POST 6

Mental Disease and Repetition

I went to the library and got loads of books out this week. I found a few on Art and Mental Disease which have interested me looking through the paintings and drawings...

Book - Outsiders, an art without precedent or tradition - Arts Council of Great Britain 1979

Oswald Tschirtner - A soldier in World War II on the Russian front, later a prisoner in France. When he reached home in 1946 he was found to be schizophrenic, and has been hospitalised ever since. He draws only at his doctor's instigation, in a radically schematic style with elongated figures and expressive repetitions.

I have noticed this common occurrence in this art that repetition is a key process. I want to explore this further in my work to try and create tension with repetition, maybe used more in my video than in my stills interpretations.

Book - Artistic Self-Expression in Mental Disease, J.H.Plokker.

'The drawings in which we cannot really speak at all of designing will be described as scribbles. They occur both in acute schizophrenic conditions of agitation and in cases which have become chronic, which create an impression of being dead. In the first case, we are often stuck by the great tension under which the work has been carried out.'

I like this idea of showing the aggression and tension in art. I could maybe use this idea of scribbling aggressively and frantically in my video along with other elements, to represent how these feelings are put onto paper.

'It often occurs that a patient will draw long rows of heads or other figures on one sheet, these showing little if any variations. Or they will reproduce the same small scene in an identical manner several times in juxtaposition, they suddenly introducing a small variation by adding or omitting an element, then returning again to the old stereotyped pattern.'

I also like this overlapping of images almost in a double exposure idea with paint. I could use this idea also in my video by overlapping other images or text to create a deeper effect on the viewer. Cramming more information quicker to make the mind work faster and build up tension.