23/04/2024

Panic Insanity

"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

Albert Camus

“Ah, yes! The Torture Garden!  Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion:  these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.  What I saw today, and what I heard, is no more than a symbol to me of the entire earth.  I have vainly sought a respite in quietude and repose in death, and I can find them nowhere.”

Octave Mirbeau, The Garden, Chapter 9, The Torture Garden, 1899.


Art is, and usually has been, not a monologue or rant – but a dialogue and discourse, a debate, and a shared communal celebration. I do not believe that only those that suffer can make great art - art history in fact proves the opposite. Most great artists have been healthy and socialized human beings, capable of running professional careers, that brings them into contact with others. Likewise, the world is full of people who suffer more than van Gogh or Artaud ever did, but they are not artists, and there are plenty of mediocre artists who will never create anything of significance. However, the art that I have mostly needed to look, has a tragic component to it, which usually was born from artists who had similarly tragic visions.


I have always made art because I suffer. I often paint my best works when racked by misery and self-loathing - but if I manage to create something and I am proud of it - I am briefly relieved like an addict who gets a hit. Suffering may have fuelled many of my art works, but it has also prevented me from creating freely countless times. The shadow of my mental illness, arrived at the same time as my creative urge, however, if I have continued as an artist, it has often been because I have had few other options. Trying to make the most of my limitation, I have tried to make a virtue out of my trapped, and circular creativity. Still, my borderline personality disorder and psychotic ambition led me to over-rate my arts importance, and its testimonial rights. I tried to turn my purgatory of creativity into a socially lionized fetish. My masochistic confrontation of my own failings – led me down an ever more tragic cul-de-sac. The solipsistic, autobiographical, pessimistic, anti-social and transgressive elements of my art, only further doomed me to failure in an art world that deemed such traits as old-fashioned, irrelevant, and unacceptable as art. Until my success with the Oisín Gallery, I thought that my suffering would end with money and fame, but in fact in many ways in increased; it took me years to realize that the trouble was in my head - not in the world.


A lonely, needy boy, my brooding introversion cut me off from the rest of the world, and made me the subject of suspicion and jokes. I went around with my eyes cast downward, and with a perpetual pout. I became dark and suspicious, reacting aggressively to any slight, and was paranoid that the world was out to get me just as my mother had warned me. I lived through a terrible kind of loneliness as a child. I felt like a dog kicked so many times it could only cower in a corner. Within this solitude, I had to learn how to entertain myself. I lived more in my head than in the world. I had an unbounded capacity to enter books and paintings, to inhabit cultural worlds often long since passed. The more I avoided the real world, the more literary and artistic worlds became my greater reality. I was moved by art so much that Dickens and Kafka, Renoir and Degas seemed more real to me than my own family or friends. I used art to both escape the real world and at the same time reshape it. 


I have taught myself without any greater purpose than to stimulate my mind and find solutions to my own existence. Teaching myself from books, I let my tastes and interests at the time to guide my idiosyncratic studies. I find being taught by someone else almost unbearable. Yet, when I was young, and I trusted you, I could talk to you for hours about Schiele, but I did not know how to pronounce his name! Because, I had only read about him in books.


Intellectually and creatively, I may be very talented, but emotionally I am stunted and immature. Most of my talents are those of the housebound ‘genius’, not the active man of the world. Locked in my bedroom, I dreamed of artistic glory. My fantasy that I was the greatest artist alive, was based on nothing but a depressive need to justify my meaningless life to myself.


Sometimes I have a great day with the paintbrush, other days I cannot seem to do anything right.  Thus, every few weeks I find myself plunged into depression, unable to find any pleasure in life, in art or in friendship. Like a cripple, I lie in my bed, my stomach tight, my brain like cement and my mind running in a downward spiral. None of this is new to me, I have suffered similar bouts of despair all my life and I will suffer them again. They come and go as inexplicably as rain.


They say that more women suffer from depression, but that more men kill themselves. trying to answer this riddle some have suggested that the reason for the disproportionately high rate of male to female suicides is because of the more aggressive ways that men chose to use to kill themselves by. There is some truth in this, but I would ask, what does it take to push a man to the point of a lethal means of disposal, one with no hope of rescue? I think that the answer lies in men's repressed and inarticulate psychology. Men and boys in particular do not have the language skills, and emotional intelligence of girls and women. Men can never assume the mantel of victimhood that women own, nor can they act and manipulate people as easily as women. Although people often tell men to open up about their feelings, they do not accept men if their feelings are about politically incorrect issues of masculinity, or issues with women. Moreover, for a man, it is often worse to admit depression than to kill themselves, such is the shame and emasculation they feel. Add to that men's lack of close friendships, physical comforting from others, and inability to talk about mucky female things like 'feelings', and you have a molten ball of hopeless self-hate, with nothing to cool it down. Unequipped to analyse and deal with their darkest emotions, men bottle up all their frustrations - until it explodes upon themselves or on others. 


When I ended up in a psychiatric hospital at the age of twenty, after my first attempted suicide, my family and doctors kept asking me, "Why did you want to kill yourself?" I could not answer the question. I did not know myself. All I knew was that my life was unbearable. It took me years of therapy for me to realize that my fucked-up childhood had twisted and distorted my mind beyond reason. I mention this not to go into my past but to point out that many people don't understand their illness or as the psychiatrists say, they have no 'insight' into their condition. Personally, I found that understanding the root of my mental illness was vital, though not a cure.


There are many kinds of depression, but since I am not a specialist in the workings of the mind, I will restrict myself to my own. People think that depression is a rather monotonous catatonic experience, if only that where true. My depressions range from mild sadness to morbid melancholy to boiling rage, to self-loathing bile, and self-pitying martyrdom. Depression seems to strike like a blow to my heart and mind, robbing me of all courage, energy and will to live.


Swamped in depression, I morbidly feared for the beloved lives of my mother, my girlfriend, my best friends or even my pets both living and dead. Or I could only selfishly think about myself, my suffering, my rotten childhood, my rejections from women and the art world, my failure as an artist, my pain, and me, me, me and oh yes me!


Some say that depression is a highly narcissistic illness, and they are not wrong. Perhaps that is what makes it feel like such a selfish, cowardly, and defeatist experience. Depression feels like a capitulation from the fight of existence and the race for power, but it also feels like the most clear-headed assessment of existence - absurd, meaningless, cruel, and pointless.


I remember reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (1946) and in his chapter on Arthur Schopenhauer he pointed out, “From a scientific point of view, optimism and pessimism are alike objectionable: optimism assumes, or attempts to prove, that the universe exists to please us, and pessimism that it exists to displease us. Scientifically, there is no evidence that it is concerned with us either one way or the other. The belief in either pessimism or optimism is a matter of temperament, not of reason, but the optimistic temperament has been much commoner among Western philosophers. A representation of the opposite party is therefore likely to be useful in bringing forward considerations which would otherwise be overlooked.” (Bernard Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1993, P.727.) 


