Quick, which is more nuts, a picture of a Santa cat waving a baby Jesus cat at three kittens who are more interested in some kind of perfectly circular ham on a table in the bushes, or a vegetal fractal cat? Yeah, I don't know either, but the progression of English artist Louis Wain's cat paintings from anthropomorphic felines cavorting in high style to something that looks a lot more like a machine elf than a cat has been cited as a typical example of the artist's slip into schizophrenia.
Trouble is, the progression is spurious and the diagnosis posthumous. Wain didn't date his works, and as a fantastically prolific artist, only a fraction of his output is datable by its publication. The progression of the paintings that pops up in psychology text books was created by psychiatrist Walter Maclay as support for his own experiments with the effects of mescaline-induced psychosis on art. No factually established chronology involved.
A successful freelance artist, Wain developed a specialization in cats after his wife Emma began to feel the effects of breast cancer early in their marriage. For three years Wain amused his suffering wife by painting copious renditions of the beloved pet cat that brought her comfort. Emma strongly encouraged her husband to publish these works, and after her death, his depictions of cats golfing, having tea, and attending the opera brought Wain increasing popularity. After all, picture books with titles like Somebody's Pussies have always sold well.
Although he enjoyed a strong career, Wain supported his five unmarried sisters. And well, he was a bit gullible. Publishers repeatedly took advantage of him in his heyday, and as the Victorian fad for anthropomorphized animals declined, he made several very poor business decisions. He became moody and occasionally violent, and his sisters, with whom he lived, had him locked up in an asylum, easy enough to achieve at the time, be the patient mad or not, so long as they were impoverished social misfits.
So was Wain mad? And what about those hundreds of paintings of machine elves - I mean cats?
Everybody's familiar with the crazy artist narrative. Western culture has one narrative for women, who get to produce increasingly emotionally poignant works as they slip into suicidal depression. Men get to become powerfully innovative and wild in their creativity as schizophrenia takes over their minds. It's a familiar tragic arc. Bold, unconventional artist climbs to success, he is praised as a genius, then a fatal flaw is exposed. His work becomes stranger, his behaviour erratic. His art is revealed as a product of madness rather than a product of genius. We may still appreciate the form, he is an accomplished artist yes, but we no longer have to consider meaning. The meaning is madness and it is madness to take madness too seriously.
There are certainly other views to take. Wain churned out hundreds of cat paintings every year. They seem to have started out as a mixture of practice and comfort, but they became his bread and butter. The guy loved cats, sure, but repeatedly painting them may well have been Wain's one good business decision rather than the supposed obsession that fits it into the crazy artist narrative. And if a sane man paints a cat every two to three days for twenty years, is it really any wonder that he plays around with his style?
From the perspective of technique, Wain's fractal cats amaze. The breakdown in ability that co-occurs with schizophrenia is not evident. We might never know, but it's entirely possible that Wain began producing these paintings early in his career alongside the socially acceptable pictures that earned his living. It seems reasonable to imagine that the experiment with pattern and color and the freedom to draw sneaky and cruel expressions served as an outlet after producing tens of pictures of treacle sweet kittens picnicking in a pile of roses.
Across professions, people desire to develop, to push themselves, and when they have reached a certain level of mastery, to play. When this play is comprehensible, it is the laudable sign of a developed mind. When it makes us uncomfortable, steps must be taken, and the crazy artist narrative springs into action.
In western culture, the place of madness is the margins. Prophets to the desert and mystics atop pillars at the edge of town in the classical age, madmen put aboard ships in the medieval era, the insane confined to asylums after the Enlightenment. Sacred as lepers because they suffer, and just as unclean. In the expulsion of madmen, a great fear of psychic contamination is exposed. The mad must be quarantined and the infection contained.
Yet we crave contact with the otherworldly. Stylites, those mystics perched on pillars, closer to heaven than other folk, were visited for wisdom. Recontextualized, talk that would be deemed unacceptable in the streets of town could be appreciated as a beautifully obscure reflection of truth. At physical distance, bordered by conventions of interpretation and rituals of reception, the risk of contamination recedes and a channel to the spiritual or otherworldly is opened.
So established, this channel is safe. We observe without being overwhelmed, our reason swept aside by the spirit, our mind swallowed by the birthing void.
If art invokes an unbound contact with the otherworldly, we can cram the artist into the crazy artist narrative, bending and binding the facts of her life until a framework of interpretation and reception surrounds her. We no longer need fear her work and what it could portend. We don't have to ponder how the work changes our being in the world; we have changed its manner of being, contained the infection. And still the channel to the otherworldly is open, in a superficial way. We observe without being affected. The great overwhelming fear of powers that dwarf us, that derive of nothing akin to human reason, is transformed into entertainment. We listen to the stylite and laugh. We look at Wain's cats and think what a funny picture.
In defining Wain's machine elf cats as the products of a diseased mind, we grant ourselves the illusion that we understand them. Hell, my practice or stress relief suppositions do the same. We place the order that suits us onto the image, and when we stare into the unreadable eyes of the branching, spiraling cat, it is no longer the holy void we see but a reflection.
