During our recent visit to Amsterdam we encountered the following graffito that really grabbed my attention and gave me pause for thought. “What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.” Well: I have to confess I have some spontaneous sympathy with that. I suppose it depends what you mean.
I agree with the bit about garlic and salad. We have wild garlic growing in the lane past the front of our house, and I make regular raids on it, to add to the herbal mixture. It gives a far more delicate flavour than crushing bulbs of garlic. For some reason the British have never managed to get the hang of salad, and if they do dress it rather dull mayonnaise seems to be the most popular solution. At least that is better than the situation during my childhood, when people used an appalling concoction known as “salad cream”. Thank God we don’t see much of that these days, so I suppose that there has been some progress.
But “insanity and art”? I have no problems with the idea that artists stand outside the scope of “normal” ways of looking at the world. I have been impressed for some time by David Hockney’s insistence that, above all things, the task of the artist is to look. In his view we reflect back to society in general things that are normally missed. This does not imply necessarily that the artist is touched by insanity. We are required simply to acquire a discipline that others do not possess.
Where I begin to develop a sympathy with the graffito is the possible suggestion that art often loses touch with “reality” and entertains possibilities for being and seeing that might be dismissed in normal circumstances as fantasy. I guess that there is an element here of seeing things and hearing voices that in the everyday world could be dismissed as schizophrenia. Linked to that is our propensity on occasions to say things that in other contexts would be embarrassing, rather like a small child commenting aloud on the bad habits of an elderly relative. Lack of inhibition, however, is linked only very loosely to “insanity”. Where, perhaps, we might be considered as cases for treatment is the obsessive-compulsive disorder that drives us to make art whatever the circumstances and the cost. I’m not convinced, however, that this benefits society as a good dressing lifts a salad.
I’m reminded, of course, of Shakespeare’s comment that, “genius is to madness near allied, and thin partitions do the twain divide.”
I reckon I need to think a bit more about that one.