Written by: Lake Angela, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Both personal experience and historical analysis reveal that artists on the schizophrenia spectrum excel at expressing our remarkable ways of experiencing the world through visual media. In fact, I have wondered whether the so-called positive symptoms of schizophrenia spectrum cognition contribute to the way we tend to present color as vividly ornate yet sweeping in its movement across visual art, poetry, performance, and multimedia artworks!
Historical examples can be viewed in the influential 1922 collection Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (often translated Artistry of the Mentally Ill) published by Hans Prinzhorn and featuring such accomplished artists as August Neter and Franz Pohl. The visual artists represented were referred to therein as The Schizophrenic Masters, and their work made an indelible impression on the more famous Expressionist painters who nevertheless looked upon the schizophrenic masters as artistic primitives revealing base human emotions through their wild brushstrokes and color choices. In this way, the schizophrenic masters were subjects of condescension even as their artwork was admired and their aesthetics appropriated by others.
Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and the Blaue Reiter group as a whole became famous after espousing and further developing the Expressionist aesthetic initiated by the schizophrenic masters and other “naïve” artists. Although Marc and Kandinsky tragically faced death and exile respectively during the course of the war, as a schizophrenic artist, Franz Pohl was targeted and eliminated by the regime. He was one of about 250,000 murdered in the course of Aktion T4, the Nazi program to eliminate those with schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, and related psychiatric disorders by gas chamber or starvation. The involuntary euthanasia of the disabled by authorized physicians and other Nazi medical students surpassed 70,000 murders just between 1940 and 1941.
While those called schizophrenic masters undoubtedly have influenced the course of color meaning and composition, the little recognition they receive is not based on their art itself but on their art as seen through the prevailing neurotypical lens of illness. They are taken up as curiosities as well as artists and their work as studies of the expressions of the perverse in human nature. Other well-known examples of schizophrenic masters who contributed new visions to the field of visual art, though they also are not as revered as those formally remembered as Expressionists, include Adolf Wölfli, who was memorialized in the 1921 study Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist). More recently, Canadian artist William Kurelek became known for paintings like The Maze, which he created while in a London hospital under treatment for schizophrenia.
Aside from deriving influence, synesthetes such as Wassily Kandinsky bear another connection to schizophrenia spectrum thinking when their art so clearly involves the sounds and movements of color into bodies and shapes, as Kandinsky explores and clarifies in Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art). As noted earlier, often there is a clear commonality across schizophrenia spectrum artists’ work: ornately detailed and vivid color patterns and, in many cases, asymmetrical or warped, though still geometric, shapes are stunning characteristics. My own visual transcriptions of the world fit these descriptions. The energetic drawing shown above, Trompeten, is my rendition of the sound of trumpets, an artistic interpretation made more complex by seeing the sound of trumpets through the Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl’s poem written in German and translated into color movement idioms. Regardless of whether my work is successful as a translation, one can see that the musical sounds speak color!
Although I work primarily in poetry and movement, like many artists I know on the schizophrenia spectrum, transcribing the world of emotion in color comes very naturally, whether in multiple dimensions in performance work or in two dimensions on paper. The roles of color and movement are clearly important to me in my poetic and choreographic work, as they are to other artists on the schizophrenia spectrum. The role of sound is harder to describe in schizophrenia spectrum artwork.
Both in poetic and choreographic creations, I work closely with attention to rhythm and sound. However, I was asked recently how I choreograph to music, and I realized that I don’t—in fact, I never have. This is because sound, like color, is the property and expression of certain emotions to me, often extremely dissonant and never repeating in any pattern accessible to logic, so it also defies representation such that a general audience might hear my auditory experience. Similar to the phenomenon of auditory hallucination, the sound I hear may be distressing or confusing to a general audience rather than an expression of meaning by way of an emotional code, as I have learned to understand it.
As a result, I always choreograph to “silence” and then ask another artist such as my spouse to layer music over the composition or performance for the benefit of a general audience. As it is most commonly a largely neurotypical audience viewing my work right now, musical compositions with repetitions and patterns help audience members to connect my movement expressions with their own physical experiences of emotions. I place the term silence in scare quotes above because I suspect that I never really hear silence—I hear sounds amplified in the environment, color sounds, and things others don’t hear and might call hallucinations. So, dancing or composing to music with any kind of repeating notes or pattern—the features that appear to make it calming, enjoyable, meaningful, or catchy to others, depending on the kind of music and its purpose—would be overwhelming to me as a shock of bombarding stimuli, or at the least unproductive.
In my experience, some days the grass can speak particularly loudly, the trees echoing the comments through their root systems. I hear what I take to be nonhuman language, the speech of colors, and so much more in the environment nearly all the time. The total sound I hear can be overwhelming, and so far I am unable to parse through it enough to interpret and share in a way that others might understand. Compounded with this type of synesthetic enhancement of the environment is the experience of audio hallucination for many other people on the schizophrenia spectrum. Similar to the ways I have explained previously regarding my remarkable visions, auditory hallucination does not necessarily have to be frightening when we consider that it is a different way of understanding the world that can lead to a new way of creating based on different cognitive “wiring.”
In my artistic work, I do rely on an internal sound environment even though I do not choreograph with music. Another way of explaining is that I choreograph in silence, even though I never really hear silence, because that way I also can focus on developing the meanings of movements and their qualities to be interpreted by viewers as connotation. There is also a dimension to seeing dance that is physically experienced based on the audience’s own experiences of embodiment, so I need the meaning of dance pieces to be emotive in every way possible—to imbue emotion as a way of meaning-making.
Everything in the environment “speaks,” sometimes overwhelmingly. For some on the schizophrenia spectrum, sound environments can be divided into internal and external environs. External sounds such as plants speaking can be controlled to an extent by changing my physical location if I desire, but internal sound cannot really be altered—except perhaps by a rather drastic change in mood, as from severe anxiety to relative calm. I hear the sound that corresponds with color and emotion in my movement and connect these to make meaning, approaching the emotional extremes of such sound as I experience it.
Of course, it is helpful to remember that like autism, schizophrenic experiences exist on a spectrum, and though I have presented some historical as well as personal examples here, there are bound to be varieties of creative experiences among historical as well as present-day schizophrenic masters. To further our understanding of and the possibilities for translation across media, particularly in respect to the nonverbal languages theoretically accessible to all (what have been called across history, in more idealistic terms, the universal language!), I would like to hear from others who engage in intersemiotic translation. My process diverges for every poem I translate into dance, each work of art commanding and necessitating its own way of language. Whether on the schizophrenia spectrum or not, how do you engage in transformation, translating associative, creative thinking across media?
Lake Angela, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Lake Angela is a poet, translator, and dancer-choreographer who creates at the confluence of verbal language and movement. As Director of the international multimedia group Companyia Lake Angela, they offer sessions in guided healing through poetry and movement and provide a platform for schizophrenia spectrum creativity. Their full-length books of poetry, Organblooms (2020) and Words for the Dead (2021), are published by FutureCycle Press. As poetry editor for Punt Volat, they select and publish innovative new poetry in four languages with co-founder Kevin Richard Kaiser. As co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing Services, they help aspiring writers polish their manuscripts for publication. Lake holds a PhD from The University of Texas at Dallas for their intersemiotic translations of German Expressionist poetry into dance and their MFA in poetry.
