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The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces upon the Wunderblock
Organized by CATHERINE DE ZEGHER

The Draming Center APRIL 15-]uNE 10,1000

UCLA Hammer Museum JUNE 25-SEPTEMBER 17, 2000

A Subterranean Chapter of Twentieth--Cemury Art History

[Acknowledgments] 7

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7 7

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03
Catherine .12 Zegher
“No Man's Land”: On the Modernist Reception of the An of the Insane 77 777 09
Hal Foster
The Mad as Artists 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 25
Sander L. Gilmn
Prinzhorn’s Heterolopia 7 7 7

,
77 77

,
43
Allen S‘ Weiss
Some-Thing, SomEvEVent and Some-Encounter between Simhome and Symptom 7 7 7 61
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger

Notes on the Authors 7 7 7 77 7 7 7 76

Works in the Exhibition 7 7 7

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7 7 777 77
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List of Illustrations (fold-our) 7,

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 someone de zegher, Direcmr
A SUETERRANEAN CHAPTER or TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART HISTORY

For even rtwo nsve tire sensonon oi being rlwsys cm'tlnpud wrmundmi by
in,
our own soul. snll it does not seem .r fixed and immnvsolt- pnsn rather do no
seem to bc home my With it. nnd perpenmlly Struggling to tronsccnd it. to
break out into tru- world. with a perpetual discouragement us we lrenr cndlsssly
all rronnd its that unvzrylng sound which is not an eclro tront nitlrout. but the
resnnsncc of r vibration trnnt within
MAnch PRousr‘

{31 What is the relevance of exhibiting the Prinzhorn Collection at this moment? This seems the
question at stake as, in the spring of 2000. The Drawing Center undertakes the first New York
presentation of this legendary and influential group of works. The Prinzham Collecilon: Tracer 141107:
the Wunderblock features a selection of over two hundred drawings and books made by psychiatric
patients between 1890 and 1920, The collection was assembled in the early 19205 at the University
of Heidelberg on the initiative of the psychiatrist and an historian Hans Prinzhorn (188671933),
who intended to inaugurate a museum.K Due to the rise of fascism, the brutal course of World War II.
and the political unrest afterward, this goal was not realized. The museum is now finally scheduled
to open in 2001, and therefore The Drawing Center's exhibition will likely mark the last major
presentation of the collection outside Germany.

Astounding for their intensity and beauty, the works in the exhibition chronicle the artistrpallem's
painful struggle to reconcile personal interior EX|SIEI1CE with the demands of external forces During
an era of new research into mental illness Dr. Prinzhorn was at the forefront of methodological
changes in treatment, and also advocated for the aesthetic legitimacy of the works drawn by psychotic
individuals who were marginalized by society. Concurrent with prinrlrorn's research were the
activities of many avant-garde artists who attempted to transgress an existing formal visual language
by exploring spontaneous acts of creation and the role of the unconscious. People as diverse and
famous as the artist Alfred Kubin and the sociologist Georg Simmcl came to visit the collection, but
its works became more widely known, particularly to artists. through Prinzlrnrn's publication of
Bildnerei der Get‘steskmnken (Artistry of the Mentally III) in 1922. This book became a souice of
inspiration to numerous artists, particularly in Germany and France between World War 1 and it, and
in the United States after 1945.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the art of the insane represented not only [he lost world of
childhood, but also the burgeoning force of the utopia of aesthetic experimentation, which
characterizes the beginnings of the avantrgarde in fact, artists do not function to clarify the ways of
communication, rather they amplify the possibilities of interchange and critical analysis. Their search
focuses on new means of expression that do not conform to the practices dictated by a
convcntionalized academic establishments Often avanbgarde artists turned to the artworks of
individuals who had evaded the usual categories of art history They directed their aflcnllon to so-
called primitive art and children‘s drawings. but also developed a fascination tor the prototypical type
of madman; the schizophrenic as “an emblem of creative insurrection against rationalist repression
linked to social powerf" In this sense the Prinzhom Collection had a particular influence on artists‘
perception of the creative act, such as that practiced and theorized in automatic writing and drnwmg
by the Surrealists. and later by Jean Dubuffet and his Art Bmtr Following the war, further interest in
the modes of expression found in the Prinzhorn Collection, particularly those considered directly
revelatory of the unconscious, took root in the United States during the Abstract Expressionist
movement. Proof that works of the Prinzhorn Collection were challenging the traditional notions of
 art I)€‘£1mt’strikingly clear when, between 1931 and 1938, they were used by the Nazis tis an
cxmnplc ot' "degenerate ed and jttxtdposcd with those by other artists, such us Oscar Kokoschko,
lisily Kitndlnsk}. Kurt Schwitters, and thc Dadaists. to discredit and reject inodcin art,
Referring on the tint- hand to the role of the unconscious in the creative act and lltL‘ imaginary
prtices . and on the othcr to the concealed scope of the Prinzhom Collection as a “subtcrrancdn”
chapter of lWL‘I’iliClh-Ccnlufy art history, the exhibition's tlilc. 'I‘mcut upon the W'untfei’bluck. is
inspired by Sigmund Freud: concept oi‘the unconscious and the repressed. According to Frctld, the
wimdcrlrluulr represents the way in which the psyche records material. HQ adopts the metaphor of
the wundcrblock. which is a child's toy, also known as the mystic writing pad, consisting of a thin
slit-ct of clear plastic covering a thick waxed board The us r can write- or draw on ll with any
pointed instrument, pro ing through the sheet oiplusric, mdhing traces in the coutcd stiriucc- below.
As soon a the sheet is lifted, the imagc above disappears, while traces of it remain on the wax
bciictitlt. hos, thc itimdcrlalucle alludes to the way the psychic system which. havlng recent-d scnsc
reception from the outsidc world. remains unmarked b) those- imprc . oiis that then pa through it
to it deeper layer nhorc thcy iire rccordcd as unconscious mcntory. lt illuminates the mcchan in by
uhich the repressed becomes thc prototype of the uiiconscio ..
‘l’ht- drnwmgs oi' the Prinzhorn collection capture the pains tmd struggles oi modern lil‘c glimpsed
through somc of i must lorturcd yct onary figures Thc works wcri: created by artist-patients
out of inner noc .ty. and with no ulterior porposc Being overwhelmed by incomprehensible
events and litter loss. they experienced o collai oi their “mid-view os donned by sot-mi
consensus. "In order to mtistcr this lifcrthreatcning state. defcnsc and adaptation iiiechuni. ms iakc
ovci; geared to immediate Sur\’l\’ . images are dismantled and ontologically revrtlued, to create a
new \t'orldevlt-it made up ni'clements drann tom the earlier stages or development octivtncd by
])<ychosis."‘ Lost to society and lost wtthin him/herself the schizophrenic creates symbols in the
hope ofopening up the old rclinbie world nod to how it make new sense, An urgcnt need to impose
order on chaos is developed. The common mid idyllic inrerpretotiun or the insane, who would hove
immediate access to th‘ purc origin of art, |S that s/hc is circulating in the imaginary world, and is
not quitt- connccted with the symbolic world. But, as it appears and this will also be clarified by the
es s in this volume, lht‘ psychotic individual tries more than anything else to constantly rcstorc
the symbolic order

Today the Priiizltnrn Collection icstifics to past lives of social exclusion, psychic illness, solitude.
and isolation—experiences that arc common. yct too often erased from collflclivc memory.
Consisting of beautiful productions of art that can neither be identif' d as residues of psychi iric
therapy, nor as scientific documents of anthropologic research, nor as monumental aestheti
achievements. the mini small works—drawn on booklets, diaries, cardboard, and pieces of
non papcrvcwtlpc hicrachics in the cultural rind artistic domains and occupy a liminal space.
liovcriiig between the center and the margins. inside and outside the mainstream. In regard to
ctintcmporary art, I would like to addrc- ihc collections relevance by summarizing a recent
conversation 1 had with Ros ind Kra Following the art historian Hubert Damisch, Rosalind
Kruu argues that "Dubuffct‘s interest in tlie Prinzhorn material arose from his conception of it as a
corpus of radically anti-Dtlchampidn possibilities. Fuse-muted. like so many other Frenchmen. by the
parable of Robinson Crusoe, that tzilc of the shipwrecked s ilor washed ashore with d few remnants
of his culture, Damisch examines today’s artistic production and asks: ‘Il' all clsc were washed awav,
would tiny of us, pressed ugumst the very most extremes of necessity, expand any precious ounce oi
our remaining energy in the pursuit ufart? That is to say, this parable sets up a model that is totally
foreign to the proiniscuity of the currcnt institutional definition of art; this is drl becat (- ii is in a
gallery, because it is in a place that shows an. thi art because 1. the artist. s y so. lo the contrary,‘
Damisch goes on, 'as for the an of the insane. these works were driven by ncc ~sity, Therc vtzis no
5 audience. There was no public, no museum, no exhibition—only an urgent drive to draw, to paint.
What tntt‘t‘csltld Duhuffet, was just this little guy in his tiny room obsessively scribbling or wliitiling
and driven by necess y. And that's what ‘nteresting hecausc Duhuffet too was obsessional, driven,
or wanted to be. He constructed his own necessity He tried to discover a form of art that would he
necessnni once again. That's why the word art preoccupied him 50." Thus thc significnnct of
Dubuffet's connection to psychotic art comes from its contrasting energy within a situation where
art has nu reason tor being, since it is made out of a compulsion The idea that it is simply there
because of some kind of an institutional definition would be wrong. It is there because the person
who is making it, Cannot not make it. inner psychological drive to make ll’iisirestilttng in the artist's
Willingness to sit in LI room, whittiing away and doodling and pasting and smcuring and doing
whatever the person is doing—translates into the fact that the work has an absolute energy and
drive behind its making - need tn exist is totally riveting."
'

Pertaining to a lot of contemporary art, Krouss continues: “it seems to me that we are at a turn
where we need that kind of protection from the scductions of Duchamp‘s institutional model—one
that has led to the outcome that a young boys adolescent room with all his clothes thrown around
has become the present uncontested paradigm for art making, which strikes me its n really hanttupt
position. The Prinzhorn material is as far as we can get from that model of installation art. For me
that's what its relevance is now. Of course. today the situation of mental patients is very different.
Because of the drugs that are used to treat psychosis this kind of Ell'l is no longer produced. Those
patients are medicated so that thcir drives are modi ed and no longer issue into this nninnw and
outpouring of graphic energy. i suppose that the change in the treatment of psychosis has modified
the possibility of this art as a contemporary form of production, However, there are living artists
such as Hanne Darhoven. On Kawara, and Raymond Pcttilion who in a way seem to be connected to
the Prinzhorn figures and simulate in thcir work that kind of coinpulsivc drive to repeat, to continue
to mark. when bcing confronted with reality, In contradistinciion, there is a lot of contemporary art
that could have been anything, and that is not simulating, but just phony. it finds its rationale in the
simple act of snuggling into the spaces of the art institution with its totally circular logic, What
Duhuffet saw was that psychotic art breaks through that logical circle in the driven compulsion ol‘a
series of repeated gestures, whether it is marking. drnwuig, or doodling. it simply tides through the

smugncss of the institutional definition.

ln this context it can he argued that modernist and postmodernist and thought of the twentieth
art
century have turned inward. Instead of either reflecting an external reality, and conveying an ethical
or political m sage, or expressing an emotion, they have focused on the revelation of the processes
of their own existence and internal structure. Curving back in a perpetual movc upon itself or its
institutional definition. art has curtailed any discourse that does not concern the expression of its
own form. While initially intended us an eroding of conventional languages. this celebration of an
utter self-involvement has led to forms of hypcrrcllexiiiiy and alienation, providing analogies for the
mysterious symptoms of schizophrenia. For what occurs. according to Louis Sass, is a sort of death
iii-life. though not the kind so often imagined, for what dies is not the rational so much as the
desiring soul, not the mental so much as the physical and emotional aspects of one‘s bcing. This
in a morbid " t” ‘ identified by‘ (
“ obscurity and violent contradiction,
entails the paradoxes of the rt-flexive, A careful comparison of modernism and schizophrenic
experience may thus be characterized less by fusion. spontaneity, and the liberation of desire than by
separation. restraint, and an exaggerated eerebralism and propensity for introspection, In the course
of Sass's analysis, one of ihc great ironies at modern thought gradually emerges: "the madness oi
schizophrenia—so often imagined as being antithetical to the modern malaise, even as offering a
potential escape from its dilemmas at hyperctinscxousness and self~contml7may, in tact. be an
extreme manifestation of what is in essence a very similar condition.
This analysis of modernist and postmodernist art seems to correspond to the transformation drawing
underwent during the twentieth century, from the more sensory gestural marking, with automatism
as the procedure of its most immediate and authentic transcription, toward the conceptual
compositional notation determined by the rigor of a voluntarily “self-imposed" schema or a structural
matrix. By focusing on the “thetic” or static phase of language, structuralism posited language as a
homogeneous structure and made possible the systematic description of the social and/or symbolic
constraint within each signifying practice. Wiih its yearnings for “scientific" objectivity and rationale.
introversion and strategy have thus become crucial to a lot of contemporary art practices. The
Prinzhorn Collection, which combines in a unique way aspects of modernism and schizophrenia,
can throw new light on this develupmenl and paradoxically reinform an art scene that increasingly
engages in a hypermarcissislic activity to valorizc the personal as opposed to the public in a
solipsisiic move away from sociopolitical space. What occurs then in most contemporary work is a
duiil scmiology of a divested language atuompanied by other heavily invested semiotic materials and
compulsive actions, in reality, in a society of consumption, this acting-out is a manifestation of an
immediately satisfied demand that happens before the mediation of language and the other even
begin. The obsessional dissociation between affect representation and verbal representation often
results in a feeling of emptiness and artificiality constituting wounded “narcissism" and "false
personalities." According to Julia Kristeva, these new maladies of the soul share one common
denominator: the inability to represent, or “phantasmatic inhibition.”

Acknowledgments
Upon my arrival at The Drawing Center, I considered it of importance, or the beginning of a new
century, that the institution looks back at the art history of the twentieth century, in particular at
some obscured areas of the domain of drawtng. The Prinzhorn Collection represents one such
example. I wish to take this opportunity to thank some of the individuals who participated in the
realization of The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces upon the Wuvrderblock, held on the occasion of the
Center's annual gala benefit First and foremost, I acknowledge the Prinzhorn Collection at the
University of Heidelberg, and most espectally its Curator, Dr. Inge Iadi, and Assistant Curator, Dr.
Bettina BrandrClausscn. To present such an esteemed group of works is truly an honor, and The
Drawing Center is deeply indebted to the expertise rind generosity of Dr Jadi and Dr. Brand-
Claussen, who greatly contributed to this project by lending the works prior to the opening of the
new museum in Heidelberg. In addition, I thank ihe collections exemplary staff, particularly
Gabriele Tschudi and Torsten Kappenberg. The selection for this exhibition is informed by the work
of Laurent Busine, Director of Exhibitions at the Palais des BeauxrArts, Charlcroi, Belgium, who
organized an exhibition of the collection entitled La Beuulé lnsensée, Collection Prinzhorn in the
winter of 1995-96. Under the title Beyond Ransom/111 and Psychosis- Works from the Prinzhorn
Collection the exhibition then traveled to the Hayward Gallery. London, in 1996. i wish to thank
Laurent for his enthusiastic contribution to the realization of this exhibition.

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Drawmg Center publishes this expanded volume of the
Drawing Papers, which marlts the seventh edition in the series and offers the opportunity for new
scholarly research into the collection. I wish to profoundly acknowledge and thank the contributors
to this publication Hal Foster, Professor of Modern Art at Princeton University; Allen S. Weiss,
Professor of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York Universit and artist,
psychoanalyst, and writer Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, all of whom generated innovative new texts
that Will contribute to the greater understanding of the works on view. in addition, Sander L.
Gilman, Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professor of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the
University of Chicago, has generously granted permission to republish an illuminating essay on the
collection. Containing four major essays. this volume introduces a body of drawings that, while little
known to the general public, has been influential to the theorimtion and practice of the avant-garde and
some of the most important an movements of the twentieth century, In addition, The Drawing Center's
interpretive approach to both the exhibition and the publication includes a consideration of the clinical
environment in which the drawings were created-where the patients' urgent need to impose order on
chaos led to a "drive towards expression," as Dr. Prinzhorn stated. Focusing on drawing in relation to
insanity, this number explores the imaginary order versus the Symbolic order in visual language, as well
as the belief in the value of art and creativity for the cure and study of mental illness (a radical idea
some one hundred years ago), and the Visual complexity and legitimacy of the drawings in their nwn
right, This publication was conceived as a companion to the catalogue Beyond Reason, Art and Psychosis:
Worksfmm the Prinzhorn Callecli'an, published by the Hayward Gallery and the University of California
Press, which contains color reproductions of the majority of works in The Drawing Center's exhibition,
as well as essays on the history of the collection by Dr, Jédi and Dr. brandClaussen.

Like Drawing Papers 7. the exhibition's accompanying public programs address several crucial
questions concerning the mystifying links between madness and creativity. Further, aspects nf these
exchanges extend tn the exhibition James Castle. House Drawings concurrently on view in The
Drawing Center's Drawing Room. Primary considerations are the individual/artist as an outsider to
the mainstream, and notions of the basic human struggle between interior life and thoughts and
exterior assimilation in society, The public programs include a symposium with the essayists of this
edition of the Drawing Papers, a lecture by independent scholar and psychoanalyst John M
MacGtegor on machine symbolism and the dreaming mind. and the inauguration ofthe center's
new Line Reading series. Curated by poet and scholar Lytle Shaw, the Line Reading series creates
an interdisciplinary dialogue between the range of historical and contemporary exhibitions of
drawings and current innovative writing In prose and poetry. The first participants in the series are
poets Kenward Elmslie, Bernadette Mayer, and Brian Kim Stefans. I greatly look forward to these
events, and thank all the remarkable scholars and writers for their important contributions to the
programmatic aspects of the exhibition.

Following the exhibition in New York, the Prinzhorn Collection will travel to the UCLA Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles. I am very pleased that the exhibition will be seen on both the East and the
West coasts of the United States and wish to thank Ann Philhin, Director of the UCLA Hammer
Museum, for joining me in this project, This will be the second time thai one of The Drawing center's
exhibitions has traveled to the Hammer Museum since my arrival, and it is my belief that both
have set the ‘ J for an ongoing In addition to Ann, at the Hammer I
extend my thanks to Cynthia Burlingliam, Senior Curator of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic
Arts, and Carolyn Peter. Assistant Curator.

At The Drawing Center I owe a debt of gratitude to the staff members who Contributed to this
project, In particular. my assistant Katie Dyer deserves special mention for her tireless work on the
publication and other cmcial aspects of the proyect. To the graphic designer Luc Derycke l extend my
thanks for his adept design of yet another Drawing Papers. Beth Finch, Curator, ably assisted with the
selection of works, the organization of public programs. and the realization of this publication. Allison
Plastridge, Registrar, did an excellent job coordinating the logistics of loans and transport. For their
contribution to fundraising efforts, I thank The Drawing Center's former Assistant Director, Ellen
Haddigan, and Development Officer, Blair Winn, who skillfully steppod in to assume many
responsibilities pertaining to the project following Ellen's departure. Once again, Anne Blair Wrinkle.
Public Relations Associate and Special Events Coordinator, has expertly orchestrated the benefit
dinner, and for this 1 am deeply grateful. Working with Operations Assistant, Greg Peterson and the
freelance attainstallet’. brute Dow, Director of operations, Linda Matalon, thoughtfully oversaw the
details of the installation. Sheila Batiste, Director of Schools Programs, has developed an insightful
education program for school children that is related to the exhibition.
The Prinzhorn Collection is a challenging body of work that requires supporters that are sensitive to
its unique merits. The exhibition and its accompanying publication have received generous financial
assisrance frurn The Howard Gilman Foundation. 1 wish especially to thank Pierre Aprsxine at the
Foundation for his immediate enthusiasm for this project. Significam support has been provided by
the National Endowment for the Arts. the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Consulate
General of the Federal Republic of Germany. where I acknowledge Hans-Heinrich von Srachelberg,
Deputy consul General, and Henning Simon, Consul for Cultural ond Economic Affairs.
Additional funds have been received from individuals who attached great importance tu Ihe
presentation of this exhibitiun, including board member Frances Benny Adler and Allen Adler, and
Sally and lloward Lepow, l olso wish lo express my deep gratitude for the Board of Directors,
particularly its cry-chairmen Dita Amory and George Negroponre, who have championed this project
since its beginning. Finally, for working within complicity and complexity, I am most of all indebted
to Benjamin Buchloh,

N01Es

|Mart-oi Proust, sirurm‘r Way, in Remembrance n]Things Fort, vol.l, "ans, C,l<, Scnn Moncnelf and Tortott Kilotartin
(New York Random House, 198”. 93
2 Fara |homughdescripimn ol'thc formation and early history oi thc collection We Borrini Emml-Claussen. "nit Collrction of
Works afAn in the Psychlzlrlc Clinic, Hexdelherg~lrom rI-le Beginning; until ms." in Beyond HIaxlm,An and PSyChmxx. Work
[mm [he Prinzhorn Collection, orhih, cal lLondun. Hnyward Gallery and Berkeley Unlvcrslly ol'ciilil'ornia Press, 19%). 7.23.
3 c Deleuu‘ ind F Guulmn, Amroediru: Copiiitlirm mid sclnmphrenio, (ram. R, Hurloy, M Seem, and H, Line (New
York, Viking, 1977). R7~ES.
a Inge Jodi, "Puinh ofVICWAPHSpccllves—Honmns," in Bt'yrmd Rattan, §0
5 February [3. 2000 I am very grotelul to Rosalind Krauss lor dlscuismg this projed wtrh me
o. ”A canversalmn with Huhort Domisohx‘ October as (Summer rm), to
7, Louis A. Sass, Madness and Madummn. Inxlmily l'n lhe high! of Moder-n Air. Literalure, rind Thimg‘u (Cambridge, Mass, and
Landau. Lnglnnd' Harvard University Press, 199M, ln
ti Julio Krisleva, New Mnludiex o/tht Soul, trani, Ross Gubermon (New Vori Columbia University Press, I995), 9-10,
 We! ‘Foster

“Nu MAN'S LAND": ON THE MODERNIST RECEPTION OF THE ART OF THE INSANE

[9/ The modernist reassessmenl of the art of the insane follows that of the art of "primitives" and
children both in time and in logic Long dismissed out of hand or viewed in diagnostic terms, such
art was ready for reevaluation by the late I910s and early 19205. Yet modernists saw it according to
their own ends only—as intrinsically expressive of a self, directly revelatory of vision, or consciously
defiant of all convention—and for the most part it was none of these things, Rather, these three
readingsicall thcm “expressionist," “visionary," and “transgressive” respectivelywhespeak modernist
l’antasies of a pure origin of art or an absolute allerily to cullure that obscure more than reveal the
symbolic import of the art of the insane, or so I will argue here,
Well before the moderiiisls, the Romantics had also viewed the art of the insane as an epitome of
cieative genius; between these two epochs. however, its status was downgraded dramatically By the
late nineteenth century this art was no longer a model of inspiration but a symptom of
"degeneration." The ltey figure hcrc is thc italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, who. along with his
l-lungarian rollowcr, Max Nordau, spread this Ideological notion of degeneration to several
discourses. Lombroso undeistood madness as a regression to a primitive stage of psycho-physical
develt)pmenl-a model that prepared the phohir association of insane, primitive, and child, which
persisted in the twentieth century alongside the idyllic association of the three as innocent
vxsionarles.‘ Already in Genius and Madness (l864), a study or m7 patients. half of whom drew or
painted, Lombroso detected this degeneration in absurd and/or obscene forms of representation that
he deemed atavisticfi
This discourse of degeneration passed from psychiatry into psychoanalysis as it emerged at ihc turn
of the century; the diagnostic approach to the art of the insane also persisted Like his French
predecessor Jean Martin Chart-at, Sigmund Freud only extended this approach through reversal, as
he looked for signs of pathology in thc work tit-sane" mastcts like Lcnnardu da Vinci or
Michelangelo. Only gradually was thc diagnostic approach to the art of tho insanc coiiiplcmcntcd by
other approaches. first with L'zm ehez lesfous (1907) by Marcel Réj the pseudonym of the French
psychiatrist Paul Meunier, who examined the art of the insane for insight into the nature of artistic
activity as such, and then with Bilalnerei tier Ceiswskmnlwn (Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 1922) by
the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, who pursued this line at inqutry in ways that influenced
several modernists directly.
This revaluation of the art of the insane, it should be added, followed a period of great nosnlugicdl
debate about psychosis. in 1883 the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin proposed his typology of
“dementia praecox" (which included a paranoid form), while in 1911 the Swiss psychoanalyst Eugen
Bleuler introduced his calegnry ol‘"schicophrcnia," which he defined as a broken relation to self and
world as manifest in a dissociation of thought, action, or affectias a disruption of subjectivity
marked by a disruption |nrepresentation, Meanwhile, Freud offered the term “paraphrci-iia' as a
substitute for "dementia praecox" and "schi7ophrenia” and as a complement to “paranoia" (ohwously
it did not catch on). Although he found schizophrenia and paranoia often combined (as in his 191!
analysis ol'Judge Sehreber), he also treated them as symptomaticttlly dislincliin a way that is
important tor my argument below. In tho Frcudian account tho schizophrenic is overwhelmed by
hallucinations that only deepen his sense of internal and external "catastrophe," while the paranoid
is driven by projections that attempt to counter both these "catastrophes" With delusions of personal

grandeur (on the one hand) and of world order (on the other).‘
 i. The Art of the insane as "Expression" (Hans Prinzhorn)
Significantly. Prinzhorn studied art history at the University of Vienna before he turned first to
psychiatry and then to psychoanalysis No doubt it was this unusual training that led the Heidelberg
Psychiatric Clinic to appoint him in 1919 to oversee its collection of the art of the insane. Begun when
Ktaepelin directed the Clinic from 1890 to 1903. the collection was soon extended under Prinzhorn to
(roughly) 5000 works by 500 patients from various institutions throughout Europe, But he left the
clinic Just before the publication of the Eildnerei in 1922, perhaps an indication of his ambitions for
the book, which did indeed serve as the primary access to the Heidelberg collection thereafter.
The Bildncrei included a “theoretical part," ten case-studies of “schizophrenic masters," and a summary
of "results and problems." With only 187 reproductions, it was very selective of the collection; it was
also far from scientific. Although some works do show affi ‘ties with Symbolist, Expressionist, or
Dadaist art, few of the patients were trained in any way. Indeed, few were interested in art at all before
they were encouraged, institutionally. to take it up, hence the works cannot be deemed spontaneous.
Moreover, the works are far too disparate in style, material, and technique to fit any one theoretical
profile. And the profile that Prinzhorn did present is often contradictory in its own terms.
On the one hand, Prinzhorn aimed not to be diagnostic; he proposed six "drives" as dominant in
psychotic representation but as active in all other art as well. On the other hand, he did not seek to
be aesthetic; he cautioned against any direct equation of this material with art, and, even though he
called his ten favorites "masters," he used the archaic term, Bildnerei or “image-making," in
coniradistinction to Kum! or “an.“ Nevertheless, Prinzhorn does refer in his text to van Cogh, l-lenri
Rousseau, James Ensot, Erich Heckel, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Alfred
Kubin (the only significant artist of the time to set- the collection in person). Of course, interested
modernists soon made further connections of this sort, but then so did equally interested enemies of
modernism. The 1937 Na1i exhibition Emanete ”Kunst" (Degenerate “Art") attacked modernists like
Paul Klee precisely through this association with the mad, and it drew on images from the
Heidelberg collection in doing so.‘ in this way a reversibility haunted the modernist reevaluation of
the art of the insane, for if the an of the insane could be revealed as somehow modernist, the art of
the modernists could also be branded as somehow pathological,
Intellectually, Prinzhorn was shaped by the formalist aesthetics of the art historian Konrad Fiedler. as
well as by the psychology at exptcssion of the philosopher Ludwig Klages. As his allusions to artists
suggest, he was also taken by Expressionism; in the Bilrlnerei he claims for the art of the insane a
“profound” affinity with the "emotional attitude of the ‘latest' art." its “devaluation of outward
appearance." and its "concentration on the self.”
Together, these influences led Prinzhorn to his theory of the six ' rives" that govern the “image-making of
the mentally ill"~drives towards cxpte ion, play, ornamental elaboration. patterned order, obsessive
copying, and symbolic systems. the inter tion of which was said to determine each image, Here again,
however. he courted contradiction, for his drives toward expression and play suggest a subject open to
the world in a way that the other drives do not. On the contrary, compulsive omamentmg, ordering,
copying, and systemhuiltlmg suggest a subject in rigid, even paranoid defense against the world, no! in
open, even cmpatheiic engagement with it. Perhaps Prinzhorn sensed this contradiction, for he did come
to pose the drives of expressive play as correctives to the drives of obsessive ordering, and, as we will see.
his initial blindness here may point to an eventual insight into the opposed drives at work in much of
this art. And in the end he did admit this fundamental difference between artist and schizophrenic:
The irritates. artist still remains in Contacl With hurrurrury, even rrurrly through desire .ind longing, and the desire rur ihls
conlau rptrrts rtr us out ofall pictures by “normal" people, The rchrzaphrerut, or. the other hand, is detached from
hurruruiy. and by dentition u neither willing “or able rtr reestablish contaci with if, lfhc would, ht would be healed wt
sense in our plciufl‘s the complete au|lsl1cisclall0n anti the gruesome sulipsism which or exceeds the luruu of
piyt‘hupalhit' ilicrrtutrrt and believe [hat in II we have found the assent-t ul rt-hrtrrphrurit turrrigurutruu:
 ii. The Art ofthe Insane as "Vision" (Paul Klee) and "Tmnsgression" Germ Dubuffet)
Prinzhorn assumed an equation between image and psyche, and it was this lack of mediation that
allowed him to claim an “essential insight," through the art of the insane, into the "universal form" of
artistic expression.“ A similar equation allowed for other projections of “essential insight" by the
modernists who were most engaged by the art of the insane: Klee. the stylistically sui generis Swiss
arti , Max Ernst. the German DadaiststurnedsSurrealist; and Jean Dubuffet, the French founder of
Art Brut, All three knew the Bildnevei well, though not the collection as such. Klee had heard
Prinzhorn lecture before his book appeared, while Duhuffct encountered the Bildemei in 1923, only
a year after its publication (he was not yet active as an artist): as for Ernst, he discovered the art of
the insane independently, during his early studies at the University of Bonn from 1911 on. Although
obviously not the only influence on these three artists. it did prompt them to elaborate some of its
attributes not only into stylistic devices but into aesthetic models, or so I Will claim here.

In 1920, early In his involvement with the art of the insane, Nee began his wellaknown “Creative
Credo" with these words: “Ari does not reproduce the visible; rather. it makes visible.“ In this
makingsvlsible he gives special status to the insane as well as to the primitive and the child: as
inhabitants of an “in-between world" that “exists between the worlds our senses perceive," they "all
still have—or have rediscoveredrthe powcr to seem This power is visionary for Klee, and as early
as 1912. in a review of the Elnue Reiter, he deemed it necessary to any modernist “reform” of art.”

We know from Oskar Schlemmer. his colleague at the Bauhaus, that Klee knew of the Heidelberg
collection before Prinzhorn lectured on its holdings ncar Stuttgart in July [920.” And we hear from
another Bauhaus colleague, Lothar Schreyer, that Klee identified with the Bildnerei upon its
publication in i922—and this at an institution, the Bauhaus. soon renowned for its rationalism.
“You know this excellent piece of work by Prinzhorn, don't you?," Schreyer has Klee remark, "This
picture is a fine Klee. So is this, and this one. too, Look at these religious paintings. There's a
dcpth and power of exprcssion that I never achieve in religious subjects. Really sublime art Direct
spiritual vision.“ And it is true: when Klee illustrates "religions suhjccts," as in his “angels."
"ghosts," and “sects," he does not often achieve this "power of expression" However, when he
evokes “direct spiritual vision," an expression that “makes visible," he does sometimes approach it.
One such approximation is [he watercolor known as Angelus Nov/us (1920) [ill. 3], which, with its
ornamental patterning of wreathes and wings (one of the drives, according to Prinzhorn, in the art
of the insane), does convey “direct spiritual vision," or at least it did for its onetime owner Walter
Benjamin, for whom it was an allegorical angel of history-as-catastmphe." But what exactly is this
vision of which Klee speaks? Might it run the risk of a menial state that. far from innocent, ls
hallucinatory, even horrific—a vision that comes to possess its subject? This state. too "direct," too
“sublime," is evoked in some psychotic representations that are akin to Angelus Not/us, such as
Manslmnce Figure by Johann Knopf Kill. 4], one of the ten Prinzhorn "masters" whose work Klee
would have known (in the Btldnerei he is given the pseudonym “Knuptar,” and his diagnosis is
listed as “paranoid form of dementia pmecox")," A “monsttance” is 3 “making vlsible"; in the
Roman Catholic Church ii is an open or transparent vessel in which the Host is displayed for
veneration. But this “monstrancet' ure" is monstrous—an image that, however obscure to us.
appears we transparent to the “religious vision" of its paranoid maker, the intensity of which shines
through untamed”

A glimmer of this paranoid intensity |s caught in several Klees of the early 1920s, and in its dazzle
his innocentidea of the art of the insane is burned away. In this way. just as Prinzhorn wanted to
see the art of the insane as expressive, only to discover that it is often radically inexpressive, that is,
expressive only of schizophrenic withdrawal, so Klee wanted to see an innocence of vision in this
art, only to discover there an intensity that sometimes borders on paranoid terror—rm angelut run/us
 Q. .‘6'
sum. . mm» M 16' i
m, 3

[t2] t)fc£|la:|rt)1)ltc indeed. Here, as \ttth Prtmhurn, the lnllli|l blindness ul his mttdel ttl' lltL‘ url of the
lnsztnc mu) pruduee 2m L‘\Cnl|ldl insight. whereby the' inn" pI‘OJL‘ClELl onto lltcau prll|€n|5 is
revealed AS the terror thttt tl _
\\ lul, then. (if the "Hdltsgrusslt’o" model of the art nf the insane :thmccd b) Duhul'fcl? Again.
although he encmlmt-red llw Bthhtwei ertrly, m 1925 while in military service in Flt'l‘tclt-nccuptutl
Germany his related work developed onh Liter. in the middle 1940‘. In the interim, lmuever.
uohut't'or cortespondcd “mt patients and doctors in varrom usylums. an Iltlt'rcsl that prompted lus
Initiul gathering ol‘“trregulttt" ttrt (including primitive. "Al“: or folk, and Inadnt’l under the ruhrie /\rl
Brut—[mil tn tn "raw," in opposttltm k) refined or ”culturul " In I948. along utlh /\Ittlré Brctun, qun
Patullmn. Charles Rzmonv Honrkl’icrrl‘ Roche, and Michel 'lttpté. he lutmcd |lie Cumpugntc do I'Arl
Brut. and to 194911: presented the first uxltilfitttm or its holdings (roughly 2000 “OILS b} as one»)
at the (lulene René Dmutn in Parts ['he Sho“ virus accompanied by ht ' hest-kntmn w“ an the
subjL‘Cl. "L'Att Brut prei‘ere ttux ("15 culture In which the lmtt uni: is presented as A radical

\erslun ol' th Homanttc gunluc free ol‘ttll (unvuntitm-

\\'e mtmmdtn lltlslt‘ntt\utrlopmdutt-tllwpcmtmunmtuhwlht urtt .t»tutt..rmrtroromum plumItult'ttrnttpurt
tuitttmn to the .1 no .t tint‘llck‘ludlsl utm- .orm~ ttortu- ever}tltmgiwlnects‘ clwtu 0| “tumult, mm ot
trrln3puslllnlh tltttlttm. duet ul unttng
t‘rtthmruhto tlrl no me \\'Ilnc>5 here to
plum mutt hi "twins
.
t 4mm rtrt-tr nun tit-pun. Amt mu Imm urt- tootttpttom or mm.) m
oomph-rely pure mout- npt'rtlllnih mu. oruro. tot! Cullrt'h rctmettttd .n .tll ul
4:! mt mm t nun rmputm
ltk

‘
his tdeulization of the art of the lnadnc I, milar In those of Prinzhorn und Klee: It too us times
notions el'easentlul expre _
tn" and Llll’L t "\istun." But for l)ubufi'et the nature of lltla .trt ts inure
lransgrcsan'c than fermal, as tn Prin/hum, ur >|1lrlludl, (IS tn Klee: "[ heliew vert much in the \alues
of senagcry: 1 mean inhllncl. pilskmh. mood. VIOlL‘nL‘L‘. ntttdness.‘ Sn tun, like the ttll’lk’rfiv this
idealtzatiun is u primi 5m: it l)clie\e$ in a return to "depths." But. unlike the others. It defines
 ill, 5 ill. 6

['3] these depths origin ofart, which one can somehow reclaim rcdetnptively, so much as an
not as an
outside in art. which somehow breaks into its cultural spaces disruptively. And yet, like other
primitiyisms before his, Duhul'l'et targets academic art; in this regard his outsider logic is really an
insider move. a gambit designed to win a place within ayant-garde lineagesr’“ More important here,
even as [)uhtil’l’ct seeks to undo the opposition between normal and abnormal art ("this distinction
bettieen normal and abnormal seems quite untenable who. after all. is normal?"),“ he reaffirms an
opposition between lml! and Cultural art. between Clvillwd and ntineivtlr d forms. in this way his
transgression may come to support the very law that it purports to comes t may even work to
reimagiiie the "sacred" basis or this lziw. "riol'iiiorion in i world which no longer recognizes any
positive meaning in the sacred." Michel Foiicoiilt writes in his essay on Georges Bataille on
transgression. s this not more or less what Vie may call transgression a way of reeomposing its
cinpty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating

\’et right here, like Prinzhorn and Klee before him. Dubufl'et may point to an inflgl‘il into the art of the
insane to the very blindness of his anti~cultural eonception of 11*}: twofold insight into its subjeciiie and
symbolic order alike. /\5 for the first insight, far from “unscathed," thc psychotic is scarred by trauma.
and this ‘lllL' disturbance may be registe d in the bodin distortions that are often evidcnl in the art
of the insane. in this art parts of the body, especially eyes and mouths. are often gmssly enlarged, and
sometimes tlisrupriiely plunged into other parts of the body, so that eyes become breasts, say, or months
doiiiiic as isaginiis. Klee experimented with these dcungcmcnts or rhc body-image, but Duhui‘i'ct did so
more extremely, and net sionally (as in Gmml mi clitirbonnmtx, 1944 [ill 5]) in ways that correspond to
images in the lsi'ldnerei llhc resemblance to certain drawings by Hcrmann Bcehlc. known iis Heil [ill. a].
is unciinriin—or is it consciouslv —closc>, Through these devices Dubuiict evokes a schizophrenic
,

sense of literal self-dislo otion, which is far from the "completely pure artistic operation" that he wished
to see in the art of the i he.
The second insight is more implicit; it involves the status of the symbolic order as imagined in the
art of the insane, The bodily derangement: in this art appear more desperate, even debilitated, than
empowered, and this is sometimes true in Dubuffet as well. In this way both oeuvres suggest a
parallel to the act of transgression as conceived not according to the avantrgardist logic of Duhui’fet
but by Bataille and Foucault. To put it as simply as possible: rather than attack artistic convention
and symbolic order, the art of the insane appears more concerned to find this law again, perhaps to
found it again, at the very least to “recompose its empty form, its absence." For to its horror this is
what this art seems to see—not a symbolic order that is too stable and solid, that it wishes to attack
as such (again, as posited by avantvgardist logic), but rather a symbolic order that is not stable and
solid at all, that is in crisis, even in corruption. Far from antircivtlizalt’onal, then, as Dubuffet wanted
to imagine them. these artists are desperate to construct a surrogate civilization of their own. a stops
gap symbolic order in default of the given one n

Thus far I have sketched three creative misreadings of the art of the insane: the Prinzhorn model of
expression, the Klee model of Vision. and the Dubui‘fct model of transgression. All three are
modernist projections that use the art of the insane to propose a metaphysical essence of art.
Although each model locates the artist differently, they all presuppose an ego that is intact enough,
indeed present enough, to be expressive, Visionary, or transgressive in the First place, Even more
oddly, they imagine this ego in radical discontent wtth artistic convention and symbolic order alike.“
In this way they project a symbolic order against which this radical discontent is posed—one that is
stable and solid. And none ofthis seems true o/ihe art ofinsane at all; instead it is in conformity with
avant-gardist ideologies of immediacy and rupture. Far from self-present. the psychotic artist is
protoundly dislocated, ottcn literally lost in space. And far from avant-gatdist in its revolt against
artistic convention and symbolic order, psychotic representation attests to a mad desire to reinstate
convcntion, to reinvent order. which the psychotic feels to be broken and so in dcspcratc need of
repair or replacement. In short, the obsessive elaboratinns of this art are not made to break the
symbolic order; on the contrary, they are made in its breach.”

iii. The Art of the Insane as “Regression" (Max Ernst)

Ernst had few illusions about the innocence of the art of the insane—expressive, visionary,
transgressive, or otherwise. 0n the contrary, as he states in Beyond Painting (1948). he sought to
exploit its disturbances in ordcr "to cscopc the principle of identity" in art and self alike." Again. his
encounter with the art of the insane came early, in his studies at the University of Bonn in 1911 He
began to read Freud in 1911 too, the year of the Sehreber case-study of paranoia, and he may have
first looked at the Kraepelin Textbaak of Psychiatry (1883) at this time as we“ (some of its
representations of shock treatment and physical restraint seem to have influenced some of his early
cullzges)?’ At one point Ernst even planned a book on the art of the insane, "They profoundly
moved the young man," he tells us in Beyond Painting. “Only later, however, was he to discover
certain ‘procedures' that helped htm penetrate into this ‘no man‘s land'"~proccdures “beyond
painting" like collage, “trottage” (an image produced through rubbing), "grattage" (an image produced
through scraping), and so on.”
in large part, however, Ernst elaborated these procedures from the art of the insane, and they soon
became crucial to the definition of the Surrealist image (this suggests that this art was an
intermediary between Dada and Surrealism). As Breton wrote of their first showing in Paris in 1921.
the early Ernst collages "introduced an entirely original scheme of visual structure, yet at the same
time corresponded exactly to the intentions of Lautréamont and Rimbaud in poetry?” Thai is, like
"the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table," the famous line
or Lautréamunt adopted as the Surrealist motto, these collages pcrtormcd “the coupling oi two
realiti . irreconcilable tn appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them" that came
 ill. 7 ill, 8

[:5] to define Surrealist aesthetics.” Key here is the connection drawn by Ernst between disruptions in
representation and in subjectivity, and it is difficult to imagine this aesthetics of disruption without
the model of the art of the insane. When Ernst moved to Paris tn 1922 to join the Surrealists-to-be,
he brought the Bildnerzi as a ritual gift for Paul Eluard, who. as it happens, collaborated with Breton
on a poetic simulation of madness titled immaculate Conception in the same year—an inaugural text
oi Surrealist writing.
Ernst connects disruptions of image and self explicitly in Beylmd Painting. The book opens with a
"vision of half-sleep" dated “from S to 7 years," in which little Max watches his roguish father make
“joyously obscene" marks on a panelia first encounter with painting cast in terms of a “primal
scene," which Freud defined as a fantasy of parental intercourse though which a child teases out the
riddle oforigins." Ernst uses the trope of the primal scene in the origtn stories of all his procedures
"beyond painting." in effect, through collage and the test, he sought to desublimate art, to open the
aesthetic up to psychosexual drives and disturbances; and, again, his model of hallucinatory vision is
underwritten by the art of the insane. "I was surprised," Ernst writes of these experiments. “by the
sudden intensification of my visionary capacities and by the hallucinatory succession of
contradictory images superimposed, one upon the other, with the persistence and rapidity
characteristic of amorous memories."u
More is involved here than a disruptive device, however. for Ernst develops this notion of traumatic
fantasy into a model of aesthetic practice. “It is as a spectator that the author assists...at the birth of
 ill. 9

[i6] his wor ,‘ he argues in Beyond Painting, "The role of the pointer is to... projecl that which sees itself
[it him."“ Again, pcrhaps with the primal scene in mind, Ernst positions the artist as both a
participant inside and a voyeur outside the scene of his art, as both zin actiie creator of his fantasy
and a passivc receiver of its images. Indeed, the Visual l inations and sexual confusions of the
primal sccno seem to govern not only his definition of collage ("the coupling of two realities
irreconcilable in appearance") but also of its purpose (to disturb "the principle of identity"), This
aesthetic is already ctcmplificd in the curly collage titlcd The Master's BL’Llnmlil (1920) [ll]. 13]. an
otlcrpalnllng of at page troni it Gcrmttn schtililrbouk of an array of'd ‘l'crcnt animals and objects it)
than or to Imct‘ Hum hath thi- itnimai accupant‘s and tho skm‘l‘t‘Ll spat-c or the room sccni to gt.
back at the artist-vicivcr in throat, as if a traunititic fantasy such as .i primal scene. long repressed.
had suddenly returned to threaten master." even [0 "unmttstcr" him. Although the title alone may
alludc to ti primal scene, it is in the formal dis/connection of the image ‘ anxious pcrspcctivc,
contradictory sculc. and mad juxtaposition (table. bed, cabinct, tree, ivhitlc, sheep, bear. tish.
SlhlkL‘lill’ml traumatic fantasy is evoked, paranoid affect produced. Such are the "proccdurcs" that
helped Ernst penetrate the "no man's land" of psychotic representation, and to pass from thc world
of Dada tti that of Surrealism.

Often in his first collages (again. made in Cologne before the publication of thc Bildiiereil Ernst not
onl) tissumcd (I quasi-autistic persona. “Ditdiimaxf' but also imaged the body in a quiISlc
schizophrenic guise as u dvsfunctional machine. Based oit found printer-proofdiagrams ol' obscure
mechanisms. thcsc collages are more estranged than the ironic iucchanomorphic portraits of other
l)zitlaists like Duchamp ttnd Picuhiu. With titles like The limiting ofFumcialls Sal/liars Ill]. 7], thesis
disjunct schema: seem to point to thc narcissistic damage produced by World Wilt l (in which Ernst
was slightly “Oundudl. For example. in SelfrCunxit‘ucletl Small Machine (1919) [ill. 8] thc body is
evoked as a broken apparatus: innrc, it is subsumed by this bizarre prosthesis, as though it had taken
on life of its own. 0n thc left is a drum figure with numbered slots; on the right is a tripod
personage, suggestive of both a cttmctu and a gun, as if thc subject of military-industrial modernity
had developed (or is it regressed?) into two functions altinHtccOrdiiig machine iind killing
machine. Below this literally split txcliizo) figure rtins a confused account ol its armored “anatomy."
in German and in French, which conl'lates sex and scatolngy, precisely as ti schizophrenic mtgl’ll,
 ill. IO

[t7] And indeed thisself constructed small machine is reminiscent ofapamcular genre of
of machinic ' for damaged 5 ' that, however,
only debilitate these damaged egos further“ [illi 9]i In this alienated self-portrait, then, Ernst seems
to figure the development of the military-industrial subject as a regression to broken functions and
disordered drives. In so doing he also seems to intuit, through the art of the insane, that this
disorder is social as well as subjective; it is this insight that allows him to adapt this art, to
“historicize” it in effect, into an indirect critique of the symbolic order of his time.

To recap: in his Dadaist collages Emst evokes a damaged ego through the machinic substitutes that
it struggles to devise as a lastrditch life—support, in the manner of some schizophrenic
representations. Later he develops a Surrealist aesthetic based on a “hallucinatory succession of
contradictory images"in the manner of some paranoid representations (this aesthetic was made
programmatic, often banally so, in the'‘critical paranoiaof Salvador Dali) In thisway Ernst not only
elaborates the art of theinsane " ‘ " it is as if he ’ ‘ it ‘ ’ the
swnqmmamlng; of its representations, as it were. And this understanding makes his use of the art of
the insane quite different from the avanr-gardist accounts of Klee and Dubuffet. Unlike these others,
Ernst does not position this art as a redemptive origin of art or as a radical outside to civilizationi
for, again, that is to project a symbolic order that is intact, even solid. Rather, he draws the more
radical insight from this art that the symbolic order may already be cracked, and that this crack is
crisis for the subject as well. In so doing Ernst suggests another way to view not only the art of the
insane but the relevant work of Klee and Dubuffet, which I want to reprise briefly now.
[ll 13
'9 iv. The Art of the Insane as a Crisis in the Symbolic Order

As noted, both Klee and Dubulfcl often deranged the image of the body if in keeping with the
schizophrenic sense of ego-damage or sclfrdislocatlon, and, like Ernst, they sometimes figured the
body its dystunctionally mechanistic as well.” These distortions of the bndyrimagc are pronounced in
the art of the insane too, and they point to a paradoxical treatment of boundaries, of figureground
relationships, that is also evident there. as it is in the related work of our three modernists.
Sometimes ' i ' ' .
are ettaced "
i ii ,,
or
i it
, , or
i.
ju

to the point where they are effaced again—as if, in the very attempt to underscore the lines between
scltand world necessary to a sense of independence, an image of autonomy, these same lines were
blurred, this desired distinction undone. Some images in the Heidelberg collection are paranoid
projections of grandiose fantasies (world systems, miraculous events, hostile machinations) that are
elaborated to the point where the very order of these projections tips into its opposite—utter chaos.
Others are obsessive inscriptions of the pictorial field—here the desire for the lawis often
‘in repeated ‘ or
‘

'‘
are ‘ ‘
(tLhe
’ to the point where all sense of
ttgure and ground all sense otditterence, is lost most poignant exampleis a work by Emma
Hauclt. Sweetheart Came (Letter to Husband)( 1909) [illi 10], an image darkened into illegibility With
the repeated plea to “cornea.

Klee evokes this collapsing of figure and ground, this merging of subject and space, in the eerie
watercolor Room Perspective with Inhabitants (1921) [ill. 11]. Here perspective is made hyperbolic. its
rationality made irrational. More precisely, its humanist reconciliation of subject and object—which
Erwin Panofsky once defined, in the Renaissance epitome of perspective, as its great cultural
achievement—is pushed to the point of inhuman reversal, for here subject and object are not reconciled
as equal terms so much as they are dissolved as indistinct entities, as the ghostly inhabitants of the
room merge into its foreshortened floor and walls.“ Perhaps the best glass on the horn‘fic spatiality of
Room Perspective is this account of schizophrenia by the Surrealist assoctate Roger Caillois.
To those dispossessed souls. spacc sccnts to bc a devouring force Space pursues thorn, encircles them, dtgcsls them in a
gigantic phagocytosis lconsumptton or bacteria]. it ends by rt'placmg them Then the body scpamies itseli innit IhoughL
the individual bit-alts the boundarv or his slut. and occupies the other side or his senses tic tries to look at himseli tront
any point whiteuer in space. He reels himselt becoming spice, dart space where ihlngs cannot be put He is tinulnr. nul
similar to something. but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is the convultirc possession."

This awful condition or mere similarity and convulsive possession captures the "schizophrenlc"
apprehension of collapsed boundaries and invasive spatiality, which, again, is otten evoked in the art
of the insane [ll]. [2], What is of special interest in this art is that sometimes this apprehension
seems to prompt a "paranoid" counter that has its own pathological effects—a defensive projection of
space as too distinct and distant, of the world as now estranged and so hostile in this estrangemenl.
Here it is Ernst who evokes this "paranoid" alienation in a collage like The Master‘s Bedroom {ill. [3],
where the Viewer becomes the vtewed and where storybook animals and bedtime things appear as
enemies. If we can juxtapose the two “rooms" of Klee and Ernst for a moment, Room Perspective with
Inhabitants suggests a "schizophrenic" dissolution of the subject into space, while The Master‘s
Bedroom projects a “paranoid" alienation of the subject by spaceias it the "schizophrenic" or the first
room sought to be recentered, made "master" again, by the “paranoid" projection of space in the
second room. in its hallucinated opposition of self and other. In this account, then, paranoia would he
the last refuge—the last asylum, as it were—ola subject threatened by schizophrenic self-loss: “I" am
still an “I" as long as there is an other in space, or even as space, out there (to get me); this other
keeps me centered by its very slterity, in its very threat.“ Yet, obviously. this "paranoid" projection of
space is no more guarantee of the subject than the “schizophrenic" construction of ego-prostheses
discussed above. Both are attempts at self-rescue that only underscore Selfrluss. Such is the
understanding that an Ernstian reading of the art of the insane allowsi“
 -..,.t.t w...» M w“

ill. 14

v. The Symbolic Order as "Old Lecher"

[20} I want to conclude with a work by Ernst that turns an evocation of a failed subject into a critique of
a failed symbolic order. It is a work known ([0 me at least) only through a photograph Ihat shows
Ernst with Luise (his wife at the time) huddled in his Cologne studio with Eluatd and Gala (his wife
at the time) in 1920. [t is a simple snapshot that commemorates a new friendship. they pose
together for the camera. But they do so under a strange assemblage that resembles a three-
dimcnsional version of the “selfrconsttucled machines" of his Dadaist collages. It is a stick figure
apparently made up of found wood and metal, topped With a hat and possessed of a gun (in any case
a later collage with the same title is constructed or deconstructed out of these items of fashion and
war), The figure thus recalls not only the crazy diagrammatic machines of the collages but also the
caustic human commodities of the well-known collage The Hat Makes the Man (1920) [ill. 14].

Ernst gives the assemblage a titular caption in the quasi-schizophrenic “word salad“ in German and
French that is common in his contemporaneous collages. "Old Lecher wtth Rifle Protects the
Museum's Spring Apparel from Dadaistic interventions [L'état c’est Moll] {Monumental
Sculptural." This is neat nonsense. to he sure, but it is pointed nonsense. perhaps allegorical
nonsense. in this moment or military defeat and social Chaos the slate is figured as an "old tether"
whose only authority is sheer force, “the rifle."And yet it still wants to protect the cultural
patrimony, “the museums," from the attack of "dadaistic interventions" But the performative magic
of state power (“l'état c‘est MOIl") no longer functions; it is ridiculous, and the foursome lie here
casually, almost insolently, indifferent to this police force Moreover, the cultural patrimony that it
wishes to protect is already degraded: it is little more than fashion, “spring apparel," the new
commodities (which miflit include the avantrgarde) of each new season. The old lechet is a
“monumental sculpture," but it is a monument to the failure of symbolic monumentality, a
monument to the collapse of social authority. It is this critical lesson#that the art of the insane
might point not to pure expression, originary vision, or vanguard transgression so much as to a given
crisis in the symbolic order—that Ernst discovered in “the no-man’s land" of its representations.
NOTES

I. Today ihrs parireulai ino ol exoiies nausi sirihe us as very odd, hui ai ihe rune ihey were seen as necessary guides in ihe
rnodernisi seareh lor "primal beginnings in an" lpaul Klee). siiaighiaway, ihen. we laee ihrs old rnodernisi paradox—ma!
a. ire prunaey and expressive unniediaey would he pursued lhmugh ihe inediarion or represeniaiions as complex as

psychnnc Images, irihal nbjccls, and ihe drawings ol children

2. See Cesare Lonihros-o, Genie e Folio (Milan, 1864!: iranslaied inio French in [889, Engllsh in |B9I.and Gerrnan in lxga
On ihe hisroneal reeepiion ol rho ari olrhe insane. see Sander L cilrnan, Di rsrrev and Paihology. Signolypex a] Seaualiri.
Rose, and Madness (llhzca Cornell Universiiy Press, 1935), esp., 217-38; and John M Marciegoi. The Discovery oflhz All of
the Insane (Plincelon. Princcmn Universlly Pmss, 1989).
3.Agi1ln. ihe eruoial |cxlhere is ihe 19]] case»sludyaf]udgc Schreber, "Psychnnanalyllc Noies upon an Aumbiogxaphlcalr‘ccoum
ola case of Paranoia (Demenira Paranoides)." The hesr general relerenee for ihese nosologieal dehaies is lean laplanehe and J. B.
Panhalls.1hz Language o/ Poehoaoalyse, irans, Donald NieholsonSrnirh (New ank w.w. Nonon. 1973).
4, 0n lhc firsi page Pnn‘zhnn'l wriles: 'We ernphasue rhai no anisiie value judgments are implied when we eall ohieeis pnxluced is,
hildende Kunrr lereaiive an), laddnsrei Annoy szlhe Mehially lll, irans. Erie van Hmckdorfl [NewYork springerVerlag, I972]. l )
s As early as [92! a Humbug proressor narned willielrn Weyprandi used a eondeninaiory juxapaxilmn ol insane and
.nodernisi an, a deyree exlcnded by Paul SchullzesNaumbmg in Kunn and liaae in 1935 and ihen. oloourse, in Eriiarieie
"Kilns." in I937. ln I933 rhe Ndzis insralled Carl Schneider as direeror of rho Heidelberg clinic; as was he who pronded
inaierials Ear ihe 1937 eahlhiiion, Sehneider laser heearne soreniilie direeror olihe Nazl earerrnrnarion pmyam orrnenial
parienis, See aeiiina Erand~Claussm. “The colleenon olworlrs orriri in ihe Psychiatric Clinic. Heldclbelgifmm ihe
Beginnlngs uniil I94 , n Brand-Claussen ei al., e . Bryond Reason, An and Px'yc'msxs Worksfmm iha Prinzhnm colleeiioa
(London, Hayward Gallery. mo).
o. See "sunrrnary" in Pnnzlmm, Amory of ihe Mehially lll.
7 INCL 26!)
ii. lhid. This :quahnn heiween image and psyche was also assumed in ihe ann-rnodernisr madlngs oirnodeinisi an as mad. Sn
ioo, il rnusr he adiniiied, ii is sorneiinres assunred in osyehoanalyne accuunls or animcludlng. perhaps. my own helow
9. l-clix Klee, peril Klee. His Life and Work in Documerus (Newyorlr Ceorgc Brazillcl. wozl. iss.
I0. Ibill. IRA,
|1. Paul Klee, hgerbuchev ‘898-1918, "D 905 (Stuttgart Verlag Gel-d Hula, I988), 320-21
12, Klee might also have seen a seleeiion or ihe eolleenon in January I92] ai zinglers Kalaineir in Frankfun where he would
show a year laier.
ls. Paul Klee. IS}: quoied horn loihar Sehreyer, Ennnzmngen an shine and Bauhaus (Munlch Langen and Muller, [956),
How much we can irusi ihis rnernury or a oonuersarion is ehvrously open io dispuie
l4 See Walrer Benia Theses on she Philosophy ol Hisiery (1940!. in lllumiuaiiour. ed HannahArandl (New York
Scharkan Banks. I969). 257- 58.
[5 This pariieular work is nor in ihe Eildnzrei', our a lew relaied images are ineluded.
[6. ln Th: Fallr Fandaraeuial coneepis of Psyehoarwlysis (New York w.w Norion, |98|JJacques laean suppesis lor so l read
him) ihar a very irnporrani pan of ihe syrnholie order is "ihe lmagc-scvccn" where all our soeial codes ol'uisoal mwgniunnA
an hisiory. pop-eulrural Images. movies, ere—are filed, as ir were Beyond ihis imagcrscrcen is rhe horrilie gaze or rhe world.
ihe real, and ii is she lumen of ihls Screen in scrcul ihis real. io iarne iir pare (m ihe larniliar device a! Irnlnperl‘ncil, Lacan
adds ihis purpose ol rhe pieiure as a "damwasvegard," a Ian-ling ol ihe gaze or she world). New, ,usi as language may he
disordered ror rhe psyehone. so rhis imageesereen rnay appe pierced or rorn. ll so. nirahi sehraophreure hallueinarions
arid/or paranoid proleclions he aiienipis so ml in ihrs “MI is loyerhoinpeusaie ror rhis darnape. in ihe iraapeseieoni very

suggeslive hereis ihis pzssage rronr rhe Bildnerer where Augusl Naiierer (z.k.a. Neier), one or ihe ienrnasiersdiscusses
iheapp iiion ihai he depreied agzln and again [ill 2o] M lirsi l saw a while spas in the eloud very near hy—lhe olouds
all srood siill—ihen she while spoi wiihdrew and renamedin ihe slry ihe whole nnre, like a hoard. 0n rhis hoard or sereen or
stage pierures followed one anoiher 11k: lightning. rnayhe lo.lloo in hallan hour. so ihai l could ahsorh ihe raosi nnporrani
only wuh ihe grates! aiieniion. The Lord hinrsellappeared, ihe wiieh who eieared 1h:world—in heiween ihere were
worldly seenes. war pieiures, paris ol ihe earih. inonunrenis, haiile scenes from ihe Wars nf Liheranon, palaces. marvelous
palaees. in short ihe heaunes ol ihe whole world—hui all or ihese in supraearihly pieiures. They were ai leasi 20 orerers
high, ii was like a rnoyie The plclures were manifesiaiions ol she last judgmem, Chrisi eould noi oornplere ihe redenrpiirrn
heeause rhe Jews erueiried him ioo soon. Chrisi said ai ihe Mnunl oi Olives ihai he had shivered under ihe preiures thch
appeared ihere, These are pierures. in oiher woids. he ihose orwhieh chrisr spokz. They are revealed in me hy cod lor ihe
eornpleiion of ihe redempiion" lAnrsir—y, lsoeom.
17 Some hisiorians argue ihai nuhullei aerually iraveled io Heidelberg in 1923 io view ihe eolleeiion in person
IS. lean nuhulrei, "All Bull in Pvuferencc io ihe Culiural Ans" H949), irans, Paul Foss and Allen 5, Weiss, Art or Tex127
(DecembersFehmury was): 33.
19.Jean Duhurlei, Jenn Dubflflel iNew ank. m0). 2
20. By his own laser adrnission- "I quire agree ihai no arr lorrn exis|s ihai
nor in sorne way dependeni on euliural givens"
is

(Duhullei, L'Horrrrne du commun a l‘ouuraee lPans: Galliniard, l973]. 429) on sueh garnhiis. see criselda Polloeh, dinni-
carde Gamhiis ”4384891 (Lnndun. Tliarnes a Hudson, I992).
 '
12 rr firm in Prefucncc," 33
22 Mlchel Foucauli. "A Profase io Transgression. in Language Comer-Memory, Pmcncz. ed. Donald F. Bonchard ilihas-i
Cornell Univorsiiy Press, 1977), 30 The essay firsr appeared in "Harm-nag: a Georges Emanuel” Criquve IQS-‘Jb (I963).
13 Sci: um: 16 My line 0' though! hem Is mdelfied m the pmvucnlive lexl nf Eric Sanlncr, My 0er anal: German, Daniel
Paul Sehralicr'r sacrei llisiory o/ Morlemiiy iprinceioo. Pnnceron Universiry Press, mo) 'Thc social and pulihcal srabiliry or
a sneieiy as well as the psyeholngieal ‘heallh' nl iis rnernhers," saniner wrires, “wauld appear in he correlared m the ellicaoy ol
ihese syinlinlic operations-lo whar we wish! call rheir Marnmxivz magiuiwhercby individuals ‘bccnmz who ihey are,'
assiiine ihe social essence assigned in rheni by way or names. iirlcs. degrees, posrs, honors, and rhe like. We cross ihe

ihreshrild uf inoderniiy when rhe aiienuaiion uf ihese perlorniarively errecniaied social bonds becomes chronie, when rhey
are no lungcr capable oi Selung ihe subjccl in his or her selhondersrrnding. The surprise ollarod by iho analysis of

paranoia. .is rhai an immune erisis' has ihe poieniial ro guleme nor unly feelings oicairenie alienarion, inninie, and
prolonnd Cmpllncss. zule-(Ies associared wiih nhsence: one oi The ccnull iheorerical lessons of rhe Sohreber case is preclscly
rhai a gcncrzlllcd arieniiaiion orsyrnholic power and aulhority can be experienced as rhe collapse or social space and rhe
nres or inslnution inro ihe inore innmaie sore iii one's being, The feelings generaied ihereby are, as we shall see. ansisiios
nor oi absence and loss has oi nverpmximily. loss- or disrsnce lo some obscene and malevolanr presence rhir appears ro have a
direcr hold on ane's inner parls"1x .
2-» For neiiina Erzndvclaussen ihis goes back In Prinzhorn av. lensi. “The whole avimsgnrde conccpi orwillliilly vlnlafing
picrorial conveniion—a praciice ihai emerged unscalhed rroin any ainoiinr rinse comparisons Wish rha an or she InsaHCA
linds iis iiliimaie expressmn in Prinzhorn's model, accordlng so which she nulislic. niaii irrisi makzs visible, in rhe ‘iinio
myslicd rhe whole world.'whai is is ihai marks mu ihe genulne snisr' (Ba-yam! Reason. m.
25 See notes 16 and 23
26. Max Emsl Beyund Panning (New York' Wmenbom and Schuln. 1948i. 13. This extraordinary an "muse ls wrinen d: a
sellanalysis in which she developmenr orhis an is narrared as ihe srory or his psychic lire ll eonsisrs ol several lexls some
ol which were lirsr iiblished in snncalisr .oiirnals rrorn rhe lare mos ihroiigh rhe middle leans The phrase to escape ihe
principle o ni v is a qunlzllun honia review lay/indie areion nra 192] show olerrly Emsl collagen see Btya
naming, I77.
27 Sr: Elizabelh M, Lemar, Max Emil. Th5 nychaaml)1lc Sawfly (Ann Arbor UMI Pmss. ”89% 52,5;
25. Ernsr, Be’ond Painiirig. is.
29. André Brown Ar '5“: Genesis and Parspecllve of Suntalism" (l94l), I" Sunmlism and Painting (New York, l972)r 64
so. Ernsi. Beyond Painiivig, 13
‘
3| lliid.. 3 The classic text on she primal seene is, oi course. flu: Woll Man case siiid roin ihe l lisrory oian liiraiiiile

Neurosis" nan/ix) For more on rhe primal scene in grass. see my compalsire anion (Cambridge, Mass MIT Press, lwsl
52, Ibid.. 14, compare [he accounr or Ners-r in nut: lb
33. Ibid , 5.
34 in The Empry Fonven lnjaniile Autism and ihe Bmll nfthz silj (New York The Free Press, won rhe psychoiherapisi
discusses rhe niinamaus case nra boy named loey who leli ihiii he was "run by machines These machines. which Joey
"

holh ennsrrncied and ropresenied mar only drove him lain prorecred him as a "defensive armanng, againsl anxvelyiagalnsl
"

dangers rhii he perceived is vuthirl wiihin and wirhoni. They niainramed his bodyego imapo—niainiained is as deb iiaied l
mean in sugnsl rhai Ems rs rhis idea ola crary prosrhesis in rhrse early works For more on ihis ennnesiion see my
Armor Fou. October so (Spring l99l).
ss. Dnbnirei ravored rhe animilisric ovcr ihe mechanisnc, while Klee soinerimes combined rhe rwo, as in his well-known
Tniiirenrig Machine (19m,
in. See Erwin Panolslry, Perspective as Spnbnhc an11924»25).|uns Chrisiopher woiid mew York, zaine Bucks, 199| l.
:7. Trend liked in associale rhe systeMsbui in; or philosophy with paranoia ilrorn which he. rhen, wauld nor be iniiniinea
ihis mlghl be [he poinr or his playhil analogy), and rhere is a paranoid dimension in receni French iheory as well—rhe
alienanon of ihe gan- in Same and Lacan, rhe power of surveillance in Foucault. and so on As suggested above, in rhe very
tnllquc arrhc sobiecr in such iheory rhera mlghl he a secrei mission olrescne. As Leo llersani ooinmenrs» "In paranoia, ihe
prirnary ranciron or the enemy is in provide a dariniiion of she real ihar inahas paranoia necessary. we innsr rhorerors bcgln ib
snspecr rhe paranoid siriicinra irseliar a device by which consciousness mainrains rhe polariry oi sell and nonselr, rhiis
preserving the concept uf ldemily" ("Pynchol-l, Parlmnu and Lilexamre," In Repvexenmrxonx 25 [Wlmcr I989}. H39),
38, This understanding is foreshadowed in a was essay by rhc Viennese psychoanalysr and an hisrorian Emsr Krls who was
crirical cl ihe Prinzhorn idenlirarion of ihe arr arrheinsina. Kris (whiz acriially visiied ihe Huidclbzrg collecrion) read ii
insiead as a railed projeci or resriioiio ee The Art of rhe lnsane," in Psychoanalyric brploninonrin Ari (New Vork,
Shocken Books, 1964).
L. In mu. \I.n I um \n In. IA i‘ht-lumalun

1H 13
ill. [6
 amidst L. gizmnn

THE MAD as ARTISTS‘

The Psychopoth as Artist

I25] Are crazy people more creative than others? RD. Laing, the British psychiatric guru of the l960s,
affirmed this more forcefully than most.‘ He saw (and sees) madness as a creative response to an
untenable world‘ the family (or perhaps even society) is dcstructivcly mad; those whom society
labels as insane are only responding to the craziness that surrounds them by creatively reworking it
The diseased world (or family) labels this response an “illness," and this View determines how the
individual is perceived and, more important, treated. Society denies this creative response of the
mentally ill even though it presents the roots for any true understanding of the nature of insanity, To
use Michel Foucault's formulation, the mad are denied their own voice} They are forced to speak
through either those institutions that caused their madness, such as the family, or those that deny
them insight, such as medicine.

In the l960s Laing undertook an experiment to show that the insane could be treated and restored if
they were, in a sense, reprogrammed. Laing's creation was Kingsley Hall, a community of patients and
therapists which attempted to return “ill" individuals to that stage in life at which they were exposed to
thc pcrnicious influence of the sick world about them. They were encouraged to return to infancy and
relive their cariy life in a new caring, protective, “healthy" world, the world of Kingsley Hall.

Kingsley Hall had a favorite patient, Mary Barnes. Together with her therapist. the American
psychiatrist Joe Berke, she wrote an account “Ola journey through madness.” Now most
psychiatrists or mental healers who scc themselves as establishing a new order have "pct" paticnts
who serve them as the ideal example of the efficacy of their method. From Philippe Pinel, the father
oi modern psychiatry, to lean Marlin charcot, Freud's teacher, from Anton Mesmer, who first used
hypnotism in creating psychological disorders, to Laing, thc exemplary patient seems a standard
feature of all psychiatric systems that style themselves as innovative. These patients illustrate the
"creative" response that the new system enables them to make to their own madness. This is clearly
the case With Mary Barnes. Barnes validates Laing's treatment by literally becoming a creative artist,
a paintcr. She shows that she has recovered by painting her Vision of the world rather than
internalizing it in her psychotic fantasies.

Joe Berke conceived of art as the key to unlocking Mary Barnes's madness. He saw in her rcgression
to childhood a “creative" pattern: "Mary smeared shit with the skill of a Zen calligrapher. She
liberated more energies in one or her many natural, spontaneous and unselfrconscious strokes than
most artists express in a lifetime of work [ marvelled at the elegance and eloquence of her imagery,
while others saw only her smells" (1949). Mary Barnes is a real artist since she is unfettered by the
limitations of the very world that drove her into madness; she is the romantic artist par excellence,
following her own inner sense of the creative. and Joe Berke is the true critic, able to perceive the
truth in art, while all others in the philistine mob see only shit. But this is only part of the model for
the artist which Berke has internalized and which Barnes accepts and carries out in her desire to
please her therapist Berke continues this description of the role which art can play in
communicating with patients (and having patients communicate with the world) by telling an
anecdote about another psychotherapist. John Thompson, and an unnamed patient who had
withdrawn totally into his world of madness. Thompson presented him with pen and paper and “the
man grasped hold of the pen lightly and, in a few minutes, tashioncd a technically proficient.
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they were. In his Problemata he asked, “Why are men of genius melancholics?” Melancholia, the
dominance of one of the humors, black bile, was seen as the root of most mental illnesses from the
time of the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance Aristotle saw mythological figures such as
Heracles as possessing a melancholic constitution but also saw “most of the poets" as being "clearly
melancholics." Creative minds are diseased or. at least according the ancients, are housed in a body
dominated by block bile, the source of madness. Creative individuals set themselves apart from the
normal not only by their actions but also by the source of ihese actions. Their uniqueness is
perceived as the result of some greater. overwhelming force, such as madness This view was
accepted in the West for over two thousand years. and it attained the status of a truism in the
nineteenth century. With the reform of the asylums in the early nineteenth century and the parallel
literary glorification of the mad as the only ones possessing true insight (in the writings of Romantics
such as E,T.A, Hoffmann), attention is thrown for the first time on the artistic production oi" the
insane. For if the creative are mad, must it not also be true that the mad are creative?

Philippe Pinel, credited with ”freeing the mad from their chains" (and replacing them with more
"humane" treatment such as the newly developed "English straight waistcoat," (the strait jacket), in
his textbook of psychiatry (1801) mentions in passmg the artistic production of some hospitalized
pntientsi Benjamin Rush, one of signers of the American Declaration of Independence, who had the
most original mind in the history of American psychiatry, reported in lBlZ that his patients at the
Philadelphia Hospital showed uncommon capacity for poetry, music, and art.“ Indeed, as a result of
Rush's interest, there are preserved the poetry and watercolors of one of his patients, Richard
Nisbctt, which reflect this deranged indiVidual's interest in drawing detailed maps. But Nisbett's use
ol maps as a way of presenting his Vlsion of the world was no more unusual than his physician's use
of the model of government in presenting his model of the mind in his 1791 lectures on the
institutes of medicine: “The passions are the deputies of the supreme executive. and Carry into
effect all the good and evil which are fabricated by the legislative power . Both maps and
governments were powerful images in post-Revolutionary America and permeated the way in which
all, mad and sane, saw the world. Rush must have seen Nisbett's art as providing some type of
opening into the nature of madness, or else he would not have preserved it. But what Rush saw we
do not know. for he never commented on this case,

In 1845 Pliny Earle. one of the founders of the organization that became the American Psychiatric
Asso ation, published an essay on the artistic production of the insane in which he presented for
the first time the theoretical presuppositions medicine had developed to deal with the aesthetic
products of the mad, He censured society's quarantine of the insane as brutal and brought as proof
of their innate humanity the fact that they too produce works which can be seen as "elevated." He
sees in these works by the mentally ill the truths of some prelapsarian state of humanity:
It has been asserted. by one who was labntmg under nit-nut derangement, that [he only dilicrrnco between the sane and the
insane, is, |hztthe former conceal their thoughts, while the liner gull: thorn utterance This dlshnclmn is far lrss enuneuut
than might bl: supposed. and is not tlssiiiure ofnnaltigy to the remark ofTallcyvand, that "language was invented for the
purposr otooottslinr thought." The contrast helwecn lunatic: and poisons retaining the use or reason, is not so broad ind
sinirinp as would appear in such as are hit! little acquamted with the ionnor it set-ms |uinc thut one or lhe man prominent
points ordittertnte, having the general chancier in view, is lhal with |he Insane, "the shadow has receded upon the dialrpiatt-
rrr trnit," and they Ire. truly, "bu| children of a larger gmw|h " in Ihetr rttathrntntt anti antipflhies. |heltsources or pleasure
and ot pain, |hclrl'cellngs, motives, all thrir secret springs orsttion. thty appear to have returned again into childhood, But
childhood rind early llfc or. emphatically |heporiirul age of man. whtn hope is unclouded ind care is but a name. when
Motion is disinlercstcd. the heart unsulllcd, and imagination untronrtnelt-d hy |l14serious duties are working world ‘

Earle sees mad-poets as child-poets unable to repress the inner truths they have seen, But this poet
as child also sees more intensely than do the san . [t is well known that insanity not infrequently
develops, or gives greater activity to powers and faculties of the mind, which, prior to its invasion,
had remained either dormant or but slightly manifested. No other power is more frequenily thus
 rendered prominent than that of poetical composition " The mad poet sees more deeply and is able
to articulate ihis perception, Earle's examples however, are quite contradictory. For while he can
(and does) quote from poets who became insane (such as the “melancholic" William Cowper), the
poetry he cites from his patients he labels as either confused or banal.

Shortly after the publication of Pliny Earlc's essay, the British "alienist" (the terms "psychiatrist" us well
as “psychiatry" were coined in the 18305 and took a while to catch on) Forbes Winslow continued the
argument in a paper “on the insanity of men of genius" in which he noted resemblances among
paintings by the mentally ill which he collected from various British asylums over a period of twenty
years." Likewise, Cesare Lombroso, in his first major work on the sub}eci, Genius and Madness 0864),
drew analogies between geniuses, whom he saw in an Aristotelian manner as mad, and the work by the
insane which he had seen in his work in the Turin clinic.” Lombroso's book. and his subsequent fame
as tho best-known mcdical champion of the concept of “degeneracy" as tho central explanation of
deviancy (from sociopathic and psychopathic to creative acts), moved this question into the center of
the concerns of contemporary psychiatry it is only following Lombroso that the two questions are
clearly separated: one line leads to the examination of the "great" in order to find the
psychopathologicol origin or their greatness (as in Paul Mobiuss "psychogrnphs" or Freud's
"psychobiographies"); the other to the examination of the aesthetic products of the mentally ill to
establish the creativity of the mad (and discover their greatness in their illness).

Lombrosu's Genius and Madness examines l07 mentally ill patients, of whom about half
spontaneously painted. The author sees in these paintings proof of his basic tenet, which is that
sociopathic and psychopathic acts reflect a throwback to a more primitive stage of human
development. in the art of his patients he sees an atavistic form of representation which he parallels
with the “art" of the "primitive": buth exhibit a fixation on the obscene and a stress on the absurd.
He also sees, however, that his patients' art fulfills no function either in the world of the asylum or
in the greater world. it seems to be merely the reflection of the madness of the patient and has

therefore only overt meaning, without any deeper significance. What Lombroso is interested in,
however, is the seemingly spontaneous act of painting, which he sees as parallel to the seemingly
spontaneous act of painting among "savages." The act of creation rather than the product of creation
is central to Lombroso's concern.

There is another shift when the late nineteenth-century medical establishment turns to the aesthetic
productions of the insane. While most discussions of the creativity of the mad in the early part of
the nineteenth century revolved around the poetry of the insane (Pliny Earle's title). the late
nineteenth century, beginning with Forbes Winslow, became fascinatcd by the Visual art produced by
thc insane. in 1872 Ambrose Tardieu published his "medicorlcgal study of madness," in which he
commented that "although our attention to the present has been concentrated on the writings of the
mad, 1 do not shy away from saying that 1 am interested in examining the drawings and paintings
produced by the insane, What one can associate in ideas, what one perceives in one‘s fantasy, the
most impossible things, [he most bizarre images. which one would not have even in one's own
delirium, are drawn by the mzid. These creations contain nightmares and cause one's head to
swim."“ Tardieu’s conclusion is that the art of thc insane, which he also describes as somehow or
other different from the art of the sane, gives greater insight into the nature of the insane's
perception oi rhc world.

