Madness and Art

A suitable beginning for this project may be found in Foucault’s theory of what he terms Europe’s “Great Confinement,” an era of widespread social reforms during the last half of the seventeenth century (Foucault 1988:38). In Madness and Civilization Foucault asserts that up until this time insanity was met with an air of tolerance within Western society. Perceived as “a life more disturbed than disturbing,” madness was commonly understood as a necessary allegorical foil to pervasive, idealized notions of truth and beauty, thus elevating the madman to the role of the visionary and imbuing his insanity with the power to straddle the line between corporeal reality and the spiritual realms that lie beyond (Foucault 1988:37).

However, Foucault argues that this attitude towards abnormality underwent a drastic reorientation over the course of the next two centuries. Citing the Age of Reason’s preoccupation with the struggle to forge a society in which “moral obligation was joined by civil law,” he notes the emergence of a sweeping culture of confinement in which decisive and lasting boundaries, clearly demarcated by asylum walls, were drawn between the assumed productive elements of society and those found lacking due to poverty, infirmity or mental illness (Foucault 1988:46). In this division it becomes possible to glimpse the origins of a pervasive value system responsible for creating a residual schism between the participatory, and thereby valuable members of a given population, and the remaining few who do not fit the prescribed guidelines for an industrious, and thereby normative existence.

While increased industrialization eventually forced the reintegration of the able-bodied and sound-minded back into the labor force, those to whom the accepted template of reason and rationality could not be applied remained shuttered within the asylums and sanatoriums that were becoming a prominent feature among the European and American landscape. Removed in this manner from conventional society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the insane became an undeniable archetype for the very notion of the outsider. As a result of this wholesale banishment, a new subculture of alienation was created comprised of individuals given unprecedented license to fully indulge in the demands of their afflictions.

Compounded by concentration and isolation, an art capable of responding to the needs and desires of overwhelming psychoses began to emerge. Documented in the final vignette of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, as well as in the etchings of his contemporaries, the image-making activities of the mentally ill was at last exposed (MacGregor 1989:17). Although employed by the artists of the time as a rhetorical device marking the inevitable unraveling of a life ungoverned by the temperance of reason, the creative endeavors of the insane were beginning to come to light. Scratched upon walls or cobbled from scrounged materials, the gestation of a visual record particular to the experiences of the disenfranchised and dispossessed became increasingly acknowledged and referenced by the mainstream, and with this recognition the burgeoning reality of the artist-outsider was finally illuminated.

Posted by admin on April 6th, 2007 | Filed in outsider art | Comment now »

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