Madness, in the margins of liberation and censorship (2007)

Sabine Hillen

Some people are just transferring information from one container into another, and call this writing (Kenneth Goldschmith). This quotation prompts a very obvious and simple question: how can the transfer of containers be avoided today? How can we, in writing or in art go beyond the reproduction of existing features?

What initiated Marjolijn Dijkman and me to work together, was the belief that people express themselves, not in order to communicate, but because they are afraid of silence. We will give a brief presentation of various modes of language in the city and focus on the meaning of tattoos, on the traces of slogans and on contemporary forms of urban poetry.
Every expression is an attempt to overcome silence and emptiness. We unfold speech and practice writing as a reaction against the fear of the void. If an observer can discover the place of emptiness - in space, in a way of organizing streets or roads, in the design of a page or in the cut of cloths - he comes closer to understand how expression reacts to emptiness. Reflection starts mainly at the border of a center; in the margin of a filled sheet of paper. At the sideline of a spectacle invading the stage. Something is shown, is already there, existing and waiting for an answer.
Observers act at blank sidelines. They are not necessarily “acting” in networks. For them, social space is not a room where chattiness needs stimulation. The observing look is a distance in front of the action of others, probably a withdrawal from everyday exchange. How can a text or an action, in the end, become social? Social encounters are not only a matter of speech. They imply, in a literal sense, crossing borders and removing obstacles. The crossing of borders is usually called transgression. This transgression is usually considered a violent, critical outburst, a political engagement or the irruption of something new. I believe it can also be understood in a spatial context. The more fertile reflection at the sideline, the more space in the margin becomes filled up. Eventually, words, letters and drawings extend beyond the border of the paper, on a new page, a plastic table, a beer mat, whatever… When writing borders are crossed, when ideas start floating, writing comes close to a stream of consciousness, an automatic process without revision. Others would call these stumbling ideas, mostly incomprehensible to others, madness. So: do we have to curb this irruption of our private language in order to be social? Does madness require censorship or liberation?

To expose content, letters are an exemplary substance. You can apply them in several alphabets, paint them in as many layers as possible. On a skin, red bricks, a pavement or a screen. You can sew or write them as real images searching for a form. You can even choose their sizes or play with colors, spaces and effects. From a strictly spatial perspective, inscriptions need voids to surround them. They emerge when emptiness needs to be chased away. The setting of emptiness is consequently anterior to the disposal of language. It can fulfill many forms.

First form. Emptiness can be related to images of the outside world that go beyond the frontiers of domesticated territories. Is empty, in that case, what is dangerously unknown, the horizon of the sea, natural areas to discover, the forest with animals.

Second form. Emptiness is a space at the margin of a full center; the center is the place of authority, reason and public speech. The margin, in a particular way, is filled with repressed discourse, exceptions to the main rule, with voices remaining silent, without representation.

Third form. Emptiness is a space in the center. If this is so, expression can try to be a negation of this void and therefore create an illusion of richness, fullness and beauty. Or, expression can be the unmasking of this void.

Our intention is to show how the discovery of emptiness can trigger, in some situations, an abreaction. This abreaction shares only one value with madness: urgency. Its expression can hardly confine itself to intended or long term behavior. It comes close to what is unexpected, disturbing or surprising. It is related to an impossible action, an impossible language or an impossible name. In short, the liberation of madness seems to start with being angry at the world, and angry with oneself. It is about the refusal to accept human condition as it is, and about the disappointment with those who are satisfied with illusions, or start off from illusions to produce art, science and city landscapes.
The one who liberates madness is marginal. He cannot only see emptiness, he also chooses to live and survive in it. In his own modest way, he conquers the void every day for the sake of beauty. To the one who liberates madness, reality is devaluated because it is committed to sovereignty and constraints that legalize family life, the laws of mafia or street gangs. Territories are created everywhere, in different ways, even if we live in times of deterritorialisation, internationalization, dislocation and communication. In times of trouble and in times of doubt. The ones who choose void spaces are located at the border of something that is already there, on the frontier of what’s full at one side, empty on the other. How do drawings, images and letters act in these zones? What do they create? A territory, a displacement or a camouflage?

