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Zdravka Mihaylova

for GRReporter

Last year in one of the largest hospitals in Athens, ‘Sotiria’ was implemented the project "The hospital as a place of memory and pain" the goal of which was to revive hospitals through art. The four-year Urban Dig Project (Excavating cultural phantoms in the modern city) of the performing arts company Όχι παίζουμε is still running. The project focuses on excavations of urban landscape and cultural history of the contemporary city. Within its scope for a second year in a row the music and theatre play ‘Moskov Selim’ is performed, based on the last story of the famous Greek writer G. Vizyinos almost unknown in Bulgarian translation. Its stage is a desolate orchestra hall in Ωδείο Αθηνών – the Athens Conservatory where the author had taught the last two years before his confinement to the mental institution of Dromokaition in Daphne, where he died in 1896. The performances comprise of theatre of movement, music, dance, installations, and afterwards specially invited guest artists tell the audience about their work aiming to unveil the secrets and cultural phantoms in the urban environment.  

Full of pain are the eighty graphics by the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch arranged in the private museum Iraklidon within the ‘Beyond the Cry’ exhibit until February 27. It does not show the famous painting ‘The Scream’ by the Norwegian bohemian, visiting cafes where absinthe is served as aperitif before morphine. Munch possess the unique capability to diagnose - in the words of the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka – the hysterical fear behind what is called social progress. The painter of pain and death experienced the horror of personal loss yet in his infancy and was able to transform it into artistic inspiration. The idea to show his graphics in Iraklidon was conceived in 2007, when an exhibition of Toulouse Lautrec was arranged at the same museum. Although they lived at the same time, Lautrec turned to joy of life and revelries. But Munch, who had suffered a nervous breakdown, shows the darker side of life and some of his paintings bear indicative titles - "The Sick Child", "Melancholy," "Anxiety", "Vampire".  

A painting that one could not help confuse with Munch’s ‘The Scream’, however, is to be seen in the groundbreaking document exhibition titled "Cause of death: euthanasia" (21/1 to 13/3) arranged in the Benaki Museum (138 Piraeus Avenue). The exhibition was opened recently in partnership with the Hellenic Psychiatric Association. It presents 96 works from the Prinzhorn collection, painted by 18 artists with mental diseases who became victims of the Nazis' inhumane program for "treatment" by euthanasia in the period 1939-1944.  

In Nazi Germany modern art was dubbed as degenerate art and was banned as it did not correspond to ancient Greek and Roman aesthetic patterns. Significant works of art were destroyed, and artists like Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Ernst Kirchner, Paul Klee were banished from the country. The art by those in mental institutions was also deemed degenerate. If today the works of such individuals are encouraged as a way of expression and socialization, in Nazi Germany they were a “free ticket” for their creators to the gas chambers.  

In the autumn of 1939, early in the World War II, the commission of the Third Reich for scientific record of serious hereditary and related diseases was established. It was decided to use the method of euthanasia for "treatment" of people with different defects and of mental patients. The program was called Action Τ4. It was headed by the doctors Karl Brandt and Philip Buhler, and Hitler was convinced that it would contribute to the "racial integrity of the German people." Mass executions of patients in mental institutions and asylums, also known as "Operation euthanasia", wrote a black page in the history of Germany and its victims were not only Jews.

A symposium on Art and Mental Disorders opened the exhibition in Benaki. Delivered talks ranged from destigmatizing the art of the mentally ill and isolated in asylums to an analysis of the "degenerate art" of modernism, banned by decree under Hitler (Nazi aesthetics goes hand in hand with academic naturalism as a canon of art, denying and punishing any kind of modernism in Germany – the cradle of expressionism and atonal music), the use of art as a propaganda tool of the Third Reich, the recognition of art brute as art which can be offered for sale, collections of such "marginalized" art in Europe, the link art-psychopathology, historical overview of art created by people confined in asylums for the mentally ill.

The curator of the Prinzhorn collection Thomas Röske commented on the impact of such collections on modernism and contemporary pictorial expression, as well as on artists "marginalized” by disease that are already included in it. The symposium ended with the theatre show "The wave of madness in the interwar period," Stelios Krasanakis’ dramatization of the “diary of isolation” of the sculptor Camille Claudel who was stage impersonated by the actress Lydia Fotopoulou.
 
Stelios Krasanakis, psychiatrist and drama therapist for GRReporter

QUESTION: The names of famous artists - Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dali - are associated with extreme mental conditions, sealed in their art. The staging you directed and its premiere which wrapped up the symposium is devoted to creativity and insanity and is theatrically based on Camille Claudel’s letters written while she was in a mental institution where she spent 30 years of her life until her death. Besides deeply moving the viewers, it makes them think over the artwork this eminent sculptor could have created if modern concepts of art created by people with mental disorders dominated in the interwar period. A narrator mentions at the end of the show that in 1968 a memorial plaque was placed on Claudel’s grave on which, beside hers, are written several German female names. In memory of who else is this plaque?

