Gema Intxausti
05 Nov 2013 - 19 Jan 2014
GEMA INTXAUSTI
"... MEANWHILE... RAPTURE"
5 November 2013 - 19 January 2014
From the tamed Pávlov's dog to the abused dog of Kafka, when it is no longer possible to talk and barking is a symptom of madness is that something is deeply rotten.
Gema Intxausti
Gema Intxausti (Gernika-Lumo, 1966), one of the most personal voices to emerge from the most recent generations of Basque Artists, presents in Sala Rekalde her latest work entitled ... Meanwhile... rapture. This is a metaphor for madness both real and feigned, pain in its most desperate manifestation, rage, marriage as an act of usurpation; for the idiot, for exploitation, melancholy, accidental crime, vengeance, moral corruption and its most contemporary version, mobbing. For her purpose she sets out from the well-known quotation from Hamlet “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” and comes up with the title Something smells like Denmark, represented by means of a singular sculptural piece.
The phrase Something smells like Denmark in its sculptural representation displays an apparent lack of continuity and irregularity, as occurs in the soliloquies in Hamlet. Hamlet interrupts himself, speaking firstly with unease and then with acquiescence . He either finds it hard to express himself directly or betrays himself with his word games. It is not until the end of the play that Hamlet freely puts his feelings into words. As Pauline Kiernan argues, Hamlet “showed how a character's language can often be saying several things at once, and contradictory meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and disturbed feelings”.
For the artist, “this theatre within theatre takes us to another familiar reality, in the shape of the experiments carried out by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1973. It is a journey from the fiction of Hamlet’s madness to the fiction of the madness of Dr. Rosenhan and his collaborators, who passed themselves off as mentally ill in order to question psychiatric practices and eventually denounce the labelling employed by these institutions. All these experiences were collected and analysed in their study On being sane in insane places and this compendium is precisely where this artistic project finds its point of departure”.
On being sane in insane places is a study published in 1973 by psychologist David Rosenhan, in which he criticises and questions psychiatric diagnosis.
Influenced by the theories of Doctor Laing, Rosenhan carried out an experiment in which eight collaborators pretended to hear voices in order to gain admission to various North American hospitals; they did not complain of any other symptoms. The pseudo-patients gave false names and occupations, but did not lie where other biographical information or personal circumstances were concerned. All of them, including the professor, were admitted and erroneously diagnosed as having psychiatric disorders; specifically, seven of them with schizophrenia and the eighth with manic depressive psychosis.
Once these pseudo-patients had been admitted, they behaved normally and told the doctors that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. But, instead of questioning the diagnosis, and incapable of detecting the lie, the psychiatrists insisted that their charges were manifesting symptoms of mental illness, and they continued in confinement for an average of nineteen days, each of them being forced to take anti-psychotic medication.
Once inside, they ought to have been able to convince the hospital staff that they were in their right mind and leave of their own free will, but none of them managed to be discharged until they accepted the diagnosis that they were mentally ill and took medication.
When their findings were made public, a psychiatric hospital challenged Rosenhan to send pseudo-patients to his hospital so that its staff could detect them. Rosenhan accepted the proposition and over the ensuing weeks the hospital identified 41 new patients as pseudo-patients and considered more than 42 of the 193 who had arrived in recent weeks to be suspicious. However, in this second experiment Rosenhan had sent no-one to the hospital.
The aim of Rosenhan’s study was to determine whether patients’ symptoms can be categorised, whether these categories are objective, and if they match the characteristics manifested by the individual. After checking the results of his experiments he reached the conclusion that psychiatric diagnoses depend on the observers’ perceptions and that mental diagnoses are seen as irreversible. Rosenhan denounced this alienating situation and its invasion of privacy, not only questioning psychiatric diagnoses but also the depersonalisation and labelling practiced by psychiatric institutions.
Today anyone can be a pseudo-patient, in a case of workplace mobbing, for instance, a practice that has recently become so frequent; one of the characteristics of such harassment is the spreading of rumours that a certain person is crazy. A person might as a result be cruelly confined, wrongly diagnosed and stripped of all rights, while the medical response to the situation would be the same as it was forty years ago. The fact is that traditional psychiatric practices, their Cartesian perspective rooted in 19th century notions, are responsible for the perpetuation of repression that reduces the patient to a mere object that can never become a subject. The subject-patient is deprived of all rights, forming no part of communication because it is non-existent, while the observer’s gaze is not to be questioned.
We still survive like dogs, whether it be Pavlov’s domesticated dog or the abused hound described by Kafka. Listen to the subject’s discourse, not its bark or its fury, love the vocal gesture, the sound that, on noticing the existence of another, in turn considers me...
When it is no longer possible to speak, in an articulate or inarticulate manner, and barking is a symptom of madness, then something is rotten to the core, something smells of Denmark.
THE ARTIST
GEMA INTXAUSTI was born one market day in Gernika-Lumo in 1966. She studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, where she graduated in 1990, and at a later date studied Film at the University College for the Creative Arts in England. Currently lives and works in Edinburgh.Gema participated in workshops directed, respectively, by Angel Bados in 1989, Pepe Espaliú in 1992, and María Luisa Fernández in 1996, all of which took place in Arteleku, Donostia-San Sebastián.
Scholarships of note include those awarded by the Regional Council of Bizkaia for Visual Arts Creation in 1994 and in 2000, under the aegis of the Basque Government. In 2001 she took part in the exhibition Gaur, Hemen, Orain, held at the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts.
"... MEANWHILE... RAPTURE"
5 November 2013 - 19 January 2014
From the tamed Pávlov's dog to the abused dog of Kafka, when it is no longer possible to talk and barking is a symptom of madness is that something is deeply rotten.
Gema Intxausti
Gema Intxausti (Gernika-Lumo, 1966), one of the most personal voices to emerge from the most recent generations of Basque Artists, presents in Sala Rekalde her latest work entitled ... Meanwhile... rapture. This is a metaphor for madness both real and feigned, pain in its most desperate manifestation, rage, marriage as an act of usurpation; for the idiot, for exploitation, melancholy, accidental crime, vengeance, moral corruption and its most contemporary version, mobbing. For her purpose she sets out from the well-known quotation from Hamlet “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” and comes up with the title Something smells like Denmark, represented by means of a singular sculptural piece.
The phrase Something smells like Denmark in its sculptural representation displays an apparent lack of continuity and irregularity, as occurs in the soliloquies in Hamlet. Hamlet interrupts himself, speaking firstly with unease and then with acquiescence . He either finds it hard to express himself directly or betrays himself with his word games. It is not until the end of the play that Hamlet freely puts his feelings into words. As Pauline Kiernan argues, Hamlet “showed how a character's language can often be saying several things at once, and contradictory meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and disturbed feelings”.
For the artist, “this theatre within theatre takes us to another familiar reality, in the shape of the experiments carried out by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1973. It is a journey from the fiction of Hamlet’s madness to the fiction of the madness of Dr. Rosenhan and his collaborators, who passed themselves off as mentally ill in order to question psychiatric practices and eventually denounce the labelling employed by these institutions. All these experiences were collected and analysed in their study On being sane in insane places and this compendium is precisely where this artistic project finds its point of departure”.
On being sane in insane places is a study published in 1973 by psychologist David Rosenhan, in which he criticises and questions psychiatric diagnosis.
Influenced by the theories of Doctor Laing, Rosenhan carried out an experiment in which eight collaborators pretended to hear voices in order to gain admission to various North American hospitals; they did not complain of any other symptoms. The pseudo-patients gave false names and occupations, but did not lie where other biographical information or personal circumstances were concerned. All of them, including the professor, were admitted and erroneously diagnosed as having psychiatric disorders; specifically, seven of them with schizophrenia and the eighth with manic depressive psychosis.
Once these pseudo-patients had been admitted, they behaved normally and told the doctors that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. But, instead of questioning the diagnosis, and incapable of detecting the lie, the psychiatrists insisted that their charges were manifesting symptoms of mental illness, and they continued in confinement for an average of nineteen days, each of them being forced to take anti-psychotic medication.
Once inside, they ought to have been able to convince the hospital staff that they were in their right mind and leave of their own free will, but none of them managed to be discharged until they accepted the diagnosis that they were mentally ill and took medication.
When their findings were made public, a psychiatric hospital challenged Rosenhan to send pseudo-patients to his hospital so that its staff could detect them. Rosenhan accepted the proposition and over the ensuing weeks the hospital identified 41 new patients as pseudo-patients and considered more than 42 of the 193 who had arrived in recent weeks to be suspicious. However, in this second experiment Rosenhan had sent no-one to the hospital.
The aim of Rosenhan’s study was to determine whether patients’ symptoms can be categorised, whether these categories are objective, and if they match the characteristics manifested by the individual. After checking the results of his experiments he reached the conclusion that psychiatric diagnoses depend on the observers’ perceptions and that mental diagnoses are seen as irreversible. Rosenhan denounced this alienating situation and its invasion of privacy, not only questioning psychiatric diagnoses but also the depersonalisation and labelling practiced by psychiatric institutions.
Today anyone can be a pseudo-patient, in a case of workplace mobbing, for instance, a practice that has recently become so frequent; one of the characteristics of such harassment is the spreading of rumours that a certain person is crazy. A person might as a result be cruelly confined, wrongly diagnosed and stripped of all rights, while the medical response to the situation would be the same as it was forty years ago. The fact is that traditional psychiatric practices, their Cartesian perspective rooted in 19th century notions, are responsible for the perpetuation of repression that reduces the patient to a mere object that can never become a subject. The subject-patient is deprived of all rights, forming no part of communication because it is non-existent, while the observer’s gaze is not to be questioned.
We still survive like dogs, whether it be Pavlov’s domesticated dog or the abused hound described by Kafka. Listen to the subject’s discourse, not its bark or its fury, love the vocal gesture, the sound that, on noticing the existence of another, in turn considers me...
When it is no longer possible to speak, in an articulate or inarticulate manner, and barking is a symptom of madness, then something is rotten to the core, something smells of Denmark.
THE ARTIST
GEMA INTXAUSTI was born one market day in Gernika-Lumo in 1966. She studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, where she graduated in 1990, and at a later date studied Film at the University College for the Creative Arts in England. Currently lives and works in Edinburgh.Gema participated in workshops directed, respectively, by Angel Bados in 1989, Pepe Espaliú in 1992, and María Luisa Fernández in 1996, all of which took place in Arteleku, Donostia-San Sebastián.
Scholarships of note include those awarded by the Regional Council of Bizkaia for Visual Arts Creation in 1994 and in 2000, under the aegis of the Basque Government. In 2001 she took part in the exhibition Gaur, Hemen, Orain, held at the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts.