Psychiatric patient as an artist: forming the discourse of outsider art in the earlyXXth century

The author of the article studies the discourse of outsider art and refers to the beginning of its formation: the phenomenon of the art of the mentally ill, which is delineated and legitimized at the early twentieth century. Following the conceptual apparatus of Michel Foucault, the surfaces of emergence and the authorities of delimitation of the art of outsiders (in the early stage of the art of the mentally ill) are initially marginal in relation to the field of art. Instead of traditional instances of art -critics, museums, art critics - in the case of the art of outsiders, the discourse of outsider art was formed by psychiatrists, philosophers, and leftist artists. The transformation of the traditional way of legitimizing the phenomena of art was largely due to the change in the philosophy of culture and, on the one hand, the emergence of the idea of Dionysian values, irrational in culture, on the other, with the emergence of the concepts of the unconscious and the designation of its meaning in the context of personality and culture. The latter has made the field of psychiatry valuable, and psychiatrists new levels of differentiation in culture and art. But it is important to note the cardinal changes that took place in psychiatry in the period of the turn of the XIX-XX century. Including as a result of the activities of the German and Swiss schools, psychiatry becomes complex, multi-component scientific knowledge, was striving to study various aspects of the human psyche. On the other hand, in Germany and Switzerland interest in the art of the mentally ill was formed largely as a result of the active influence of expressionist painting, literature and aesthetics and other avant-garde tendencies; all this sets the stage for significant success in understanding and evaluating the art of psychiatric patients. It is also important that the actual process of legitimizing the art of the mentally ill in the texts of Walter Morgenhalter and Hans Prinzhorn had gone through the using by psychiatrists of the description's language and analysis's logic of the indicated phenomena inherent in the contemporary critical art theory.

Keywords

Authors

References