CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Morgan Shipley
“Madness” has many etymological meanings, only one of which references the clinical term “mental illness,” which is the overarching theme of this book. In popular parlance, madness also refers to an emotive state (e.g., rage or even ecstasy).1 This chapter emphasizes the madness that is intertwined with ecstatic expression and which recollects an untethered existence, relieved of rational restraints. From that space, artists deconstruct the neuroses driving the modern world in order to construct a response more reflective of and responsible to the lived human experience.
Mad art offers an ecstatic escape. Within that mad art, we uncover a distinct expression of the sacred, which favors unmediated and sacred understanding over institutionalized approaches. The coalescence of madness and art, then, is not necessarily a sign of mental breakdown, but rather signals a purposeful move. Mad art functions to release the individual from the malaise of conformist thinking by creating space to reconsider the mental contingencies associated with daily living.
D. H. Lawrence, a luminary of American literature, notes how “art-speech is the only truth … art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of [one’s] day.” Recognizing that art-speech often contains “lies” that nevertheless detail the contingencies of a specific time and place, Lawrence argues that true art is a “subterfuge,” an imaginative means to break free from convention in order to provide “an emotional experience” that, in turn, “becomes a mine of practical truth.”2 Lawrence’s indictment reveals the very uncomfortable psychological state produced by a nation torn between the expectations of a new social order and the demands this placed on notions of individual worth and self-discovery. Rather than produce a kaleidoscope of cultural identities, American society—particularly following World War II until our present moment—limited expression to how well one fits within the western “machine.” As opposed to decades of progress and individual expression, postwar American society, mired as it was in “uneasy conformity … flight from conflict … political quietism … [and] the embrace of class privileges”3 resulted in a world gone mad.
Such internal inconsistencies mimicked a psychotic state as the American populace struggled to conform, but also sparked a growing recognition that madness allows one to break free from a condition of insanity in order to locate, as Jack Kerouac celebrates, identities “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.”4 Kerouac’s language highlights how one must expand beyond the confines of the modern project in order to be “saved” from a world of blind obedience and systemic control. He implies that one must remain open to the nonrational, ecstatic, and mad states suggested by Allen Ginsberg’s poetic provocation: “America when will you be angelic?”5 From “mad” to “saved” to “angelic,” Beat authors like Kerouac and Ginsberg capture the intertwining of the artistic and the sacred, as does the religiously infused art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who acts as the concluding case study for this chapter. The art of each of these three guides western culture toward a holy reality that liberates the individual from stifling conventions to find space for imaginative reconstruction.
Within the poetic language of figures like Kerouac and Ginsberg, or through the juxtaposition of religious symbols and cultural/economic motifs in the work of Basquiat, art contains the capacity to rescue madness as the true nature of modern American subjectivity, a perspective that connects the Beats and Basquiat to a broad American tradition of searching for identity (and the divine) outside the walls of traditional institutions and normative structures. In madness, which Basquiat symbolizes through the often-grotesque juxtaposition of angelic, skeletal, and oppressed bodies with religious and profane symbols, one finds the doorway to authentic identity. Yet because such a statement might sound “crazy,” visual and poetic art becomes a means to both uncover this sensibility of locating coherency outside mental rationality, while also creating the condition to overcome the reification of (false) spiritual belief and ersatz cultural living. In this sense, the intertwining of lived bodies, religious iconography, and perspectives of madness highlights the apocalyptic aspect of modern American living—and specifically the associated existential angst presented by questions of mortality—and, in so doing, presents us with an intimate portrait of the nature and reality of sanity in contemporary America. Ultimately, these artists direct us back to the demands, expectations, and potentialities found within the self-reliant ideal of the American project.
Mad Generation(s)
The myth of post-World War II America presupposes an idealism marked by affluence and familial bliss.6 Fortified in the dual narratives of self-determination and economic opportunity, the romanticism of American exceptionalism shaped a growing belief that liberal democracy and capitalism offered the pinnacle of human progress. From Levittowns to a growth in consumerism, the baby boomer generation came of age believing that the world was at its fingertips7—a reality come to life in today’s instant access to everyday materials via tools like Amazon Prime, entertainment using the Internet, and knowledge via smartphones.