Stelios Krasanakis: There are many artists whose work is related or is the result of psychopathological conditions and reflects the emphatic force of madness and insanity. We should note that there are cases of creative psychotic disorders and other, catastrophic ones which destroy the creative ability. Camille Claudel belongs to the second category. The last known sculpture she has left dates back to 1905 and is a bust of her brother - the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel. We have no works by her ever since then and she spent the years from 1913 to 1943 in a mental institution where she had not scatched even a single drawing. As for the memorial plaque with the names, this is a creative invention especially for the show. It aims to highlight the biography parallel between Claudel and female artists whose works are shown in the Prinzhorn collection. In fact, such a plaque has never existed and this will be more clearly emphasized in the final version of the theatre event which will soon be performed on Athenian stage in March.

QUESTION: Apart from its diagnostic and therapeutic value the art of people with mental disorders helps to better understand the structure and nature of madness, how do such people percept society and the world at large, it facilitates the mapping of the subconscious. Could you make it clearer in what manner "could art be a way out of the impasse of the soul" as you say in another interview of yours?

Stelios Krasanakis: Mental disease means a mental impasse. Anything that helps expression and exteriorizing of mentality is an antidote to mental inactivity. The flexibility of our mentality, the ability to adapt to difficult internal and external situations, are signs of mental health. Creative expression serves in this direction but it does not necessarily mean that any expression of our creative capabilities is a work of art. When this happens, as with the mentally ill artists gathered in the Prinzhorn collection, it is an evidence not only for the talent but also for the mental power of the man who can distinguish light even in darkness, and life beyond the prospect of death.
 
Marios Vazeos, financier and director of the festival on the island of Naxos to GRReporter

QUESTION: The thematics of the summer festival on the island of Naxos in 2008 was the harbinger of the exhibit "Cause of death: euthanasia" at the Benaki Museum exploring the relationship between art and madness. The cultural organization ΑΙΩΝ in collaboration with the scientific society Psychology-Art’ organized within the festival then the unique exhibition titled Psychotopia, helping the audience to understand this interdependence through literary and theatrical texts, musical and film works, oeuvres of fine art. Obviously you, the organizers, have special sensitivity and sense of the human soul’s topography whether it comes to people with mental disorders or healthy ones and you acknowledge their art to be equivalent to that of "normal" people. Would you tell what was your concept for organizing these events?

Marios Vazeos: The exhibition ‘Psychotopia’ was only a part of an arts festival which presented the relationship between artistic creativity and madness and insanity whatever its source might be - even madness of love. Mental landscapes verge on the landscape of art and there is always osmosis, intertwining between artistic expression and deviations and curvings of the human soul.

QUESTION: Along with the symposium on Art and Madness that followed the opening of the exhibition of the Prinzhorn collection we saw the installation ‘The Book of Death Talks’ by the contemporary German painter and sculptor Klaus Pfeiffer, who lives and works on Naxos. What were his ‘works of madness’ shown during the festival on the island in 2008?

Marios Vazeos: We have long lasting collaboration with Klaus Pfeiffer. He is an artist we admire and value. He took part in the exhibition with the installation ‘The Ship of the Insane’ associated with the repulsive custom in the Middle Ages and in later times - before the creation of asylums for the mentally ill - people with mental disturbances to be boarded on a ship which was let sail unnavigated till the waves devoured it.

QUESTION: What will be the main subject and highlights of the events during this year's festival? It will be held in the medieval fortified tower that dates back to 1600, belonging to the Vazeos family ("Πύργος Βαζαίου"). Over the past ten years it has become an established venue on Naxos for meeting different cultures and original creative projects.

Marios Vazeos: The title of this year's program is ‘Less is More’, since it focuses on smaller but the authentic performances, musical works and literary presentations.

QUESTION: Have you collaborated within the festival activities with Bulgarian artists, or maybe some Greek artists were invited to cultural events in Bulgaria? For example, the two excellent singers Vuyukli sisters who participated in the festival on Naxos turned the opening of the branch of the Foundation for Greek Culture in Sofia in 2008 into an unforgettable experience, winning the admiration and applause of the audience with their "multicultural"  repertoire.

Marios Vazeos: Despite the respect we have for Bulgarian culture and its artists it has not yet happened to establish cooperation with artists and ensembles from Bulgaria, something that we hope will happen in the future. What especially delighted me was that the Bulgarian state has bought the home of the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in Vienna and the fact that now the cultural center of the Embassy of Bulgaria in Vienna is housed there - an act of saving a historic building in which the Vienna Philosophy Circle gathered in the 1930s.  
We are particularly satisfied that talented artists who participated in the Naxos festival have been to and are known in Bulgaria because the Vuyukli sisters are among the most talented and attention worthy "exportable" Greek musicians.