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To feel, despite everything
Insight
stress disorder wasn’t listed until DSM-III in 1979, but psychoanalysis had made the general public familiar with the idea that traumatic experience lingered on in the minds of those who suffered it, and that trauma could recur and in unexpected ways. The idea, in Dead of Night, that there’s no escaping the cycle of nightmares might be one reason it didn’t sit well with an audience still reeling from the war.
And perhaps the protagonist’s fate mirrored the concerns of a society moving out of a world war and into a cold war, continuing a seemingly endless cycle of horrors. Perhaps poor Craig is still there, 70 years after the film first came out, going through those horrible nightmares again and again.
Simon Guerrier
Exhibitions To feel, despite everything
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 2 October 2015
was killed by police, and Evelyn committed suicide. The only survivor is Coral, with whom Errázuriz remains friends. In a later body of work, El infarto del alma (Heart’s infarct), Errázuriz collaborated with the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit. “Now we are travelling…to the psychiatric hospital in the town of Putaendo, a hospital built in the 1940s to treat tuberculosis victims and…converted into an insane asylum receiving patients from the country’s various psychiatric clinics”, noted Eltit in her travel diary (Santa Fe: Helen Lane Editions, 1992). “The remaining patients, most of them indigent, some without civilian identification, [are] catalogued as NN [no name]”. Errázuriz’s photographs of paired lovers are confrontational, their undeviating gazes focused on her camera, impossible to evade. Their facial expressions, deformed by antipsychotic medication, their differing ages within pairs, their shabby clothes, and institutional haircuts, mark them as different from ordinary people, but the power and poignancy of Errázuriz’s photographs show that although marginalised and incarcerated, these people also love and feel affection. The first photographs by an American to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale were ten photographs by Diane Arbus (1923–71). Her subjects were also marginalised
Poetics of Dissent is at the Pavilion of Chile at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy, until Nov 22, 2015
Courtesy of Paz Errázuriz
The International Art Exhibition, held in Venice every 2 years, is stimulating but exhausting. This year there are two international survey exhibitions of contemporary art; 87 national participants exhibiting in pavilions at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and throughout the city; and 44 collateral events. Among exhibitions which, based on prior knowledge, we expect to either enjoy or dislike, there are invariably others whose intensity of artistic vision and achievement unexpectedly impress or challenge us. Photographic essays by Paz Errázuriz (born 1944), displayed in the Chilean Poetics of Dissent exhibition, depict people living on the fringes of society during the country’s military dictatorship. They were an extraordinary revelation. Self-taught, Errázuriz began taking photographs in 1972, the year before the right-wing general Augusto Pinochet deposed the popular socialist president Salvador Allende. During 1982–87, she documented the lives of 12 male transvestites, working in clandestine brothels in Santiago and Talca, Chile, in a body of work entitled La manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple). She did not dare exhibit these radical photographs until 1989. When these pictures were published as her first book in 1990, only one copy was sold. Central in its narrative are two transvestite brothers, Evelyn and Pilar, and their mother Mercedes. In Evelyn 1 (1982), heavily made-up and wearing drag, he reclines on a bare mattress in a sparsely furnished brothel bedroom, his pose echoing both Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Manet’s Olympia. “La Manzana de Adán is a work that…was carried out under extremely difficult circumstances; at a time when its protagonists were being subjected to curfews, political, and police persecutions…it is a work born with the mark of something to be regarded in the future”, commented Errázuriz in 2014. She and her collaborator, Chilean writer Claudia Donoso, befriended the transvestites, living with them in the brothels while documenting their lives in image and text. Female sex workers were reticent about being photographed, because their families didn’t know that they worked in a brothel, but the transvestites were flattered, particularly when their photographs were published in a women’s magazine review of an exhibition of the work. Many of Errázuriz’s subjects were ravaged by AIDS, Leyla
Paz Errázuriz, Evelyn 1, La Manzana de Adán (Chile, 1982)
875
Insight
people, including transvestites, dwarfs, giants, circus performers, and nudists. She photographed A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, NYC (1966) in brutal close-up, emphasising his pock-marked face, plucked eyebrows, and long finger-nailed hand holding a cigarette. It’s a shockingly honest photograph, but it lacks Errázuriz’s defining empathy for her subjects.
La Manzana de Adán and Infarto del alma document “a chapter of the political history of Chilean sexuality, a history that unfolded in a patriarchal, authoritarian and machista society”, concludes Andrea Giunta in her Poetics of Dissent catalogue essay.
Colin Martin
Master stroke
Tate /Tate Images
The Art of Bedlam by Richard Dadd is at the Watts Gallery, Surrey, UK, from June 16, to Nov 1, 2015
Knowledge of Richard Dadd’s life is often restricted to its gorier components. Stories of madness, murder, and an obsession with worlds beyond our own cling to the 19th-century artist’s reputation. However, a new exhibition at the Watts Gallery, Surrey, UK, aims to dispel the operatic melodrama surrounding the man, and instead explores his moving battle with mental illness. Dadd was born in 1817 and grew up in Kent before his father relocated the family to London to allow his artistic son to study at the Royal Academy. Dadd’s initial work won him both praise and the opportunity to document the European and Middle Eastern travels of solicitor Sir Thomas Phillips. Towards the end of this tour, however, the artist’s mental health began to deteriorate, with Phillips noting an increased “violence of expression”. Returning to England, the increasingly delusional Dadd killed his father in the belief that “such sacrifice was demanded by the gods and spirits above”. He then escaped to France, with the aim of assassinating the Austrian Emperor. While there, he was detained after violently attacking a tourist. Upon his second, forced, return to England, he was confined to Bethlem Hospital, more commonly known as “Bedlam”. Admitted to a secure psychiatric unit, the artist was diagnosed with symptoms akin to what would now be likely characterised as schizophrenia, with Bethlem’s superintendent Sir W Charles Hood noting his patient’s belief that “certain spirits have the power of possessing a man’s body and compelling him to adopt a particular course”.
Far from quelling such spirits, Hood attempted to channel them by encouraging Dadd to paint. Doing so resulted in the creation of some of Dadd’s most famous works. One such painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855–64), is the exhibition’s jewel. Painted for Bethlem steward George Haydon, the piece takes its name from the central figure of a wood-cutter, splitting an acorn to create a chariot for the fairy Queen Mab. Around him, figures of varying sizes crowd the small canvas, ranging from the beautiful to the grotesque. The work is intricately detailed, with figures barely bigger than a finger each imbued with lives and characters of their own. In doing this, Dadd created a world so vibrant that it inspired artists as diverse as Terry Pratchett, Freddie Mercury, and Siegfried Sassoon, the latter of whom once owned the painting. Dadd’s obsession with the fantastic is also explored through other works in the exhibition. Puck (1841) depicts Shakespeare’s cherubic trickster, while Contradiction– Oberon & Titania (1854–58), juxtaposes the rigid figures of the King and Queen of the fairies with a thriving mass of sprites, pixies, and centaurs. Such motifs could, in the hands of a lesser artist, collapse under their own saccharine sweetness. However, under Dadd’s patient brush strokes, the inhabitants of fairyland develop a sinister demeanour not present in the classic works of the earlier romantics. Away from the ethereal, the exhibition also showcases the artist’s delicate landscape watercolours and his work on Sketches to Illustrate the Passions—a series embarked on with Hood’s encouragement to illustrate the sort of extreme emotions it was believed could result in mental illness. Feelings like Hatred (1853) and Agony–Raving Madness (1854) are present, but some of the works also display a sharper satirical edge. Insignificance or Self Contempt (1854) shows a small man in comically overlarge clothing, whereas Patriotism (1857) depicts two soldiers examining a map of an area—which includes the “Sea of Trouble” and an asylum called “Lostwithal”. Inclusion of more everyday feelings, such as Anger (1854) and Grief or Sorrow (1854), suggests that Dadd’s understanding of “madness” was perhaps closer to our own than we would care to admit.