Those people unfamiliar with depression like to trot out helpful tips like, pull your socks up, stop pitying yourself, go for a walk, get some sun, make a list of your achievements, tell yourself that you are a good and worthwhile person and so on. But how do you go for a walk, when merely getting out of bed is an ordeal? How do you get pleasure out in the sun, when you crave the privacy of a darkened room? How do you make a list of your achievements when even if you do, you find them all hollow and meaningless? How do you tell yourself you are a good person when every single sin, act of cruelty and stupidity you have ever committed, lurches forward in your mind like a mass of mutant zombies? 


Yet that is all part of the madness of my emotions. When I am depressed, I don't think to myself, "You have a distorted sense of reality!" Instead, I say to myself, "Ah-ha here I am again - staring the reality of human existence full in the face! Life is utterly meaningless! There is no God! My art is worthless and will end up on a rubbish tip when I die! There is no hope! Life is just a vicious and unjust game - and I am a loser!" 


When I am depressed, I can hardly bare to watch television or listen to the radio. I see the smug, vain, and stupid media heads chattering utter gibberish, talking about this new car or that new film, or this new actress, or that new dress - my stomach turns, and I am fit to puke. Watching hour after hour of boasting fools; attentions seeking whores; strutting macho pricks; sub-standard intellectuals pontificating; Feminists moaning and carping; politicians lying, fighting for power, shitting all over each other, and seeking to police the thoughts and actions of everyone in society - makes me revolt against the whole world. But watching the news is even more upsetting in all its painful barbarity, senseless violence, and human misery. As for pop music with its ‘I love you. You love me’ or 'I'm a sexy boss-bitch you'd be so lucky to have me', or 'I'm a gangster stud bow down to my greatness', or ‘shake your booty’ chants, is sickening in the extreme! A loop of hormonal repetition, and narcissistic posturing as insane as any lunatic’s rant.


Personally, the only cures I have found for my mental illness are my art, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, psychotherapy, and the time to reflect and rebuild my psychic defences. Then one day out of the blue I wake up and feel happy, and events conspire to encourage my optimism. I paint, I draw, and I enjoy my hours and days again. As the days progress I feel more and more confident and start to hope that my art will be one day be recognized, then I start thinking about my retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art, my interview in Artforum and my lecture at Yale! Of course, I am genius I realize, so I send off some submissions, to small art galleries in Dublin and abroad. Then I wait and wait and wait. Like a trickle the replies come back one after the other, no, no and thanks but no thanks. So back, I fall once more, into the cold dark light of reality.


You see for me art is an alternative religion, a purpose for living and literally a reason not to kill myself. As a religion, it is not up to much. Even if I were to become a genius like Michelangelo, Goya, or Picasso, it would not be enough. I would still die, still rot in the ground, and my art no matter how revered and cared for by the most skilled conservators in the best museums in the world, would decay to nothing in a few thousand years. I remember when Woody Allen as a child in Anny Hall went to the doctors suffering from depression. The doctor asked him why he was depressed, and Woody said something to the effect that the universe was endlessly expanding and would eventually burn itself out - so what was the point of doing anything? It was utterly hilarious, but exactly the kind of thoughts I have had all my life. To a megalomaniacal egotist, such thoughts are part of the morbid fabric of despair. Art creates a fictional lottery of immortality, but the prize (even if you win it) is a bogus one, with a built in used by date.


But I do take courage from the fact that heroes of mine like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh, Winston Churchill, Sylvia Plath, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen, Robert Hughes, Morrissey, Curt Cobain, and Brian Sewell have all suffered similar 'black-dogs'.  To me that is one of the great things about art, it is a community of like-minded souls who as Morrissey would say, "Have lived and loved and suffered just like me.” In a world of shinny happy people, their voice is even more profound and all the more meaningful. For one of the most perverse things I have found, is that the sadder I am, the more I need to hear sad music, but it does not make me feel worse, it makes me feel a bittersweet joy that sooths my heart and calms my mind.


Of course, there are communities and communities, and some are more helpful than others. One of the saddest things I have ever heard about on the Internet, are those suicide groups in which sick and twisted people goad others into killing themselves. Personally, I find such groups utterly revolting. If suicide is anything, it is a personal choice, anything else is murder and cowed stupidity. Moreover, if depression has taught me anything it is that depression is a temporary emotional state, that can change with a kind word, embrace, or new friendship. As they say, "suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary crisis.” For me suicide is no longer an option, I have long since outgrown it. Maybe life is meaningless and absurd, but everyone has the right to live his or her life to its fullest expression.

The Sanest Lunatic in The Art World Asylum

“Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.”

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, Virago Press, 1979, P.13. 


“The Decadent is usually male, since decadence, literally a “falling off,” requires renunciation of a cultural burden, abandonment of a public persona or duty.”

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, London: Penguin Books 1990, P. 437.


"When I have inspired universal horror and disgust, I shall have conquered solitude.”

Charles Baudelaire, Journals.

 

I am an extremely psychologically disturbed man. I suffer from a borderline personality disorder. But as insane as I am, through decades studying art history, and interacting with the art world, I have come to realise I am the sanest man in the insane asylum of the art world. Because, unlike so many that populate the art world, I know I am unwell! 


Panic is only a heartbeat away from chaos and anarchy, it is a condition feared in crowds and the individual. However, I have repeatedly experienced this state. Most of my life I have suffered a low-level anxiety that pervades everything I do. Occasionally that anxiety has erupted into full-blown panic – brought on by my mother’s demented behaviour, my own insane actions, or the behaviour of others towards me. Shell-shocked from my childhood, my art was a response to panic and fear – an art based on emotion not reason, the unspeakable not the theoretical.


Sometimes I wonder if my one and only fate as an artist and human being is to be recorded as a case study, to entertain the prurient and those fascinated by the psychology of man. I have been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. BPD, an incurable personality disorder, is characterized by; unstable relationships, fear of abandonment, identity issues accompanied by a chronic sense of emptiness, self-harm, suicidal mood swings lasting from several hours to a maximum of a few days, intense anger, and a tendency to think in black and white terms, rendering the patient unable to avoid conflicts. Sufferers often have histories of trauma and abuse. They are said to love beyond measure on Monday and then hate beyond reason on Tuesday. They have a disordered sense of self and are said to be bad as well as mad. They are regarded as troublesome patients, always looking for attention, watching for signs of rejection, and are highly manipulative. It is said that a suffer of a borderline personality disorder can talk with a psychiatrist for over five hours about themselves, and the psychiatrist is still left feeling they do not know the true personality of the patient. My first psychiatrist Dr Anne McDonald, in her notes remarked that I had a "very unusual personality", and that it "was difficult to have empathy" with me.


Much later, I realised that I mostly suffered from a quite borderline personality disorder in which I turned all my shame, anger, and sadness on myself, isolated myself from others, and laser focussed all my rage and mortification into my art. Because of my childhood, I also suffer from an avoidant personality disorder, narcissism, and an acute obsessive-compulsive disorder. My OCD resulted in my obsession with artistic productivity, and vain attempts to beat Picasso; my Sexual OCD and constant self-comforting masturbation followed by intense shame and guilt, and which was triggered by my mother’s flirting with me, sexual exposure, sexual punishment, and physical abuse; and my confessional obsession which was a result of my Moral Scrupulosity OCD. I also suffered from social anxiety, gynophobia, toxic shame, chronically low self-esteem, and masochism most of my life. Because of my chaotic and traumatic childhood, and my subsequent quite borderline personality disorder, I had no fixed emotional, intellectual, sexual, or artistic identity. I was irritable, impulsive, had difficulty forming relationships and getting on with people or enjoying social situations. I was in a state of permanent identity crisis and perpetual artistic stylistic crisis. Moreover, I was constantly subjecting myself to examination, making judgements on my past styles and on the ultimate value of my artistic trajectory.


Whether dressed in women's clothes at eleven, getting into a physical fight with another student in Art College, being kicked out of Art College for indolence, bleeding from the wrists in a para-suicide attempt at twenty-one, wandering from one prostitute to another in Amsterdam at twenty-two, taking copious amounts of drugs in my late twenties, or being angrily rejected by 99 arts bodies, and my art being attacked as adolescent filth, my life was as far from the professional life of a contemporary artist as one could imagine. You don’t have to be in the business of understanding the human mind - to realize that my deranged young life, shaped the nature of my art.


When I was young, I did not think I was insane. From the age of seven and a half, I did everything in my power not to let my mother’s insanity infect me - nor let her crazed abuse break me. My inner art world - became my escape route from pain. I still do not think I was ever truly ‘mad’, since I was reacting to circumstances largely beyond my control, always retained a certain moral compass and most of my crimes were aesthetic ones. I just did not know how to cope with life - since no one had ever really taught me. Nevertheless, my nine attempted suicides, three psychiatric incarnations, six electro-convulsive treatments, sexual perversions, and drug abuse in my twenties, would certainly have deemed me a lunatic in the eyes of many who knew me at the time.


Since the age of twenty-one, I have taken anti-depressants like Prozac and Seroxate and anti-psychotics like Melleril and Olanzapine and these drugs have taken the suicidal edge off my depression and borderline personality disorder. However, what has helped me even more has been the love and acceptance of my girlfriends and the support of my many good friends and family. I feel very ashamed of my past behaviour - and hope that I will never return to those bad old days. Part of that process for me is texts like this, in which I try to come to an understanding of my life.


From the age of sixteen, I opted for an inhumanly exiled position from society, one that was heartbreakingly lonely, economically penurious, devoid of power, and creatively silenced. However, it was a position, which shielded me from the judgements, rules, and herd beliefs of my fellow man. As Jean Dubuffet wrote: "For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.” However, mental illness carries a great social stigma impossible to underestimate. As Peter Schjeldahl has pointed out: “The judgment of insanity is sometimes one with which we evade seeing into ourselves too deeply, an inner hygiene projected outward. No judgment is trickier, or more apt to boomerang.” (Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991, P. 32.) The commuter on Dublin’s DART, is fearful of people with mental illness and avoids those thought to be mentally deranged. Even I have at times avoided certain friends I know who suffer from schizophrenia, not out of fear, but out of a desire for self-preservation. Befriending a mentally deranged person, can result in hours spent dealing with their delusions and trying to persuade them to seek help. Frequently, one’s efforts are greeted, with nothing but hostility, denial, and bitterness. However, I have found that they can also be some of the most meaningful and real friendships in life.


My estranged existence with my insane mother made me ‘a stranger on the earth’ dimly trying to understand my existence, the mysteries of love and lust, and the nature of society through culture and culture alone. Somewhat like a modern day des Esseintes, the anti-hero in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ decadent and Symbolist novel A’rebours (Against Nature, 1893), I watched in silence the TV in my living room, read books, looked in awe at paintings in museums, and furtively glanced at women in the streets. Put in the position of a voyeur of the world and of women, I feared real human contact and social situations, which I felt hopelessly out of my depth in. Women petrified me, and even the most banal conversations with them sent me into a panic. Yet I wanted to understand them, so that I could reduce some of the terror, they provoked in me. Therefore, television, art, literature, cinema, and porn were the only ways I could enter any kind of fearless understanding or enjoyment of women. The unusual, perverted and compulsive demands I made on culture to teach me what life could not, led me to the observation that culture was a hopeless, deceitful, and unhealthy medium of education. Later, life taught me that an hour in the arms of a woman after a night of courtship, instructed me more than a year’s worth of reading books, looking at films, masturbating to porn or digesting philosophical or Feminist texts. The real texture of courtship, love, and lust I discovered, was impossible to truly convey in art. I still believe that art can hint at the depths of human experience, but one must have had a life to fill in the blanks.


The German Neo-Classical sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, accused Rembrandt in writing of being possibly the greatest liar in art history, but Rembrandt never contradicted himself and maintained a consistent story. And it is true that even (maybe especially) the greatest artists present a vision of the world that is unique but also a lie. Artists like Picasso would say that they use lies to point out greater truths and it is up to the viewer to decide whether to accept their version of reality as more truthful that truth itself. Personally, I have never possessed one singular truth, rather, my art has expressed only what I have felt and believed at different stages of my life. For example, I truly believed in the self-pitying adolescent angst of my youthful paintings - but I was also honest enough to move on from it when it no longer represented my maturing truth. 

             

Nietzsche famously wrote that: “We have art to save ourselves from the truth.” Like many of Nietzsche's provocative pronouncements, it says a great deal, about how many people treat art - namely - as an escape from the drudgery, horror, and ugliness of life. Art as such is a form of grand distraction, from the intractable religious, political, and sexual injustices of existence. However, while I respect Nietzsche, my own attitude to art could not be more different. To me art is the expression of a search for the truth of my existence and the existence of others. And this search for truth conditions many of my responses to art. For while there are many forms of art that I can admire and enjoy - the art I truly adore and turn to in times of real depression is realist and expressionistic in nature. For in the pits of melancholy, when the media world appears to be nothing more than a ridiculous circus populated by stupid, attention-grabbing buffoons, I seek the gravitates of artists of real integrity, intelligence, sensitivity, and originality.