Why does the emphasis shift from poetry to art? The shift, as we can see in 'l'ardieu's observation, is
one of which the “scientific" investigators are quite aware. It can on one lcvel be understood as a
direct reflex of the role experimentation plays in impinging various modes of aesthetic
communication on the popular consciousness. Romantic poetry was the face of Romanticism as far
as the popular understanding of the revolution in perception was concerned.” For the lanes and
29 early 1870s, especially in Paris. it was art in which the most visible and controversial
experimentation was taking placer Art became the appropriate vehicle for experimentation, just as
poetry had been some four decades prior. It is not that experimentation in art had not taken place
during the early nineteenth century (as for example in the work of Théodore Géricault or Caspar
David Friedrich), or that experimentation in poetry was lacking in the late nineteenth century (think
of Baudelaire and Mallarmé), or that the popular view of where experimentation was present had
shifted. Thus the central question asked concerning the creativity of the insane both preselected
that medium in which experimentation was then taking place and imposed upon the products of the
insane the ideology of the avant-garde. By the end of the nineteenth century. the art of the insane
represented not only the lost world of childhood but also the utopia (or distopia) of aesthetic
experimentation.

Only four years after Tardieu published his first halting speculations on the art of the insane. Max
Simon used the art of the mentally ill as the basis for a set of diagnostic categories." Simon
discovered specific, formal qualities in the art of the insane corresponding to six of the categories of
late-ntneteemh-century psychiatric diagnosis (melancholia, chronic mania, megalomanla, general
paralysis of the insane. dementia. and imbecility), Thus paintings by the “demented" are childish or
foolish while those by "chronically manic" patients are incoherent and disregatdful or reality in their
use of coltir. Simon was also struck, as was Lombroso, by some of the ”bizarre" content of these
works. specifically their sexual imagery. His intent was to use paintings and drawings by the mentally
ill as diagnostic tools. His attempt was bound to fail since his categories of illness were as much a
reflex of his time as was his formalist methodology. Simon was working With the critical tools of his
age, He approached the work of art in the asylum much as his eye had been trained to see the work
of art in the museum. Robbed of all context except one that is sell'rconscitiusly neutral, the work of
art in the museum demanded to be seen as a closed structure rcfcrring only to itself. Embeddcdncss
was either excluded or consciously rcprcssed. Simon's view was rigidly formalist He commented on
composition and lo a much lesser degree (because they point toward the context of the work) on the
themes of the works ofart. However, as the medical director of the asylum at Eton, Simon had set
the limits for the examination of art by the insane in his application of contemporary aesthetic
standards taken from the fine arts to objects that he labeled as aesthetic objects, Thus the artistic
production by the insane was given the status of “ART.“

ln |88Z Emmanuel Regls published a detailed reflection on the art of the insane in which he
carried Simon's argument yet further.“ He focused on the orthographic component present in
much of the “art" of the insane. As early as Lombroso's work, it was evident that the clear line
between the "writing“ and the "art" of the insane was an artifact of the beholder. Pliny Earle
himself discussed the first published clinical study of an "influencing machine," described by john
Haslam in 1810. and is fascinated as much by Haslam's reproduction of his patients sketch of the
machine as he is by the vocabulary the patient used to describe it. Regis. reflecting to no little
degree the late nineteenth-century fascination with grapbnlogy. concentrated on the formal aspects
of embellishment and structure rather than on the. broader context of the relationship between
words and image. Indeed. he tended to see the shape of the words as more important than their
meaning. As a reaction to this attempt (no matter how superficial) at a new synthesis of word and
Image, Marcel Réja published the first comprehensive overview of the “an or the mad: drawing,
prose, poetry" (1901), In which he argued that there can be no direct, overwhelming relationship
between mental illness and the total aesthetic production of the insane.“ It is only in the world of
words, in literature, that this influence can be judged. Réia's work is clearly an attempt to “save" art
as a haven from the synthesizing attempts of writers such as Regis and the American psychiatrist
Ales Hrdliéka. whose little-known essay “Art and Literature in the Mentally Abnormal" had
appeared in 1899‘“
 ill. 18

A New Madness

[3°] in psychiatric circles during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, there was a great deal
of interest in the artistic production at the insane. Part of this interest was rooted in an m‘erall
shift in the definition of mental illness. By the definition of mental illness, I do not merely mean
what is considered to be er V but what aspects of being crazy are seen as standing in the center
of a scientific' consideration of madness. What diagnostic criteria are emblematic for madness?
it is clear thar for the greater part of the late nineteenth century. the “dis ase" that defined
madness was "general paralysis or the insane," Madness was perceived as tin alteration or mind
rather than of emotions and thus fitted very nicely into the model of mental illness which
dominated late nineteenth-century psychiatry Seen as some type of a reflex of a disease of the
brain (indeed it was shown, shortly after the beginning of this century, to be the final stage of
syphiliiit infection), it fulfilled the apcrcu ot' Wilhelm Cricstnger, dean of nineteenth-Century
biological psychiatrists that "mind illness is hrtiin illness." But by tho closing decades or the
nineteenth century the basic definition of mental illness began to change. Psychiatris such as
Jean Martin Chareot in Paris and Sigmund Freud in Vienna turned to the study til the emotions.
The new illness which begins to take center stage in 18905 is dementia praecux, a term coined by
the French psychiatrists BenedictrAugustin Motel in 1856. [ii Emil Krttepclin's revitalization of
this diagnostic ategory in 1896, modern psychiatry found that "disease“ which best defined its
center of mental illncs .' In l9]! the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler restructured what for
Kraepclin had been a static concept (dementia praecoxl, a dis use having an inevitably negative
outcome, into a more dynamic category (schizophrenia), a category that has been the focus of
l\‘\'enlielh~ccntury psychopathology. T\\’Cn|lel}|~ccmury psychiatry had been greatly interested In
the implications of the artistic and poetic products of the schizophrenic. Bleuler's major
contribution was to separate what he considered the basic structure of schizopltrcniai
dlsasstlcimttm of thought. lnss of appmprtate effect, ambivalence autlsmifmm the accessory
symptoms such as hallucinations, alternations of personality, not C tinges in language and
 cat Law. . i “w
W46"
.,

[3:] hdttduritmg as well as the act‘mlngly unique artistic productions of iiw schizophrenic Bleuler also
countered Kraepelin's view that schizophrenia nt-t ,snriir ended in Intal ileCy: he saw the
potential for a return of the schizophrenic patient to society
interest in the artistic production of the insane was not lacking in the decades preceding Kraepclin's
and Bictiidr's “mks. but was greatly heightened with the popularization of the cuncepl
"schistipirrcntai‘ inst-pit Rngucs de i—urs- '5 1905 monograph, VVrititig mi Dmtvmg in Mental/1nd
Net-mm Illness, presented the idea that the work of art produced by the mentally ill served as a
anslation" of the illness into concrete form.‘ Such views served as a bridge to Bleulcr‘s theory of
tl‘it‘ accessihtlny nt‘ |heunderlying structures of stnitnpint-tna through Its peripheral products This
is a far cry i‘rnrn L'rnii Kratpniin‘ statement that these products. which he called "word or picture

salad. ‘ were meaningful only as a gross sign of the dementia, much as a rash signifies the presencc
of measles. For such thinkers as Rogues de Fursac and Friedrich Mohr (in essays published between
[906 and 1909). the illness could he interpreted through the work of art itself “'

The shift in perspective had implications not onh for the understanding of Sclluuphrcnlu, but also
for treatment Folloviing in Freud‘s footsteps, Bleuler listened to, observed. and allcmplt‘d to analya‘
his schizophrenic patients while seeing them as suffering not from some type of physical alteration
of brain structure (a disease of the mind) but from a sctcrc disorder of the psyche. As such the
arllsllc products or titt- schizophrenic assumed a greater and greater role in buth diagnosis and
treatment Schizophrenics were perceived as suffering from some type of alteration in their relation
to their sense of selll According to the next theories. this relationship could he extrapolatcd from the
nature of their art.

The idea at a d)ndmlc psychopathnlngy ds evolved by Bleuler influenced a new generation of

psychiatrists, who began to concentrate on thc products of the schizophrenic as a means of
examining and eventually treating the illness. The center of interest moved From Blculer's hospital,
the Burghnivli outside of Zurich, to the university clinics at Heidelberg These had been run by
 Emil Ktaepelin until the end ofWurld War 1, Following the war they were headed by Karl
Wilmanns. later the editor of the comprehensive handbook on schizophrenia produced by the
Heidelberg group in 1932, During the 1920s Heidelhcrg became the center for the study of
products of schizophrenia as means of access to the central problems or mental illness. ln 1922
Hans Prinzhorn published his study of the "art of the insane" based on the Heidelberg collection,
which he helped found; in 1924 Wilhelm MaycFGross, who would become the founder of British
dynamic psychopathology. published his study of the "autobiographies of the mentally illsw These
endeavors stood under the influence of Wilmanns as well as the most original mind of the
Heidelberg school, Karl laspers, whose systematic handbook, General Psychopathology (1913). hoth
summarized the existing literature and indicated the paths that should be taken by future students
'
of psychopatholog laspers's extsiential phenomenology as well as that ol the philosopher Ludwig
Klages, Prinzhorn's main influence, saw the peripheral products of the mentally ill as a tool to
explore the alienation uf humans from their essential self in a sense, Jaspers and Klages were
reacting against what they perceived as the biological basis of Freud‘s thought. They wished to
replace Freud's hioiogical model with a purely psychological explanation tor psychopathology
Prinzhorn and Mayer-Gross picked up the challenge to examtne the artistic and literary products or
the mentally ill in the light of this new manner of understanding the insane.

Hans Prinzhorn had initially approached the art at the insane in an essay published in 1919.” This
essay was superficially little more than a summary of the literature, but like Jaspers's great work or
six years earlier, it used a survey of the literature as a device for defining the direction the
lnvt‘sllgatlon must take, Prinzhorn perceived four stages in the "scientific" treatment of the art of
the insane: first, the awareness that the insane do produce works of on (Tt’ll’dieu): second. that
these works oi art could have talue in diagnosis (Simon); third. that the approach appropriate to
the study of this material was an intrinsic one (Mohr); fourth, that the question of the relationship
of this art to “real" art should be part or the investigation (Réja). The program outlined in 1919 was
carried out in his 1922 volume. Artistry oftlte Mentally Ill." ln undertaking a formalistic analysis of
some 5000 works by 450 individuals, Prinzhorn stressed the inner structure of the works of art as
the key to meaning. Following Bleulcr, he assumed that these works htid a hidden meaning
inasmuch as they related to the inner world or the schizophrenic, He outlined six major formal
criteria of the art of the schizophrenic which point directly to the nature of the psychological
disruption in the illness: the compulsive need to express inner teelings, playfulness in expresslng
them, the need to ornament (the horror felt at leaving any corner of the paper undccomtcd). lllC
need for order, the drive to Copy or imitate, and finally, the self-conscious development of complex
systems of tisual and literary symbols or icons. In spite of his development of these categories
(which he understood as the reflection of the basis of schizophrenia as a disorder of the character).
hc warned at the conclusion of his work against using them simply as 21 means of labeling a given
work of art as the product of the mentally ill. Prinzhorn's seeming contradiction is in reaction to a
scrics of monographs beginning with Paul schilder's study of madness and knowledge (1913),
which drew parallels between the art of his patient “CH" and the avant-garde, specifically the
works ot Kandinsky.“ Prinzhorn was quite aware that he could all too ca , i'all into the type or
fallacy that characterized some earlier studies, They took a group or patients labeled as insane,
examined their products (as medieval doctors had examined the urine of fever patients), and
determined that the patients were insane. Prinzhorn believed that the art of the schizophrenic
shows some certain qualities, but that without the patient (or a diagnosis) before one, one cannot
determine whether the work reflects a disease process or not. This break with the rigid equation
between artistic production and diagnosis does not evolve from Prinzhorn‘s formalistic analysis of
his pattents' painting. it must be understood in the context of specific concept of the mythtipoests
of mental illness which dominated the German intellectual scene in the opening decades of the
twentieth century.
33 The Artist as Psychopath

During the opening decades of the twentieth century, German expressionism reveled in the exotic.
The “discoveries" of African art by Carl Einstein very much paralleled the "discovery" of the insane
by such diverse writers and poets as Ernst Stadler, Georg Tralsl, Alfred Dobiin, and the dadaist
Richard Huelsenbeck.“ This discovery was precipitated by the need to define the avant-garde as the
antithesis of the established order Artifacts imported from the Wilhelminiao Empire's colonial
empire in Africa during the i880: had been embedded in the "anthropological museum," where they
gave the German middle class proof of its inherent superiority over the primitive. Einstein simply
reversed things, seeing the isolated works of African art as proof of the superiority of the primitive
vision over that of technological society, The Wilhelminian Empire created a massive system of state
asylums, eentering about the huge hospital at Bieleiield (founded in l867) which housed upward of
5000 patients. lithe state found it necessary to isolate the insane, the avant-garde would integrate
them. or at least integrate the myth of insanity into their image of an ideal vvorld. Hugo Ball, the
dadaist and expressionist, in a sonnet entitled "Schizophrenia," placed himself in the position of a
patient, a patient given a new identity as "the schizophrenic"-
A victim oi dismemhermeni. completely possessed
l dim—whal do you eall it—sehoophrenie.
You want me to ramsh irom the seene,
in order that you may fnigd your own appearanee.
I roll press your words
into the sonnett‘s daii measure
My a d arsonie
tias measured the blood in you to the heart
From the days' light and customs permanenre
Pvmecl yourselves with a seeore wall
From my madness and yarring erariness
But suddenly sadness will overcome you
A subterranean shudder will seize you
And you will be destroyed in the swinging oi my flag.“

Ball. who is notmad even though the bourgeoisie labels the avantgarde as “crazy," and “ill." uses the
identity of the mad poet to comment on the true nature of society, The schizophrenic becomes a
device, used in much the same way as other exotics have been traditionally used to present a
critique of society. Wieland Herzfelde. a publisher and the brother of the inventor of the modern
photomoniage, John Heartfield, states this position quite boldly in an essay published during i914
in the leading expressionist periodical Action:
We call people mentally ill who do not understand us Dr whom we do not understand i shall speak about the latter.
Normally one does not make this distinction The pz|ienL ii an osyluiii are crazy that‘s enough Ont- is sorry about these
poor uniortiinatos. one laughs at them and is horrified by thuir late.
The mentally in an: artistioally giired. Their woris show a more or less unurplamed hot htincst sense ior the heaoiiiul and
the appropriate. Eul sineo their sensi iity iiiars item ours, the torms colors and relationships oi lhelr works appear to us
at stmnge. birarre and grotesque
('27.
Nevertheless the tart remains tho the possessed can work creatively and with
devuilon. Thus they remain proteoted rom boredom, the most apparent reason to be unhappy, even though thereis little
tradition or innuenee on them. They only integrate into themselves that which is in harmony Willi their psychological
changes, nothing clsi: They keep their own language. it is the statement at their psyche, and yet orthography, puntiualmn.
eyen
words and toms of phrase. which do not reneet ihcir feelings. they avoid. Nm out oi iorgotiulncss but out at
unwillingness. The road are not iorgaiiiil. What has impressed itseli on [heir psyeho, remains iott- it their memory. For

cvcryilllng which impresses them. they have a haunt memory than do we, but they have no memory for unimportant things
A similar grit has rausod the artist to be considered as a dreamer who avoids reality and lives t our anti strurtiiro 1"

Herzfelde sees the mad as model artists. The German expressionist saw in the image of the insane
the reification of their own definition of the artist in conscious opposition to the structures of society.
in 1921 Walter Mnrgenthaler had presented the work of the schizophrenic artist Adolf Woliii within
the format of the ”an historical monograph.” Wolfli was presented not as a clinical case, masked
[34] behind a pseudonym (Breuer’s "Anna O." or Freud's “Dora") or initials (Schilder's “G.R."), but as an
artist whose work merited serious attention as art. It is against this tendency that Prinzhorn reacted
by arguing that the mad may produce art but are not artists per se. He was concerned about the
extension of the self-conscious confusion between artist and patient which is embodied in the
melaphoric language of the ewtcssionists. He saw the patients as not creating “works of art" as part
of free creation but as a direct result of the process of illness. But this aspect of the creativity of the
mentally ill could not be measured by a formalistic analysis of their products. lndeed through the
confluence of similar sources (naive and votive art among them) and the growth of interest in the
productions of the insane (and their increased accessibility through works on this topic for the lay
public), the line between the works of the mentally ill and the artistic avant-garde was blurred. But
this was true only if the context of the work was ignored. Thus Prinzhorn found himself in a dilemma.
He saw the limitations of his approach. but did not see a resolution of the problem,

Prinzhorn‘s search for the essence of the art of the schizophrenic was doomed. But his presentation
articulated many problems concerning the nature of artistic production and the role of the artist-
patient as the outsider. Unlike the patient, of course, artists must create For themselves the persona
of the outsider, which they don like a helmet to do battle with society. Prinzhorn was quite aware of
this attitude and of how it compromised the understanding of the disease process.

Prinzhom's Patients

The ituiterial in the Heidelberg collection was preselected in a very specific nmnnet. In the letter
that Karl Wilmanns, and his then assistant l-ians Prinzhorn, circulated to all of the major asylums in
Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 1920, the intent of the project was made very clear. They
wished to collect “drawings, paintings and sculptures by the mentally ill, which are not merely
c0pies or memories of better days, but rather an expression of their own experience of illness.” They
 were specifically in "l. ' “ ‘ 2 r which clearly
arose from the influence of psychopathology, socalled catatonic drawing, 3 every type of sketch
even the most primitive. which may have no value in itself, but which can have comparative value.’
Thus Wilmanns and Prinzhorn solicited only interesting and "crazy" material from their sources.
They excluded the repetitive, the boring, the ordinary Thc fascinating nature ol' their material is the
result not only of the psychopathology of the patients but also of the preselection by the institutions
that supplied it. The Heidelberg project was interested in the insane as artist, with all of the
ideological implications which that term bad for the educated bourgeoisie.

Prinzhorn‘s patients were ill. They were not shamans speaking an unknown tongue, nor were they
Romantic artists expressing through their at: conscious disapproval of modern society. These
patients were ill. and their artistic productions reflected the pain and anguish caused by that illness.
This {act was often overlooked by earlier commentators on the art of the mentally ill as well as by
those writers who used the persona of the mad as their alter ego. We can see this anguish in the
case notes to the work of that artist whom Prinzhorn calls “August Klotz " The alteration of his name
from “August Klett" to "Klotz“ is of interest, since “Klotz" is a perjoraiive term for an idiot. During
Klotz's hospitalization, as reflected in the original case notes rather than in Prinzhorn's selective
interpretation of them, the patient's constant pain is stressed. Since Klotz was not Prinzhorn's
patient, but was at the asylum in Goppingen, Prinzhorn's Views were based on the case material
rather than on a firsthand knowledge of the patient, We can reread the material. preserved in the
Heidelberg archives, and see what caught Prinzhorn's eye when he wrote his analysis,
The case notes begin on 4 June 1903, when Klotz was thirty-nine years old. and describe the
patient‘s excitement, his hallucinations, and fear of imminent death. He had tremors in his hands,
headaches, nightmares. He was fearful, informing his doctors of his supposed “syphilitic” infection.
(Syphilophobia was among the most vivid terrors of the nineteenth Century.) He showed no physical
sign of infection, however. He attempted suicide on i2 June by slashing his abdomen. It was only at
the end of August that anything that could be perceived as “artistic" was recorded in the case notes-
in his manic ratification the pm ‘sctarches the Wall's " In j'iiiy- PW Kl‘otz began to l’tal'liici‘riatc
about the pattern of his wallpaper. (Hcrc the “real" and the "literary" world approach one another.
for this motif is central to Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s tale of madness, ‘Thc Yellow Wallpaper"
([1892] ) In September he began to smear figures and secret signs in grease on the walls of the
asylum. From that point. Klotz produced "artistic" works. detailed letters, highly complex symbolic
systems, ornate drawings, and sketches. But all of these were achieved in the context of the turmoil
of his illness The pain Klotz experienced in the asylum, the pain that dciined his illness, made any
forrnalisiic analysis of his work meaningless. Kietz‘s case notes (one of the two sets of case notes
preserved in the Prinzhorn collection in Heidelberg) describe his “illness." Only in the absence of
such information could the work be interpreted on strictly formalisilc grounds. Prinzhorn, who had
much of this material, saw the constraints built into his critical model. For missing from it is the
personal. individuated illness of each patient, ihe patient’s response to the illness, and the
unbridgeabie anguish. These dimensions are equally missing lrorn the images of the insane
entertained by the German avantrgarde,

Race, Madness, and Politics

The avuntgarde‘s use of the outsider as a mask was a commonplace by the 1920s. In Germany,
however. there was a parallel development in the creation of a mask for the quintessential outsider
in that society, the jew. As has been discussed, the theories of degeneration advanced by the French

psychiatrist Bénédict-Augustin Morel. honed on Darwin's View of the development of species, led to
the labeling of many somatic pathologies and psychopathologtes as “degenerate." They were
explained by the "decline" of the group amicred because of its inability to compete successfully in
36 society. This was, of course. means of labeling perceived differences in outsider groups as both
it

pathological and immutable Thus the idea of inherent differences among races is slowly replaced in
the nineteenth century by the idea that it is somatic characteristics that differentiate these groups.
in other words: “We are healthy, they are sick." As we have seen, many different diseases were
ascribed to the Jews but the label that most effectively summarized the perception of the Jews in
Germany was “craz, Belief that the Jew was generally predisposed to mental illness became a
commonplace throughout the early twentieth century. This myth, unlike the selfrconstructed myth
of the artist as mad, had a very specific set of consequences in the real world. First. the Jews
themselves became convinced of the slur's validity because it was embedded in a scientific (and
therefore reliable) dogma. Second. there was now a plausible rationale for isolating Jews from
society. The ghetto was no more. but the asylum could serve as a surrogate ghetto in which to put
these “crazy" Jews, Here the myth had a pragmatic consequence in associating two outsiders, the
insane and the Jew,

Such views are nol on the fringe of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century medicine, They
stand at the center of "liberal" German science. Krafft-Ebing, after all, represented the loft-liberal
political tradition within German and American medicine, But the association oi'Jews and madness
became so powerful that il defined the perception of the Jew within yet another context the role
that the Jew was seen to play in the world ofihe arts. For many complicated reasons. German Jews
were perceived as dominating the artistic and literary avantgarde in Germany from the close of the
nineteenth century“ Port of the reason for this was indeed the presence of highly visible German-
]ewish artists (or artists labeled by the antirSemltic press as Jewish) such as the impressionist Max
Liebermann. There were, however. equally well-known non-Jewish impressionist such as Wilhelm
von Uhde, and it is clear that the perception of the avant-garde as predominantly “Jewis was
partially owing to the cultural outsider status shared by the Jew and the avanl-garde, The irony of
course is that many Jews. for example the conductor Hermann Levi, played a major role in the
conservative aesthetic tradition of Wilhelminian Germany, yet conservatism was never perceived as
“JeWish.” When the expressionists began to adopt their role as "mad," the association of the Jew, the
artist, and the mad was complete. What was initially a pose or theory became part of the political
program of German anti-Semllism.

In 1924, in the Landsberg prison in Bavaria, the leader of a failed coup d'ettit against thc young
wetmar Republic dictated his political philosophy. Adolf Hitler added Bolshevism to the equation of
Jews. arti is, and the mad since the revolution in Russia was seen by the German right wing as the
most recent success of the international Jewrsh conspiracy-

Evtn before the mm of the century an element begun to intrude into our in which up to that time could be regarded as
entirely foreign and unlniitin To be surz, even in earlier times |hetcwere occasional aberrations of taste. bui such cases
were raihci iiiisiit derailmcnis. to which posterity could attribute at least a certain historical value, than products no
longer of an ariisiic degeneration. but of a spiritual dcgencranon that had reached the point of destroying Ihc spirii. in
them ihc poliiical collapse, which later became more vtstble, was culitirully indicated
Ari aolshevism is the only possible cultural torm and spiritual expression iii aolshevism as a wholc,
iinviinc to whom this so ms sirangc need only stibicet the an of the happily Bolshevitcd sums to an ciaininaiion, and. to
his horror, he will be confronted by the morbid cxcrcsccnccs iil' insane and degenerate men. with which, since ihc turn oi
|hccentury. we hate become familiar under the collective concepts of cubism and dudiism. as the official and rccnpnued
iit ril ihose states, Even in the short period of the Bavarian Republic oiCouncils, ihis phenomenon appeared Even here ii
could be seen ihri all the official posicrs, propagandist diaivings in the newspapers, oic , hate the imprint. not only of
political biii oi cultural decay
No more than a par cal collapse of ihc present mtgniiude would have been conceivable sixty years ago was a rultural
collapse such as begun to manifest itself in riiturtsi and cubisi walks since laoo lhinkable Sixty years ago an erhihiiion ul
so-callcd dadaisiit "experiences would have seemed slmplv impossible and us organiters would have ended up in thy
madhousc. while today they even preside over on associ S Thls plague could not appear ai that ii e. because neither

would public Dplnlun have tolerated it nor ihe siiie calmly look on I‘m ii is the business of the slalc. in other words. of us
leaders, to preterit 2 people from lacing driven into the arms orspintual madness And ihis is whctc such a development
 miultl some day rneynnlily end For on the (lily when this type otan really corresponded to the generoi new of things, one
ntrhe grayesr rransrunnatrnnr or humanity nouid havu occurred the regressive deyelnpmcnt or the human mind would
hnyc begun and the end would be scarcely conseiyauie
Once we pass rho dcvelopmem or our cuirurai life in the last twentyd'rve years in renew train this standpoint. Wc shall he
horrrned in see. how iar we irre already engaged in this regression Everywhere we tneounrer seeds which represent the
beginnings oi parasrnc growrhs which must sooner or Liter he the ruin ol our culture in them. roe. we can reeopnrro the
symptoms otdctay uta slowly inning world. Woe to the peoples who can no longer rnasrer ihis disoasoiw

Hitler thus enters and shapes the dialogue concerning the artist as outsider. It is impossible to avoid
the conclusion that Hitler, the failed Austrian watercolorist. saw the glorification of patients such as
Wolfli or indeed the entire interest in the art of the insane as prool‘ of the "crazy' direction the
avant-garde had taken, While there is no direct evidence that Hitler read Prinzhorn's work, he would
have been exposed to its central thesis through reviews and polemics published in a wide range or
sources, including the newspapers or the far right. Hans Prinzhorn's work, published two years
before iiirier completed his own, could well have seryed as a catalyst for these views. The irony is
that Prinzhorn's book reflects the political conservatism associated with his mentors. Ludwig Klages,
the philosopher, and the conservative Munich art historian Conrad Fielder, Both stressed the
"intuitive“ nature of creativity and perception; both tied their theories to the politics of the day. For
example. Prinzhorn srresscs the "tribal" identity ofeach ui‘ hrs patients. August Klotz, for example, is
described as having the typical persona oi the swahian. Like many conseryatiyes, Prinzhorn flirted
With the Nazis indeed, because of his death in June of 1933, it is quite impossible tOJudge what
his long-range response to them would have been. Prinzhom's support of the Nazi state, like that of
many of the intellectual conservatives who, at first, rejoiced at its “stability," might well not have
been welcomed by tho Nazis in the long run.

