Bjarne Melgaard “Psychopathological Notebook”
Karma
This event has ended.
Cobra artists zealously embraced the art of the insane as part of their rejection of Western aesthetics and anything that smacked of classical culture. United by a keen interest in Marxism, the Cobra group envisioned itself as a “red international” that embraced spontaneity, collaborative work methods, and also drew inspiration from children’s drawings as well as various forms of primitivism. As one of the central protagonists of the Cobra group, Karel Appel was among the 10,000 visitors to the Psychopathological Art exhibition at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in 1950. Perplexed by the modest pamphlet containing only texts to commemorate this exhibition, Appel used this deeply loaded document as the backdrop for one of his most important works—his Psychopathological Notebook(1950). Temporarily inhabiting the subject position of the “insane” artist, Appel aggressively covered the theoretical and medical texts with his own spontaneously-drawn images. Emotionally liberated by the example of the patients, these explosive pages form a veritable Rosetta Stone of Appel’s deeply personal iconography that often reoccurs in subsequent works. As Daniel Kuspit has written of the seminal importance of Psychopathological Notebook, “Appel declares himself a psychopathological artist… he counters the intellectuality of the book with the emotional reality of his art; he undoes the book’s efforts to deal in a systematic, scientific—ultra sane—way with the art of the insane by spontaneously making it.” This watershed work not only represents a pinnacle of Cobra’s own concerns, it marked a turning point for Appel’s own fecund, varied iconography that he would go on to develop in his painting until his death in 2006.
Three generations later, Bjarne Melgaard revisited Appel’s iconic Psychopathological Notebook with an intensity that is almost Oedipal in its murderous aim at this long string of artistic forefathers. Melgaard attempts to annul the radicality of Appel’s original gesture by inflicting his own signature marks in a frenetic, aesthetic assault. Taking the facsimile of Appel’s notebook as his “canvas,” Melgaard has violently crossed out Appel’s name with urgently-applied strokes of black ink wherever it appears and has written his own name as the author of this book. Drawings by Melgaard of his own recurrent tropes have been cut out and taped over the Appel drawings…
–Excerpt from L’Art Chez Les Fous by Alison Gingeras
Psychopathological Notebook, 2016
Contributions from Katie Stout.
With a collaborative essay by Alison M. Gingeras, Jamieson Webster, and Alissa Bennett.
Media
Schedule
from February 13, 2016 to February 28, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-02-20 from 18:00 to 20:00