It is said that if someone were given the right to speak freely for ten minutes, people would be horrified by what goes on in their mind - much of which would be classified as anti-social, violent, sexually deviant, blasphemous, or criminal. Today, we have the internet to thank for revealing just how spiteful and evil people can be. In art, the cliché of the 'mad artist' is widely popular and strongly believed by the average person. What is it like to be mad? Would you know you were crazed, without being told by others that you were? In today's modern politically correct world, labels like 'mad', 'deranged' or 'lunatic' are not to be uttered. However, they remain in use in private, against those we dislike and if they are not used in the media, it does not mean that they are not still felt and acted upon by both the man in the street and those in positions of social authority. There is still a culture of blaming the victim in mental health. Yet in some ways, madness is empowering. It is a position I am quite willing to fall back on in times of isolation and stress. As R D Laing wrote in The Politics of Experience: “If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of this situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh is on us. They will see that what we all ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quiet ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds... Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough... The person going through ego-loss or transcendental experiences may or may not become in different ways confused. Then he might legitimately be regarded as mad. But to be mad is not necessarily to be ill, notwithstanding that in our culture the two categories have become confused... From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not ‘true’ sanity. Their madness is not ‘true’ madness. The madness of our patients is an artefact of the destruction wreaked on them by us and by them on themselves. Let no one suppose that we meet ‘true’ madness any more than that we are truly sane. The madness that we encounter in ‘patients’ is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego.” (R D Laing, The Politics of Experience, P.129-144.)


People, who have never known madness or who are looking back on it wistfully, usually Romanticize it. Nevertheless, madness as lived through - is a hellish form of mental self-torture - that can come to define and even destroy your life. For the public, stories about mad artists are comforting and amusing. It confirms their suspicion that talent comes with suffering, and reassures them that even if they do not have any talent, their life is not spiralling out of control. Madness allows society to classify oddballs like Blake, van Gogh or Dalí. The myth of the mad genius locates intellectual projects - which are undeniably brilliant, but devoid of common sense – on the margins. 


For centuries everything has been tried by doctors and quacks to cure madness and nothing has succeeded. Many philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and writers like John Dryden and Edgar Alan Poe have insisted upon the link between irrationality and creativity. John Dryden wrote: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” Poets like Blake and Holderlin and musicians like Schumann and Beethoven have all suffered bouts of depression or mental illness.


One of my favourite philosophers, the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer observed in The World As Will and Representation that: “It is often remarked that genius and madness have a side where they touch and even pass over into each other, and even poetic inspiration has been called a kind of madness.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation, Trans. E.F.J.Payne, Dover Publications Inc, 1969, P190.) He went on to site many examples of philosophers like Aristotle who wrote: “There has been no great mind without an admixture of madness.” And the biographies of great men of genius, such as Rousseau, Byron, and Alfieri further suggest a link with madness. However, Schopenhauer he went on to make the distinction between the mental cripple, trapped in his own circular thoughts and the healthy genius making an objective art of wisdom. Schopenhauer warned that: “…it has been observed that a poet may know man profoundly and througherly, but men very badly; he is easily duped, and is a plaything in the hands of the cunning and crafty.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Trans. E.F.J. Payne, Dover Publications Inc, 1969, P194.) In literature, the indecisive angst of Hamlet and nihilistic grief of King Leer, have long been the sources of debate on the nature of sanity.


Madness exposes the artist to intense and uncontrollable emotions, thoughts, and ways of viewing the world. They might suffer, but they also see deeper into the depths of existence than normal healthy people, who can repress the painful thoughts of being. Like a livewire, the artist suffering from a mental illness can become a seismograph of being. Having met many ordinary mentally healthy people who live drama free lives, I have often noted how intellectually and creatively barren they are. On the other hand, I have met many mentally ill people who although not creative, have obvious creative insights. The list of suicidal, tormented or sacrificed modernists is a long one; the Marquis de Sade, Goya, Holderlin, Blake, Friedrich, Kleist, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Strindberg, Ensor, Kirchner, Dalí, Artaud, Pollock, all suffered from mental illness, or depression. The fate of the modern artist has been to record the fall of man in all its torture. The sacrificial artist has his cousins in the suffering of Christ and the evolutionary theories of Darwin where the fate of the individual is at the expense of the greater survival of the species. Indeed, one of the most cogent analyses of van Gogh came from the equally tortured Antonin Artaud, who in his essay The Artist Suicided by Society, made clear that van Gogh's suicide was in fact nothing of the sort - it was a murder! Van Gogh who could not fit into a society who had no use for a man of his virtues and deemed that his death was a necessary sacrifice for the greater good of the society at large.


As Holland Cotter has pointed out, artists throughout history have been noted for their neurotic, morose and eccentric behaviour: “A detail-freak streak in Leonardo da Vinci’s personality led him to leave many projects unfinished. The 16th-century painter Federico Barocci was plagued by a psychosomatic malaise so crippling that for 50 years he worked only two hours a day and spent the rest of the time, in agony, in bed. (He must have worked extra-hard in those hours because he turned out a lot of product.)... The Mannerist painter Francesco Bassano, in a frenzy of paranoia (he thought the police were after him), jumped out a window and died. The Dutch artist Emanuel de Witte, best known for his immaculate church interiors, is thought to have drowned himself. The architect Francesco Borromini, damned by a critic as “a complete ignoramus, a corrupter of architecture, and the shame of our century,” ended it all with a sword.” (Holland Cotter, Odd Faces, Strange in Their Day, but Familiar in Our Time, The New York Times, 16th September 2010.)


Pierre Cabanne, in his monograph on van Gogh, excellently summed up the modern alienation of artists like van Gogh and pointed out its sociological rather than pathological nature when he wrote: “The inevitable breach which exists between genius and society existed in the case of van Gogh in its most dramatic but also its most impassioned form. People often fail to realize at what cost in suffering a work of art is born. By admiring it, praising its merits (having during his lifetime despised, insulted and cast out its creator), by granting him a place of honour in their museums, they think they are ‘rehabilitating’ their victim, whereas all they are doing is condemning his executioners all the more. Society was responsible for van Gogh’s ‘madness’ just as society was responsible for the fall of Rembrandt, discredited and abandoned by all, for the morbid obsessions of Goya, for Delacroix’s deliria, for Lautrec’s moral decay, for the cursed life of Pascin, for the martyrdom of Utrillo, for the ‘mysterious’ death of Nicolas de Staël. The cry from the cross – ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ – echoes through the ages, finding its most tragic expression in the spiritual night of the man who tried to impose his private universe on the society which gave him birth.” He went on, “Thus the problem of van Gogh cannot be discussed from the pathological point of view – although it will no doubt be discussed as such for years to come – but, as is seen from the study of his life and his work, the problem is a sociological one.” (Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh, London, Thames and Hudson, 1963, P.237.)


Van Gogh himself adored the minor, heavily impastoed canvases of Monticelli who had drank himself insane. In his last month’s, van Gogh wrote of himself as mad as Hugo van der Goes – the Gothic painter of genius who had a nervous breakdown and entered a monastery never to paint again. “Once again I am close to Hugo van der Goes’s madness in the picture by Emile Wauters. If I did not have kind of dual nature, a monk’s and a painter’s, I should long since have been quite totally in the aforesaid condition.” (Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh.)


Personally, I do not consider every lunatic a genius. Sometimes geniuses emerge who draw strength in the short term from their madness like van Gogh, Nietzsche, or Artaud, but many like Richard Gerstl were broken by it long before they matured. I try to make my madness a strength and accept that certain kinds of rational or classical modes will never suit my temperament.


Leo Tolstoy said that: "Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them…. It is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.” (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, 1898.) While I admire the moral integrity and power of Tolstoy’s prose, and while I agree with this quote, I know that my form of communication - is not what Tolstoy meant. Tolstoy in fact would have loathed my art, especially my pornographic art - which he would have attacked as evil and depraved. Yet I would have been in good company. Tolstoy in a fit of religious and idealistic piety, attacked Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bach, and Beethoven, not to mention his own books.  My art would have been too perverted, too aggressive, and too raw for his pious mind to take. Attacking the sexual explicitness of French painting, writing and popular song, Tolstoy wrote: “These are all works by people suffering from erotic mania. These people are apparently convinced that, since their entire life, as a result of their morbid condition, is concentrated on the smearing about of sexual abominations, it must mean that the entire life of the world is concentrated on the same thing.” (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, London: Penguin Classics, 1995 P. 62-3.) The poor man would have had a fit if he had seen my art.

               

Indeed, the great problem with Tolstoy is the narrowness of his taste and his narrow limitation of communication to that which can be proved to be good (again, a highly subjective thing, what can uplift and cure some, can alienate, madden, and lead to the death of others who cannot live up to false ideals.) Overall, I find much to admire in Tolstoy's definition of art. I too have hoped to communicate my feelings of alienation, pain, thwarted lust, and love for women in my art, as Kleist said: “…to be understood, if only on occasion, by one other human soul.” (Quoted in ‘Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings’, Ingo F. Walther, & Rainer Metzger, P.29, Taschen 1997.)


Herbert Read, who was also an admirer of Tolstoy also had problems with Tolstoy’s definition of art: “Tolstoy demands that the artist should not only succeed in expressing his feeling, but also in transmitting it. That I think, was the mistake which landed him into such difficulties. Because, if you put the artist and his feeling on one side, to whom, on the other side, must he convey his feeling?... I would say that the function of art is not to transmit feeling so that others may experience the same feeling. That is only the function of the crudest forms of art – ‘programme music’, melodrama, sentimental fiction and the like. The real function of art is to express feeling and transmit understanding… We come to the work of art already charged with emotional complexes; we find in the genuine work of art, not an excitation of these emotions, but peace, repose, equanimity.” (Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art, London: Faber & Faber, First Published 1931, Reprinted 2017, P. 222.) As with Tolstoy, my problem with Read is the desire to use art to create a better society rather than reflect the true fallen nature of our existence, and by doing so then perhaps change things. People may abhor the nature of pornography, but for me as a student of human existence in all its forms, pornography is part of the vast dark matter of existence that Civilization does everything it its powers to hide and deny - but which tells us unpleasant truths about existence.


I view art therapeutically, and anyone who goes to a therapist and refuses to be honest is wasting both their own time but also the therapists. I am also reluctant to subscribe to Read’s snobbish attitude to culture. As I noted in my autobiography The Panic Artist, I learned more about women watching Big Brother and other reality TV shows than in all the novels, art books, films even porn I studied. So, I do not think you can ever tell what any form of culture can teach you. 

             

To me the antithesis of great truthful art is Kitsch. Kitsch is typified by lowbrow skills, faked sensations, trite analogies, and sentimental themes. The most important thing about kitsch is that is like a cheap postcard presenting a grossly simplified candy coloured and idealistic version of life devoid of complexity, ambiguity, contradiction, or paradox. For me the greatest art takes on emotions, desires, ideas and realities that are inexplicable and have no easy answers. They are frankly difficult not just to comprehend but also difficult to draw easy moral lessons from. Kitsch is also inherently extrovert and I loathe most extrovert art. The extrovert artist is so indulged because their work is inherently complicit with their society. They are in fact mascots for their society. Their artistic work is flattered and praised because it fulfils the prejudices of its audience. So, there is often a buffoonish quality to extrovert artists and their art. Because they work so hard psychologically and artistically to please and thrill their audience their works achieves success out of all proportion to its actual merit. Moreover, the extrovert artist is forgiven his or her poncing around, pompous ideas and egotistical posturing because he or she is fulfilling the subconscious fantasies of their audience.


However, kitsch is not in my opinion a matter of medium. Greenberg broadly defined Kitsch to include Jazz, Hollywood movies, advertising, commercial illustration and ‘Tin-Pan-Ally’ songs. Personally, I loathe advertising but not because I dismiss it as crass, pointless, and kitsch (it is of course all those things), but rather because it is so skilfully manipulative of the human mind and subconscious. In my view, there have been amazingly authentic musicians (Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Morrissey, Kurt Cobain, and Lana Del Rey) and filmmakers (Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Noah Baumbach) who have made a high art of their usually debased mediums. But whatever the medium the problem remains, 99% of all culture is inherently Kitsch, namely formulaic, dishonest, academic, plagiaristic, shallow, and hypnotically manipulative.


Today there is expressionist kitsch, gothic kitsch, horror kitsch, adolescent kitsch, heavy metal kitsch, porn kitsch even Nazi kitsch, in fact it pervades and pollutes everything in this age of commercialization, which sucks the soul out of everything and turns the husk into product. Kitsch is a formulaic approach to production, in which the various real discoveries of the genre and medium are raided for the most successful and pleasing forms, content and narrative. For me there are only two ways Kitsch can be seriously enjoyed, firstly in a knowing and ironic way, and secondly as willing form of escapism from more serious study. 

For me, from the position of 'madness', the art student, academic, art professional with his MFA, arts-grants and collector friendly art works are objects of utter contempt and ridicule. The glorification of art as a new kind of religion, has spawned millions of artists and countless, dealers, curators, gallery attendants, museum heads, art teachers, academics, photographers, critics, and journalists, who live off the myth of arts importance. Not only is the art world full of completely talentless people who cannot draw, paint, sculpt or manipulate and fire a pot, so many of them are also masters of excuses and projection, bitterly lambasting anyone with skills, as narcissistically self-satisfied or insecure and desperate for approval or some other such rubbish. I have seen these wastes of space everywhere in the art world, and their only talent is for bitching and only skill is for stoned philosophizing and their nature is totally unoriginal in its uselessness. These abject failures, only admire artists even more abjectly talentless than themselves. 