Andrew Bianchi 876
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 2 October 2015
stress disorder wasn’t listed until DSM-III in 1979, but psychoanalysis had made the general public familiar with the idea that traumatic experience lingered on in the minds of those who suffered it, and that trauma could recur and in unexpected ways. The idea, in Dead of Night, that there’s no escaping the cycle of nightmares might be one reason it didn’t sit well with an audience still reeling from the war.
And perhaps the protagonist’s fate mirrored the concerns of a society moving out of a world war and into a cold war, continuing a seemingly endless cycle of horrors. Perhaps poor Craig is still there, 70 years after the film first came out, going through those horrible nightmares again and again.
Simon Guerrier
Exhibitions To feel, despite everything
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 2 October 2015
was killed by police, and Evelyn committed suicide. The only survivor is Coral, with whom Errázuriz remains friends. In a later body of work, El infarto del alma (Heart’s infarct), Errázuriz collaborated with the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit. “Now we are travelling…to the psychiatric hospital in the town of Putaendo, a hospital built in the 1940s to treat tuberculosis victims and…converted into an insane asylum receiving patients from the country’s various psychiatric clinics”, noted Eltit in her travel diary (Santa Fe: Helen Lane Editions, 1992). “The remaining patients, most of them indigent, some without civilian identification, [are] catalogued as NN [no name]”. Errázuriz’s photographs of paired lovers are confrontational, their undeviating gazes focused on her camera, impossible to evade. Their facial expressions, deformed by antipsychotic medication, their differing ages within pairs, their shabby clothes, and institutional haircuts, mark them as different from ordinary people, but the power and poignancy of Errázuriz’s photographs show that although marginalised and incarcerated, these people also love and feel affection. The first photographs by an American to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale were ten photographs by Diane Arbus (1923–71). Her subjects were also marginalised
Poetics of Dissent is at the Pavilion of Chile at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy, until Nov 22, 2015
Courtesy of Paz Errázuriz
The International Art Exhibition, held in Venice every 2 years, is stimulating but exhausting. This year there are two international survey exhibitions of contemporary art; 87 national participants exhibiting in pavilions at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and throughout the city; and 44 collateral events. Among exhibitions which, based on prior knowledge, we expect to either enjoy or dislike, there are invariably others whose intensity of artistic vision and achievement unexpectedly impress or challenge us. Photographic essays by Paz Errázuriz (born 1944), displayed in the Chilean Poetics of Dissent exhibition, depict people living on the fringes of society during the country’s military dictatorship. They were an extraordinary revelation. Self-taught, Errázuriz began taking photographs in 1972, the year before the right-wing general Augusto Pinochet deposed the popular socialist president Salvador Allende. During 1982–87, she documented the lives of 12 male transvestites, working in clandestine brothels in Santiago and Talca, Chile, in a body of work entitled La manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple). She did not dare exhibit these radical photographs until 1989. When these pictures were published as her first book in 1990, only one copy was sold. Central in its narrative are two transvestite brothers, Evelyn and Pilar, and their mother Mercedes. In Evelyn 1 (1982), heavily made-up and wearing drag, he reclines on a bare mattress in a sparsely furnished brothel bedroom, his pose echoing both Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Manet’s Olympia. “La Manzana de Adán is a work that…was carried out under extremely difficult circumstances; at a time when its protagonists were being subjected to curfews, political, and police persecutions…it is a work born with the mark of something to be regarded in the future”, commented Errázuriz in 2014. She and her collaborator, Chilean writer Claudia Donoso, befriended the transvestites, living with them in the brothels while documenting their lives in image and text. Female sex workers were reticent about being photographed, because their families didn’t know that they worked in a brothel, but the transvestites were flattered, particularly when their photographs were published in a women’s magazine review of an exhibition of the work. Many of Errázuriz’s subjects were ravaged by AIDS, Leyla
Paz Errázuriz, Evelyn 1, La Manzana de Adán (Chile, 1982)
875
Insight
people, including transvestites, dwarfs, giants, circus performers, and nudists. She photographed A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, NYC (1966) in brutal close-up, emphasising his pock-marked face, plucked eyebrows, and long finger-nailed hand holding a cigarette. It’s a shockingly honest photograph, but it lacks Errázuriz’s defining empathy for her subjects.
La Manzana de Adán and Infarto del alma document “a chapter of the political history of Chilean sexuality, a history that unfolded in a patriarchal, authoritarian and machista society”, concludes Andrea Giunta in her Poetics of Dissent catalogue essay.
Colin Martin
Master stroke
Tate /Tate Images
The Art of Bedlam by Richard Dadd is at the Watts Gallery, Surrey, UK, from June 16, to Nov 1, 2015
Knowledge of Richard Dadd’s life is often restricted to its gorier components. Stories of madness, murder, and an obsession with worlds beyond our own cling to the 19th-century artist’s reputation. However, a new exhibition at the Watts Gallery, Surrey, UK, aims to dispel the operatic melodrama surrounding the man, and instead explores his moving battle with mental illness. Dadd was born in 1817 and grew up in Kent before his father relocated the family to London to allow his artistic son to study at the Royal Academy. Dadd’s initial work won him both praise and the opportunity to document the European and Middle Eastern travels of solicitor Sir Thomas Phillips. Towards the end of this tour, however, the artist’s mental health began to deteriorate, with Phillips noting an increased “violence of expression”. Returning to England, the increasingly delusional Dadd killed his father in the belief that “such sacrifice was demanded by the gods and spirits above”. He then escaped to France, with the aim of assassinating the Austrian Emperor. While there, he was detained after violently attacking a tourist. Upon his second, forced, return to England, he was confined to Bethlem Hospital, more commonly known as “Bedlam”. Admitted to a secure psychiatric unit, the artist was diagnosed with symptoms akin to what would now be likely characterised as schizophrenia, with Bethlem’s superintendent Sir W Charles Hood noting his patient’s belief that “certain spirits have the power of possessing a man’s body and compelling him to adopt a particular course”.
Far from quelling such spirits, Hood attempted to channel them by encouraging Dadd to paint. Doing so resulted in the creation of some of Dadd’s most famous works. One such painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855–64), is the exhibition’s jewel. Painted for Bethlem steward George Haydon, the piece takes its name from the central figure of a wood-cutter, splitting an acorn to create a chariot for the fairy Queen Mab. Around him, figures of varying sizes crowd the small canvas, ranging from the beautiful to the grotesque. The work is intricately detailed, with figures barely bigger than a finger each imbued with lives and characters of their own. In doing this, Dadd created a world so vibrant that it inspired artists as diverse as Terry Pratchett, Freddie Mercury, and Siegfried Sassoon, the latter of whom once owned the painting. Dadd’s obsession with the fantastic is also explored through other works in the exhibition. Puck (1841) depicts Shakespeare’s cherubic trickster, while Contradiction– Oberon & Titania (1854–58), juxtaposes the rigid figures of the King and Queen of the fairies with a thriving mass of sprites, pixies, and centaurs. Such motifs could, in the hands of a lesser artist, collapse under their own saccharine sweetness. However, under Dadd’s patient brush strokes, the inhabitants of fairyland develop a sinister demeanour not present in the classic works of the earlier romantics. Away from the ethereal, the exhibition also showcases the artist’s delicate landscape watercolours and his work on Sketches to Illustrate the Passions—a series embarked on with Hood’s encouragement to illustrate the sort of extreme emotions it was believed could result in mental illness. Feelings like Hatred (1853) and Agony–Raving Madness (1854) are present, but some of the works also display a sharper satirical edge. Insignificance or Self Contempt (1854) shows a small man in comically overlarge clothing, whereas Patriotism (1857) depicts two soldiers examining a map of an area—which includes the “Sea of Trouble” and an asylum called “Lostwithal”. Inclusion of more everyday feelings, such as Anger (1854) and Grief or Sorrow (1854), suggests that Dadd’s understanding of “madness” was perhaps closer to our own than we would care to admit.
Andrew Bianchi 876
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 2 October 2015