Had Mein Kampfremained merely the political platform of a group of cranks. the interest that
Hitler showed in the state of German art would have become an unimportant footnote to any
reading of the historical context of Prinzhorn's work. But on 30 January 1933 Hitler was asked to
form a new government, and by the end of that spring he had turned Germany into a Nazi state In
the mid-19305 there was a purge ofjews from all state and academic functions, including the few
Jewish museum directors and teachers at the various universities and art academies. Gallery
directors began to arrange shows that contrasted the “degenerate" art of the “Jewrsh'” uvant-garde
With the "healthy" art of German conservatism. In Nuremberg the director of the city art museum
arranged a show he called the "horror chamber of art."“ in Chemnitz, where the director althe
museum was fired by the Nazis, or, Wilhelm Rudiger arranged a similar show under the lids: "Art
Which Does Not speak In Our Soul.“ But these regional shows were hur preyiews for the massiyc
cithihiricn "Degenerate ‘Art"' staged by Joseph Goebbeis's Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and
Propaganda on 30 June I937. Adult Ziegler pur together a show of 750 objects in rooms in the
anthropological museum in Munich totticiaiiy designated "the city or the moyemeni"). Among the
artists “exhibited" were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (25 paintings). Emil Nolde (25 paintings), Otto
Muller (13 paintings), Franz Marc, and Lionel Fcininger, as well as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Lissitzky,
and Marc Chagall. What is striking about this exhibition is that it employed a basically ethnological
approach. it did not consider the paintings “works of art" but rather representative of the atavistic
nature of the Jewish avant-gnrdei (Even though many of the artist represented—such as NOlKleA
were not Jewish, their role in the avantrgarde enabled the Nazis to label them as such.) The
catalogue accompanying the exhibit used the comparative approach to illustrate the degeneracy
represented by the works of art. African masks were used to show the "racial" identity of the avant~
garde as identical to blacks But most important, the art of the avant-garde is related to the art of
the mentally ill. And the prime witnesses called for the prosecution were Adolf Hitler and Wieland
Herzfelde. Hitler's programmatic statement at the opening of the “Hall of German Art" in Munich
on 19 July 1937 is juxtaposed wuh Herzfclde's expressionistic call for the art of the mentally ill to be
g8 recognized as valid.” The Nazis took the equation of artist : mad = Jew as a program of action. The
museums were stripped of this "degenerate" art, some of which was sold at auction during I939 in
Luceme and some of which was simply destroyed.

The Nazis did not create the categories of "degenerate" and “healthy" art. It was the seventeenth-
century critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori, in an attack on Vasan and Michelangelo, who first used
Machiavelli's label "corruzione" to describe art. Friedrich Schlegel, the German Romantic critic, in
his lectures on Greek poetry, labeled the works he did not favor as "degenerate " But it was only in
the nineteenth century. following the work of the medical anthropologist Benedict-Augustin Morel
(l857) and Max Nordau's popular book Degeneration, that the medical Category of the “pathological"
was linked with the artistic category of the "degenerate." By the time the Nazis used the term in
their 1937 exhibition had become a fixture in any discussion of the avant-garde. They simply
appropriatcd the contrast of "healthy" and “degenerate" and placed into each category those works of
art that the audience, no matter what its aesthetic predilections, would have expected The “healthy"
was the traditional; the "degenerate" was the avant-garde. Each group were its label with a certain
smug satisfaction. Each group thus defined itself negatively.

Hans Prinzhorn had officially left the Heidelberg clinic in I921 even before the publication of his
work on the artistic production ol the mentally ill. He was following up the interest of the
l‘ '1 'L r ' ' ' in r ' , drugs such as P when be contracted an illness in
the field which led to his premature death in June 1933. His collection, however, remained in the
Heidelberg clinic (or at least in its basement). Wilmanns was stripped of his directorship of the
clinic in 1935 because of his outspoken anti-Nazi views, and Jewish psychiatrists such us Mayer.
Gruss were dismissed, Wilmann‘s successor was Curl Schneider. a member of the Nazi party from
1932 and, after the Nazi seizure of power. the political officer of the newly purged Heidelberg
professon'dt, Schneider was inyited by Goebbels to speait at the opening of the exhibit ot
"Degenerate ‘Art'." His speech, though it was not delivered at the time. was published under the title
“Degenerate ‘Art' and the Art of the Insane."u Schneider's crudely political statement reified the
association of the art of the avant-garde and the art of the insane by simply dismissing Prinzhorn‘s
ambiguous but careful use of this material and returning to a pre-Bleulerian view of the "picture
salad." Schneider's position was a clear reflection of his understanding of the implications otihe
Heidelberg approach to the mentally ill Jaspers had been stripped of his position in I937, by which
time all of the followers ot the ”Jewish science" of psychoanalysis were exiled t'rotn the German
scholarly world. Schneider was distancing himself From an area that had come to be labeled as
“Jewish." He saw the entire attempt to understand the art of the insane. beginning with the “Jew
Lombroso," as part of the Jewish corruption of Western art and science, a process that culminated in
Freud and Adler's attempt to explain art as pathological rather than as the healthy expression of a
healthy society. Again it is the metaphor of the mad as artists as articulated by Wieland Herzfelde
before World War I which Schneider cites as his ptouf ot the corruption of the ayantgsrde, a
corruption exploited by those who wish to destroy the body politic, the Jews, and the Communists.
Schneider argued against the definition or art as tom, 2 definition that Prinzhorn borrowed from
Klages, and stressed the question of whether the art of the mentally ill would ever be perceived as
having "successful" form or whether it is a parody of "healthy" art. Schneider denies the insane, like
the Jew and the black, any true aesthetic sensibility The new perception of the insane as unable to
communicate on any level permitted the Natis to begin their first experiment in mass murder. the
“euthanasia" of the inmates of the German asylums." Schneider served as one of the most important
experts in the Siefllllailon and murder of the mentally ill until the intercession of the Catholic
Church in the person of Cardinal von Galen shortly after the program had begun in l939. The
movement from killing the insane to killing Jews was but a short step, because the interchangeability
of the mad and the Jew had long been established in the popular mind of Germany,
 49355,;
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tattictti Changes in the political. sat-tat, and intellectual history at tit-tint.“ that study must he rt’tttl
in the light of [[5 eonteu {lb nell us its reception niihiii ll'na neh Tlie “4“5 that Prinzhorn liiimell

cau' in his approach and the veiled political use to Wthl’l the popularization of the art of the incane

ttts ptit both colored tht‘ ttt-itetuting of his “out In ttthittiatt. the shirt in the inetlieul and popular

understanding of madness, itt acceptance as an appropriate alter Cgt) lor the LIFIIM in \‘\ ilhelminitin
and Weimat German). 'gurcd in the Frightening use to \tlnch this material was eventually put
Prinzhorn did not ll\(‘ (0 set- the horror at Nan German) and the use that was m‘ALlC at his project,
hut he certainh sensed the pussll’llllt) inherent in examining art labeled as the produeu oi the
meiittill) ill Thi one of the reasons he calls li ludy an examination ofthe Riltliicwi, arii IC
production. rather than the Kiimt, art, ml the mentally ill. The Nuns. hone-vet. redtie tl all ol the
munbgartlc to Bildnewi. denioting it From art. ’] heir amner to the question of the ereatwitt oi the
insane vtas to deny it. retliiting the insane to a stihliumaii level. denying them the status of members

of a “cultural enti uncl t'temtttilly murdering them. Jens ttta art- tteh in lhts light. at duguncmlt‘s
“hose pathologt evident in the madness of their Bilclitri-ei 'l he supported inability to create works
,

of art thus assumes a major function in deliiitng the outsider. a position it had held since Hegel's
intd-riiiietcenth»ccntury leCusaiOH ol' the nature ol African art. The dillerenee 19, ul tourse, that by
the 1940: direct measures were taken to 1511 the "(It c' ham [he "hath palate."

‘Otigmallt ptilflhllml in Sand-1 t. (lllnmn Chapter in, “the Mud it» »\rti\t~. ni/(titettte ittitl “Alli/1,0,!) simuitym u]
sittttutat Race. and ttiiiltttis» llll’Itllth M’ and London t‘ttmetl UnnL‘h‘l“ Press, WM), 2|", £8
40 NOTES:

1, Sec R. D, hing. The Dividtd Self. An Existential Study in Sanity and Madnexr (London 'l'nvistnck. 1960). as well as Robert
Buyers and Robert Ofllll.zds,l41mg and Anllrl’sychialq‘ (Hnrmundswmth Penguin. 19m.
2. Michel Foucault. HlSlmm dg lajoiled l'ige clatsrque (Parts Galimatd. I972), 56 Fl.
3. Mary Barnes and Joseph Berkc, Mat-y Barnes: 1wAccaum: oft Jtmmey Through Madnm (New York: Harcaun Brace
Jprrntryich, 19711.1» has! critique trt Mary Burnt: ts U.H Peters. "Mrry Bamcs Psychopathologische
Literaturtnrcrpretallun rtrrt Beisptel ether llteranschcn Gillung, Psychose-Fikton." rt Bemd Urban and Winlried Kudszus.
eds . ‘7
' tine
’
in A
' ‘
l9fll).
230799
4. See the discussion on Bennett Simon, Mind and Madnesx in Amman! Greece (Ithaca. NY. Cornell University Press. 1978),
223737
5 Plllllppe Pinel. Tmtlé médiLa-phllmophiquc rtir l'alie’nulwn martial; art la mum: (Par ichartl. Cattle at Ravter. IX [1301])
e. Bunjlmln Rush. Medical Inquiries and Obtznl/tlion: uptm the Dawn 0]th Mind (Philadelphia Kimhurznd Richardson,
1812). And Ei-ic Carlson e| al, eds, Benjamin limits henna: rm tht Mind (Philadelphta.At-nericin Philosophical Sonny. 1931).
7. Eric Carlson and Jeffrey I Wollock. "Bcn‘amin Rush on Politics and Human Naturc,“]oumal oftlie American Medical
Asmcialion 236 (1976). 73-77
i2. Pliny Ealre. "The Pantry at Insan ry. American 1mm! 17/ Prychaloglcnl Medicine 2 (1845) 193.224. Other nineteenth
Century works on the "poetry oftlte insane" am' R a. Branch Letjtrrir lirtirritrni (Barnett: Gay tr Dnrrcr, 18801and Ils
continuation. Av, Iv Tthrrpdkofi. Lat/aux ltttérai'm (Moscow WC CZUHEI, IRES).
9 Furlx-s Winslow “On the Insanity of Men nf Genitts."]oumal iifi’rycholagicnl Medicint 2 (1848) 262-91; On 1h: Obscure
Disease: altha Brain and Di‘wnlen ufthe Mind (Philadzlphia- Blanchard 8t Lea. 1860): "Mad Artistsfjmimul 0f Pnrholagical
Medicine n.s 5 (1880). 33775 The best ovcrvtew of the literature on the medical use of an ofthe insane is Maria Meuer»
Klt-dentcll. MEdijnisElw Lrirrttir z!" Mmamnphm’tn art ttsthelichln Einbildungxltm/I (Frankfurt- Europxlst‘hc Verlagsanslnlt,
1980). 31742
IO. Cesare anhmsn, Ccnia efolli'a (Milan. Chiust. 1864).
ii Ambrose Auguste Tardi . Elndz wattle-Megan rrtr lit/nits (Paris he Balliere c1llls. ism
12. On the Romantic laiclnztiun with th: mglflside and the function of poetry see Mario Pm. The Rumnntchgony. Hans
Angus Davidson (New York Meridian, 1956)
13 Max Simon. "L'trrtaginatttrrt dans la folie."Aantrmédlcurmchalagtques 16(1875) 355-90,
14. E, Regis Les allénés petrtt par Eux-mi-mes." Encephala 2 (121321 184798. 371783. 557M; 2 (1883) 542755
15 Marcel Réjti. ‘L‘zit malride Dcssrns di: ftius, Revue untverselle |(1961) 913-13, and Lin! the: lat/mix. Le damn. la
pmxt. it poe'stz (Part: 50C Du Mercure dc Frame, 1907).
16. Ale} HitlliEka. "Art and Lttmture in the Mentally Ahnorrru 'Amnmn jpumal aflnmntly 55113991. inmna.
17. Manfred Blculer. Forsehtrngert unLl Bcgriffsuzndlungen tn der SL‘hiwphmmclehrc. 194171950," Fonschritl:dzv
Neurologir rind Psychiatrie 9/10(1951)' 385-453, Wenet Janz Tliemen MM Tendtzttzen d4? derrirchpmlitgert Psychrrriritr
(Berlln sprlngct. 19m
18. Joseph Rogues de Funac. Lei écntx at la:damn: Jan: (es maladiu "Emilie: ct "manila.- swim cliiiiqtie (Pans: Masson, 1903)
19. Frredrielt Jua|lnns Mohr. "uher Zgihnungen Von Getstcskmnken." thlschn'fl frrrrrrrgetmdtr Psychologxc 2 (1908-09). 2917300.
20, The best overview ts Werner Janunk. ‘1000 Jahrc Heldclhctger Psychiatrie.‘ in Psychopathologiz rtlr Grflmllugenr
wistenichufi (Stuttgart. Thxemc. 1979)
21. Karl jaspcts. Alletiieine Psychopathalugte (Berltrt Springer. 19m
22. Hans Prinzhorn. "Das lnlderische Schzttcn dcr Geismskrznkcn." Zeitrchvift [in die Cemmte Neiimlogie rind Pgehiatne 32
(1919), $0136. Onc- evidence al Lombrosa‘; influence on many at these later studies is the fact that. Jns| as Lumbmso
followed his studies ofthe insane with ttudlzs of |l'1t: drawings and graffiti hunt! in prisons. Prinzhorn followed his study of
the int of the insane with Btlrlnzvzi der szangenmi (Berlin, Axel Junckcr Verlag. 1926). art of the prisoners
23 The best overviews trrt Prinzhorn trt German :m:the three pnstwar earringtit-t of [he exl’llbmons selected lrum the
CalltCllUn Wollgtmg Ruthe. Eildnevei tier Ccltterltmnken ant der P'iflZhDM'Smnmlllng (Heidelberg Galen: Rollie. 1967).
Bildznzn' m pryclnsch Kmnkzn, rm .1” sirtrrtiurtg Patrzitnrrr (Bonn. nhernhrtttwtlrg. 197 :and Ham Crecke and Inge
Jnrchov. Eds , Dre Puttzhormammlung (Konlgslcin Alhenium, 19301 An English (ranslallnn at Frtnlhom's 1922 monograph
Bildneret iler Gaixterkrunlren (Berlin 1. Springer. 1922) IS Aflislryafthe Mentally Ill. trans. Eric Van Brockdorff (New York:
Springer-Vrrlag. I972). Tharc it also a monograph by Roger Cardinal. Otmide Art (New York- Pracgcr. 1972).wh1ch deals
with most ol'thc Primhnrn material,
24, ml Srl‘llldt‘r. qulm ttrrii Erlttmilnix. Em: psychopallwlagixchz Still“! (Berlin J. Springer. 19m
25. These lexts are now collected in Thomas Anz. :d.. Phantatten t‘i‘lnr den Wahnrinn EnyESSlamSnlifl‘hE szl: (Munich- C
Hznscr, 1980). SIC also Wulgang tht. “Dar Geisteskranke iitt Expfcsslomsmu‘," Cindi-1w psychiatrist: IS 11972) 19572! t.
26 In Anz.Ph/17llaxlen fiberdltl M/ahmnm, 58 My translation.
Z7.1htd.. 127-32.
28 Walter Margenthzler. Em Geirierlemnltzr als Kt'i'nxiler [Bern‘ E Bln‘hcn I921)
29. Sot- my and Wall Van Eckhatdt's Bent-:11 Brzchl‘s 3511”] (New York: Doubleday, 1974).
3t), Mcirr Kurrrpf. trans. Ralph Manhcim (szbrldge Hnughlon Mittlirr. 1943). 258-59,
31. See print Bah. “Emma" Kunsl:xnnrrtmtbatei im Dniien itetsh (Hannover: Fackeltragcr—Vetlag. 1962), and Henry
Gmsshans. Hitler and the Artists er Meier. 1983), 95.115.
(New rarlr- i-lnltner
32. See the translation by William c, Bunce, Degenerate "An' (Redding. cann.» Stlver Fox Press. 1972).
33. Carl Schneider. “Entnne Kunst uitd frteltunsl." Archiv fitr psychiattte mid Nervenltmnlrlieit 110(1939) 13m The link
between the Jews, the insane. and “degenerate art" was one otrite standard associations of the Reich Mi slty tor Propaganda.
See Franz-Heyen, ed., Parole dzr Woche Eint Wudzettung i'in Di-iltert Ruck, ”36-19“ (Munich: dtv. 1983), 44.
34, Alexander Mitscherltch, Doctors of lrtjanty: the Story time Nazi Medical Crimes. trans. Heinz Norden (New York:
H. Schuman. 1949)
 villen S. ‘Weiss

PRINZHORN’S HETEROTOPIA

.. a patient is God but sweeps ihe roam willingly.

HANS PRlNzxnnx, Amslvy o/ihe Mentally lll

Emma Bochmayer, Untitled fill. 24]

{s31 ls there a primal source of both image and word? Is it physical or metaphysical? Does it even make
sense to pose the question in such a dualist mariner? Reflecting on the paintings of Cy Twombly,
Roland Barthes considered the essence of writing in ten!“ of neither use value not farm, neithet
oommunioation nor calligraphy, but rather in terms of gesture, defined by its ruins: blunders, marks,
traces, imperfections, negligence. waste. accidents. He sums up his impressions by stressing that the
work entails a certain impulse, a certain demand of the body itself.‘ This theory of ruin value
indicates the zero-degree of writing: the impulse underlying inscription, the non-significative pleasure
of marking, the gesture that traces the passage of a body in the world, For to stain is to exist.
" i! " ' '

Seeltingtheeommonr ofall' 5 l' 5,, 'and L Hans

Prinzhorn centered his Gestalt theory on bodily gesture; the organization of the artwork is based on
a primal tendency of nonolzjective disordered scribbling, chaotic traces, traces of chaos,
nnnrepresentational, nonteleological marks. The impulse of pleasure reigns. with no significance
other than the immediate expression of motor activity and corporeal presence} Though such traces
are soon assimilated to the needs for expression, symbolization. reproduction, and decoration. they
are initially presymbolic, preobjective traces of excitation. direct signs of the primary processes,
without intention or norm. Rhythmos precedes logos. Accident antedates essence,

Written well after the emergence of abstract art, in which letters and words had long served as
plastic pictorral elements, annorn's n’lem'y sought to place psychopathohrgreal productions rm the
same aesthetic basis as all other art. Far from being a purely formalist theory, as the centrality of
Gestalt psychology might suggest. his was one based on the inextricable interrelations between
formal and symbolic domains. lnsisting that a work in itself cannot be psychoanalyzed, that one
cannot deduce pathology from aesthetics, and that the meaning of any given work is dependent
upon a nexus of psychological, existential, historical, and symbolic determinations, he stressed that,
'The problem becomes both obscure and fascinating when patients carry out their own
philosophical battles with instincts and cultural forces, because although they use traditional
symbols...they spontaneously or. from another point of view, intuitively, add new meaning: to old
symbols or even create new ones out of their own conflicts."x Combat is the crux. for it is through
such endopsychic agon that a unique worldview is established: deformed by illness. informed by the
restricted world of the psychiatric institution, formed through the aesthetic impulse.

Might notthis Gestalt schematization suggest an appropriate mode of experiencing every image, such
that aesthetic perception is congruous with the structural aspects of an artwork? Might not some
works demand the relaxation of our symbolic vigilance (stop making sense!), so that gestural traces
may be pursued by our own motor actions, for the sheer pleasure of the act, before all classification
and analysis? At the other extreme, might not other works demand a profound, disorienting.
disquieting journey into the labyrinths of the symbolic, to undreamt of regions, to alternate worlds
whose metaphysics are marked by, “the devaluation of the external world and the dissolution of reality
and unreality>"‘ Might this not lead us, followrng Octave Mannoni, to posit the aesthetic productions
of the mentally ill as a unique literary genre; or even, as Jorge Luis Borges might well insist, to
consider such works, along with all metaphysics. as a subgente of fantastic literature?
45 Frenzjoseph Kleber, Plan of the Regensburg Institution [iii 25]
Modern aesthetics is fractured by one of the aporias of depth psychology: the imagination is either a
reactive form of hallucination, sequestered in "another scene" by the repressive exigencies of the
reality principle; or, conversely, it is an active force, a potentiality~nrganized by the primary
processes, by desire, by the libido—establishing this other scene precisely in order to escape the
constraints of reality. This question of intentionality, while a key to the psychoanalytic enterprise, is
conversely the source of a common fallacy that plagues aesthetic hermeneutics: the “intentional
fallacy," in which intention is deduced from forrn
Foreclosure of the symbolic enriches the imaginary; loss of contact with the world motivates the
construction of alternate worlds. Such phantasmatic substitutes characterize two modes of fantasy.
delirium and literature. In delirium, however, the agencies of psychic reflexivity (establishing the
boundaries of the self) as well as both communication and empathy (guarantors of contact with a
communal world) are either diminished or cease to function altogether. Among the most disquieting
examples of halluctnalory psychotic literature is Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous
“Inexs (the text upon which Freud based his theory of psychosis), in regard to which Octave
Mannoni suggests that psychiatric asylums, “are like ‘prosthetic' substitutes for this other place,
when it is lacking, in that asylums materially and actually isolate what cannot be denied.” The
asylum is a representational, theatrical system, the real scene of hallucinated worlds, a space
hyperboltcally closed, hermetic as the psychic system of paranoia that breeds within its canhncs, the
stage of a "gruesome solipsrsmft

In the instruction of stage direction and decor, obligatory readings should include memoirs of
incarceration in death camps, prisons. hospitals, tales of seafaring. shipwrecks, balloon journeys, arctic
and submarine exploration; accounts of monasteries. anchorites. stylites; studies of paleolithic art,
spclcology, and even premature burial. For the realization of theater presumes the negotiation of
claustrophobic (and claustrophilic) space" In this context, the history of the representation, both
realist and fantastic, of psychiatric institutions deserves detailed study.1 The totalizing, overdetcrmined
spaces of this other scene, these alternate worlds, can be either utopic or dystopic. Utopia implies a
finite spatial or systemic closure that permits an infinite affective or imaginative openness. The fixed
nature of any icon, architectural or otherwise, is always perturbed by the open ended variability of the
narratives to which it is susceptible. The architectural icon is sublated, often effaced, in perverse,
aberrant, and abnormal stagings of the theater of the impulses, where the traumas and enigmas of
existence are abreacted and narrated. Such mutability would seem to be antithetical to the inherent
solldness of architecture, suggesting a paradox at the very core of utopianism,

Dystopia often coincides with reality; utopia rarely does Thus the dual role of fantasy- as defense
mechanism, to reduce psychic torment or libidinal strife; and as wish-fulfillment, to compensate for
matcrial impoverishment tir psychic deprivation Regarding Franz Joseph Kleber‘s Plan oflhe
Regensbmg Institution. it is impossible to know what the precision of his architectural “realism"
symbolizes or conceals. However. given his diagnosis as, “primary insanity in form of melancholia
cum stupor." one can sense the perpetual futility of enclosure, the saturnine weight of stone, the
stifling formality of regimentation, the tightening anxiety of panopticism.“ One can only marvel that
a varied and sustained artistic production originated in such an institution; artists such as Kleher
prove that there are means, however “minor' and obscure, to transform institutional space into
veritable heterotopias.
i“, 26
47 August Nanerer, Napoleon. Antipope. The Invisible Enemy of God in the Clouds l ill. 26]
The climax of the New Testament, The Revelation ofjolm, reveals a great celestial artwork, where
the apocalyptic opening of the seven seals discloses the ultimate powers of the heavens over human
destiny- “And there was a violent earthquake; the sun turned black as a funeral poll and the moon
all red as blood; the stars in the sky fell to the earth, like figs shaken down by a gale; the sky
vanished, as a scroll is rolled up...“ From vellum to celluloid, this scroll would provide the ground
for a master narrative illuminated by an iconography yacillating between dam macabre and motors,
between personifications or autofigurations of death and the vast contemporary technology of death.
Every technological transformation (whether dreamt or realized) changes the ratio between the
senses. modifies forms of fantasy, and offers new aesthetic possibilities. A certain modernist
apoc ' L the Christologi ' and l ' ' ' r are sublated into paranoid
delirium rir ‘ ‘ ‘'
‘ ‘
“ J as a veritable ‘ the
quintessence of special effects,

August Natrerer began to have hypocondriacal and delusional symptoms in 1907; taking himself for
a prince, a king, an emperor, Christ himself, he spoke in great anguish of the imminent last
Judgement, His hallucinations, later represented in drawings (notably after the First World War)
variously called forth visions ofa prophet, a pope, the Antichrist, and the Spirit of God in the
clouds. After a suicide attempt he was interned. and subsequently manifested acute schizophrenic
symptoms, marked by innumerable hallucinations.
At first I saw a white spot in the cloud, very I'IL‘II’ byv—the clouds all stood still—then the white spot withdrew and
rcrnained in thc sky the whole time. like it board. on this board or sctccn or stage pictures followed one another lite
lightening. maybe |0.000 in hallan hour. so that l could absorb the most important only with the greatest attention. The
Lord himselfippctred, the wttch who created the world—in hetween there were worldly scenes. wit pictures, pans or the
earth. monuments, battle scenes from the Wars of Liberation, palaces, marvelous palaces. in short the beauties of the
whole worldebut all otthcse in supraeirthly pictures. They were at least 20 meters high, could be seen clearly, and were
almost colorless. like photographs; some were slightly colored. They were living figures which moved. Iii first l thought that
thcy wett- not really alive, then they were transcended wtth ecstasy. the ecstasy was breathed into them. Finally it was liltc
a movie, The meaning became immediately clear on lost sight. even it one becomes conscious of the details only later
whtlc drawing them. The whole thing was very exciting and eerie The pictures were munttcsiations olthc last
iodgernent,,,.they are revealed to mc hy God for the completion ortht- redemption “

Perhaps only in madness is this supreme conjunction or optical, meteorological. theological, and
protocincmatic phenomena realized. Such is the nightmare of a total cinema revealed in psychosis,
where the libidinal thrusts of the return of the repressed transform both perception and
imagination. circumventing and reinventing the narrative forms then being codified by the studio
production of the period. Natterer's hallucinations passed at the rate of approximately ten thousand
per thirty minutes, i,e., approximately five and a half images per second. or about three frames per
image at silent film speed The sublimation of theology into psychosis serendipltiously offered a
prototype of the most advanced experimental cinema. ‘1 Visual
imagery and narrative trajectories
were t ified within ' ' ' ' ' informed by modernist
technophilia and technophobiaiimages and tales soon to be disseminated within the art world,
precisely at the moment in l922 that Max Ernst arrived in Paris, bearing a copy of Hans Pnnzhorn's
Artistry o/lhe Mentally ill as a gift for Paul Eluard.
ill 27
49 Jakob Mohr, Proofs till, 27}
Despite the contemporary infatuation wtth all things electronic, being “wired" may bear the most
sinister connotations. Antonin Artaud tate of nerves, states of mind, state of the world. There are
moments when the universe seems to resemble most closely a nervous scalp quivering with electric
jolts.“ This description of a psychic state raised to cosmological proportions (written years before
the invention of electroshock therapy) proved to be a precursor of the physical tortures, psychic
catastrophes, and “artificial deaths" he suffered during his years of incarceration at the psychiatric
hospital of Rodez. Afterwards. protesting against the electroshock treatments that ravaged him, he
would despair: “The human body is an electric battery whose discharges have bccn castrated and
repressed, whose capacities and emphases have been oriented toward sexual life, while in tact it was
created precisely in order to absorb, by its voltaic displacements, all the stray reserves of the infinite
veid, of the ever more incommensurable holes of the void of a never satisfied organic possibililytm
The stn'vi'ng for tfie absolute engendbrs angst.
Evcrsincc René Descartes's mechanistic metaphysics and Julicn Offray de La Mcttrie‘s nation of "man
the machine," the human body has been repeatedly assimilated to sundry artificial forms, whose energy
derives trom power sources that control (and often punish) the body, mind, and soul. Such prostheses
are amplified and demonized within the mechanisms of paranoia. As Mark Roberts suggests, in relation
to Schrcber, “Plugged into madness, rendered into a machine. strapped into restraints, probed by
devices, subjected to the psycho- and electromechanical theories of the time, Schreher was naturally
both intensely aware of the fact that he had become a machine and horrified that he was one.""
Schrcber became a machine connected to god; not god the absent clockmaker of a perfect universe,
but a more sinister, sadistic, all-too-present manichean demiurge. one who batches his creation, one
who recrcatcs humans as impoverished marionettes, as malfunctioning machines, as freaks.
The psychoanalytic locus classicus on the topic is Victor Tauslt's, "On the Origin of the influencing
Machine in Schizophrenia."
Thc schizophrenic influencing machine is a mechanism tits mystical nature. The p is are able to givc only vague hints
of its construction it consists of boites, cronies. levers. wheels, buttons. wtrcs, batteries and the like Patients cndcovoi to
dtsmvcr the construction at the opptrarus by moons of their own technical knowledge. and it appears that with thc
progressive popularization orrhe sciences, all the torccs known to technology are utilised to explaln the functioning til the
apparatus. All the discoveries nlmanlund. however. arc tcgsrclctl as inadequam to citplain thc man'elous powers of this
machine. by which the patients iscl themselves persecuted “
The major characteristics of these mechanisms, which act in the form of a "suggeslion apparatus."
are that they make the patients see pictures, usually in the form ofa magic lantern or
cincmatograph; they produce corporeal motor phenomena (often ofa sexual nature); they create
various pathological occurrences and either product or eliminate thoughts and teclings. all by means
or air Currents ‘ or it rays. Psy ' ' ' the of these
machinesin psychosis as a pathological projection serving as defence against total narcissistic
regression of the libido, with the sense of estrangement due to a turning away of the libido from
forbidden organs or objects, These are works that, as Prinzhorn claimed of psychotic art, “emerged
from autonomous personalities who carried out the mission at an anonymous force,"
Suggestion apparatuses, anxiety producing machines, influencing machines, bachelor machines, intcmal
machines: the solipsist circuit of desire surveillance, and punishment prefiguted in many myths and tales
brcd by the early historyofimage and sound recording inaugurated a central stylistic trope of modemlsm.
create a 'ontology, ' ' '
a ' "
'
or
proliferation of the real and a gap within the real, generating both the fantasized reconstruction of the
past and the proleptic inscription of a future; establishing both the simulacrum of the body and its
prosthetic pmlongations Henccforth, reproduction and creativity are no longer distinguishable;
of
temporaiity can no longer be conceived as linear and univocal space becomes labyrinthin human
perception and cognition are ' '
with ‘ robotics, and
“L 28
51 Louis Costner, "America Privat" (ill. 28)

Is this a new design for a bicycle. or an infernal machine? As modernist forms and
psychopathological symptoms both have a propensity toward overdeterminatiun, the question is
ultimately unanswerable. However, one symbolic matrix that might shed light on the problem is
what came to be known by the felicitous term coined at midcentuty by Michel Carrouges, machine;
célibaiaires, bachelor machines. The most concise definition of the bachelor machine is given by
Carrouges: “A bachelor machine is a fantastic image that transforms love into a mechanics of
death.""‘ Such transformations describe the solipsistic circuit of onanistic sexuality (incorporating all
possible dualisms and , delirious ' '
all possible ' ‘
contradictions), useless simulation (where every machine is essentially infernal), and morbid
functionalism (where time, solitude and death exist synonymously and contemporaneously). Jean
Clair schematized the major forms of such apparatuses, the manifestations of which are legion in
the annals of modernism: antigravitation. chronometry, cycles, electrification, love-making machines,
art-making machines. perpetual motion, artificial life, voyeurism." Some examples: Villiers de l'lsle
Adam. The Future Eve; Jules Verne, the Chateau of the Carpathians; Raymond Roussel, Impressions
ofAfn'ca; H. 0. Wells, The Time Machine; Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony; Francis Picabia. Girl
Bum Without a Mother; Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare lry Her Bachelors, Even and
Anemia Cine'ma; Heinrich Anton Muller, Machines; Fritz Lang, Metropolis; Adolfo Bioy Casarcs, The
Invention of Morel. Richard Lindner, Boy With Machine; Jean Tinguely. Machine-Happening
Aawdetimctive; Harry Smith, Heaven and Earth Magic; and especially Alfred Jarry, The Supemuzle,
that most hallucinatory celebration of [he phallic erotics and impossible mechanics of the bicycle.

Rather than accentuate the incommensurable, tragic distance between ardent desire and nostalgic
death that constitutes the core of romanticism, the ultramodernist bachelor machines canflate Eros
and Thanaros, suppress nostalgia, collapse time and eternity, confuse origins and telos, so as to
inaugurate an epoch where reproductive technologies inform corporeal mechanics and
phantasmatic simulacra.
ill. 29
 Katharina Detzel, Katharina Detzel with a male stuffed dummy of her own making (ill. 29}
What is a doll? What ts t doll> it‘s something strange it‘s something irom the shadows it's something {mm the earth. It's
something irom the ongtn, It's something magical. it‘s something paternal it‘s something lorlndden. it's something rtont
God it's something distant, it‘s something WIIhoul eyes. it's something animal. it's something birdllke. it‘s something
slleni, it's something eternal, it's something oitnud. it's something pehhlelitc, Something vegetal. Something irorn
childhood. Something cruel Something yoyous. Sol-nothing screaming. Something mutc That's tile

So writes the French artist Michel Nedjar, creator of hundreds of superlatively grotesque and
morbid rag dolls. His litany would suggest that dolls are not only primal objects of psychological
projection, not only protean doubles of the human form, but an elemental ontological category.

In Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship. Clayton Eshleman discusses the implications of the
Freudian notion of the primal scene for the poetic imagination. He utilizes the model ofa pyramid
lying on its side to connect memory with the immemorial. humanity with the unhuman, the body
with phantoms. Surmounted by the self, the parents are phantasized in the pri act of coitus,
'
’ '
‘ as 'r ‘ and mutual
'
" "
this is in tut vided into the
sets of grandparents, greatrgrandparents, etcetera, etcetera. Exploring the depths of this pyramid, he
imagines "Who knows what you will find at the back wall—deified ancestors, human beings With
animal heads, or roaring nothingness.> And streaming out from the base, like giant squid tentacles,
are these not the pyramids roots connecting it to the kingdoms of the nonhuman other?"2| What if
we were to use this schema to create a doll museum? At the entrance will be found such dolls as
Barbie and Bécassine, Matreshka and Midrani, Ken and Cl. Joe, Bluette and Raggedy Anne, so
often cast in stereotyped, neurotic, Oedipal family games; further back are ritual dolls representing
ancestral figures, assurances of social continuity and psychic stability; yet farther back will be
effigies of white and black magic, exrvotos, fetish dolls, demonic figurines. death images; and finally,
in the profoundest recesses, exist certain unmentionable, unrepresentable, uncanny objects, hardly
dolls at all, inadequate icons of the black abyss of depression, the horrific dismembcrments of
schizophrenia, the crushing dciiications of psychosis.
Everybody has contributions to this museum; everyone has body doubles, astral projections, fantasy
figures, fetish objects, magical amulets, secret portraits, pale reflections, private monuments, subtle
bodies. Where would we place Katharina Detzel's dollfirotesque sexual caricature, sad
impoverished icon—In our museum? Is it an apotmpaic effigy or simple plaything? Magic or fetish?
Nostalgic or ludic? Traumatic or mocking? Representation or misrepresentation? Ultimately, the
location of any doll in this museum without walls depends more on how it is used or abused than on
how it appears.
55 Kutz. Untitled fill. 30]
In the Phenomenology afPetcEplion, Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains how, "Sexuality conceals itself
from itself beneath a mask of generality, and continually tries to escape from the tension and drama
which it sets up... Sexuality is neither transcended in human life not shows up at its center by
unconscious representations. It is at all times present there like an atmosphere..i, Sexuality becomes

diffused in images which derive from it only certain typical relationships. only a certain general
emotional physiognomyfm The libidinal body serves as a symbolic system, aspiring equallyro base
materiality and sublime spirituality, For the schizophrenic, as well as the dreamer, the body
represents the universe, This is precisely why eroticism beats both a concrete and a spiritual
dimension, why it is manifest in both representational and abstract compositions.“ Thus both a
secular system (Freudian metapsychology) or a theological one (Tantrism) could have sexuality as
the dominant principle of the symbolic, as the dimension that informs all appearances and essences.

Is this image by Kat: a most awkward attempt at the sheer instrumentality of pornography) Is it a
" ' of Eros '
J by that r' ' to absolute '‘
typical of much
schizophrenia, where the religious and the erotic intermingle to generate forms not uncommon to
modernist art? is this drawing symptom, obscenity, art, or myth?Certainly thereis a symbolic
transfer between these ' '
which ' ‘
levels of ‘
'

rather than ontological differentiallonsi This work shows the limits of the formulation" symptom
or
art?" which, subsequent to Prinzhorn's analysis, must henceforth be posed as “symptom and art." it
is simultaneously symptom, stimulation, provocation, art, and myth, all ambiguously circulating in a
dense hermeneutic equivocation.

Crucial to Prinzhorns study of thepsychopathology at expression(assuming the historical

" of ‘ L
‘
l was the desire to

expand the aesthetic realm, and not to demarcate determinate boundaries between pathology and
aesthellcsa A generation later, lean Dubuffct attempted a similar expansion of the aesthetic field by
means of the notion of Art Brut, which must be considered a polemic rather than a theory, an
overture rather than a delineation. in both cases, art historical taxonomies were perturbed,
subverted, enlarged, the realm of the imagination enriched.
57 joseplt Schnellzr, "Hypemdmm" [ill. 31}
They attempted to “ .,sweep me away in their sexual hyperaesthesia, their libidinous mannerism, their
salacious erotic sensibilization, their carnal obsession with the abject and infectuous flesh, their phallic
copulative delirium, their concrete corporeal erotization, their complete affective beastialization, their total
sexual corporization, their crass hypodermic invagination, their integral erotic debauchery, their totally
prolligate abomination, their unveiled criminal fornication,"" The fiendish sexual torments and psychic
assassination attempts suffered by Antonin Artaud—victim of demons and vampires, incubi and succubli
were experienced as divine punishment, necessitating the exclusion of sex and love from his ethos, Artaud
comments on the rationale for his anti-erotic asceticism: “insofar as I am concerned, my dear friend, I already
stated that the best means of getting rid of the demons that torment us and make us ill is to remain chaste,
because it is the practice of sexuality that summons the demons to us, and that creates maniacs, neuropaths,
perverts, and criminels. All demons are obscene lubricious ideas which in the course of time have deranged
the human brain, and I believe that it is this idea that Freud had at the bottom of his mind when he created
the scientific term ‘libldo,’ which incriminates sexuality as the cause of all pain and all evil."“

In this hallucinatory psychic scenario—opposed to the rule or syllogism, and therefore determined by the
chaos of noncontradiction—man and god, life and death, Ems and Thanatos, self and other, man and woman
are conflated. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Artaud abjected god in order to recreate himself as his own
origin, in his own image. The instauration of an anttroedipal, antltbcocratic ascesis, a radical purification,
would be a guarantee against the profligare sexual abominations of god, Artaud sought an impossible
transcendence of sexuality. There exist, however, other scenarios.

Incarceration often leads to the most unbridled sexual fantasies, famously attested to by the work of D.A,F.
Sade, and here, Joseph Schneller. Not surprisingly, these fantasies are frequently manifested in
sadomasochlstic form—itself a principle of nonconttadiction. merging pleasure and pain, active and passive,
reality and fantasy—where the codes of power and sex are mingled in every gesture, Emsiricb and
ambiguous, terrifying and delightful4xists as the aporia between the imaginable and the unimaginable,
geslure and speech, desire and act. These slagings or the erotic otter spaces obscene, because haunted by
death; sites rascinaiing, because ruled by pure metamorphosis; scenes of excess. because they necessarily
extend beyond the limits ofquotidian imagination; realms of seduction, because they permit phantasmatic
projection, theaters of pornography, because of an unspeakable promiscuity; domains of transgression,
because symbolic articulation is no longer possible. such is the erotic field of modernity.
59 Oskar Heuberg, Castmti [ill 32]

1913 was awatershed year for modern art: Luigi Russolo published The Art of Noises; Marcel
Duchamp produced his Bicycle Wheel and composed the aleatory Musical Erratum, Kasimir
Malevich conceived his black square series; Igor Stravinsky composed the Rite of Spring; Marcel
Proust began publication or Remembrance o/mvlgs post; Lee de Forest used the newly invented
technology of regenerative electric circuitry to produce the first sound amplification. But. less noted,
this was also the year that Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, left the choir of the Sistine
chapel. This eventuality was presaged in the middle or the seventeenth century by Gregorio Allegri,
who exclaimed, ”When we, the castrati, will no longer be here, bel canto will also intone its
Miserm," With the disappearance of the last castrato, an entire tradition of song, indeed, one of the
summits of the vocal arts. forever disappeared. A certain expression of the sublime was lost.

The search for a ,pure enunciation—a voice free from bodv. sex. mortaliw1-Lhe Mice ofargelststhe
music of the celestial spheres—culminated in the song of the castrati. Their voice was of the broadest
range (often three octaves), capable of hitting the highest notes (occasionally F above high C); it was
endowed With the most sophisticated suppleness of embellishment, and evinced a unique sonorous
quality combining the lightness, flexibilility, and high notes of the female voice with the brilliance,
limpidity, and power of the male voice.“ The performances of castrati—sexually ambiguous, human
and angelic, sensual and sublimeiprovoked paroxyms of joy. By 1913. the prodigious vocal purity,
power, and passion of the castrati had already fallen into oblivion, and the reality of castration
passed from one myth to another, now bound by the knots and doublerbinds of the Freudian
Oedipal complex, with castration relegated to punishent (both real and imagined), perversity, and
even medical treatment.

ln Oskar Herzberg's circa 1913 watercolor, the choir of castrati sing to God's glory in what may be
imagined as a psycho-melodrama represented upon an abstract, almost modernist stage. (Edward
Gordon Craig's stagecraft was already well-established, With its simplified design, abstract lighting,
and extensive use of screens and curtains as plastic elements). A menacing phallic object occupies
the foreground, and a vaguely celestial assembly antitheticaliy hovers above, in symbolist presence:
dualist machinations of the symbolic. As these young boys would be at the beginning of their singing
careers, without their mature vocal prowess, the representation would seem to balance the
remembered or imagined perfections of celestial voices with the pictorial idealization of sexual
innocence, sealed by divine grace and menaced by the eruptions of the unconscious. Are not such
sonctifications and forebodings the prime movers of our metaphysics?
60 NOTES.

1, Roland Barthes, "Cy Twombly. Non main seat multurn." in Lahore et lhlaliis (Paris in» Scull, 19112), lsU—(il
oti

2, Plans Prinzhorn, Artistry nflhe Mentally 111, lmns, Eric von Brochdurii(New vnrh springer-Verlag, 19721, 14,
3. lhld , 237
'3 Ibid.. 2“.
s. Octave Mannoni, "writing andMadness.“ In David Allison. Prado de Olivelrd, Math Roberts, Allen 5. Weiss, eds.
Prychoris and Sexual identity Toward a FmtrAmzlylic Wrw a] the Schrelrer case (Albany Sta|e university at New York Press.
1983). 58.
a. Prin'lham. Artistry ofrhe Mentally 111, zoo.
7 Sec Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish The Birth oflhe Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (W75: New vorh, Vintage Books.
19791; and cistan Bachelard. The poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press. 19o91
it For possible models. see Roland Barthes. sade, Fourier, LItylzlu, trans. Richard Miller (1971 New york, Hill B Wang.
197o1, Robert Harbisoii, The Built, the Unluilt and the unhnildable (Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 19911; Helen Rnscnau.
The ideal City (New itorit Methucn. 19331, ManiredaTniuri. The sphere and the Labyrinth, irins. Pellegrinu tl‘Aciemo and
Robert Connolly (Cambridge. Mass: MIT Press, 19901; and Alberto Mongiiel and Gianni Cnadainpi. The Dictionary of
Imaginary Places (New vorit Macmillan, 191101, The most recent major discovery in the genre is discussed in Jo Farb
Hernandez, John Beardsley, ind RogerCatdinal,A. c Riuoli,Archiieclanagmfictnl Vittoria (New Yorhtnbratns. 19971
9 Bettina Brand-Claussen, inge Jadi, and Caroline Douglas, Beyond Reason, An and Pryehosir, warltsjrorn the Prinzhorn
collection (London Hayward Gallery and Berkeley university of Caliiornia Press, 199s). lm
iii. The New English Bible. The New 'restantant (extort) and Cambridge Oxford and Cambn'dge University Presses, 19701, 322
11. Prinzhorn, Artistry ofthe Mentally 111, 159-60
12 Note Abel ounces pioneering use at eiirsmely briet' montage segments. notably in La Home (19231. single home work would
become a staple n1 :xperimenul tilm beginning with Robert Ereer's cinema of the |95cs seertllcii s Weiss, "Kinumadliess," in
Shattered Forms All Bnit. Phaniasins, Modernism (Albany. State University otNewvcrh Press, 19921, llSrlt’a on the relations
between psychiatric art and modernism, see Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism (New 1(or1r. Basic Books, 19921; Maurice
'ruchmaii and Carols, liliel, eds , Parallel visions.- ModerriArtists and outsider/in (Los Angeles. Los ringelcs County Museum oi
tin, 19921; John M, MacGregor, The Discovery of the/1n o/ the Insane (Princeton Princeton University Press, 19t91.
Ii. Antonin Arluud. letter of 22 August [926. in Lame; 1‘: Cénicn Alhumtiiou (Pans Callimard, [969), 266.
I4 Antonin Aruud, "Le lhéfilte de la cruau|£“1|947), in Gem/re: camplélex. vol. 13 (Pam. Gallirnatd, 1974). ms.
l5. Mark Roberts, Schrebcr as Machine, chhnophobe, and Virtualist," The Drama Review ISl (1996). 37.
1o victor Taush, "on the origin oi the influencing Machine in Schlmphmnm," Psychoanalytic Quarterly (19331; reprinted in
Jonathan Ciary. Michel Feher Sanlnrd Kwinter, Ramona Naddatl, eds.. lncorporntrons: Zone is (19921 544 On the» relation
between this subject and Laeanian tiiin studies. see Juan C ice, "The Annieiy til the influencing Machine' October 22
U982) 43—59; tor a speciiic analysis oia "bachelor machin in the cnnlexl of"inl'luenc1ng machines," sce Annette
Michelson,"Anémii: Cinéma' Reflecl'lom on an Emblemuc Work," Atlfanml l2. no. 2 (1973l: 64—69,
l7. Prinmoin, Artirlry o/ the Mentally 111, 272
IS Jean Clair and Harald stecman. eds, Junggercllenniarchiwen/Ler Machines Cdilmtaite: (Venice. Alfien, 19751, 21, This is
the catalogue of an enhib ion at the Musee des Arts Decoratiis, Paris, l976, The original text is Miche1Carrnuges, Les
machines celibaiairer (Paris. Aromas, 19541; see also Rosalind itrauss, Bachelors (Cambridge. Mass. MIT Press. 19991,
19, Jean ciai es machines célibalaltzs," in Lane art carpi (Paris neunion des Musees Nattonaux/Gzllimlrd/Eleclz.
1993), 433739.
20 Michcl Nedyar, interviewed by Allen 5 Weiss and Gregory Whitehead. trom Lindoniytable, a radio documentary on dolls
broadcast in the Amber do in Citation audiophoniriue or France Culture, Radm Fiance (22 December 199o1
21. Clayton Eshleman, Novices, A biady of Poetic Apprenticeship (Lus Angelcs Mercei 2t Allchtson. 19B91, 11.
22 Maurice Moriaau-Ptiniy, thommalvg o/Perceptron (19451, trans, Colin smith (London houtledge B Kegan Paul,
1970), 237
23. See Maurice Tuchmdn and 1nd. Preeman, eds, The spiritual in AWAbstmct Painting 18917—1935 (New rnrh Abhevllle.
I986)
14, Autumn Arlnud. Cuhum (In Relour 11 Paris (December 194&January 1947). in Oeuvres cmnplélex, vol. 23 (Fans,
Galllmztd, I990). 205,
25, Antonin Anzud. letter of ll February 1944, in Nowelmx Emits dl Rode: (Paris. Gallimatd. 1977), 84785.
2o. See Patncit Barbier, The World afthe Casiran, trans, Margaret Crosland (London Souvenir Press, 199 . rid Michel
roitat,TheAnge1‘r Cry. Beyond the Pleasure Principle in opera. trans. Arthur Denner (liiiaca, er Cornell Univeisiiy Picss.
19921. Recordings ofAllesandm Moreschi were made in 19112 and 1904. Though they otter hardly any sense at all at the true
beauty or the casirato voice. they remain a curiosity worth hearing: Allerandru Moreschr The Last Castrata. complete vaiiaan
Recordings (Opal CD 93211.
 ‘Bmcha Lichtenbarg ‘Etti‘nger

SOME-THING, SOME-EVENT AND SOME-ENCOUNTER

BETWEEN SINTHOME AND SYMPTOM

smthome and symptom

{6i} When we are reflecting on the difference between a creative artifact produced as a symptomibe it
an expression in a form and with the help of “artistic" tools, be it in the language of writing, of
painting, or in a musical language—and a work of art that appears as what Jacques Lacan names, to
mark a slight hut definite difference from the symptom, a sinlhome. a seemingly paradoxical idea
imposes itself: it is the symptom—and the creative artifact produced as a symptomilhal in fact
makes sense in and by the Symbolic. And such a making-sense in and by the Symbolic. creative as it
may be, cannot be a measure of art, because it discovers itself via significance that is already
culturally accepted. Once again, the question or this difference is called upon in view or the works
of the Prinzhorn Collection.

A form comes to life and excercises its effects as a work of art on a level that, at least to begin with.
subverts this significance; a level equivalent to the level of events that burst out in the Real, And so
we may say that the work of art. any work of art fabricated as a sinthome. is in a way Crazy; it is
produced at the level ofjouissance and it is meant to create jouissance and to make sense through
what is left of it (an objez a, a plusrderjoutr).

