Thursday, March 30, 2017

Blindness and Insanity

Albrecht Dürer
The Insane
before 1528
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"I come now to the facts. The bright light of electricity served, at first, to illuminate the subterranean galleries of mines; after that, public squares and streets; then factories, workshops, stores, theaters, military barracks; finally, the domestic interior. The eyes, initially, put up rather well with this penetrating new enemy; but, by degrees, they were dazzled. Blindness began as something temporary, soon became periodic, and ended as a chronic problem. This, then, was the first result – sufficiently comprehensible, I believe; but what about the insanity lately visited on our leaders? – Our great heads of finance, industry, big business have seen fit to send their thoughts around the world, while they themselves remain at rest. To this end, each of them has nailed up, in a corner of his office, electric wires connecting his executive desk with our colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Comfortably seated before his schedules and account books, he can communicate directly over tremendous distances; at a touch of the finger, he can receive reports from all his far-flung agents on a startling variety of matters. One branch-correspondent tells him, at ten in the morning of a shipwrecked vessel worth over a million; another, at five after ten, of the unexpected sale of the most prosperous house in the two Americas; a third, at ten after ten, of the glorious entrance, into the port of Marseilles, of a freighter carrying the fruits of a Northern California harvest. All this in rapid succession. The poor brains of these men, robust as they were, have simply given way, just as the shoulders of some Hercules of the marketplace would give way if he ventured to load them with ten sacks of wheat instead of one. And this was the second result." 

 from Paris en songe (1863) by Jacques Fabien, published in English as Paris in a Dream (1864), quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Alexander Ver Huell
The Insane in an interior
1856
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Caspar Luyken
Insane man riding horse backwards
1704
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Caspar Luyken
Don Clarazel attacked in Marseilles
by the landlord's insane brother

1697
etching (book illustration)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Gesina ter Borch
The madness of merry companions feasting with Death
1660
watercolor
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"From time immemorial this enigmatic need for sensation has found satisfaction in fashion. But in its ground it will be reached at last only by theological inquiry, for such inquiry bespeaks a deep affective attitude toward historical process on the part of the human being. It is tempting to connect this need for sensation to one of the seven deadly sins, and it is not surprising that a chronicler adds apocalyptic prophecies to this connection and foretells a time when people will have been blinded by the effects of too much electric light and maddened by the tempo of news reporting (Jacques Fabien, Paris en songe, 1863)." 

 Walter Benjamin, from the section on Fashion in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999) 

Odilon Redon
Madman in somber landscape
1885
lithograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

William Sharp after Benjamin West
King Lear's Madness on the Heath
1793
etching, engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Self-portrait - "Collapse with Lamp" - Zakopane
ca. 1913
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Taddeus Langier, Zakopane
ca. 1912-13
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Charles Nègre
Imperial Asylum at Vincennes
Games Room

1858-59
albumen silver print from glass negative
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Charles Nègre
Imperial Asylum at Vincennes
Refectory

1858-59
salted paper print from glass negative
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Hugh Welch Diamond
Patient at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum
ca. 1850-58
albumen silver print from glass negative
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Hugh Welch Diamond
Patient at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (with dead bird)
ca. 1855
albumen silver print from glass negative
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Anonymous Photographer (France)
"Lottery to Benefit Originals"
ca. 1852
daguerreotypes
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Daguerreotypes of the inmates of a local French insane asylum are used in the early 1850s on a poster promoting a public lottery to raise funds for the asylum, a lottery promoting its intention to "benefit" the authentic "originals" in the photographs.