Robin was an exemplary pupil in my secondary school. Never late for any lesson, always with his homework completed and never in any way disruptive in the class he was the very model of a good student. We, others, were the somewhat wild lot and our form teacher, in desperation, would point Robin out to us as the way we should aspire to behave and learn at school.
Many years later, when many of us managed to obtain a university education, start a career and get married, I visited Robin in Cane Hill mental asylum. Two years later he was dead because of some incorrect medication given to him. The mental asylum has since been sold off by the National Health Service and, as in the case with so many other similar institutions, is now converted into luxury flats.
What does this prove? Perhaps that madness is an expression of repression which seeks out alternative views of the world where life has never found a secure safety valve. Anyway, for too many to call someone ‘mad’ is an easy opt-out clause to use if that person cannot be fathomed.
Vittorio Sgarbi, the eminent Italian art critic, historian, cultural commentator and one-time mayor of the Sicilian town of Salemi, has been described as mad by several of his critics because of his frequent public outbursts but, at least, Vittorio uses these tantrums as a release from the often impossible situations he find himself entrapped in.
All forms of madness are similarly attempts to escape from impossible situations when the door seems shut. Ironically, however, the door is, indeed, shut – in many cases for life – despite liberalization though the Basaglia law passed in 1978 when Italy became the only country (so far) to abolish psychiatric hospitals. (Does it show with regard to some of the people one meets in the street here?).
Vittorio Sgarbi is a prodigious curator of highly idiosyncratic exhibitions. We remember his selection of paintings displayed at Milan’s international exhibition of 2015 and described in my post at
https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/09/11/sgarbi-con-garbo-at-expo-2015/
There was an equally memorable show when we visited Trieste a couple of years ago.
As cultural commentator, Sgarbi has some pretty weird ideas too, as described in my post at:
https://longoio3.com/2017/08/22/great-job-opportunities-in-italy/
With special mention of Lucca’s former lunatic asylum at Maggiano, which we visited (as tourists, I hasten to add) and described in my post at:
https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/luccas-very-own-snakepit/
Sgarbi’s disturbing exhibition entitled ‘Il Museo della Follia’ (Museum of folly) at Lucca’s ‘cavallerizza’ (stables), on until this August, is well worth taking in – if you can take such things, that is.
I recently visited the ‘Museo’; I don’t wish to introduce too many spoilers here; I’ll just say what for me the highlights were:
Francis Bacon’s self-portraits:
Antonio Ligabue’s post-naive paintings:
Sketches of patients in the former Maggiano mental ‘structure’:
This evocative painting of women at Florence’s own psychiatric institution at San Salvi:
The pleading letters of inmates assuring the authorities that they are now sane and can be released:
The extraordinary explosively-lit, ‘grill’, wallpapered with almost nose-less photographs of inmates:
Stereoscopic glimpses into the former electro-therapy quarter of Maggiano hospital:
And plenty more to drive one somewhat crazy (if one isn’t already).
What is significant in all this is that the definition of whether someone is mad or not still has little consensus in medical science. Tobino’s 1953 book on the inmates he supervised as head psychiatrist at Maggiano mental hospital is entitled ‘the free women of Maggiano’. However, these wretched females, entrapped in an ex-convent on the Luccan hills and with separate male and female quarters, could hardly be described as ever truly having been free today.
Indeed, currently we are as far from true freedom of expression as ever before. As William Blake put it in his poem on London: ‘in every cry of every Man, in every Infant’s cry of fear, in every voice: in every ban, the mind-forg’d manacles I hear.’ In each generation new definitions of freedom are formulated, often so far from that natural freedom which is the rightful inheritance of every human on this planet. The concept of freedom is, indeed, defined by the ideology of those who control us. They can tell us whether we are ‘free’ or not: indeed, whether we are ‘mad’ or not.
In this respect, Sgarbi’s exhibition arouses many disturbing thoughts and connections in the minds of all who dare to visit it. If you are in Lucca you should drop in to view it before you drop out…
