The Art and Politics of Artists With Mental Disabilities Experiencing Confinement

Abstract

In this article, I utilize an indisciplinary theoretical framework through the work of Jacques Rancière to examine the artwork of artists with mental disabilities experiencing confinement in asylums in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. I further examine preexisting ways in which this artwork, focusing particularly on the Prinzhorn Collection, has been positioned within art history and psychiatric medical models in the 19th and early 20th centuries that situate these artists as geniuses, as examples of Expressionism, or as pathological. In contrast, I suggest that these artists’ work can be a form of politics and dissensus. The indisciplinarity of Rancière’s work and Disability Studies offer art educators new possibilities for understanding the artwork of people experiencing mental disabilities by disrupting the disciplinary logic that can inform thinking about these artists.

Notes

¹ As Graby (2015) wrote with regard to the application of the terms neurodiverse, neurodivergent, and neurotypical, to those with mental disabilities, “[T]he term ‘neurotypical’ was coined by neurodiversity activists to refer to the majority neurotype without reinforcing its privileged status and the marginalization of others” (p. 235). The term neurodiversity challenges that there is a “normal” state of the human mind, positing that experiences by those labeled as being on the autism spectrum or those who position themselves as having a mental disability are diverse rather than pathological.

² Indisciplinarity is distinguished here from interdisciplinarity with regard to a breaking of, rather than a crossing of, disciplinary boundaries. Rancière (2008) commented, “It is not only a matter of going besides the disciplines but of breaking them. My problem has always been to escape the division between disciplines, because what interests me is the question of the distribution of territories, which is always a way of deciding who is qualified to speak about what. The apportionment of disciplines refers to the more fundamental apportionment that separates those regarded as qualified to think from those regarded as unqualified; those who do the science and those who are regarded as its objects” (n.p.).

³ Unless otherwise specified, these artworks were created between the 1880s and 1921.

⁴ Born 1852 and last recorded in West Prussia, Schwetz, 1900.

⁵ Born 1873, date of death unknown.

⁶ Date of birth unknown, died 1941.