I.
Let’s hold on a moment to the first form we outlined some minutes ago. Is empty what is dangerously unknown, the horizon of the sea, the areas to discover, what extends beyond the domesticated world. If travelers during their trip are threatened by the surrounding, they often think that by carrying signs of their identity with them, the unknown will be less fearful.
Turtles have the advantage of carrying their homes wherever they go. Tattoos offer the same advantage. Originally they gave to explorers the home they were missing. Even if some aristocrats loved being tattooed, most inscriptions were linked to specific spaces: the ship leaving for the colonies, the army traveling in deserts or mountains, murderers and thieves being kept in a long-term detention.

Often the inscriptions on the skin exorcised the difficult living conditions of the travels, the fights, the crimes and the incarceration. The inscriptions mentioned the names of one or more lovers, the quarter the owners grew up in as a child, the ship they belonged too. Even linguistic commonplaces were used and they appeared on arms, legs or backs:
The study of Alexandre Lacassagne, which was achieved in the south of France in 1881, mentions very frequent expressions pour la vie (I will remember it as long as I live), enfant du malheur (for children born of wedlock).
The words were often rendered in dialect, sometimes with spelling and grammar mistakes; tattooing was illegal before the invention of O’Reilly’s tattoo-needle.The tattooed inscription was not only the autobiographical reminder of a land, city or state, it was also a form of primitive writing borrowed from animistic beliefs. According to this cultural context, writing equaled believing in the power of the word and the image. This belief was also shared by psychiatric patients, who tell us, as stated in the study of Lacassagne, that they believed in the ability of tattooed inscriptions to make things become present.
Edouard V. from Marseilles had a cross and some biblical scenes tattooed on his chest and back. Before leaving for the battlefield and being unable to go to a church, he opened his shirt and prayed. For Jean R., born in 1828, in the region of Bouches-du-Rhône, the tattooed drawings on his both arms came to live shortly after being applied. He was convinced the inscriptions gave him access to a new world and erotic power over his mistress. His body showed on the right arm 1) two birds holding together a crown, 2) two intertwined hearts, 3) the portrait of Napoleon; on his left arm 1) a man giving the arm to a woman 2) a cupid with arrow 3) the tools of tanning, his profession.
In the studies of Lacassagne and Prinzhorn madness is still confined to restricted areas. In the Heidelberg clinic and the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic in Bern, illness is not liberated. It is still regarded as a physical and moral deviation, a danger, a violent attitude that needs correction and censorship. Prinzhorn is in this context a transitory figure. In his Artistry of the Mentally Ill he stated that patients often cover whole sheets edge-to-edge with scribbles; as if fear gave the drawer no rest until every empty place was filled up .

The liberation of madness starts in Zurich at the early twenties of past century and continued until the sixties. Through the letters of Artaud and the pictures of Aloïse Corbaz who had been cured for a long time. Finally she cured herself by ceasing to fight against her illness and undertaking to cultivate it, marvel at it and turn it into a reason for living. The process of liberation was therefore a therapy that did not repress the realm of incoherence, delusion and hallucination, but integrated in society. Instead of curing mental illness, one tried to stimulate patients to act in society. As an example one can think of the experiments in Guislain hospital of Ghent, the San Giacomo Hospital in Verona, the state colony in Geel that enabled patients to live near the asylum. Mental patients are no longer treated as victims of degeneration or illness. They obtain the role of mindreaders, visionary subjects able to see what is only revealed at second sight. What Steven De Batselier will call the “psychopathological syndrome of normal society”, is based on an idea first formulated by surrealism in 1924: “We who love [madness] understand that the insane refuse to be cured. We know well that it is we who are locked up when the asylum door is shut: the prison is outside the asylum, liberty is to be found inside” (Paul Eluard). Some decades later De Batselier would not hesitate to see the insane as models of visionary state of being. According to him, their behavior is immune to organized forms of power, indifferent to appearances and sex stereotyping. Like artists they still can approach reality with astonishment. Normal society, on the other hand, has to cope with isolation, submission and repressed forms of emotion.