Liberalism and capitalism promised postwar youth the capacity for personal fulfillment unknown to an adult generation raised during the Great Depression; yet it also produced a paradox of dependency and alienation, a condition captured, for instance, in Betty Friedan’s study of the “feminine mystique” or in Robert Putnam’s recognition that more and more Americans are “bowling alone.”8 Today, this paradox translates through material ideologies, expressed in a general cultural narrative that 1) prioritizes technological capability, 2) commoditizes success through purchasing power, and 3) mediates daily realities by structuring relationships through technology dependency via platforms like Twitter and Facebook.9
In other words, modern Western culture routinized existence, producing an individual whose sanity, by being constituted through technological and economic adherence, becomes marked by a broad disconnect from any felt notion of selfhood and community.10 Within this modern imperative—an imperative pushed to its extreme in today’s world of standardized testing—to be sane means to assume one’s role within the social machinery; to step outside one’s identity markers, or to challenge the coherency of one’s societally-sanctioned trajectory, is to appear mad, a condition requiring greater social intervention, which has ranged from the coddling gratification of Dr. Benjamin Spock to the competitive fire of tiger moms.11 Yet by equating socialization and education with the ability to exist in and produce for the external world, individuals “grow up absurd”12 in a “modern civilization [which] fails to satisfy profound needs”13 in people, resulting in a culture gone mad by making sanity a measure of how well one integrates into and is dominated by one’s social worlds and their conformist contingencies.
Why though? In decades of economic growth and social development, what compelled individuals toward an expression of life seemingly cut off from authentic relationships and devoid of personalized dreams? Although promised much, those who grew up after World War II in America “could set little in store regarding the future”—with death seemingly around every corner, turning to the instant gratification presented by consumerism and materialism made sense.14 With the “exterminating angel of nuclear holocaust” and the “colossal slaughter and devastation wrought by global war” hovering in America’s public imagination,15 an image fortified in the 1950s and 1960s by the proliferation[?] of bomb shelters and the daily school survival chore of practicing “duck and cover,” and mirrored today in America’s mediated obsession with terrorist attacks and rumors of nuclear proliferation, the postwar pursuit of happiness devolved into ordered insanity.
Rather than decades of progress, equality, and opportunity, postwar America continues to struggle with its own internal failings: the base truths of poverty, systemized racism, enculturated misogyny, entrenched patriarchy, and the prevalence of violently divisive international relations (epitomized in postwar decades by the Cold War, and exemplified today in rhetoric surrounding terrorism) reveal the root hypocrisies that disconnect the desires and needs of individuals from themselves, from each other, and from their government. As Allen Ginsberg witnessed so honestly, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”16 Ginsberg’s “Howl” grasped prophetically the first meaning of madness within this chapter—that is, the psychological state of insanity that came to define American society in the age of postindustrialization, an age of increased wealth and educational opportunity, but also one designed around social control and contrived connectedness. It is no accident that Ginsberg’s own mother (whom he memorialized in “Kaddish”) was diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined to state hospitals, or that Ginsberg himself had a court-ordered stay in Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital’s psychiatric ward as a young man.
Ginsberg identified the system of control as “Moloch,” a religiously appropriated symbol from the Hebrew Bible denoting an idolatrous god to whom children were ritually sacrificed through fire. Ginsberg appropriates such material idolatry in order to associate Moloch with war, government, and capitalism, positioning Moloch as a symbol of the cultural insanity that reduces humanity to functional cogs driving the Western “machine.” Visualizing an inhuman monster consuming America’s soul, negating expressions of love by fortifying the world externally, Ginsberg bemoans: “Nightmare of Moloch … Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money.”17 Within such a world, people find themselves bound to an identity beyond their making, a constructed reality in which one has no choice but to go “Crazy in Moloch!” exactly because, as Ginsberg continues, “Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!”18
Yet in beginning with the “best minds” driven “mad” who ultimately go “Crazy in Moloch” because the system deprives them of their “natural ecstasy,” Ginsberg reverses the source for true identity and the meaning(s) of sanity and madness within contemporary American society. Dehumanized and disfigured by a modern system, Ginsberg identifies a way beyond the machinery of western culture, highlighting the ecstatic states—vis-à-vis religion, drugs, and community (e.g., sex)—that allow for both a point of reflection (for Ginsberg, art and poetry produce this condition exactly because “the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy”)19 and, as a direct result, space to break free. In other words, insane states of being result from staying within the strictures of modern society; one is driven to this state by the compulsive expectation of fitting within normative states of being.
