By Giuseppe Marasco
Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors
With work by Alice Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Tracey Emin, Anna Furse, Susan Hiller, Sarah Lucas and Francis Upritchard…
Ends 2 February 2014
Free association figures so largely as an influence of Freud’s on Modern artists… I wish I’d risk it in this article.
I had the luck of accompanying Tulip Saddiq, Labour Arts Councillor and Parliamentary Candidate for Camden, and curator Dawn Kemp on a special tour of the current exhibition at the Freud Museum. (Tulip is an impressively strong woman… who later in the day was to consult at the Somali centre).
Boasting the sort of background that is unthinkable in England’s politician’s, yet far more common to France, where a Minister, would be able to hold their own on a cultural arts Television program.
Tulip Saddiq keenly drew out on the nature of translation and the loss of contextual meaning in the writings of Freud. (Tulip Saddiq did her Masters at UCL Translating the Bangladeshi Poet and Nobel winner RabindranathTagore). A point which was discussed in relation to the translations of Freud into English from German and the meetings that Freud and Tagore had.
Being in such company I can’t be help think about the Media at large, and what it is we try to say and to whom, when we write. What images and performance do we create, how much control and ambiguity. Now with Selfies and Social Media adding their force. An intriguing part of the exhibition is about this itself… lines that can be draw in the history of Mental Health, treatments and notions of behaviour which were constructed by Male Doctors in line with the expectations of the day.
The first Mental Hospitals had lecture theaters, were patients were shown to the male students, and it is here where questions of performance and the appropriating of women’s bodies arise. Sometimes the female patients quite knowingly would play to the ‘audience’ that were going to see nervous women, relishing the attention. Later the surrealists would look to the the photographic documentation of the ‘poses’ that would exemplify Hysteria and other conditions, as an idealised pure vocabulary of expression. How the the history of art and our current notion need returning to with great subtlety. Whilst later in the exhibition Marilyn Monroe who visited Anna Freud for analysis, contributes as a meditation on the nature of Media on women, the ownership of ones own image, as well as the abstracted alienated self image and its demands of conforming and performing to the tropes of male desire.
The Exhibition is inspired by Lisa Appignanesi’s acclaimed book Book Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and Mind Doctors. and Freud’s women co-authored by John Forrester.
Funded by a first time boost from the arts council. This is the First of many historical exhibitions with contemporary art. Says Curator Dawn Kemp, on the continuing influence of Freud. All they [women] wanted was education says Kemp. Making a point that we are at least ‘Not having to go back to the artist group the’ gorilla girls.’ to exhibit women artists.
Three layers to these connections are put to us in this exhibition, there are those who where treated before the new field of psychoanalysis and those to later benefit from the new culture or have analysis and now the artists, who are house hold names, exhibiting in this show.
Draws in and draws the outline of a trajectory to the creative expression and freedoms manifest now in the art section of the exhibition.
This exhibition makes accessible to us the center of the constellations of lives, relationships and intellectual company (fellow journeymen) that shaped Freud’s intellectual outlook. It so happens that women where central to Freud’s life, and even once depended on it (Napoleons Niece, Princess Marie Bonaparte, was the confidant to whom Freud posed the famous question ‘What does a woman want?’, she was instrumental in getting Freud and his immediate family out of Nazi-annexed Austria in 1938. She was the model for the sculpture Princess X by Brancussi , of which Picasso said that it was Phallic. Apparently later on in life she had surgery to have one of the first Designer Vagina’s.
Freud’s style and openness, proximity and attitude was were most important qualities … which are recalled in the memories by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) who was a leading member of the imagist poets, in – Tribute to Freud. H.D wrote of
Freud’s ability to let people reorder their world. the process of discovery and the nature of the unspeakable becoming a process to poetry.
A magnificent show, that evokes the relationship of more than 30 individuals to Freud, how they related and his continuing influence. It’s an exhibition that hides nothing. That makes all accessible. Literally puts the means into the hands of the public. It reminds me of the the care and the Mission that he British Library has when it puts on its own fine exhibitions. The Recent Propaganda exhibition comes to mind.
It underlines something of the Means and Material of the modern world.
An interesting pertinent current in the exhibition is that of media, image, image ownership and relationships. An interesting element is where it touches on the lives of Celebrities… those who
work with desire, manifest it or perform close to it.
It’s fitting to see the show in the company of others, as one feels participant in the constellation of the lives surrounding Freud
It is often commented on, that the house has a feeling of being alive in the way that a family home does. what this exhibition does so well, is to carry on forming new constellations of lives, relationships and creativity.
It really is quite a bountiful show.
Now, the big project that the Freud Museum and Dawn Kemp have their sights set on interpreting the Anna Freud room.
Anna pioneered the field of Child Psychology during the War time, working with Orphans having founded the Hampstead War Nurseries.
http://www.freud.org.uk/
Ends 2 February 2014