II.
Besides this romantic interpretation of mental illness, the surrealist view remains interesting from a strictly spatial perspective. If the void was a space located in the margin of a center, this center was, at the end of the 19e and the beginning of the 20e centuries, the place of authority, reason and public speech. Abreactions came into being in the margin as exceptions to the main rules or as a form of rebellion. From the twenties until the sixties, some language shifts appear. What was located at the border, often in a space considered empty, closed or unknown, invades the center.
The pictures of Marjolijn show how the spatial setting of slogans reacts to symbolic speech of parties, undermining electoral promises. These slogans are applied without bombing or lettering, only with plaster or whitewash in the neighborhood of posters or during demonstrations. In the eighties slogans disappeared to be transformed into tags with the name of individuals or street gangs. The newspapers of Sao Paulo mention how a certain boy named “Juneca” was the first to have the idea of marking his name with piche on the walls of ugly city buildings. Next morning the whole street was full names of children who followed his example.
The technique of pichaçao involves small fines or imprisonment for 24 hours. That’s why the name and language used in the tag has to remain secret or unreadable. In some situations, the material is applied from the outside windowsill. Taggers can form human ladders until four people high, the youngest and lightest on top. The young age of the writer explains also why the inscription is sometimes badly made, incomprehensible, full of errors and spelling mistakes.
Even today Sao Paolo is still growing. It remains one of the ugliest cities of the world, a desert for the poor, without funding or finances for its colonial architecture. Pichaçao exists on the surface of contested wealth. It is an abreaction that keeps on punishing the fortunate until they produce a world less “punishing” to begin with .

III.
Today many of us believe art has to have political implications. But what can we do when the space of believing is empty? Mircea Cantor made in 2003 a twenty-two minute video called “The landscape is changing”: “The camera tracks a group of protesters moving through the streets of Tirana, Albania. The dozen or so young men and women are shown marching down sidewalks (…) sometimes with police escort. Otherwise an orderly demonstration (…) the participants hold mirrored posters overhead, inexplicably. Their surfaces appear abstract, merely reflecting back the urban environment, curiously articulating no apparent demands. The signs in fact undermine the language of protest (…) and replace it with ambiguity (…). The landscape is changing indeed.” (T.J. Demos)
Changing in what way? The void has found its place in the center. It is hidden in an excess of language that erases all language, stuck in an amount of data that only have the appearance of language. In this chaos, what is full and what is empty, what is central and what is marginal seem to withdraw from stable positions. Canteor shows us not only an absence of language, but also moving blank spaces, built with mirrors. These mirrors tend in the first place to reproduce images of the city instead of making new ones and therefore generate entropic tendencies.
So what is this void if it presents itself as the absence of language? Maybe Canteor wants to say that meaninglessness of language is the ultimate key? Probably things aren’t as simple, especially not when others seem to work towards achieving an identical goal.
The works of Eric Van Hove and Marjolijn Dijkman like to operate in silence. The installations they produce or the archives they collect reveal the trace of an anonymous subject, struck by impossible action or impossible language. Subjectivity appears only in the obsessive attention for details; in the gesture of handwriting or a bodily movement. Although the exhibition of the subject is limited, their production wants to free itself from reproduction. But most of all it shows how language fails establishing contact with the other.
What are all political slogans of the sixties about? Who put them there in first place? Why did Leuven had to be a Flemish? And how strange was it to create two libraries divided by language? Confronted to the excess, Marjolijn is sharpening her curiosity and can only focus on incomprehensible speech-acts of others, left on walls, windows, restroom doors or seats in busses.
In Leuven Eric refuses to use English, the language of globalization. To him performing, means being concentrated, speechless, in a curved position during hours. He writes his state of mind in French on the streets, while people step by or react. He describes his performance as an abreaction – an exteriorization of emotional tension -, a stream of consciousness that disturbs what is organized. In the end, Erics French comes close to the blank mirror spaces of Canteor. Shoppers and students walk by and don’t understand what it is all about.
So what can we do if writing on an empty space, to chase fear, only ends in creating a new incomprehensible void? In all these cases, these experiments do not mention the name of an author. The installations and platforms are an invitation to the passengers. They can walk by or react. So in the end this project is maybe more about liberation than about madness.

Probably tattoos and tags enter nowadays in a cultural institutionalized context. Video culture on MTV uses them to create models, images to imitate. They belong to normative dress code of rap and rock scene. Because of this institutionalization and normative distribution they are not equal to artistic experiment. On the other hand, we do not pretend that taking place in the margin is still possible today. Nor do we pretend that idealizing madness or taking place in a subculture is enough to make interesting works. The gentle side of madness – its unpredictable character - becomes a goal we can aim to. And yet, being unpredictable is not equal to create fiction. When the ones who want to make illusions tend only to be scientist or technicians, the danger exists they privilege reproduction to production.

So here we seem to rediscover our initial question: how can the transfer of containers avoid reproduction?