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

Article:

Artists mythologies and media genius, madness and art history, in: Screen XXI/3, 1980, pp. 57–96

Crucial questions have not been posed about how art history works to exclude from its fields of discourse history, class, ideology, to produce an ideological, 'pure' space for something called 'art', p57

This article is prim- arily an account of the dominance of the ideologies of art history across a wide and extended field of cultural discourse, sites of cultural consumption and areas of cultural practice. p58
I shall concentrate on the central constructions of art and the artist produced by art history and secured by its hegemonic role throughout this network. The prime area of attention is the figure of the artist. p58
This core, against which all attempts to investigate modes and systems of representation and historical conditions of production (ie a social history of art) break, is signified by the most typical discursive forms of art historical research and writing - the mono- graph (a study of the artist's life and work), and the catalogue raisonne (the collection of the complete oeuvre of the artist whose coherence as an individual creator is produced by assembling all of his or (rarely) her work in an expressive totality) p58
But there is more to this than collecting diverse fragments in order to unite them by a designated author, a category problematised and analys- ed by Foucault... p58

The subject constructed from the art work is then posited as the exclusive source of meaning — ie, of 'art', and the effect of this is to remove 'art' from historical or textual analysis by representing it solely as the 'expression' of the creative personality of the artist. p58-59
The construction of an artistic subject for art is accomplished through current discursive structures - the biogra- phic, which focuses exclusively on the individual, and the narrative, which produces coherent, linear, causal sequences through which an artistic subject is realised. p59
The material for my argument comes from a detailed case-study of a nineteenth century Dutch painter, Vincent Van Gogh... p59
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 VG is the well-known and popular artist. No other Western European painter is so universally familiar. More reproductions are sold of his work than any other artist of any country, school or period. Exhibitions of his work draw large crowds throughout the world from New York to Korea. He is the subject of innumerable books, films (like Lust for Life (1956)), novels, television documentaries and so on. A large museum is now dedicated to VG — the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh in Amster- dam - and displays a permanent exhibition of his paintings and drawings while also selling books, postcards, calendars, slides and other memorabila to tourists from all over the world. VG repro- ductions adorn school corridors and dentists' waiting rooms. An exhibition in 1979 at a museum in Groningen in the Netherlands documented a movement in the 1940s and 1950s for the improve- ment and modernisation of taste and decoration in working class homes. Reproductions of VG's paintings were conspicuous on the
walls of these model homes. p59
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highlight how important VG is, and how much has been written / said about him. ADD IN.

Closer reading of the variety of texts through which this figure 'Van Gogh' is constructed produces a more complex signification. Around his life and work what appears to be a particular form of discourse has developed - a special way of discussing the artist and his works which is presented as if it were only a response to, a reflection of, his exceptional special individuality, his genius. p60

Van Gogh, easier and well known than most photographers, accessible to more people, all the choices and everything, impossible to know. This is why i chose him.

Include Johari window example more in the problems facing this chapter.

Fritz Novotny, published a study on 'The Popularity of Van Gogh'4 in which he attempted to refute the idea that Van Gogh's renown was falsely based on a fascination with his unhappy life. Novotny's article opens by quoting a 1947 radio broadcast in which it was argued that VG's popularity was spurious. It resulted from the over-exploitation of the human interest of his biography, the dramatic events of his life, Ms suicide, 'sentimental factors' and 'curiosity about his abnormali- ties'. p60-61

Novotny constructs from the careful analysis of VG's paintings and drawings an artistic subject, the personality of the painter. The distinction I perceive between Novotny and those he is criticising is one between the subjectivity of an individual express- ing itself in painting and the subjectivity of a painter revealed through the paintings. The distinction may seem slight but the emphasis is crucial.because what is at issue is the notion of an unhappy man who paints and, on the other hand, an artist into whose 'artistness' all other facets and circumstances of his living are subsumed. Novotny wrote in order to challenge the tendency to mistake Van Gogh's personal biography for an artistic biography. And it is the production of that exclusively artistic subject that is the main project of art historical practice. p62

The multi- plicity of readings of VG's paintings from different class and cultural positions are subsumed into a notion of his' accessibility sustained by the construction of art as a visual experience of a self exposed in paint on canvas. p64
If VG is produced as the paradigm of the artist, that place is supported by the assimilation of VG to another historical repre- sentation, the correspondence of 'madness' and 'art' - the myth of the mad genius. All aspects of VG's life story and the stylistic features of the work culminating in VG's self-multilation and suicide has provided material to be reworked into a complex but familiar image of the madness of the artist - 'sensitive, tormented, yet incredibly brilliant* as an advertisement for a limited edition of gold medals struck with reproductions of VG's most famous paintings in a Sunday Times Colour Supplement aptly restated it. p64

