Representation in Self Portraiture This is a blog to keep track of my dissertation research and to help develop ideas in an organised manner.

 source video http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/van_gogh/10916.shtml blue peter
 'Dear Theo, it is said, and I strongly believe, that it is difficult to know yourself, but it is also difficult to paint yourself, working on two self-portraits as I have no-one else to paint'
YES USE THIS QUOTE


A Degenerate Work of Art: "A Portrait of Himself," by Van Gogh
author: Petronius Arbiter
1917

refers to the portrait dedication to Guaguin
completely slates the self-portrait
'Here we have a work of art which is so self evidently degenerate work by a degenerate artist that we need scarcely say anything about the inept artist!

Michel Foucault - History of Madness (some few mentions of Van Gogh highlighted below as direct passages)

Page 28
It is that tragic consciousness that is visible in the last words of Nietzsche and the
last visions of Van Gogh. It is that same element that Freud began to perceive at the
furthest point of his journey, the great wound that he tried to symbolise in the
mythological struggle between the libido and the death instinct. And it is that same
consciousness that finds expression in the work of Antonin Artaud. If the thinkers of
the twentieth century paid more attention, they would find in Artaud’s work one of the
most pertinent questions of the age, and whose clutches are the most difficult to
escape. Artaud never ceased to claim that Western culture lost its tragic focus the
moment it finally forgot what he termed the great solar madness of the world, the
violent ceremonies which enacted the life and death of ‘the great Fire Satan’.

It is only by examining such extreme discoveries that we can finally come to
understand that the experience of madness common since the sixteenth century
owes its particular face, and the origin of its meaning, to that absence, to that dark
night and all that fills it. The linearity that led rationalist thought to consider madness
as a form of mental illness must be reinterpreted in a vertical dimension. Only then
does it become apparent that each of its incarnations is a more complete, but more
perilous masking of tragic experience – an experience that it nonetheless failed to
obliterate. When constraints were at their most oppressive, an explosion was
necessary, and that is what we have seen since Nietzsche.

 Page 351
Half remaining in the shadows, this experience of unreason changes little from
Rameau’s Nephew up until Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. But for that
continuity to be demonstrated, it must be freed from the pathological connotations it
has been assigned. The return to immediacy in the late poetry of Hölderlin and the
consecration of the sensible in Nerval can offer nothing but an altered or superficial
meaning so long as we set out to understand them from a positivist conception of
madness. Their true meaning should be asked of the moment of unreason in which
they are placed. For it is from the centre of that experience of unreason which is the
concrete condition of their possibility that the two movements of poetic conversion
and psychological evolution are to be understood. They are not linked to each other
by a relation of cause and effect, and they proceed in what is neither a
complementary nor an inverse mode. Both rest on the same base, that of
submerged unreason; the experience of Rameau’s Nephew already demonstrated
all that it contains of the drunkenness of the sensible, the fascination with the
immediate, and the painful irony where the solitude of delirium originates. What is at
stake here is not the nature of madness, but the essence of unreason. If that
essence could go unnoticed, it was not simply that it is hidden, but that it loses itself
in all that might bring it out into the light. For – and this is perhaps one of the
fundamental traits of our culture – it is impossible to remain in a decisive and
indefinitely resolved fashion at the distance specific to unreason. For it must be
forgotten and abolished no sooner than it is measured, in the vertigo of the sensible
or the confinement of madness. Van Gogh and Nietzsche in different ways were
evidence of this. Fascinated by the delirium of the real, by its scintillating
appearance, and by time abolished and absolutely re-found in the justice of light,
ensnared by the immutable solidity of the most fragile of appearances, they thus
were rigorously excluded and trapped within suffering beyond all exchange, and
which figured, not only for others but for them as well, in their own truth, which had
once more become immediate certitude, madness itself. The moment of the
Ja-sagen, of the embrace of the lure of the sensible, was also the moment they
retreated into the shadows of insanity

 Page 352
But to us, those two moments are as distinct and distant as poetry and silence, day
and night, the accomplishments of language in its manifestation and its loss in the
infinity of delirium. For us, confronting unreason in all its redoubtable unity has
become impossible. The nineteenth century, in all its inflexible seriousness, rent the
indivisible domain designated by the irony of Rameau’s Nephew, and drew an
abstract frontier through that former unity, demarcating the realm of the pathological.
In the mid-eighteenth century that unity had been briefly illuminated by a bolt of
lightning, but it was more than half a century again before anyone dared revisit such
a region. After Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Raymond Roussel and
Artaud ventured there, with tragic consequences – i.e. to the point at which the
alienation of the experience of unreason pushed them into the abandonment of
madness. And each of those existences, each of the words that made up those
existences repeats with the insistence of time the same question, which probably
concerns the essence of the modern world: why is it not possible to remain in the
difference that is unreason? Why is it that unreason always has to separate from
itself, fascinated in the delirium of the sensible and trapped in the retreat that is
madness? How was it that it was deprived of language to such an extent? What is
this power that petrifies all those who dare look upon its face, condemning to
madness all those who have tried the test of Unreason?