The “madman,” however, is freed from this condition—she finds herself within the realm of the ecstatic, which etymologically denotes a state of ex-stasis, or a radical disjoining of subjectivity from fixed identities and stagnant realities. A true moment of mysterium tremendum et fascinans, to understand madness within the ecstatic (and the ecstatic within madness) shakes the very ontological foundations of western culture, resulting in an experience, as R. D. Laing proposes, where “mundane time becomes merely anecdotal, only the Eternal matters.”20 As with Ginsberg’s mad response to the insanity produced by Moloch, Laing laments against a modern world predicated on a basic psychological sacrifice that, in order to “live in a secular world,” the “child abdicates its ecstasy,” leaving one “unconscious of our minds … it is we who are out of our minds.” However, as Laing ultimately suggests, “we need not be unaware of the inner world.”21
Mirroring Laing’s caveat, Ginsberg, when howling “Breakthroughs! over the rivers! … Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! … Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!” invokes this second meaning of madness as the desire to become aware of one’s “inner world” in order to see how “only the Eternal matters.”22 Within such an autonomous zone of awareness, in which epiphanies bring both despair and newness, Ginsberg ultimately highlights madness as sacred: “The world is holy! The soul is holy! … Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! … everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! The madman is holy as you my soul are holy!”23 In understanding a reality in which “everyman” is an “angel,” Ginsberg fully positions madness as a divine condition, a point of and for holy reflection against the mad state produced by Moloch. To see the “madman” as “holy,” and then to make this all about the sacred nature of one’s own “soul,” removes sanity from the modern game of assuming the roles and masks expected by society in order to reconstruct “true sanity” as entailing subjective madness.
A Mad Vision(ary)
As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop, within a western culture mediated and governed by economic principles that blindly bind individuals to their social herd, madness becomes the sphere for individuality in the purest sense exactly because such space remains untethered and—by nature—isolated from society.24 Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and embodied this space as a willful act, as a consequence of the abuse he experienced at the end of a heroin needle, and at the hands of an art industry all too quick to exploit him (he completed nearly 2,000 works before his death at the age of 27). Using a collage of images, symbols, and words as a means for self-actualization and as a process to represent ecstasy in a world bound by self-deception, Basquiat played with meaning, using his art to express both disdain for a world gone mad as a consequence of liberal capitalism and the need to go mad to break free from the condition this produced. Emerging onto an East Village, New York art scene dominated by the Pop Art aesthetics of figures like Roy Lichtenstein and, most significantly in his life, Andy Warhol, Basquiat challenged the homogeneity of an art-world-turned-industry defined increasingly by pastiche, wealth, and repetition, the last a compositional process Basquiat played with and exploited through his disjointed use of photocopied images, which he often placed (and covered) within his paintings, making his art “simultaneously found and made.”25
For Basquiat, art created the opportunity to speak back against the norms—cultural, political, and artistic—constricting individual potential and creative expression. And, although Basquiat found himself labeled as the “first black artist to achieve anything close to blue-chip status in the contemporary art market,”26 his capacity to inhabit two spaces simultaneously—graffiti/gallery artist, high/“primitive” art (the latter, a label he rightly challenged as racist), black/white, rich/poor—left Basquiat in a mad state, an insider and outsider whose work, amidst an art world “less a business than an industry,”27 remained “concerned with the production of meaning rather than with the isolation of specific icons or texts.”28 Regarding Basquiat’s work, art curator Marc Mayer warns against literal interpretations of Basquiat’s intertextual images: “I can’t help feeling that a painstaking analysis of Basquiat’s symbols and signs is a trap that lures us away from the abstract and oneiric purpose of these pictures. They are not sending us coded messages to decipher, so much as confusing us at once with their discursive sleight of hand.”29
Through an intertwining of black skeletal figures, arms upraised, positioned within religious iconography interspersed with textual signs, symbols, and markers, and referenced by divinely inspired names (for example, Untitled [Baptism], 1982; or Profit 1, 1982), Basquiat not only inspired viewers to “decode its [his art’s] particular representations,” but also, as Jordana Moore Saggese stresses, “to discover the possibilities for representation.”30 As Saggese continues, in subverting “the relationship between artist, object, and viewer by creating a nonlinear narrative of painting,”31 Basquiat evades the very binary thinking that reifies the consumerism of contemporary culture while creating space, as bell hooks argues, to grapple “with both the pull of a genealogy that is fundamentally ‘black’ (rooted in African diasporic … tradition) and a fascination with white Western traditions.”32 Basquiat’s deliberate ambiguity and madness—captured through his collage of text, media varieties, compositional methods, and neo-expressionistic painting—thus reflect the realities of living in a materially-contingent world, one that results in racialized bodies, gendered expectations, and class divisions, but also creates the conditions to use art as a point of ecstatic overcoming.
Through images that play with the limitations of formal—and pop—aesthetics, Basquiat’s work signals a willingness to locate and expose the violence and boundaries of socio-cultural normativity, pointing the viewer to the complexities of artistic appropriation and construction, as well as the instability of identity within the modern moment. In Profit I (1982), which consists of acrylic and spray paint on canvas, the juxtaposition of a skeletal figure with arms upraised, letters standing alone and near one another, scratch-outs and paint-overs, numbers and table graphs, an incomplete clock and roman numerals, and an almost endless train of partially complete symbolic references (from a crown of thorns to the dollar sign), signals an indignant understanding on the part of Basquiat that led to the production of a defiant “sacral exceptionalism” within his work.33 Basquiat demonstrated an ability, to borrow from Susan Sontag’s reflections on interpretation, “to recover our senses … to see more, to hear more, to feel more” through the obfuscation of immediate meaning and within the process of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing images.34
Along with his high school classmate Al Diaz, Basquiat initially sought such recovery from modern America—for himself and others—through street art images produced under the pseudonym SAMO, an acronym for the “same old shit.” Tagging poems, jokes, aphorisms, and prophecies in marker and spray paint on subways throughout New York City, the two used SAMO to critique, as Saggese notes, “consumer culture”:
SAMO AS AN END 2 NINE-2-FIVE
NONSENSE
WASTIN’ YOUR LIFE
2 MAKE ENDS MEET … TO GO HOME
AT NIGHT TO YOUR
COLOR T.V….35
Such public exhibitionism positioned SAMO “as an alternative to the commercial art world,”36 an antagonism that Basquiat transitioned into his gallery exhibits through subject matter that, although allowing him entrance into the 1980s high art scene, nevertheless “always separates him [Basquiat] once again, and defamiliarizes him,”37 leaving the viewer with “paintings and drawings [that] highlight the dynamic process of looking,”38 both in terms of the works of art under one’s gaze and at one’s current moment, cultural history, and fabricated identities.
To engage Basquiat’s work, then, is to gain access to a culture gone mad in its materiality; it also, however, presents the viewer with insight into the spiritual, physical, and ephemeral nature of modern life. In Profit I, through the image of a white-outlined, black body, arms upraised, crowned with a nimbus accentuated by golden rays, Basquiat speaks to the body’s eventual degeneration while simultaneously celebrating its sacrality. As with SAMO graffiti, Basquiat forces us to engage an outwardly religiously inspired figure within the contemporary frames of capitalism, playing with words and labels, ubiquitously naming this piece with a phonetic sign that speaks to a sense of foreseeing (prophecy) while remaining bound by an economic system that transforms everything into a “profit,” including Basquiat’s art. Within this dual sense, Basquiat invokes Christian scripture—“The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10)—while fully positioning religion as a source for/of such evil within a world defined by producers and consumers, wealth and profits, the saved and the damned. The main figure thus emerges as martyred, a character whose upturned arms can be read as both lamentation against the insanity of the world and surrender against a system beyond one’s control. Through its stark light/dark contrast, the image ultimately captures Basquiat’s perception that, amidst the chaos of modern culture, self-actualization can be found within the creative madness of fragmented presentations.
