Condition-Related Art gugging

→ Condition-Related Art
A large part of Leo NAVRATIL’s research and observations made him believe that the artistic excellence of his patients was rooted in their psychoses. Therefore it could not be compared to the personal talent of other, non-psychotic artists. “To claim that the art of the Gugging patients may be attributed to their talent and long years of practice while unrelated to their illness seems to me (…) completely wrong. In reality their art would never have been created without their mental disturbance, the illness was a necessary condition for their genius.” Thus, in order to do justice to the artistic productions of bipolar (manic-depressive) and schizophrenic people, he put them into a relative context – Navratil coined the term “Condition-Related Art”.

From a contemporary view this notion appears hypothetical and no longer supportable. It is true that Navratil observed a depletion of creativity with some of his patients when their psychosis had temporarily subsided. Alternatively, their work lost its spark and originality; and he also unearthed painters, draughtsmen and poets, throughout the history of arts, who only developed into really fascinating artists after the onset of their illness. But it remains unclear why a sane person should primarily draw from their intrinsic talent while the same thing is contested for a psychotic – and why the presence of a psychosis alone should suffice as a condition to develop such artistic competence as to lastingly fascinate others.

It is true that mental (and sometimes even physical) changes can disrupt the intellectual make-up of a person to such an extent as to cause creative functions to unexpectedly reveal themselves. The illness works like a stimulant, a dam-breaker, and the cultural feat becomes an alternative experience, an existential escape. Many people thus unlock an unforeseen creative capacity, which, freed from normative inhibitions, can easily be tapped.

Naturally, a greatly altered state of consciousness or perception will also change someone’s style and the degree of verbal and visual deformation. (see also: “Die Merkmale schizophrener Bildnerei, H. RENNERT, 1962) . But drastic abstractions or schizophrenic characteristics as such will not automatically make an insane draughtsman into an artist any more than they would a sane one. They are mere superficial formalisms, functioning as a medium of what we complexly and cryptically perceive as art or poetry.

Having said that, with regards to the unusually high (and from today’s view purely coincidental) density of artistically talented patients whom Leo Navratil discovered on his ward since the 1950s, his conclusions are understandable and of great historical value. Navratil was a doctor and a scientist. To him, art was an initially unexpected variable. Once fixated, he saw it confirmed in and around Gugging and came to the conclusion: “schizophrenics are artists”. He deducted that any other psychiatric institution might also be developed into an arts centre.