Where Postmodern Art and Schizophrenia Intersect
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/arts/design/31MUNR.html?ex=1018562312&ei=1
&en=89cd13a20e504898
March 31, 2002
By ELEANOR MUNRO
The human mind, so fragile and so susceptible to trauma,
pain and despair, also has wonderful recuperative powers
and can find a kind of release through the processes of
art.
That was the message of a recent conference at Cooper Union
sponsored by the National Alliance of Research on
Schizophrenia and Depression, or Narsad. The centerpiece of
the event was "Mind Matters," an exhibition of paintings,
drawings, prints and sculptures by artists with brain
diseases.
At first look, there seemed little difference between these
products of disordered mentality and work by postmodern
artists. We are all, normal and abnormal alike,
brain-centered, brain-driven. A half-century ago, the
psychiatrist Karl Menninger proposed: "Gone forever is the
notion that the mentally ill person is an exception. It is
now accepted that most people have some degree of mental
illness at some time."
Most of the artists in "Mind Matters" are integrated into
society and its visual culture. All use their eyes to place
themselves in the environment; each uses hands and mind to
diagram the world, to make a home for consciousness in it,
to stabilize themselves in space, perhaps to bring back
ghosts of childhood.
The Narsad event began in Cooper Union's Great Hall with a
trio of distinguished neurologists showing slides that
illustrated, with melancholy objectivity, the many unknowns
and relatively few knowns in brain science today. Oliver
Sacks talked about the autistic artist Jessica Park, 40,
who has endured a lifelong quest for "meaning" - the word
was Sacks's - in paintings of fantasy architecture under
color-flushed skies or stars. The autistic writer and
animal expert Temple Grandin talked about panic states in
cattle as they approach the slaughterhouse and her
architectural strategies for dealing with them. In the
exhibition gallery, her big architectural diagrams made a
chill pendant to Ms. Parks's cool transcendent tropes.
[Continued at
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/arts/design/31MUNR.html?ex=1018562312&ei=1
&en=89cd13a20e504898]
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