As Cathy Curtis details, “encoded within the seeming randomness of Basquiat’s writing and imagery is a bleak lack of trust in systems—however superficially benign—that fuel or reflect power struggles.”39 Basquiat’s aphorisms, graffiti, and artworks decenter perspective, forcing the viewer (and reader) to turn off pragmatic thinking and empirical meaning in order to understand how, in the redefinition and reformation of words, signs, and images, we can locate a spark of authentic living. In recognizing the boundaries of linearity and traditional modes of understanding, we come to see the double-bind of madness that drives the aesthetic response and cultural alternative of the Beats and Basquiat. More importantly, through this recognition, these artists invite us to participate in constructive chaos—within prose and imagery that inundate us with meaning only to be canceled by a well-placed brushstroke or symbol of a world gone insane, mad art functions to unveil our individual holiness. Horrified by the decay of subjectivity and spiritual values, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Basquiat pursue art as a means to challenge the banality and excess of western society by representing the costs of commodity culture. In locating insanity as the consequence of modernity, and madness as the source to imagine anew, these artists purge themselves of structure, syntax, and normative meaning, sharing “a desire to journey inward to the darkest recesses of the human psyche” in order to remember what it means to be human and, through this remembering, revive the capacity for selfhood and community.40
Notes
1. See Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
2. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin, 1977), 8.
3. Jonathan Franzen, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (2002),” Farther Away: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), 309.
4. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1991), 5.
5. Allen Ginsberg, “America,” in Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002), 39.
6. See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003), and Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
7. See Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
8. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), and Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, 2001).
9. See Jose van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
10. See Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect (New York: The New Press, 2014).
11. See Benjamin Spock and Robert Needlman, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 9th ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 2011), and Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin, 2011).
12. See Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Vintage, 1956), 5–10.
13. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: An Owl Book, 1955), 11.
14. Carl A. Raschke, The Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism and the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1980), 2068.
15. Raschke, The Interruption of Eternity, 207.
16. Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002), 9.
17. Ginsberg, “Howl,” 20–22.
18. Ginsberg, “Howl,” 22.
19. Ginsberg, “Howl,” 27.
20. R. D. Laing, “Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis,” in The Psychedelic Review 1, no. 6 (1964): 8.
21. Laing, “Transcendental Experience,” 11.
22. Ginsberg, “Howl,” 23.
23. Ginsberg, “Howl,” 27, emphasis added.
24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin, 2009).
25. Jordana Moore Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 108.
26. Steven Hager cited by Dick Hebdige, “Welcome to the Terrordome: Jean-Michel Basquiat and the ‘Dark’ Side of Hybridity,” in Jean-Michel Basquiat, ed. Richard Marshall (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), 62. Basquiat challenged the racialization that accompanied the “tropes and stereotypes of primitivism,” which defined narratives surrounding black artists and, in particular, Basquiat. See Saggese, Reading Basquiat, 17–19.
27. Lisbet Nilson, “Making It Neo,” ARTnews 82 (January 1983): 64.
28. Saggese, Reading Basquiat, 7.
29. Marc Mayer, “Basquiat in History,” in Basquiat, eds. Marc Mayer and Fred Hoffman (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2005), 49.
30. Saggese, Reading Basquiat, 7.
31. Saggese, Reading Basquiat, 9.
32. bell hooks, “Altars of Sacrifice: Re-Membering Basquiat,” Art in America 81, no. 6 (June 1993): 70.
33. Leonard Emmerling, Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–1988: The Explosive Force of the Streets (Taschen, 2006), 32.
34. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), 14.
35. Saggese, Reading Basquiat, 3.
36. Ibid.
37. hooks, “Altars of Sacrifice: Re-Membering Basquiat,” 70.
38. Saggese, Reading Basquiat, 7.
39. Cathy Curtis, “A Bit of Basquiat: Meaning More Important Than Style in 11 ‘Blue Ribbon’ Works From ‘84 at Newport Harbor,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1993, http://articles.latimes.com/1993-07-27/entertainment/ca-17242_1_newport-harbor-art-museum.
40. Saggese, Reading Basquiat, 124–125.