The question presents itself: Why do we need VG as mad genius? p65
Some have argued that the madness attri- buted to the artist is a means of displacing the threat of rupture of discourse produced by artistic practices. I find this suspiciously romantic: it is already part of the myth of mad genius. For the present I want to suggest that the discourse on madness and art operates to sever art and artist from history and to render both unavailable to those without the specialised knowledge of its processes which art history claims for itself. p65

In so far as we intended to provide an historical study of paintings and drawings in the form of a pictorial essay, a special distinction was drawn for our book by the publishers between 'the man' and his 'art*. But his familiar identity as the mad genius was placed as a kind of frame within which our alternative approach could be situated and contained. p68

II    Van Gogh and the Pathological Syndrome On July 29 1890 a Dutch painter named Vincent Van Gogh died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. This event has determined the constructions of the artistic subject 'Van Gogh'. It is both the climax to and necessary closure of the narratives from which VG is produced. The suicide is taken to be an artificially significant event in terms of the artist who was both its agent and of whom it provides the explanation. p69

So in the case of VG, unspecified illness becomes doubly secured as artistic madness. It is treated not only as a facet of his artistness but a confirmation of it. p70

A substantial area of the VG literature addresses VG from a. psychiatric 'perspective' - what Hammacher labelled the 'patho- logical syndrome'. p70
There are two main ten- dencies in the literature on the pathological syndrome. The first is an attempt to diagnose VG's mental illness by conflating periodic fits with his uninterrupted activity as a painter to secure the image of the mad genius, and the second reveals a desire to cor- relate the interpretation of his art with a specific psychosis. p70
v important!!!
 Jaspers deduced that VG was schizophrenic. His diagnosis was based in part on the limited number of paintings he had seen but predominantly on translations of VG's letters. In order to confirm his diagnosis Jaspers called for the preparation of a comprehensive catalogue raisonne" of the paintings and drawings of VG. He would then have a sound chronological framework which would enable him to chart the development of the psychosis. p70

Jaspers links sickness with increased productivity, liberation, and imagination. Psychosis is connected with a particular kind of creativity - creativity perceived as a departure from the adult conscious norm, from civilised restraint, into the liberation of the unconscious - paralleling the child/ the dream, the myth. It is both asocial and primitive. p71
v important! 

Teleological inevitabil- ity marks Minkowska's readings and so in the search for evidence to support her diagnosis she looked to the pattern of his work, concluding thus her discussion of what she took to be his last painting:
Without doubt, in this his final work, the artist had given striking symbolic expression to opposing, inner forces. In our own prosaic manner we can say that these two movements, one of elevation and one of fall, form the structural basis of the epileptic manifes- tations, just as the two polarities form the base of the epileptoid condition.* p72

Such texts can both be criticised for the inadequacy and lack of rigour in diagnoses as well as for the invocation of mythic notions about the artist. But what is most striking and relevant for my purposes is the correspondence between the psychiatric analysis of an artist and the typical modes of art history. The premises may differ but the effects are not dissimilar - a chronological and in some cases teleological approach, the reading of paintings for the signs of the artist, the production of the artistic subject from the traces of his work, the unification of all experiences and products of an historical individual. Van Gogh, as the seamless unity of the artist. p73

Such arguments and alternative readings, however, are not
sufficient to refute the construction of Van Gogh as mad artist, precisely because the base of that construction is neither clinical pathology nor readings of historical evidence. The pathological syndrome is both a support for and arises within the dominant narrative and psychobiographical structures of the literature we call art history. p76

remembr to reread bits such as ways of seeing.

 In the majority of studies of VG general discussion of his crises of fits is subsumed into an exclusive concentration on the two most dramatic incidents, posed as revealing self-mutilations. In one, a small section of an ear lobe (not the whole ear) was sliced at the height of a crisis in December 1888. The other is the quiet and determined suicide which has been constructed from the act of shooting himself in the stomach in July 1890. p76
 
 Conclusion p96
That art history can be analysed as a practice of 'interpretative criticism', a hegemonic practice, the site of the production of bourgeois ideas about art and artist, p96






Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk