In 1938, he had a vision of angels bathed in light. He believed that he was Jesus Christ, and
that the Virgin Mary had given him a mission.
His task was to recreate the universe in visual form, in preparation for
presenting it to God on the Day of Judgement.
He believed that he had been
brought by seven angels to the yard where he lived in Sao Clemente Street. That same year, he was first arrested and
then hospitalized for treatment for paranoid schizophrenia. He was to spend the rest of his life in the
hospital of Colonia Juliano Moreira in Rio de Janeiro.
In an attic of the hospital Bispo do Rosario began his
work creating an inventory of the universe.
For the next fifty years he spent up to 20 hours a day working
obsessively, creating more than 800 sculptures, objects, garments and banners
that began to spread across the entire building. In
2012, eighty of the pieces were loaned to the Victoria and Albert Museum for
the exhibition where I first encountered this fascinating artist. I
remember a wall of Miss Universe sceptres, his tributes to female beauty. I remember there were a lot of embroideries,
as well as numerous model boats. Many of
the pieces were recycled from scrap and everyday objects. Like Marcel Duchamp, he takes an everyday
object – a bicycle, a bed – and made it into something cosmic. Like Duchamp, he mounts a bicycle wheel on a wooden
frame.
Recyling is also evident in the way that the imagery of
Bispo do Rosario’s artwork draws on memories and fragments from his past. For example, images of boxing, ships and
other aspects of his life are recuperated and integrated into his work. Brazilian coastal scenes are meticulously
rendered, complete with little ships dangling silver anchor chains. But religion is the central theme.
Back in Japaratuba, it was men’s work to stitch the
banners for the religious processions, so Bispo do Rosario was working within
his cultural tradition. He stitched
religious messages and all sorts of other texts on his fabric creations
Language is key to the work, with embroidered texts including
poems, current affairs updates, romantic quests, adverts for bibles – with the
poignant words “even with the bible, in the psychiatric ward one is abandoned”.
A huge amount of effort went into these creations. The ornamental embroidered texts have been
compared to illuminated manuscripts. For
a British audience, there is an inevitable comparison with the recent
production of Tracy Emin, only that the Brazilian artist is oriented not to
this world, but to the next.
Words also flow onto paper, card and wooden boards. In
the V&A exhibition, it seemed that everything had writing on it. As if cataloguing his own life, Bispo do
Rosario created lists of names, columns of numbers. For
example, he made a list of everyone he ever met. He also collected things – examples of hats,
of shoes, of tin mugs. I absolutely love his wall of objects –
ladders, shears, tools of all kinds. It’s
almost as if he was Noah, gathering items for an ark. We talk now of mental illness in terms of
distress, but these productions do not seem like expressions of pathology. Art has become a way of coming to terms with
the world. Ironically, despite this monumental
act of curation, many aspect of his biography remain mysterious, including his exact
date of birth or the identity of his parents.
This making was a spiritual, not an artistic task. After all, he saw it as his duty to prepare
for the Last Judgement. When visitors came to see him at the hospital,
he would carefully dress himself in his ceremonial Annunciation Garment robes. When
people came to see him, he would test them with a riddle: “What is the colour
of my aura?”. He carefully controlled
who was allowed to see his creations. Photographs were permitted, but only under his
strict instructions. He enjoyed
authority and respect at the psychiatric hospital. Patients, staff and visitors were all
recruited to further his work. He said
"The
mentally ill are like hummingbirds: they never land, they always hover two
meters from the ground."
I’ve also read All
Dogs Are Blue, an autobiographical novel by Rodrigo de Souza Leão, which describes the
terrors of being confined to a mental hospital in Rio de Janeiro. But for Bispo do Rosario, the institution was
a shelter and refuge, rather than the place of fear and abuse that these places
have often been for others. Apparently, he was the only patient with his
own key to the asylum, perhaps because he was the only one who had no desire to
leave the place where he had found fulfillment.
His work has an extraordinary intricacy, complexity and
impact. It reminds me of surrealism, of
the fabric creations of Louise Bourgeois, of the collages and constructions of
Kurt Schwitters. Above all, there is the
spirit of Dada in this complex and lunatic creation. This creative achievement is all the more
extraordinary in that Bispo do Rosario was entirely self-taught, worked in an
artistic vacuum, and generated all this extraordinary art through his own
originality and imagination. He did not attend art therapy classes or have
contact with other artists. He did not
care about recognition and respect, just as long as he was left to do his
spiritual work.
In the 1980s, psychiatric reform in Brazil, as in many
countries, led to de-institutionalization of some people with mental
illness. In 1982, the Museo do Bispo
Rosario was created, to look after the work he was making at the hospital. The first exhibition of his artwork was held
in 1989, just months after Arthur Bispo do Rosario died of cancer. This was followed by shows at the Venice
Biennale, in Paris, and now in London. Today,
more and more people in the art world venerate Artur Bispo do Rosario, for his
authenticity and originality, even though he never saw anything he did as
art. His treasury of 802 works is now designated
as part of the national heritage of Brazil, and his museum runs art
workshops for people with mental illness
and members of the public. In his
hometown of Japaratuba there is a statue of him, wearing his Annunciation
cloak.
