How delightful to be Andrew Bryant’s choice blog! What a pity that it coincides with my website appearing to have a complete neurotic breakdown and disappear from view all together…… lets hope by Monday morning my designers can restore it to full health!
Andrew has brought up a couple of really interesting questions and in my eagerness I will think them through now (in a rudimental way) and maybe return to them in more detail later.
To Andrew’s flagging of the polarity between ‘outside’ and ‘inside,’ I would also add ‘pubic’ and ‘private’ as related concepts. Both sets of polarities refer to a tension between what is projected outwards and is taken by society as useful, acceptable and of inherent value and that which is marginalised or deemed insignificant. The lovely, wondrous Jeanette Winterson speaks at length not only about the intimate healing power of art, but also about it’s vital role in healing and sustaining an individual’s inner life.
“If you believe, as I do, that life has an inside as well as an outside, you will accept that the inner life needs nourishment too. If the inner life is not supported and sustained, then there is nothing between us and the daily repetition of what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending.’” http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/journalism_…
That curating should act as a devise for augmenting the inner life and bringing it’s discourses toward a more public forum is not something I had previously considered (obvious as it may seem when I think about it now). Curating equals making public but also acts as a tool of validation for the artists who are ‘curated’. By curating around the topic of mental illness I offer to augment it’s discourse into the realms of public recognition and acceptance.
Before I get far to excited about this….most of the artists who I am thinking of inviting for the show are all established in some way and are in the process of successfully pursuing artistic careers. Often (as in the case of Kim Noble or Hans Bernhard) they find themselves interrupted by mental illness midway through a successful career where they already have permission to make their inner life public (esp Kim Noble!). It seems then, that there is an ethical question to be considered around which artists the curator validates toward a public forum and those that she ignores and therefore permits ongoing marginalistation. The mentally ill are a marginalised underclass who often collect on the edges of society and to glamorise the issue by only selecting established artists who already have a voice might be conceived as misrepresenting the core issues around mental health. I imagine that this might be the kind of argument that Andrew is moving toward when he says
“art never has the good or bad fortune to be tested in the world.”