Page 536
endless rebirth, in the discouragements of repetition and disease, of the truth of a
work of art.
Nietzsche’s madness, and the madness of Van Gogh or Artaud, belong to their
œuvre, perhaps no more or no less profoundly, but in a totally different way. The
frequency in the modern world of these œuvres that explode into madness no doubt
proves nothing about the reason of this world, the meaning of these œuvres, nor
even about the relationships that are made and unmade between the real world and
the artists who produce such œuvre. And yet that frequency must be taken seriously,
like the insistence of a question; since Hölderlin and Nerval, the number of writers,
painters and musicians who have ‘lapsed’ into madness has multiplied, and yet we
should not be deceived – between madness and œuvre there has been no
arrangement, no more constant exchange, and no communication between
languages. The confrontation now is far more perilous than before, and their
competition allows no quarter: their game is one of life and death. The madness of
Artaud does not slip into the interstices in his œuvre: it is precisely the absence of an
œuvre, the constantly repeated presence of that absence, the central void that is
experienced and measured in its never-ending dimensions. Nietzsche’s last cry, as
he proclaimed himself to be both Christ and Dionysus, is not at the limits of reason
and unreason, the vanishing point of their œuvre, their common dream, reached at
last and instantly evaporating, a reconciliation between ‘the shepherds of Arcady
and the fishermen of Tiberias’; but it is rather the destruction of the œuvre itself, the
point at which it becomes impossible, and where it must begin to silence itself: the
hammer falls from the philosopher’s hand. Van Gogh, who did not want to ‘ask the
doctors’ permission to paint’, knew very well that his œuvre and his madness were
incompatible.
Madness is an absolute rupture of the œuvre: it is the constitutive moment of an
abolition, which founds the truth of the œuvre in time; it delineates the outer limit, the
line of its collapse, its outline against the void. Artaud’s œuvre experiences in
madness its own absence, but the ordeal, and the eternally recommenced courage
of this ordeal, all those words hurled at a fundamental absence of language, that
whole space of physical suffering and terror that surrounds the void or rather
coincides with it, that is the œuvre itself – a cliff-face over the abyss of the œuvres
absence. Madness is no longer the space of indecision where the truth of the origin
of the œuvre threatened to transpire, but the decision from
Page 537
which it irrevocably ceases, forever suspended above history from that point
onwards. It matters little exactly what day in the autumn of 1888 Nietzsche went
definitively mad, and from which point his texts were suddenly more the concern of
psychiatry than of philosophy; all those texts, including the postcard to Strindberg,
belong to Nietzsche, and all are connected in a common parentage to The Birth of
Tragedy. But that continuity should not be thought of as being on the level of a
system, or a thematics or even an existence: Nietzsche’s madness, i.e. the collapse
of his thought, is the way in which that thought opens onto the modern world. It is
that which made it impossible that makes it present to us: we are offered it by all that
wrenched it from his grasp. That is not to say that madness is the only language
common to an œuvre and the modern world (we must be wary of the emotional
appeal of the accursed artist, or the inverse and symmetrical danger of
psychoanalysis); but it does mean that through madness, an œuvre that seems to
sink into the world and reveal there its non-sense, and to acquire these purely
pathological features, ultimately engages with the time of the world, mastering it and
taking the lead. By the madness that interrupts it, an œuvre opens a void, a moment
of silence, a question without an answer, opening an unhealable wound that the
world is forced to address. By it everything that is necessarily blasphemous in an
œuvre is reversed and, in the time of the œuvre that has slumped into madness, the
world is made aware of its guilt. Henceforth and through the mediation of madness,
it is the world that becomes guilty (for the first time in the history of the West) in
relation to the œuvre: it is now arraigned by the œuvre, constrained to speak its
language, and obliged to take part in a process of recognition and reparation, to find
an explanation for this unreason, and explain itself before it. The madness where an
œuvre plunges into a void is the space of our work, the infinite path to understanding
it at last, our confused vocation as apostles and interpreters. For that reason it
matters little when the voice of madness first whispered within Nietzsche’s pride or
Van Gogh’s humility. There is only madness as the last instant of the œuvre – for the
œuvre indefinitely repels madness to its outer limits. Where there is an œuvre, there
is no madness: and yet madness is contemporaneous with the œuvre, as it is the
harbinger of the time of its truth. The instant in which, together, madness and an
œuvre come into being and reach fulfilment is the beginning of the time when the
world first finds itself summoned by the œuvre, and is responsible for all that it is in
the face of it.
Page 538
That ruse is a new triumph for madness. The world believes that madness can be
measured, and justified by means of psychology, and yet it must justify itself when
confronted by madness, for its efforts and discussions have to measure up to the
excess of the œuvres of men like Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. And nothing
within itself, and above all nothing that it can know of madness, serves to show that
these œuvres of madness prove it right.

Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk