I’ve been reading about Heinrich Anton Muller in Colin Rhodes’ excellent book Outsider Art – Spontaneous Alternatives and am struck by Muller’s preoccupation with the construction of machines of no obvious purpose. (Muller was an inmate of the Munsingen asylum in Switzerland from 1906, for the last 24 years of his life.)
In this NY Times 1995 art review the influence of these machines on Tinguely and Picasso is made clear. Here’s Muller beside one of his fantastic machines, some kind of perpetual motion construction, and in some way useful to him in maintaining some kind of “sane balance” within his insanity (his initial breakdown having been triggered by the theft of his design for a grape harvesting machine, which he had failed to patent).
(Images ©Zentsch/BAWAG FOUNDATION)
The machines he eventually destroyed – in response supposedly to his incarceration. Luckily, his works on paper survived, and these have been a major influence on many artists, including Dubuffet.
Heinrich Anton Muller
Cannonne
colour pencil on cardboard, 31.3 x 49.6 cm
And here’s a note on Muller by Rhodes, one that for me has hints of the poetic, the existential, the humorous and the ubiquitous:
At the hospital Muller spent much of his time standing in a deep hole and in later years he spent hours staring through a large telescope-like object of his own construction at a small object he had made.
By ubiquitous I mean that Muller’s behaviour differs only possibly in degree from what the rest of us do most of the time….looking through mechanisms of our construction at objects we have made, a process well described by phenomenologists. Which leads me to wonder again about that term “insane”, and how convenient it’s been as a protection for those of us not so categorised.
As James Hillman said in The Myth of Analysis (in his essay on psychological language) the construction in the eighteenth century of the psychological language we largely still use was defensive :
Perhaps the immense energy that went into ordering mental pathology was meant to hold mental disorder at bay. Why, we may ask, were the new continents of the psyche not named with more felicity? Irrational and unconscious, like insane, are negative signs, begrudgingly affixed by reason to what it does not comprehend. One might have called Uranus or Neptune “non-Saturn”, Australia “un-Asia”. Even that Kantian-style definition of the unconscious as a negative Grenzbegriff (negative borderline concept) betrays the same perjorative bias toward the speech of the soul, whose expressions are simply imaginative, symbolic, fantastic, mythic – all words standing on their own, requiring no prior terms that are rational, conscious, and sane.
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