallowed up. The work of these patients is itself causally linked with chaos; and that situation had a density and appropriateness that were finally lost as a result of the scholarly cataloguing, conservatorial care and neat passe-partouting.^[36]

 Unsurprisingly, when she considers the difficulties of her role as curator, she turns to those artists who themselves appear to manifest Foster’s impulse to ‘restabilise the symbolic order’. Grebing again:

 Everything is arranged, systematized, elaborately beautified to make it credible and timeless. This is the work that fascinates and at the same time oppresses the viewer. Then, when the cracks appear, when everything slides off into the absurd and the void winks maliciously, we are irresistibly, painfully overcome by laughter – and by a desire to keep our distance.^[37]

 Grebing shows us ‘the threat from the void that is native to man’, and as this has always been a part of artistic production

 so I should like to call these fractured creations of Grebing’s works of art. They are works of art almost by mistake: they were not conceived as such by Grebing, but compulsively produced under imminent threat of extinction, as weapons to ward off death.^[38]

 Even here the language of intent surfaces, alongside a presumed access to interiority. Yet works of ‘mistaken’ art still leave the issue of presentation unresolved. The beauty we find is an imposition. In Grebing’s case in particular

 there is a great danger of mere aestheticization, because the beauty of order is highly tempting. A sheet that manifests this kind of order, extracted from the stifling mass of its peers, neatly mounted in passe-partout and hung on the wall in uncluttered isolation... will make us say: Ah, how beautiful! And there we lose both the truth and Herr Grebing.^[39]

 Jádi retired as curator of the Prinzhorn collection in 2001. That same year saw the opening of the permanent museum ‘Sammlung Prinzhorn’ in the Joseph Durm lecture hall, built in 1880 as part of the Neurologic Clinic. It has been transformed into an ‘architecturally interesting space’, ‘climatically controlled’, with ‘a well equipped restoration studio, a small but expanding library and a museum shop.’^[40] But the project was not without controversy. A German advocacy group for the rights of the mentally ill fought to have the collection moved to Berlin, to be the centerpiece of a commemorative museum dedicated to the victims of Nazi euthanasia (several of whom are represented in the collection). Rene Talbot, spokesperson for the group, claimed that Prinzhorn ‘was the one responsible for implanting this notion of the existence of a pathological art. In this way he laid the foundation for the Degenerate Art exhibition.’^[41] Christoph Mundt, Jádi’s successor, argued the opposite:

The collection is one of the very rare examples by which psychiatry can tell the public not only about mentally ill patients, but about the human condition in general. More than that, it fascinates by its beauty and aesthetic challenges.^[42]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The System of Collecting’ tr. Roger Cardinal. in The Cultures of  Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion, 1994)

Brand-Claussen, Bettina, ‘The Collection of Works of Art in the Psychiatric Clinic,   Heidelberg – from the Beginnings until 1945’, in Beyond Reason: Works from the Prinzhorn Collection (London: Hayward Gallery, 1996)

Brand-Claussen, Bettina, ‘The Witch’s Head Landscape: A Pictorial Illusion from the Prinzhorn Collection’, trans. Malcolm Green, American Imago, vol 58 no 1 (2001)

Douglas, Caroline, ‘Precious and Splendid Fossils’ in Beyond Reason: Works from the  Prinzhorn Collection (London: Hayward Gallery, 1996)

Foster, Hal, Blinded Insights: On the Modernist Reception of the Art of the Mentally Ill,  October 97 (2001)

 Jádi, Inge, ‘Points of View – Perspectives – Horizons’ in Beyond Reason: Works from the Prinzhorn Collection (London: Hayward Gallery, 1996)

Kris, Ernst, ‘Observations on the Spontaneous Artistry of the Mentally Ill’ Imago 23 (1936)

Lacan, Jacques, The Psychoses (London: Routledge, 1993)

MacGregor, John, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (New Jersey: Princeton UP)

Prinzhorn, Hans, Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A contribution to the psychology and   psychopathology of configuration, trans Eric von Brockdorff (New York: Springer-       Verlag, 1972)

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ‘Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism’, Journal of Modern Literature, vol 25: 3-4 (Summer 2002)

Read, John; Mosher, Loren; Bentall, Richard eds., Models of Madness: psychological, social   and biological approaches to schizophrenia [???]

Rhodes, Colin, ‘Exquisite Vistas’, Private Worlds: Outsider and Visionary art (Orleans  House Gallery: 2001)

Rigney, Robert, ‘Ownership Dispute over Prinzhorn Collection’, Art in  Amrica (September    2000)