Journal of a Madman

I first heard of  Anthony Maddix's 'Journal of a Madman' (1995) when Emma showed me some of her research finding for what was to become Reconfiguring The Wall. A few months later I was able to see and handle one for myself when it was included in the exhibition, 'For Matthew and others, Journeys with Schizophrenia' at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery UNSW CoFA (Sydney) in late 2006.  I remember it as substantial: large in format, with rough wooden covers and the pages combining text and drawings. I find his work powerful, poetic, brutally honest and unsettling. His journals (and other works) meld text and image in a way I've still to understand.

Gareth Sion Jenkins writes in the catalog to this exhibition writes:

In his anthropological investigation of the unconscious Anthony Mannix has used creative expression as a compass; a compass of  'Brut' proportions leading to hybrid works, which bring into relation the figurative and the abstracted, the pictographic and textural. The nature of the unconscious as a tactile landscape is evidenced by the inventive materiality of Mannix's work, which incorporates such elements as canvas, wood, rice-aper, solder, resin, vanish, acrylic paint, felt pen, Chinese ink, gouache, found objects, muslin, leather and tea. (p101, catalog to the exhibition)

[Anthony Mannix:  
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/nightair/stories/s861423.htm]

Anthony, who suffers from schizophrenia has been an in-patient in Rozelle Hospital, formed when Callan Park and Broughton Hall amalgamated in 1976.

One of the fragments on the pieced side of the quilt references Anthony's work:

Reconfiguring the Wall (2006) detail

Silk dyed with plant material from the Callan Park site, hand embroidered with cotton thread

I find myself troubled by the categories of 'Art Brut' or, 'Outsider Art' which along with other such definitions I suspect of being used to marginalize the art of a specific group, in this case--that of the mentally ill. Perhaps its most positive characteristic is that it, the process of art-making sits outside of the commercial art world. Despite my disquiet about such a groping, however, I find myself drawn to these works again and again.

A chance encounter with a comment by Rex Butler on the: ...framework defined by romanticism (the cult of the original or authentic, the continued viability of an art based on a connection to nature, a universalist and organicist  conception of human knowledge)...Our fascination is not so much directly with these things as with this unconscious, child-like gaze of the other (my emphasis) helps me here. Although Butler is discussing Aboriginal art (and the art of Kathleen Petyarre in particular), it is his reference to the other that I find relevant and connects it to Emma's work on the redevelopment of the Callan Park site.

In the introduction to the catalog for the exhibition 'Art Brut' (also shown at the Ivan Duogherty, but in 1999), the curator, Lucienne Peiry explains:

"Art Brut brings together works of nonconformist beings--patients from psychiatric hospital, prisoners, mediums, elderly people, loners, eccentrics, outcasts--whose lives have been marked by an existentialist break, Art Brut authors seize the right to speak that they have been denied by launching into creation in tottal freedom, in a self-taught way."

Rex Butler, A Secret History of Australian Art (2002), 143

[Post completed July 29]