The term Outsider art is used for creators outside the
mainstream culture like Bispo do Rosario.
Outsider Art is hard to evaluate.
How do you judge a creative work produced by someone who never saw
himself as an artist? How much does
intention matter? Talking about her
fascination with it, critic Terry Castle describes outsider art as a “gorgeous, disorienting, sometimes repellent
phenomenon”. Schizophrenia,
depression and other mental illnesses have often been associated with original
creative thought, as well as with religiosity.
Should it make any difference that these activities are generated by
extreme and unusual brain states? Is
there any significant difference between the work of Bispo do Rosario and that
of the Netherlandish Renaissance master Hieronymus Bosch, who painted
extraordinary visions of heaven and hell?
Many artists and writers, after all, have experienced mental illness,
which gives them a different perspective on the world, and perhaps a burning
need to express themselves.
Indeed, Arthur Bispo do Rosario is only one of many
people with mental illness who have achieved fame for their original artistic
vision. Adolf
Wolffli was one of the first to be recognized as an artist from within the
Swiss asylum where he was incarcerated in the early decades of the twentieth
century. At the same time as Bispo do
Rosario, there was the Mexican artist Martin Ramirez, who insisted that the
work he made should be destroyed at the end of each day. In Poland, Edmund Moniel was another person
with schizophrenia who thought he was on a mission from God, and for him,
making art had a therapeutic role, in alleviating his symptoms. It
may be that it was the same for Arthur Bispo do Rosario, that his furious
activity was a way of silencing the voices and visions. After all, he said “I do it because they tell
me to, if they didn’t make me do it, I wouldn’t do any of it.”
Even though
Outsider art has something of the weirdness of contemporary art, it also holds
out a great democratic hope, that the possibility of creation lies within every
one of us. You don’t need special
materials or equipment. Critic Roger
Cardinal points out that “almost all Outsider Art has to do with the projection
of deep meaning into shapes and materials which everyday living discounts as being
of negligible value”. Your medium could
be scrap paper, cardboard boxes, nylon tights or even toothpaste.
Perhaps the key is
disinhibition. Dr Hans Prinzhorn, who
created a pioneering collection of Outsider art in Germany, wrote that “a
primal creative urge belongs to all human beings, but has been submerged by the
development of civilization.” Art by
people with mental illness has sometimes been compared to that of children, but
I think there are real differences.
Someone like Arthur Bispo do Rosario bought all his life experiences to
bear. His artwork was deeply considered
and intended, not random or idiosyncratic.
Above all, his creation was not something external to him, it was the
world in which he lived.
We’d like to think
we could achieve something like the Outsider art of Arthur Bispo do Rosario,
but I think we’d be mistaken. Most of us suppress our dreams and
fantasies. We are too self-conscious.
We worry about what others might think, or seek approbation from the art
world. With someone Arthur Bispo do
Rosario, you have unrestricted access to the recesses of the imagination, what curator
Victor Musgrave once called “an exultant pilgrimage into the unexpected.”
Alongside the handful of people with
mental illness who have been recognized as great artists, there are thousands
more who are making art in their bedrooms, or in art therapy or occupational
therapy sessions. The vast majority of
this art is as banal and uninteresting, as the work which you or I would create
in our evening class – which is not to say that it is unimportant or useless,
but to acknowledge that simply having a mental illness does not make you an artist,
let alone a Van Gogh.
However, the association between
mental illness and art is ancient. Plato
thought of creativity as a “divine madness… a gift from the gods”. William Shakespeare wrote “the lunatic, the
lover and the poet are of imagination all compact.” More recent research by Kay Redfield Jamison
shows how a very high proportion of eminent creative people, from Hans
Christian Anderson to Jackson Pollock had mood disorders – for example manic
depression. In many cases, their
artistic work saved their lives. When
people are manic, they experience quickening of thought processes, fluency and
flexibility of thought and intensified sensation. At Harvard, Professor Albert Rothenberg has
studied the connection of creativity to psychosis. Translogical thinking, in other words being
able to bring together different ideas and cross boundaries, is often key to
original work in the arts. However, as the lives of Van Gogh and Sylvia Plath
and many others demonstrate demonstrate, there can be a thin line between
creation and destruction.
Whether prophets, poets or painters,
people with schizophrenia and manic depression have contributed hugely to our
culture. From the world of theatre, it
seems appropriate to bring the thoughts of Antonin Artaud to bear. After all, he spent time in mental
institutions himself, and knew of what he spoke when he said “This is why a
tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the
investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination
would be troublesome.” For Artaud, the
work of someone like Van Gogh was a way of “seriously upsetting the spectral
conformity of the bourgeoisie”. But the
difference between Artaud and Arthur Bispo do Rosario is that the Bispo do
Rosario did not consider the hospital a prison.
Nor was he in revolt against it.
Instead, he subverted it to his own ends. Only in hospital could he have been
recognized as Jesus Christ. Artaud said
“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except
literally to get out of hell.” But
Arthur Bispo do Rosario was different.
He did all his wonderful work in order to get into heaven.
Further reading