Thus. the meaningful wnrkra5esymptum at the mentally ill, unlike this kind of crazy artwork-as-
sinihome, is in fact very sane, contrary to any intuitive qualification of such a product. A work as a
neurotic or psychotic symptom is not a! all "neunm'c" or “psychotic" in its structure, because it isari
articulation of suffering already in the language ofthe Other, an articulation made for the Other. a
message aimed towards and communicated to a symbolic Other, and finally perhaps also
apprehended by those who can analyze it and return its sense to the subject who created it, If the
symbolic Other already contains all the clues for deciphering the message contained in the work-as-
symptom, this work has no potentiality to transform this same Symbolic, The workrasrsymptom stems
from the unconscious and alms at an unconscious ”structured as a language," at what is already here
but dissimulated, or cut away. or castrated, or repressed. or temporarily lacking. The work of art as a
sinthome, on the other hand, is a unique response that contains the enigma it co—responcls to and
that brings it about. an enigma that resonates a lacuna of quite a different status in the Symbolic- it
doesn't correspond to lacks defined by the phallic mechanism of castration but to whatever is not yet
there. to what is yet to come, to what resists the Symbolic and to the mysterious and fascinating
territory of that which is not yet even unconscious or to what is impossible to cognition,

A symptom that corresponds to a lack in the Symbolic aims to defy castration and points to a lack or
a failure in the phallic structure, A sinthome that points to the Unconscious‘s own dark margins and
struggles to resonates the traces ofa Thing is lying beyond the effects of castration; it is indifferent
to castration. it does not even defy it as the foreclosed. It indirectly hints at the failurc ofthc phallic
structure as such. or at some kind of psychic world where the phallic structure is just irrelevant.I In
that sense and in others. it has to do with the dimension of the feminine beyond the Phallus. And
that‘s precisely where—in the site of the relation to such a feminine. and in the nonrplace of such a
feminine difference—Lacan's very late idea of the sinihome steps forward to mark its deviation both
from his early notion and from his late notion of the symptom.
62

u!m:ay~r-th:-lut~:un
uymmm—x u"- ,-5, am?"
binnianvwnrqu-luy m."

.m mix-:-
3mum-n...
m”no.1..."
Ii.
n".m
..mu. mm
.xw..::......
...u.
mm,"
mum-M...
m-.."
mum m...”
m.
n

aa...emm.um-mm.mmun-an: n. yn»...«.r..r..mw..q- rm r rm
um"... mn—nfi-hnuluvu ”nan-1.49” "nanny..." ”L...
- ry‘lnrfl.

Int-muuy-Tnu mums-m m." arm?

”wmwmu. :r u.m -2 -133 :1:4 :4-rnzubiuny-rymn- .7." mm

-
ay—1.A

ammo-“mummy-muawynw :1 3" :.:y.nv.nn m o-u-r.¢arm':q

m.“ "un-

mum“: .-
arm uv-yurmunnnlufau
nanny-19.1.14)”—uproar-lapwyrnnnlu:

..... “11:41::ur'lwiwllulnrw4nlwl
m mm
m . ~ru1nry4-1- mum-n... urn. ur
an.
”an... M2 .s. m
"um-«am-,..,.1:...
”mum—72f"... law:~g::~my::z:- 1:, mm «7:1nlur:nun-numurmrznwvn-
1%! mp.

m..-a...~.a—mr:mm4_w.«.mfill! nu. -u.mn.:-n.n.uu_unuyu-a

I'“, 33

ill. 34
63 lacan's symptom, following Freudian guidelines, has two facets, One is that of the articulated message
at the service of the symbolic Other. This was emphasized by Lacan in his early theory. Here comes to
light what the symptom “says" to the Other where the subject cannot speak for itself. Under this aspect,
if the symptom participates in creation it does so by way of the metaphor, by a displacement of whatever
is already a compensation for a lack, a subjective split, a separation from one's own partial corpo-reality
and from one's own archaic mother. The second facet is that ofJouissance, emphasized by Lacan in his
late theory Here comes to light the ways drives are satisfied by way of the symptom and the pleasure
derived from an imaginary satisfaction of the desire of the Other. Under this aspect the symptom
participates in creation by metonymy, tepudiating signification by rejecting any recognition of a lack.

A symptom as such is not a work of art. However, as J A, Miller remarked, it does, according ro
Lacan, backtrack itself in effects of creation. If in its facet of articulated message "the symptom
harmoniLes With castration.” it is peYhaps more on its other facet that it backtracks itself in the
effects of creation: while following upon the trails of jouissance Here, something is satisfied by the
symptom; something in [he speak/throughbeing is gratified even if the subject is suffering.
Something is delighted "beyond the pleasure principle," in what also causes suffering, But if we
want to speak of artobject and artworking. even in light of the reading of the symptom under the
second facet, that ofjouissance, which introduces the operation of death drive in repetition.
something is missing from the picture, something that has to do with creativity that transgresses
sublimation, with the intrinsic potentiality of a work of art to open the world apart in order to
embrace a new meaning and to transform the world's frontiers into Ihreshalds,

Where a message of sufferingisymptom-can be transformed into a work of art, another sense is

created beyond symbolic signification, and a supplementary jouissance does not just penetrate the
scene or the space of the work but is invented in/by it. An unimagined trail ofjouissance is invested
then, but is not just followed by a workingrlhrough. By the sinthome, something more is added to the
domain of Jouissance, something 1can think of as a diffracted tracerimprint of trauma-and-jouissance
that. as in the reversal of the movement of time, turns the trace of an impn‘nt that would usually be an
effect into an imprint of a trace that presents itself as a cause to which, as an effect now. it would also
seemias ,,
'
reply. This or d
'
- joins in the creation or
a work of art because the work of art is not a codified message and not a pure Jouissance. Neither'is it
just an expression of trails of suffering or pleasure. nor is it a pure marking of their traces. The work of
art is an external incarnation of the bodyrandrpsyche in matter with representation. It is the unfolding
into time and place of a psychic space at the borders of the Real, in a visible form or an object that
t
though it does, like a u‘uj ii make ii and malt: sense. It makes
‘ '

sense. it boulverses, it touches, and fascinates—it and not the subject behind it.

A trace-imprint of traumarandsjoulssance makes suffer/enjoy, but not only by metonymy in terms of

clinging onto an object. And it makes sense. but not as a metaphor, not through the passage via the
treasure at existing signifiers and therefore not via the Symbolic and not via a public and social
recognitioninol, at least, to begin with; not. at least. as its defining Criterion. The Symbolic is to
start with thereby dethroned, in order to only reappear hy the back door un condition or becoming a
receptive texture that is capable to leave the access to and from what I call the Event-Thing and the
EncounterrThing of tho body-psyche—that affected bodypsytho, denuded and lusting—open.

Sinthome, knots and feminine “t'mposst'blz sexual rapport"

Up until the end of his teaching, Lacan repeatedly claimed that “there is no sexual rapport." that
psychoanalysis itself attests to that. and that this lack of rapport (relationship) is the basis of
psychoanalytic discourse, but that if such a rapport were to exist. it would be feminine. Logical and
topological considerations mainly, but also aesthetic-poetic ones, led Lacan in some of his very late
66 "woman" can‘t only be dcfincd by the failure in the phallic system. And so to this i add: if a woman
is a sinthome for every man, it is perfectly clear that there needs to be found not only another name
for what becomes a "man" for a woman but also of what bccomcs a"womavt"for a woman, because a
“woman" lot a woman cannot remain a radical Other as she can remain to men, or else. all women
would be psychotic when coming into contact With their own difference. For a woman, a "woman"
must at moments be a border-Other. She cannot be radically absent in subjectivity but deabseni or
afar/resent, and so her difference also locates a state of preabsence. However, in the no-place of the
Thing in art, Lacan identifies via the sinthomc something of the dimension of the revelation of the
”absent" icrnininc and of her “impossible" sexual rapport. 1 sec in the sinthome possibilities of
sublimation in/from forclosed aspects of the feminine. on condition that we give this notion a twtst
in light of the matrixial difference“ in order to discover by that what a “woman" can become in-
difference for a woman,

Feminine simhome as a weaving of the Heal, the Imaginary nnd the Symbolic

rhe encounter between trauma jouissance, phantasm, and desire is a unique conjunction of
working art. The register of phanlasyt ' and
'

traumatic events enables us to conceptualize a connection between it mental object and a desiring
subject at the level of the Thing “before" it is emptied and erased by the symbolic Other, before the
Other was empowered via the phallus. If psychoanalytic discourse leans on the feminine difference
as absence. on the impossibility of elaborating what is beyond the phallic field. on the impossibility
of feminine rapport and on the othering of “woman" to the point of her foreclosure, art may be a site
from which some light may be shed on this “woman," This site is not available for “therapy." but it
allows psychoanalytic research to Extract something from whatever is imprinted in art for the first
time and "use" it as its proper material. If the concept of the sinthome brings together the enigma of
the feminine and the question of the origins of the work of art, it leads to the articulation of the
enigma of art with the question of sexual difference.

"The desire to know meets Marches. in order to embody the obstacle 't have invented the km 1'“
With the notions of sinthome and knot, Lacan looks for ways for knowing “woman" beyond mere
affirmations of her existence, However, this “woman" beyond-the-phallus exhibits the intra~psychic
knot while remaining a radical Other [ii the Borrcmean knot, the unconscious is disharmonious, the
knot icads us to deal with knowledge in/of the Real Surely, says Lacan, womcn are less closely
‘to the " ‘ they are ‘ more freein relation to it The
knots account enigmatically for the failure to inscribe feminine desire'in Lacans still—and up until
the end—phallic paradigm. However, with the concept of the “knot" it becomes clear that for Lacan
tho possibility to describe the “supplementary" feminine within the phallic framework reaches its
limits. 1n the passage to a matrixial apparatus, what I call metmmorphosis, is the conformallve activity
that remembers, inscribes, and transfers traces of/from the feminine during borderlinking and
spreads its specific kind of "thinking" or sense-making across the threshold of culture. In the
matrixial stratum he" exhibits intcrscctions of knots in a transapsychic web and therefore she is
presabsenl as a border-Other. such can be the work of a feminine, “sindiome” emerging from a
shared and partial, assembled and diffracted subjectivity: it inscrihcs traces in the psyche and makcs
their passage to the world via artworking that enables a border shareabiliry in trauma and phantom
while it resonates meaning and creates feminine-Olher~desire via metramorphosis that also creates
and cements ditrectliy knots Ln 3 trans-subjective non-conscious web.
if tnowlcdgc stored in the Real is not a host of data awaiting decoding by means of signification that
will also constitute a cleft from it, but is an “invention, that's what happens in every encounter, in
any first encounter with sexual mpportw than a mctramnrphic process of webbing and wlt(h)~
nessing, a mctramorphic process of Exchange of affcct and phantasm, based on conduction uf/in
[67] imprints-traces trauma or jouissance in/ftom a joint event, and a metramotphic process of
transmissions-in-transformation of phantasy, initially between a becomingrsubject and a becoming-
m/Other-to-be, but more generally between i in Coemergence with an uncogiized nonsl, an
assembled subjective unit that can then be considered a plural-several, partial and diffracted
“woman," all of these processes release knowledge from blanks and holes in the Real. A swerving at
the heart of a joint event opens a minimal distance between partial elements and links between
them. This swerving, like in a spiral movement back and forwards and inbetween elements.
inscribes traces of these burderspacings and borderlinkings themselves. We can consider the
manifestations of these moves as a matrixial sinthome that releases/creates/invents, from a feminine
side, potential desires whose sense, which does not depend on the signifier. will be revealed in
further encounters between old and new elements. Thus, a feminine weaving tells us the story of
J
"" ’ severultry, of 1’ ‘ uLCurrenCeS of _ and of ‘
‘ '

if we can read between the threads of the braid and join them.
A work of art does not express the artist‘s intra-psychic conflicts—or does not just express them in a
relieving form. A work of art channels anew traum2(s) and jouissance(s) coming from the world and
From non-1(5) that get linked to the artist who bifurcaies, disperses, and rejoins their imprint-traces
anew but in difference. The arms! acts on the borderline, transcribing it while Sketching and laying it
out and opening it wide to turn it into a threshold and to metramorphose it into a borderspaee. The
metramorphic activity functions to borderlink known and unknown elements and it transmits the
knowledge of the artwork that is derived from invrsibility. The artist that acts on the borderline in
that way and captures a resonating meaning while knotting a transsubjective sinthome, this artist,
male or female, is an artist-woman. (Please note: Lacan uses the writing of James Joyce [0 describe
the sinthome. With what we call afeminine sinihome we are taking this notion beyond the work of
joyce to speak of a special kind or artworking, and beyond the an or writing and the problematic of
language to speak mainly on painting and the problematic: of visual art),
[7°] sinthomes. Such a doctorand-patient borderspace finds its echoes in the viewer; its vibrations
impregnate the viewer’s own psychic borderspace. It sheds light on the archaic trans-subjective
rapport between the l and the non-l and it invites one to further think of the possible transmission
between different subjects and objects, beyond time and space, in a potential in—between zone of a
transitive-subjectivc-object borne and yielded by painting at the same time that it sheds some light on
the potentiality to engender/produce/invent and analyze transferential relations in therapy.

Art as a site of transference

ln terms of the unconscious art-coefficient and of relations of transference, Marcel Duchamp
suggests a kind of aesthetic osmosis between the artist and the viewer via the artwork.“ it was Freud
himself who qualified some transferential phenomena as Unheimliche, thus opening the route for
Duchamp to deliver them to an aesthetic sphere and to make them intersect with aesthetic
experience. “Mysterious," even “mystical" affective uncanny contingencies underlie the therapeutic
potentiality of psychoanalysis, says Freud, in terms of the patient's openness to interpersonal
interaction, influence and suggestibilily, or his/her “tendency for transference" in the encounter with
the doctor with-in the psychoanalytic process. This tendency for transference, since it reposes on
sexuality that is "the activity of the libido"W enters the “holes" we are treating.
A doctor and a patient arrive at their transferential encounter with different phantasies and desires.
Nevertheless, their phantasies and desires are somehow, mysteriously, temporarily, and partially
shared in an asymmetrical yet reciprocal way, and are transformed in/by the encounter, and re-
transmitted on. Furthermore, phantasies and desires are created in the ttansferential borderspace as
already conductible and shareable though in-difference and as fabricated specifically in/for each
1 and unique p ,t‘ ‘' if a matrixial' ‘ for' “' originary
be edness with-in-out is opened in the space of transference, in the wandering of phantasy and
desire one's own phantasy and desire are not in any way replaced by those of an other. Beside a
phallic transferencdcountertransference, a matrixial transference takes place, where trans-individual
subjectivity-as—encounter is created between an I and an unknown other. or between an I and the
unknown zone of a known nonvl. The uncanny affects. both allowing and accompanying the
transference/countertransference matrixial rapport between doctor and patient, signal to both that a
common-indifference event which equally-bubdifferently concerns each of them approaches the
margins of shared awareness, surrounds the edges of its hidden cavity and is about to appeal. A
 ill 38

ttriiisfcrcntial borderspacc of lnler-Will‘irnh‘ss, bcsidcdness and transgression cmbeddcd in relations

of transferencc socks w '
to become known and thinkahlc Via the scrccn ol'\ sion. llcrcbi, an
assembled and diltractud trans-individual doctorrand-palient cntiiy rolls itself in bits and bit by bit
Into the Symhoiic levcl

Tract-s of a bimodalch trtitimu arc about to ho reborn i‘rom amnesia lntn Cocmt‘rglng memory, and
the pntcntialit of partially sharing it in the transferential borderspocc is the condition for its
appearanct. that is how we may roast Duchrimp' an coefficient connected to space of transferencc
the artist and thc Viewer transform the artwork and arc transformed by it in differcnt tinit-s and
places Lind to tiii'iort-nt dcgrcos, in diii'crsntyctconncctcti ways. Eat-h riowcr glvcs the artwork non
life, and what e. pcs the capture ol‘ the artist's awareness is the kcrncl of this process. Motrixial
affects allow and accompany seeing within/through a work oi art. such aitctts Ull’icmist- allow and
accompany the rapport witL
‘
’ ugll p, L '
'4 Affective L llkc' ‘
amazemcnt. empathy. anxiety, fascination and awe that art- hidden inside the paiicnt's roadincss for
transference. is won as closely related phenomena like wondor, dread. compassion, and ctr-n
tclcpathv which are hidden in the doctor‘s tendent 'l‘or countertranst‘ercncc, also arise in vicuinp
art. It is as if an object becomes a partial-Subject and starts to communicate with us. Shared,
exchanged. and diffractcd on the iincon 110115 partial dimension, these affects attract and diffuse
aesll'lL‘llC threads and participate in the rirtwork's potentiality for hurting and healing and for
ionrisnng tho riowcr vulnerable.
The doctor and the patient cocmorpe in tho transtcrcnnai space, shunng-m-(lillurvncc thc screen oi
phantasy through frt-c associations and flouting utlL’I‘lthn. The tlrllsl and the viewer. each of ihcm a
as r. doctorontipotiont ensemble, cocmcrge in diverse ways with the work anti by the wort. sharing.
in-tiii'it-rt-ncc thc screen orvmon through passage~lo-actiiin and floating \iewing. A matrixiul grim
floats in thc edges of visibility when a floating eye traverses the scrccn. Artist and vieiier are not in
pa ive/activt- contradiction in relation to the semen. and yet neither do they amalganiritc, lht') arc
nm the some, and the) arc not symmetrical. 'l‘hey exchange and keep a distance in proximity that
allows the artist a freedom to act and allows the VICWCI‘ emphatic L‘Umvpusslun as well as tho
ilit 39
possibility tor rc-dittusion and te-intusion oteiements in the transferenltal bordetspnce, Without
fusion at critical space or subversion and re stance makes at room for itseit,
Non-signifiering instances make sense through the artwork. SomerThing, somcrEvent. some,
Encounter, are not Just being expressed or "represented." They keep being prescntibed and keep
resonating their tie-signified meaning while attracting the viewer's gaze to join them in and to Join in
them. And this some-Thing, some-Event. or somc»Encounter has to do with the becoming-sense of
that which is for the phallic~$ymbolic an impossibilityrtomeaning. Thus, arrworking articulated via
the sinthomc and twisted by a matrtxial touch has to do With the eoming-into-sense of what for
Lacan is the “impossible feminine rapport" and what is for me an originary matrixial difference that
can't make sense without a transsubjective transmission, and whose imprints-traces emerge in/by
artworking, If to metaphor and metonymy we had to add metmmorphosts, it is in order to articulate
the potential for linking by the borders while borderspacing as a thinking process that doesn't
operate by offering substitutions for absence, and a working-through of presentified trauma and
juuissance that does not suppose it collision into a suffocating undrlferentiation,
A work of art produces, to borrow u Locnninn expression. o joui-sense, n sense emerging horn is
unique jouissance but whose vestiges are treasured by its traces (“plus-derjouir"). These traces can
be transformed into a work that will make its sense for the first time, and that rather then being
interpreted by the Symbolic will transform the Symbolic by that which was never, up to that point,
known to the Other or known in the Other or known to the 1. With such an idea, the idea ofa
joursense, not of the artist's experience but of the artwork itself in its process of transitive working-
through, we would now like to bring Lacan's sinthome into an uncanny encounter with Jeaanrancois
Lyotard’s analysis of the work of anamnesis in art,
Anamnesis works in psychoanalysis through iniinite recurrences of an lmmemnrial—yet always
present—originary scene, and an artwork. says Lyotard, emerges by working~lhmugh via anamnesis
to give traces to the in siblc in the visible. In an, repetitions in anamnesic working-through do not
reestablish the lost object but make present the unpresentable Thing, cryptcd in the artwotk's
unconscious, that keeps returning, for its debt can't ever be repaid. This Thing inhabits the artist as
if it dwelled outside her, or rather, it is the artist that is derhabitated from her own habitat by it.
from her own body and history.” The artist's body is invoked by Lyotnrri as a monster inhabited by.
and concealing the non-place ot' a Thing without face. If the subject is founded by what tot Lymard
is a recurrent intermittenee of its own losses and returns (in order to enlighten the Freudianfort/da
that establishes an object by two distinct movements—constitutive of matrixrfigure and its on/off
beatil“ a spam is brought forward by him, where an appearance is bound up with disappearance
in one and the same movement, where artwork testifies to such a spasm, and where the artist pays
for it in her own body conceived as affection, ln anamnesis, the return of the “same‘ via a spasm is
never the same for it carries the marks of the peril of disappearance in the appearance. Spasm thus
gives birth to artwork's apparition amidst recurrence as a threshold. The artist’s gesture Lyotard
refers to is that which creates a space of suspension inside recurrence and contracts recurrences as
alternations in a spasm, where an event is repeatedly processed but in difference, and artwork
affects and creates a minimal soul—an [mime minima,“

Encounters with remnants ojtmumu

A symptom reflects a traumatic event. It represents and articulates it in a dissimulated language, A
work of art is doing something else—or, perhaps, something more. It captures and transmits the
traces and effects of trauma. and it affects the vieweriwhen it worksiin a traumatic way; it makes
the viewer's individual psychic iimits more fragile. Matrixtal artworlung is tracing a spasm in/oi/i‘ot
the Other itis therefore a co spasming. If a symptom is a rymlwlrc-imaginary articulation of trauma
'
and,ouissance, a work of an is a p of where c -, is
74 inseparable from sense-creating. This is a transport-station that more than a location in time and
place is rather a dynamic space that allows for certain occasions for occurrence and for encounter,
which will become the realization of borderlinking m1 butderspacing in yet [mother matrixial space by
way of the encounter it initiates. The transport is expected in this station, and it is possible, but the
transport-station does not promise that passage of remnants of trauma will actually take place in it,
it only supplies the space for an occasion of encounter. The passage is expected but uncertain, the
transport does not happen in each encounter and for every gazing subject. In this space, a gathering
of several of the artwork’s potential intended correspondents is possible~of several, and not of all of
them, and not at just any moment, in their actualiration as partial-objects and partial-subjects
between presence and absence.“

Here we can conceive of an occasion for the realization of an unavoidable encounter with remnants
of trauma in a psychic dimension where a web of connections inside and outside the individual's
limits, and a self-mutual but asymmetrical transgression of these limits, does not favor the total
separation of any distinct individual from its own feminine dimension. This web is tragic in many
senses. but is not melancholic, hysterical, or psychotic despite the psychotic potential that stems
from this nonrseparation itself and from the overflow of the borders themselves. The realixation of
'-‘ via the artwork r and creates further encounters
'
an into, r

between the artist-woman and the world, the artist and the object, the artist and the other, artists
and viewers. The realization of such an encounter distances the painting from sheer expression (of
the Real) presentation (in the Imaginary) and articulation (in the Symbolic). On a fourth
the painting is ’ ‘by its own p
'
g within the Event Thing into a
transport-station of trauma and jouissance.
The matrixia] affect diffracts and testifies to a difference on the level of the Thing when it signals
that some-particular-Thing happens, and a work of art that brings into some light the sense that a
transition from Thing, as Event and as Encounter, to object takes place is working-the-Event-
through without a total scparmr'onform the Thing. A minimal sense of differentiationrin~togetherness
is tracing itself between signal and significance, testifying that partial subjectivity is already involved
in this move, that individuals are there to be affected, and that these individuals are not just objects
or just subjects. Borderlinkjng is thus enubled by a mimmal difference of affect or by affective
minimal differentiation that occurs in the passage from Thing-Event and Thing-Encounter into
partialrsubject and partial~objecL A joint awakening of unthoughtfut—knowledge on the borderline
mid an inscription of the encounter in traces within the space of encounter, traces that open a space
in and along the borderline itself between subjects and between subjects and objects are carried by
metramotphosis that is also thus a co-nfl’ectivity and co-activi‘ty that open the borderline between
subjects and between subject and objeCt into a space that occasion a linking and a mutation into a
threshold, so that the absolute separation between subjects upon the pattern of cut/split/castration
from the Other-Thing—a separation which in fact is the pattern of elimination of the archaic
femininity—the m/OtherrEvent~Encounter~becomes impossible Wlih'ln the work of art the
borderlines lose momentarily their frontier-quality and surrender to the transitive movement, The
artist-woman wit(h)nesses trauma not necessarily with a direct experience of the event that
causcdiuauma of other, of others and of the worldiand engraves its unforgettable memory of
oblivton in the work.

One more word

We started with the difference between a production of a symptom and a fabrication of a sinthome,
we continued by linking the questions of sinthome, art and the feminine in order to look at
amnesia. and f in both art and p y ‘ and we are ending with the
elusive matrixial difference born out of the affected body-psyche as a distance opened in the Real by
75 an affected Thing-Event and Thing-Encounter, which in the difference between work-as-symptom and
artwork can perhaps be articulated as the distance between the giving up to deathedrive in an endless
repetition circulating around an archaic trauma and a forcloseed femininity on the one hand, and the
struggle with the angel of non~lifcecoming-into-life by a differential ca-spasming with the Other and the
world, in the linkage to the feminine, on the other hand. This touching struggle opens the sphere of affected
transsubjcctivity and redefines the artist—male or femaleias a woman.

‘All quok‘s rrorn lacaues Lacan are translated by Jaseph Sims and Braeht Llchtcnbcrg Elllngcr and are eapyrrtrhred

NOTES.