I once criticized the film Mr Turner on Facebook because I thought it was boring, made by a Socialist director with no love for the heroic individual, and I thought that the film exaggerated the proto-Abstract-Expressionist nature of Turner’s work and failed to understand his immense classical training, Romantic talent, and detailed skill. I was attacked by an angry painter. “You call yourself an artist! But you cannot appreciate seeing a Master at work!” I had never thought much of this man’s art, and I quickly saw no point in arguing with a moron who could not tell the difference between a movie made about Turner played by Timothy Spall and the real artist Willian Turner - dead in the ground for centuries! But I think that the angry talentless painter was typical of many in the art world who were rationally challenged and living in cloud-cuckoo-land!


The modern-day Art College is a kindergarten with alcohol, mostly used as a party zone, for rich kids who want to avoid real life for as long as possible. Students in Art College assume the institution exists to make them into geniuses, yet, it exists to eviscerate any passion, desire or ambition in 99% of its pupils, and ease the path to success for the 1% who possess both the right kind of talent, character and ideological stance deemed worthy of glory. Like in the rest of the art world, the sorting process is as much about official honours as nods and winks. Ah, but here is the rub, you can never tell the content of a pupil’s heart by the quality of their efforts. Sadly, many pupils with phenomenal gifts choose to do absolutely nothing with them and give up art because they have nothing to say. While some students with the least gifts but a burning passion to create, keep doggedly working year after year until they achieve mastery.  


About twenty percent of students in art colleges have parents who are either high school or art college teachers, or who are curators and collectors. Taught from day one, all the “correct” ways to draw, paint and make art, their work is always technically faultless, never gauche, impolite or politically incorrect and never controversial. In Art Colleges, first you are told you can do anything you like, but then you realise you can only do what your tutor wants you to do. Or they see what you are making and then suggest you do the exact opposite. In contemporary Art Colleges, there is no rules, yet at the same time there is nothing but rules.  Such a process is ideal for creating creatively flexible artists but detrimental to any student with a true vision or expressive tendency since it robs the student of their self-belief. They seem to be more interested in making more art teachers than artists. 

              

I have seen pupils in Art College who are utterly hopeless at drawing and painting even after years of trying to master them, who then within the space of two years produce acclaimed installations, photography, video, and assemblages. Why run up Mount Olympus when you can hop in a helicopter? Many idealistic students go to Art College, thinking it will free them from the restraints of normal society. What they learn is that they simply exchange one set of restraints for another. Your art is no longer your own, it is part of a dialogue. Your views are only OK, if you can defend them constantly to your peers and tutors.


I have seen art teachers who are only in it for the money and others for whom it was an ego trip and way of declaring their authority, and worse still others who used their position to get laid. What naïve and trusting art students don’t realise - is that when their tutors go back to their staffroom - they spend most of their time gossiping and bitching about them!


It is quite a funny sight to see the library in Art College packed and the shelves half-empty at thesis time but knowing it almost deserted the rest of the time. In Art College, they write thesis on films they have never watched and about paintings they have only seen in reproduction. Culture is skimmed without any sense of history or aesthetic, ethical or cognitive understanding, things are liked or disliked, but rarely understood for good or ill.


In Art Colleges (the home of the public sector artist), left-wing politics is de rigueur, and the making of unsalable art is logical when you do not need to make a living on sales because you are paid $60,000 a year for a three-day workweek and have a guaranteed pension, the likes of which most public sector artists could only dream of possessing. Bedsides there are few big art collectors from the political left and thus less buyers for left-wing art. So, they loath anyone who is a commercial success in the art world, unless their work is so obscure it is only liked by insiders. In fact, obscure art is the security blanket of upper-class intellectuals marginalized by a rampant popular culture.

Yet, looking for an unworldly artist uninterested in commercial success in the art world, is like looking for a virgin in a whorehouse. You will be presented with one, but she has lost her virginity countless times before. In fact, most so-called artistic rebels are merely art world puppets and posers. You will accept the farce because you find the fantasy delicious just as the art world loves to pretend it is all art and not about money and power.


Growing, up I idolised supposed artistic ‘recluses’ like the elderly Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí , Balthus and Lucian Freud. The idea of a great artist who refused to compromise or sully his vision with contact with the world enthralled me. It was only much later when I researched their lives, that I discovered that they had spent most of their early life socialising, being attention whores, and arse-licking the rich, powerful, and well-connected, and they only became ‘recluses’ late in life when they could not handle the fame. I had to learn, that you had to achieve fame, success, and importance, and be in constant public demand – so that turning your back on the world and becoming a recluse to have any meaning.



The self-delusion of the MFA graduate must be seen to be believed! Having graduated they feel entitled to call themselves artists, and develop a professional sense of entitlement, even if they have nothing to say, or no discernible talent, and are only parroting the clichés of contemporary art. Having gone to Art College, they think they are the fount of all knowledge, and only have to repeat their degree show for the next sixty years. Moreover, they club together to support each other and further marginalize outsiders who do not belong to their club. Yet, worse still is the shockingly few who continue to make art. These hipster artists are so desperate to be seen as cool and interesting and to cast themselves as romantic and glorious stars in the Hollywood movie that runs in their own mind, that they would never dare to make anything foolish, controversial, or abject. 


Pop musicians endless declare their love for others in their songs and visual artists endless portray their concern for humanity. But I am reminded that in The Usual Suspects Kevin Spacey’s character Roger “Verbal” Kint said: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Well maybe he is hiding out as an artist! Because many of the artists I have known, for all their professed love of humanity, are the worst human beings I have ever known. People foolishly think art makes us better people. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the lives of artists are not the place to go to find upstanding members of the community. Countless artists have lived blameless professional lives, but others have been murderers, sexual deviants, alcoholics, and drug addicts. Leonardo da Vinci was an alleged sodomite; Benvenuto Cellini loved bloody brawls and killed four men as well as sodomised both men and women; Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was convicted of murder after killing a man in a fight at a tennis match; William Turner frequented brothels and even made erotic drawings and watercolours of the prostitutes; Claude Monet allegedly slept with the woman who would be his second wife - as his first wife died of cancer; Edgar Degas was a xenophobe and anti-Semite and frequently visited brothels; Vincent van Gogh collected pornography and slept with prostitutes; Auguste Rodin drew his models masturbating; Gustav Klimt had a harem of models who he liked to draw as they masturbated; Paul Gauguin made love with young teenage Tahitian girls knowing that he was infecting them with syphilis; Augustus John was an alcoholic and was rumoured to have fathered a hundred children; Eric Gill had sex with two of his sisters, two of his daughters, and a dog; Pablo Picasso lost his virginity to a prostitute in Barcelona and continued to visit brothels throughout his young adult life, was arrested for possession of stolen artworks, womanised and was a notorious misogynist with a dismissive view of female painters; Egon Schiele made sexually explicit drawings of child prostitutes; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted young teenage girls; Emil Nolde was a Nazi sympathiser and fan of Adolf Hitler; Wyndham Lewis attempted to kill the critic and poet T E Hulme and Lewis was a Nazi sympathiser; Modigliani was a hashish addict, alcoholic and woman beater, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain collaborated with the Nazi’s; Balthus made paedophilic paintings of teenage girls; Edward Hopper frequently beat his wife; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were raging alcoholics; Jean Michel Basquiat was heroin addict; Jeff Koons made pornographic artworks with his porn star wife Ilona Staller AKA Cicciolina. However, the epidemics that really inflict the artist community are aggressive pride, narcissism, egotism, selfishness, and snobbery. Though I shamefully suffer from them all myself. Perversely in an art world that often appears to be the outpatients’ department of a psychiatric hospital, every artist in the art world thinks they are sane and everyone else are lunatics. For all its claims of communal cooperation the real art world, works on the principles of the game theory “Fuck You Buddy!” 


Many artists (male and female) are only able to indulge their pretentious hobby through the support of partners with real careers who can give them pocket money for their art, some like Cy Twombly, are even lucky enough to marry heiresses. Others rely on an inheritance, the dole, or the kindness of girlfriends.


In the art world, one often meets the bizarre man of uncertain sexuality. They are neither flaming queens nor shamefaced closet homosexuals if anything they are asexual. On the other hand, one often meets morose beauties with perplexing self-loathing personalities and even stranger older single women who have given up entirely on personal grooming.


Over 80% of artists come from middleclass backgrounds yet most of their political allegiances are hypocritically left-wing. So, the dominant politics of the art world is socialist and Liberal even though an artist is more of a self-employed entrepreneur than a working-class labourer. Of course, the actual making of art involves a degree of manual labour, but that is only a small part of the process of building an artistic career which depends as much on self-promotion, building your brand, courting the rich and playing the arts system. Moreover, art is still the most expensive commodity in the world and part of a largely unregulated market.


The Janus-faced modern artist turns from middle class child to socialist cant spouting user through absorption of the left-wing ethos of Art Colleges which usually only exist because of government funding.  Of course, if you are lucky enough to have a teaching job in a university, receive arts council grants, and get exhibition grants to exhibit in publicly funded museums, you can afford to thumb your nose at the capitalists, but you better not criticize the politics that supports you!


Other artists, who have no wish or are unable to play the publicly funded sector for all its worth and have the audacity to still think they have a right to make art and receive recognition, must succeed in the private art sector, and rely on buyers for their work. Some have the consistency of belief to not deal in left-wing politics in this situation, yet other’s skilled at using others without guilt, try to play both games at once, painting left wing paintings, and decrying the elites, while happily accepting the checks of bankers.


How they can live with such political hypocrisy is beyond me. Personally, my early politics leaned towards the left but today I am a Libertarian. Since I am the son of a self-made businessman, and most of my artistic heroes were successful using their talents, I have never been a socialist. Besides, because of my mental illness the only chance I have ever had to better my life has been through art sales.


Successful artists are not only those with talent (many art students have talent), but they also have the ability to build a career in art. I have met artists of amazing talent, yet they are so obnoxiously arrogant, no one is bothered working with them. Thus, successful artists are those who are both talented and charming, transgressive, and accommodating, wild and tame. 80% of art world success is just about showing up at the right parties and meeting and seducing the right people. Moreover, people prefer an exhibitionist buffoon to a silent introvert. 


Artists are thought of as speakers of truth, yet in fact, they are as practiced liars as anyone else. Artists learn quickly to mention only those artists who really did little to influence their style. Countless times I have seen an exhibition of a young artist and been bowled over by the quality and originality of their work - only to discover years later the artist they stole from wholesale, the artist who was never mentioned in any of their extensive catalogue blather.


The coolest artists are often those most dilettantish, for whom creating is not an obsessive torment or trial, rather a pastime amongst other things like playing in a band, skateboarding and screwing around. They dabble at art as an escape from the real world and a justification for their fantasy life. The pathetic need for constant affirmation of so many tenth-rate artists online is amazing. They must show every unfinished canvas for support and like all dilettantes their art vaporizes without the oxygen of publicity. 

             

Art for many inadequate people is nothing more than a grand pretentious fantasy about themselves and their supposed intellectual genius. Their art is like the plastered makeup of an ugly woman trying to look like a super model or the useless muscle-bound body of a weightlifter that would not last five minutes in a real fight. 

            

The art world works through a system of grooming and bullying one only must scan an artist’s Facebook page to see the process of flattery of one’s harmless peers and condemnation of one’s genuine rivals. In the art world, you can never win, if you don’t know enough about the art on display you are a philistine but if you know too much, you are an embittered troublemaker. In boxing they say, “may the best man win”, however in art there is no such thing as an objective win only a certain popularity with the public or cognoscenti that may be an indication of universal genius or just a symptom of fad and fashion.


I have seen artists who paint twisted and warped paintings I thought was part of a style yet discovered they had a lazy eye, or their paintings were bizarrely coloured and learned they were colour blind or had cataracts, and that was how they ‘saw’ the world.


Far too often the personality of artists isn’t discussed in serious art criticism. But very often I am put off artists I admit have talent, because I find their personalities so obnoxious, and everything they produce is such a dickhead insult to the intelligence and humanity of the viewer. 

              

All my life, I had presumed that I was a narcissist. And I am. But once I entered the art world, I realised that there were far more extreme narcissists than me. Even though I am a narcissist, I have always had some interest in other people and their art. But in the art world, I met both men and women, incapable of any interest in anyone but themselves, except perhaps for the misfortune of others that delighted them and made them feel good about themselves. 

            

I have met male artists with no discernible talent, yet who are possessed by a self-belief and sense of purpose that is both obnoxious and ludicrous. Likewise, I have meet male and female artists who appear for years to be so meek and mild, yet once they have a whiff of success, they reveal the dark side of their ambition and pride. 


The egotism of the artist experiencing, what is often only a brief moment of fame and success, has to be seen to be believed. Suddenly they hold discourses on aesthetics, politics, metaphysics, and God knows what else as though they were artistic Napoleons bestriding the earth, rather than the mediocre nobodies they were just a few months before, and will return to being just as soon.


Yet the egotism of the self-involved artist is nothing compared to the ones who not only think they are geniuses but think that they are speaking for women, or oppressed. Or they are political citizen artists and activists. Or worse still they think God has called on them to make art! 


The art of a great artist is like the sun radiating truth, beauty, wisdom and transcendence, yet the personalities of most ‘artists’ are black holes sucking attention, admiration, praise, money and time out of prospective victims to their self-involvement. For every artist messiah, there are countless charlatans and posers. Given that artists are some of the most self-centred and mercenary people on the planet, it is ironic that they talk so much about socialism and charity work. Most artists I have met would do nothing to help another artist, and only form groups to advance their own agenda. They are worse than sharks - they are sharks that frolic like friendly dolphins around you, before tearing you to shreds - and leaving you for dead!