1. See Jacques-Alain Miller (19351, “Reflections an the Formal Envelope at the Symptam." Lacanian hilt 4 (19911, 13-21.
2 Ibid
3 laqcues Lacan. Les mlwdnpfl 4"?an unpublished seminar. 197344. 1974; and Le srniharrte. unpublished seminar. 197976
4. Lacan. Les nan-duper errerrr, unpublished seminar. 23 April and 12 February. 1974.
s parl'etre, usually translated as speaking-being.
b. Lacan, Le rintheirre. unpublished seminar, l7 and to February. 1976.
7. lbld.
ii. To learn mare about Etacha Llchlcnbcrg Ettinger‘s concepts of Matrix and Metttmorphosts the reader can refer lu 1he Mrmixml
Gate, (Leeds Department of Fine Arts, Leeds University, 1995 etramorphic Borderlinks and lenxial Borderspace," in Rethinking
Borden. ed. John Welshman (London: Macmillan and Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 1996), 12559» The within-
Vlsihle Screen in Inside the VuiHe, ed. Crthenne de 2egher (Cambridge. Masss MIT Press. 19%). ‘The Etc-Coming Threshold ai
Matrinal Barderlines." in 1iavellerr'1a1es,eds,. Rubensun er al. (Ruurledpe London. 19941. and Matrix and Metmmorphosis.
Diffelenczs. 4, nu. 3. (Blanmmgtan. ll Indiana University Press, 1992)
9 Lacan. Le iinthame.
10 Lacan, Lei non-dapmrrant,
11 Lacan. Le stntharne
12. Sigmund Freud (19101, "Secund Lecture," in Five Lectures on Psychnamxlysir nie Standard Edition of the Wade 17f Sigmund Freud
(5.5 l. Zl-ZS (London- Hagarrh. 19571. 27
13 Freud (19101. "First Lecture." in Fire Lectures ori Psychuamzlyaix SE. Vol. 11. 9-20 (Landon Hogarth. 1957), 10. and Freud (1910).
“Fourth Lecture.’ tn Flee Lectures art Pnehaamlyiis. 5.5 Vol. 11. 4043 (London Hogarth. 1957), 41
H Iacan, Le simhi’zme.
ls. Jacques Lacan, D'itri Run: a metre. tinpuhhshotl seminar, 195549
15. Gilles Deleuze. La literature et is v . n Crinqne ei cliniqwe, (Paris. Mmurt. 19931. 11~17
17. Burl“ Lichlel-lbetg Elungu, 'Trans-sitbieeltve 'I'urlsferenual aarderspnce,‘ irl Doctor and Patient, ed. Markeltz seppala (Putt.
Finland: Pan Art Museum Publications, 1997) Reprinted tn Deluge. Gmumn and the Phllamphy a/Eirprersiaii. ed Brian Massumr.
special at Canadian Review of Comparative Lllzmlure, 24. no. 3, 1997.
issue
lit. Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp dtt ngvle (Pans. Flammarian, 19751, 1113449,
19 Sigmund Freud (1916.171. ”General Theury til the Neurose Immducwry Lectures on Prychnarralysir. S.E. Vol. 1b, (London
Hogarth, I963), m,
20. JeaneFrancms Lyotard. 'anamnese." Doctamml Parieni.ed. Markeua Seppala (Port, nland Port An Museum Pu
‘
tians, 19971
21. Sigmund Freud (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in s E Val 13. (Landon Hogarth Press. 19551. Freud describes a child's
game with a wooden reel The child ateampanies the disappearance oi the reel W|lh the expressiun “furl" (gone), and its appearance.
wrth "da" lthere). Freud's essay is the basis for a tremendaus psychoanalytical literature concernlng the idea of psychologlczl loss, lack.
absence. the other/mother as oh,ect, the obtect or desire. and the playing abject.
22 Jean-Francois Lyotard. ‘Dilftaered Traces," in araeha Lichtenlrerg Etlmger. Hn'alavAutistv/ark (Jerusalem The 1srae1 Museum and
Aix en Provence Cite du Lwre, 1995)
23 See "An as the Transpon-station uiTrauma," in Emcha Lichtenlrere StringerArtworlu-ng 193571999 (cent and Amsterdam Ludmn. 20001,
 Untitled “ Banknote
Pencil and chalk on (oilct paper Body color on paper
67/8” 11/161175; 119) IO l/Zx6 5/1 (25,7x 1m
lnv. 75/4 lnv. 3507 vusa

Untitled Banknote
pcncil, colored pencil, chalk, and nolct ink on toilet paper Pen, bruih in body color and ink on paper
6 7/8x4 ll/léll73x |1.9) 815/l6x7l/B(22t7x18)
lnv. 76/5 lnv. 3510 new

Untitled Untitled”
Pencil, calored pencil. chalk, and vio1et ink on toilet papcr 011 on canvas
67/8x4ll/161175x113) 7 773 x 13 17161193 x 33.21
lav. 7am lnv 4267

Untitled Untitled
Pen:1|,colorcd pencil. chalk-11d yiolcc ink on toilet paper 011 on watercolor board
67/8x4 ll/lé(l75x ”,9! 113mx17 S/lb(288x44)
lnlt 76/7 lnv. 4285

Untitled Banknote
Pencil, colored pencil. dale and yiolct ink nn iailci paper Pen and pencil an piper
67/8101 ll/lé(l7.5x H W 10x93/8(255x239)
lnv. 76/5 lnv 4313d recto

Untitled Poetry album with drawings and texts

Pencil and chalk on toilet paper pcn,1arach in body color and oil, peaerl, and panel
o7/sx4 ||/16(l7.ix 11 91 7 ma k 5 (20x [2 71page

lnv. 76/9 1m. 4318:

Mayor Helkgute (Death and Soldier) Diary with drawings and texts
"Der Burgemelstzr Ha‘llenthar" (Tod und Soldai) Pencil, charcaal, some wash. chalk, pastel, pen, oil, and
Pastel and warcrcolor on paper body color
8 3/fix79/16(213xl92) 7 3/4 x 5 HE (196 K 13) page
luv 76!! Itch) luv. 103th

FRIEDRICH BLANK FRANZ KARL BUHLEK (POHL)

On the Trail of Shiller in Murbach aaN, I918 Dnsslmuse, 1901

“Spumn Schillers in Marbacli a.N." "Pennc"
Collage Brush in hady color on glued booklet pencil on drawmg paper
IS l/2x9 7/8 (39,3x25.|)
ileproduciion
53/16x75/Rll32x l93l [IN 2897
lnv. 3852
Untitled, 1901
Pencil and wash on drawmg paper
ELSE BLANKENHORN 15 a/lo x 9 5/15 (3215 X 23,71
[m 2908
Notebook with texts, notes, and drawings
Pen, brush, pastel. and pencil Untitled, 1909—16
9 mo x 7 57161219 x18 51 page Grease crayon, cramped chllk. and wash on dnwlng paper
lnv. 1882 161/4 x 12 311M413 x 30,9)
lnv. 2940
Banknote
Pen and hrnch in body color on wnung paper Untitled, 1909-16
a 773 k 7 [/8 (22.5 X lsl Pnstel and stumped chalk on drawing paper
lnv. 3499 reeta 161/4 x 12 [/16 (41,3 x 30 7)
lnv. 2942
Banknote
Body color an paper
qx 71/8018 1111 )1
M.S. vow. C. (FEMALE)
lny. 3505 recro
It Is a Cancerous Testicle, 1897
Banknote "Es is: 2171 Krebslwden"
Body colar aa paper Pencil on paper
8 7/15 x 7 “8121.4 x 181 6 7/8 x 6 [/1 (17,5 x165)
lnv. 3506 mew an 2505
 lwcinr to Try, I887 Cycle Plough
"lcli will versuchen" “Rudpflug”
Peneil on paper Pencil on drawing paper
8 l/Zxé l/Z (21,5X I65) 6 lS/lbx 9 5/1607 6 x 23.7)
lnv, 2507 luv 2393

Louis CASINER Untitled

Pencil on dlawing paper
“America privut,"c. 1920‘ 6 3/4 X” 13/16(17.2 k351
Pencil, indelililc pencil, and colored pencil on paper 1m. 2399 reclir
”X 16 ll? l33x21)
lnv 3] IS reclo Sleigh with sciil
‘Windsclilitten"
1920, 19211 Pencil on paper
Pencil. indelible pencil. and colored pencil on paper 51/2 x 12 (13.911 30.41
[3 11161283 x111
an 240G recto
1111/3117 icclo
How a Mouse Moosed the Elephant, c. 1906
OSKAR DEITMEYER “we cine Maus den Elehanten vermaust liar"
Untitled Pencil an drdwlng paper
10 3/8 x 27 9/16 127 x 701
Pencil, pan, and watercolor on paper
Inv. 2412 NCIO
51/1611 3 3/16 (129x81
lnv. 2056
Puff Poodle and Bulldog (continuation of strip
Untitled cartoon); The retriever and his trained decay
Pencil, pen, and warercalor on paper duck (below)
4 7/3 x 215/1li(12.3 k 7.41 "Pudelin Puff u Buldugg (2); Der )ogdliund u
luv. 2057 seine dressierte Lochente"
Pencil an drawlng paper
KATHARINA DETLEL 9 7/5121 1/4 (25x 54)

Katharina Detzel with a male stuffed dummy lnv. 241-: recto

of her own mahing‘ Puff Poodle and Bulldog (strip cartoon)

Pholngmph ”Pudelin Puff ii Buldngg" (1)
ss/lntn/susk 111 Pencil on dlawing paper
luv 27133
9 5/8 x 2111404511 54)
lnv 2415
JosEF FORSTER
Untitled, after 1916’ G. (Mlss G.)
Mixed media on cardboard
1315/1611 5 11/1o(35.4 x 22.11 Untitled, 1897
lnv. 4494 Embrmdery lhlead on linen handkerchief
l4 9/15 X” 1151(37 x In)
ALFoNs FRENKL lnv, 6053

Untitled
Pencil on dmwing paper PAUL Goascn
22 7/16 it so 5/115 (57 i 771
lnv 2353 recto Dream Fantasy
'Traumplmnlasie"
Untitled, 1905
liady color aver pencil on paper
Pencil on drawmg paper 61/2 x 8 US (165 x 20.61
213/16 x13 13/166313 it 35.11 1111/ RED
lnv. 2335 versn
Horus Dismembenzd‘
Airship Model byAlfons Frenlrl, 1905
“Luftscl’ti’ffe ModelAlfons Frenhl“ "Der zersmckelte Horus"
Pencil on drawing paper Body color orer pencil on paper
61/2 x 81/8065 )1 20 6)
13 3/4 x H) 3/4 (35 x 27.4)
luv. EH]
lnv, 2356 recto

"Puff T2772" "Portrait"

Pencil on drawing piper Body Color oyer pencil on paper
B S/léx 13 11/16 lZDflx 34.8) 111/2 1 3 1/3 (in 5 x 20,6)
[M 2390 mun Iny. 1199
FRAU K0114 MARIE Luau
Untitled Cell floor decorated with turn strips of cloth,
Pencil on drawing paper 1894
2111/8): 269/1615111 67 51 Photograph on card inoonr
Inv 1634
l’hnlllyaph' 4 3/11 r o 5/1511 1 x 151
1111/. 1771/1
E PAUL KUNzE
Cell floor decorated with torn strips of cloth,
UntitledV 1913
1894
Pencil, indiun inli, body color. and collage on Llrdwlng
Pltoiograph on card nioiini
PaP2r
7 l/Bx93/3118x238) Plimugraph 4 7/21 x h 5/16111 x 16)
lnv 1772/1
Inv. 705/2

Untitled, 1913 HENRICH M.

Pencil. body color, and pen on paper
63/Sx8 5/lblleleJ Untitled
lnv 705/18 rcclo Pencil and colored pencil on paper
a 7/16xfi 11/16121 n 171
DIMITnI CRAF LAMSDORFF 1n112795 recto

Drawing Book WILLHELM MAASCH

Pencil, indelible pc pen. and panel
12 5/8 x 5 5/8 (12 x 24.51pagc Ellseflower, c. 1910
lny, 2375 h isnblume"
indelible pencil and body color on calendar panic
CARL LANCE 4 3/13 \ 31/1611111 7,71
UntitledY 1:. 1900 luv. 5042 rec-to
Pencil un drawmp pupor
Untitled. c. 1910
111/16x41/2128x1141 indelible pencil and body coloron calendar page
luv 94
4 3/1 rd l/iolll.l r 7.71
A Proofof Divine Justice as against Human 1111/. 31143 recla

Injustice, 1900* “Kleist,"c. 1910‘

“Em Beweis giilllicller Gerechli’gltel’t gegeniiber Pencil. indelible pcne11,anr1 body color on calendar page
menschliclier unperechtiglieit“ 03/8x31/Iblll 1117,71
Pencil and pen on drawing paper lnv, £044 mcln
157/16 x 1; H1689 2 x 20.5)
1111/, 55 recto Untitled, e. 1910
Pencil and chalk on calendar page
On the Holy Miracle in Bread, c. 1900 433x31/161111x771
"Zum heiligen Wonder im Brod" 1n1L 3046 ruclu
Pencil on drawing paper
19 1/11 x14149.2 x 35 5) Pinhenharnrner, the Buckwheat Factor, c. 1910
lnv 98 “Finlterll-lammer der Buchweizenliiindler"
Pcnls' indelible pencil, and chalk on calendar page
Crista viene, los meurlos se levanlunl 1.2. 43/11x31/16l11.1x771
Christ Comes, the Dead Arise, c. 1900 111v. 3050 recto
“Crisis viene, los lnuertos se luvanmn! rl.li.
Cltn'sius lrommt, die Todten stelien all)" “Dare von Flandern," c. 1910
Pcn on drawing paper Pentll, indelible- pencil. chnlk, and Lindy mluriln calendar
19 5/1hx 511/16149 1114 51 page
1111/. 98/1 43/8x31/16111Jx771
lnv 3054 recto
The photographicolly verifiable, interleaved
miraculous images, revealing ofifteenyearold Higher Plant from the Mountains, c. 1910
crime, in the iroole ofihe victim’s shoe, c. 1900 "Oberpflanze nus dem Gebirge"
Die photographlsch noehsweislruren. lridcliblc pencil un lendar page
43/81131/15111 |‘(7.71
ineinonderllegenden, eln fi‘lnfzehlljdl‘lriges 1111/ 3062 {821.11
Verbrechen enzliiillenden Wunderbildcr in der
Schuhelnlegesohle des Geopfenen" "0berc1orf,"c. 1910
Pencil on drawing paper Penc indelible pencil. and body color on calendar page
20 3/16i2511/16(512x65,21 41/8x31/161111x771
111v, 99 1m 3055 reclu
 EusE MAHLER
Innocence Love (Book 3)
"Dorolhée" "Unsclmkl l1ebe"lDrittes Heftl
Per I. rrrrlelrtrle perresl, and \utcrmlm on paper Penru. pen, and brush 1n 1 1m. Inlevx rrnde fmln
a /h'\|§|1'21_713\ v1.11 mrdlnmnl 11nd prper
II“ 4427 mum 7 l/2\(x 3/?! ll‘)\ lhvll
IN’ ”I
Untitled
Mind mcdm And rnrlelrme perrerl 11.1 paper How Honor Helps? (Book 51
51/1“ 113/11121'21 2411 "W12 Ehn' h11fl3"lFUnflea Heft)
lrn. 4438 k’L'llI Punul, pen..1ndhrush 111 11 suun and glued hackle! mndk’
rrnrn c:4r1.lb1>111d.ln(l pups!
JOSEPH ALo1s Gor'rrnmn Mun-n 1‘] {/I6 \‘ b |/212(1.8x H1 §l
Untitled Im {82

Pentrl and paxlcl 1m elrree paper Blossom Boodness—Secfion 17111211123

12 1:1111 \ x l/JHEHle
1m 1593
Knowledge of Life, 1913

Airship
Punnl 11nd pdplcl on rrllrec paper 1r...“ rnnlbrwd and paper
.
“Blirhe Cme—Ablheilung I71\'lebe.\ Lebennevkunnlndfi"
Penal. pen. .1111! brush 1n sum and [dual 11.111111 mar-

111mm 5/11121 1 32 91 X S/lfixh i/filll \ Ifixl

In» 1593/1 I111: ‘85

Untitled. 1901 1119 Sp1r1tua11y 9e1fproleleg Wonder P011 .1

I’cncll .1rrr1 pusxcl on "mee- prrper D12 511-11 gelsll'g sclxul:ende \‘l/untlerlu'j 2..
x 5/11» x 12 15/111121 x 1291 1).mil and |>n|£h 1n 11.1111 cull" 1... pnpu‘
lm; 1:93/1 §7/B\ 71|419\ l7 7?
Im KKK rum
Drawing for Single Radiography, 1901
"Zelchnungj11r einjuche Durdlleuchlung" Who VWH Roll the Stone from the Entrance of
Pt-rrerl and pcll un urrret- paper the Tomb? (Easter)
8 Sllh \ l2 H/M 12111 H S)
”Wer walzt 1.1113 den Stein Von der Grubes 'l'lu‘lr7"
lm. F193“
(Ostemt
Light Phenomena 51111111" 10 Rénlgen. 1901 Pa pen. and Imntr un pay-Cr

"Llchlemchel'nlmgen dhnlich wie Rantgen" 41/11141/4110411211

ln\ 4!”
pent-11 and per. on "mt-e prper
8 i/I6AI2l3/1512|\ 32 5l
The Peace of Easter against Self-tormented
(In, HVZ/S
Henlhendom (Resurrection)
Signs and Remarks Based on Emissions and "Der ()slerfn'eden wieder do; sich qualende
Events, 1901 Heidentum" (Auferslehungl
"Anzewhen u, Belnerhungen, (lie sich uuf I‘m .1an trnrslr 1m papa
Bagebenhellen und Ceschehen" 51/111 4 7m 1 15 x 12.41
II“
pent-11 and pan un 111111-11 prrper
40-)

PK IHV I! Ifillhlll x 51.5)

Haw Is the Crow to Be Compared with the
lm H‘R/fi
Hare asAguinsl such a Pose?
"W12 :51 die Krijhe dem Hagen sulchm Srellung
FRANZ MALTER
gegemlber :11 venglelchen?"
The Goddess Sybillia's Domain. A Novel of the Penal pen, and lrrmn on nrper
011511.: Dungeons 47/1m7111 21 17111
“Der Giillln Sybilliens (r‘efillte. Roman Aer Burmrerlllese" In\ 405
11mm on paper The Dark Zeitgeist
2111/11 x Ib9/Ib (5| \421
"Der dunhele Zeingeist“
Im. lift-WI)
Pent-11. pen. 11111 11111111 un pnpw
4 I/¥xfi9/|6llll$\ Ifwfil
HEINRICN HERMANN MEaEs lnv. 40h (Cclu

Treasure Make Peace after Loyalty (Bach 2) Hook 0] Msdom Chapter 9 and 10/139111 of
“521111122 schaffe Frieden naclr Treu" 1an1111}; Heft] Daniel Chapter 7
I’tncll. prn. 11ml brmh. m 21 art-nu InleL'l 11111111- hum "Welsheil Cap 911 10/ Daniel Cup 7"
cardboard and pal-1m
p-
‘ l/2xb l/X U‘lx lb ))
43/8141/21I1x114t
Inv KKU
[111.4121e11n
 Pencil an pnper
84 God Abandon:Gods
p smxulh |x 101
"Fulgi Coll verlusl=cmler" Inv 15971.5
PcnciL pen. inil lirrnlr Lm prrper
11 713 x 4 15/111 (2211 x 1251 Bomber, I915
Inv. m reeio "thhrenzer"
I’cnc1lnnd oolnrod peneil nn drilvllng piper
TheAnarchie Snakes: he Scales ofilie Asylum 7 li/lex ll 7/101193 x 29)
"Der geselzlnse Schlangenzlrrenhausschuppen" lnv I72
Peneil. pen. and hnnh in paper
R l/2t47/I6NBA ll 21 Cosmic Axis with Hare (ll), before 1919
Inv. 417 rccm "Welmchse mit llase" (ll)
Pcmil and walcrculur on watercolor hunt-d. mmlmed nn
Samuel Help! (Cain and Abel in the Wolf: clupbuixrd
Glen in "Der Freischiitz") 8 lllhx IU S/Ih (ZUSx 211,11
"Samuel lull!" (Kuin und Abel in der luv, I74
Wolfsschluclit des Freisclliitzl
Napoleon. Antipope, the invisible Enemy of
Prnerl, pen and hru<h on paper
4 7/Kh61/8112 K 1155]
God in the Clouds, 1917
ln\‘ “9 "Napoleon, Anilpupst, der unsichtbare Feind
Gone: in den Wolken"
PETER M[YER (Moos) Perri-ll ind witlcn'ulnr on drawxng paper, vermin-ii 1.an
mourned on pro; cardboard
illuminated liturgical manuscript l0 Slihx ll lllfileJ x 204!
.
Body cnlnr, pisrel. puncl and pen on paper mounted nn luv. I75
enrilhoerd, arwn
12111 x 7 5/161“ x
The Miraculous Shepherd (ll), before 1919
I83)
Im I) 111411 119931 "Wunder-Hirihe" (111
l’cncll and \ulcrcclur an watercolor hoard, varnished, :tiid
The Adoration, 1920 mllunmd on guy tardbnelid
“DieAnhetnng" 9 5/8x7 ll/lbl245x |93l
Pen and Imdv Cull)! an o iipvr mounted in cardboard Im' I76
12 ll/Illxx 5116132 3 xlll
Mich's Head (Transparency)*
lnv. 10-"!
"Hexenhopf' (Tmnspurenibild)
The Holy Sepulchre (Field), at 1919 Pencil, walemalur, and pen 111-1 Vailflshk‘d card
“Das lil, Grub'(Pieli‘1l" 101/1511; |l2l25 9x 34 21
Inv. 184
Pencil, pen, and bad} enlor rm pnpor
ll Ij/Ili XX l/4 (32 5 x 209) “Schiessbock” (Breech), 1915
Inv lUJf Penerl ind Coluwtl penerl on drawing paper
9 Ij/lé ‘( 15 ll/lsl20.9x 3181
JAKOB Moan lnv It‘lib

Proofs, c. 1910* CLEMENS voN OERTZEN (VIKTOR 011m)

”Beweilze"
Pencil and pen on urine piper Untitled. 1900-19
ISXK 5/]6l33x2ll when on drawing paper
Iliv. 627/11 IQRfll mcln HIS/I611”) $116122} x262)
lnr 7413 NCIO
Aucusr NArneREn (N ETER)
Pharaoh, 1900-19
Witch (trial sketch), before 1919 "Phnrno"
"Hexe" (Prubeshizzel Pencil and watercolor on drawing paper
paper. penal down
pencil on \vrlllng BIS/16 it ll) [/11 (22 K )1 25,7)
‘1H/lbx61/2ll99 r in 51 lnv. 74111 ietlu
Inv. 151
Unritlerl, 190049
shin Metamorphoses (Eighl variations) Pencil ind enloreil penerl on drawing piper

"Rockverwandlungnn" (achl Vonnlionen) 8 lS/lbx IO |ll6122 3 x 25(1)

Pcnctl on pnper Inv. 74|c recto
l\ 3/8x41l6 I HM
Untitled, 190049"
‘(

lnv ISS
Pencil and wz|ercolur nn drirwinp paper
Skirt Metamorphoses (Eight variations) 10 Mon 8 [3115125 to x 22.31
"Rocltvervl/undlungen" (achl inv 74h: rccln
Vanulionzn)
 Untilled, 1900-19 Colin: Zeppelin
l’cnnl and \«ulcrx‘ulor on doping piper "Cmf Zeppelin"
Ill Mix 8 11/1!» (25.71 12.3) Pencil on writing popor
[mi 741110114) 12 7/11r 1117/111112 1H 11.111
1!“ 17 reclu
Untitled, 1900-19
Pencil rind nrnerrolor on Alriming poper Dance
1()|/|6\21|§/1612§,6x 1 I‘cmll iml nororoolor on flimsy
Inv 741pri~cio 73/1“! 101/211112x11171
1m 22
Untitled, 1900-19
penal pod nonreolor on rirowrnp papa 61am Prince 1mzonln
101/16 x21 13/16125,6x 2221 "Der Riesenfiirsl lrnzonin"
lm 74111 (emu Pomil on on'rr-e paper
12 7/81116 ”11321114151
JOSEPH sonnerren (SELL) lnv 4351a
a
"Hyperodron-i” Untitled
Pom-.1 on drawing piper inrl pirehmom paper Porn-11 and werereolor on flimsy
(a 7/lfi x9 15/115116 4 r 25.3) 7 1/4 110 7/111197 x 37111
111v, 2167 lnv 4332c

Design7Cunal level, 1915 Unlilled

"En1wu11—Canal Niveau“ Pencil enrl rrererr-olor rm fllmsy
Mixed moon and collage 7 112 1110 5/11119111 211,21
151/16x61/21381 x1651 lnv. 45.1211
1m. 232-) Untitled
Fashion Design—"Canal" Level, 1916 Pencil and norercolnr on flimsy
111 11151174 x 2951
11 7/11 r
“Mode canal Niveao"
1111:4332e
Mixed mean and collage
1'3 3/1631 5 5/16 (311.5 \13.-1l The Houses of Correction in lhe Cr‘itlingen
In». 23 N Area, 1918, 1918
Design—"CNL" Level, 1916 "Die Conectirimhduser b. Gl'iltingen 1918"
Pencil and waltmulul on papcr
"Enlwurfi'CNL. Niveuii"
Mucd media on card 2111/11: )1 12 7/11 195 x 12,71
lnv. 4311.1
H 3/11: x 5 51111131111141
Inv. 2355
ST. (FEMALE)
Anon SCHUDEI. Untitled collage, c. 1890
Pom-n on marglns ol newspmpk‘r, prsred
Steep Path, 1907
7 3/811 41 15/151111 7 x1065)
”Steiler Pfud"
1111/, 1413
Ponerl, slumped. on drawing paper
7 13/lt1 x 511/16119,9x14,41 Unmled collage, o 1891’
1m: 11160 I’cncll. chalk, and hndy color on morphs pl paslcd
Toad Fond at Full Moon, 1907 newspaper
153/16x32 11213115r11251
"Krillenleich im Vullmonde" 11-11: 3416
Pcnul, dumpcd, on drawing paper
3 5/11 x8 5111114311 219) Untitled collage, c. 1891
lnv 1661 Hndy cnlnr on margins or newspopcr
17/16x 19 15/11) (.1 7x 1111 51
The Horses' Feeding Time, 1907-08
1m 5418
“Die Fiillerzeil der Pferde"
P611111 nn zllawlng pnper BARBARA SucKFlzLL
113/3 x 10 5/11 121.9 x 271
[m 1662 Untitled, 1910
pencil and pen on omee paper
KARL GUSTAV SIEVERS 13 r 10 9/111 13% x 42)
lnv. 1956 verso
Untitled (Bildergeschichte), before 1918
sirip earinorr Untitled. 1910
Pencil on omro paper Pencil and pen on office paper
111/4 x15 5/11) (211.6 x 58.81 13 x16 9/10 1311 421
irrr s 11w, 1957 rocio
86 UntitledV 1910’ “Demagogos”
Penal and pen on "mu papur PcncI] ondrawmg paper
13 x 11, 9/16 (11 x 421 7 S/léx IU S/Ié (18.5 x218}
lnv I958 rL-CIu luv 24;]

Untitled, 1910 Norwegian Shadow

Pins m paper
"Norwegischcr Schauen"
1;x 15 9/11: (33 x 421 I’cncIl on paper
lnv. 1951 7 S/lfix 10 3/16 (18.5 x23 8}
lnv Z43b
OSKAR FILIIDINANII HEINRICH VoLI
Power Idea wa
Drawing beak “Machlideenblick”
Pencil Pcncxl on drawIng paper
8 l/lbx HI V16 (205 x251] 7 I“). H) 1/2 1134 x Zéfi)
Inv. SIS luv. 2457

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