Few of the artists populating the bloated international art world feel any real compulsion to make art, and if deprived of their comfortable life of well-paid lecturing, socially secured exhibitions, arts grants and commercial sell-outs, they would stop making art all together. What use are any of them to the world? 99% of the art they make, curate, buy, auction, and write about are just a pastiche of a handful of truly original creators fashionable with artists, critics, historians, or the public. To me they are mere technicians and bureaucrats of art. True artists, workaholics, obsessives and mavericks, pay for their brilliance by being snipped at by all these little bitches, having their life's work parodied by students, and exploited by cynical operators and crass gallery dealers. Their only true desire is for money, fame, power, and sex, not the pursuit of the ultimate in creative expression and idealism.


People think art stars are creative free spirits but usually they are nothing but manufacturers, forced to repeat themselves repeatedly. Art making becomes a form of printing money and few have the courage or intellectual waywardness to break up the printing press. Given the choice of repeating themselves and making money and fooling people into thinking they are aesthetic fanatics or risking everything by making creative choices and alienating their previous collectors, most chose the former. Most artists are confidence tricksters, and their style is their con trick. Plausible consistency is everything in a lie. Therefore, the worst thing they can do is undermine the integrity of their signature style. Most of even the greatest artists in the world have often stopped thinking creatively at the age of thirty and spend the rest of their lives refining the style that brought them acclaim. So no wonder they increasingly use assistants when what is required is product not transcendent epiphanies


Looking around an art library, it slowly dawns on you that the so-called greatest artists are the most commercial. People do not make big books on artists whose work does not sell. The problem with this is that so much of what sells is asexual, abstract, and politically correct, or is made with an impersonal workshop, studio, or factory like production line approach. Thus, most art is just about art, and has very little to do with real life in all its fallen tragedy. When you really think about it, you realize just how little painting, drawing, writing, music, or film is really about specific life events. And those artists who really do expose something truthful about their life are crucified by the press and society, and they are even taken to court for libel, slander or such like. 

I cannot understand why grown men and women who produce the kind of Zombie Formalist abstract canvases of today. How can they spend their life making coloured abstract paintings in minor variations until their dying days. For what? For money? For fame? For sex? Or just as a kind of escapist childish distraction? If my art is embarrassingly adolescent, theirs is firmly stuck in a pretentious arch-kindergarten, that is only valued so highly because it is so communally unthreatening, and guaranteed not to affect any socio-political change. These Zombie Formalists might think they are the new heirs of Jackson Pollock, but in fact, they are more like the heirs of Tony Hancock in The Rebel, in which Tony made paintings on his floor, by pouring paint on the canvas and then messing it around under his Wellington boots, the tires of his bicycle, and the with the help of his pet cow! Except that these great formalists use fire extinguishers and other implements to create their masterpieces, but their ‘innovations’ are equally absurd and pointless!


I am not against all abstract art, but mostly I feel it is the cynically commercial product of artists aware that no other style is more bank and home décor friendly. To spend my whole life painting this kind of pleasantly inoffensive, abstract messing with colour - I would have to have a lobotomy. This art is an escape from life - not an engagement with it – a prolonged childhood refusal not to grow up, or commit to anything real.


I started making art because it was something I could do it independently of others. The isolated sovereignty of painting infatuated me, and it compensated for all the other deficiencies in my life. When I was young, I thought all I needed to do was making paintings of quality, and that others would give me exhibitions, and allow me to stay at home painting in splendid isolation. I did not realize that art was a social activity, and that if I did not push myself in the art world, my work would pile up unseen and unwanted at home just gathering dust. Moreover, I did not realize that every statement of personal expression would be met with a blizzard of criticism, jibes, put downs, gross misreading, and my honesty used to crucify me.  


So I hate virtually the whole of the art world; the complacent and idiotic art students who live seven years of their life in the safe and supportive confines of academia enjoying its “great social life”; the feckless con-artists who spend their arts grants on drink and then present the photos of their boozy sessions as ‘art’; the chancers who avoid the life long struggle of honing their craft and take up those mediums that any sixteen year old can master in a few weeks; the pretentious ‘intellectuals’ whose work is supposed to be ultra-smart, yet when caught in conversation are less knowing than a Taxi driver; those who have formed their art into styles they think will bring them in money, crass gallery owners with not one onze of aesthetic passion (who might as well be selling used cars); the slimy alcoholic operators who attend every opening, not to look and learn from the art, but to arse lick those in power; the spinless critics incapable of speaking an honest word for fear it will affect their friendships and pay-packet; the poseur ‘artists’ who fitfully make art every other Sunday, because they have never had the courage to ditch the day job and really commit to their art. Together they make up about 99.999% of the art world. Success in the art world (at least in the short term) is as much to do with charm, diplomacy and salesmanship, as talent and vision. So, many artists treat art like a game. They have no integrity as artists and manipulate their art towards what they think will succeed. These artists play at art because they think it has no rules, no standards, and anything goes. 

 

I became an artist to rebel against the bourgeois life I had imposed upon me. However, what I did not realize was that the art world is even worse. Going to openings and socializing in the art world is like going to the most snobby, pretentious, and neurotic party imaginable, populated by touchy people who schizophrenically kick those below them and lick up to those above them. These people are playing a game I want no part of! In 2009, I knew a working-class girl, who had worked as a shop worker, beautician, and waitress. One night she worked as a waitress at a private dinner party. The hosts were rich, and the guests were all arty people leaching off the rich, and she was disgusted at them. She could not believe how entitled, snobby, pretentious, and greedy for free food and drink these art people were, and how contemptuous they were of the staff. I could not deny that she was right.


It disgusts me that, while I have given my heart and soul to everything I have made, while I have sacrificed my sanity and life for my art, for many others, art is just a trendy lifestyle of drinking, fucking, and avoiding work. Seeing artists today, spending more time photographing themselves posing as artists disgusts me. The shameless begging and borrowing of artists also disgust me, and life has taught me that artists are only around when they want something from you. Life has taught me that other artist’s feel free to criticize me, but if I so much as make a one criticism of them, their hackles raise, and they disappear from my life. At art openings, it is a rarity to see anyone looking at the art on the walls, or talking about art history. Art insiders have too much at stake to be honest in their opinions. Artists on the make wander around galleries, barely looking at the art on the walls, lest they miss the chance to catch the eye of the gallery owner or someone famous. Art’s main function is social and commercial. Most art is just currency in the stock market of art, or a talking point for dead weightless theorising in the university. As Peter Schjeldahl put it: “... The art world’s only two ways of dealing with success are celebrity and politics. Either the successful artist’s personality, money, connections, and so on become the hot issue or the artist’s supposed ideological agenda becomes the hot issue. What the artist actually does, by way of generating revelatory experience for individuals and a working challenge to other art, is not the hot issue, and if you think it is you end up taking to the wall.” (Peter Schjeldahl, Salle Days: `80s Something, Artforum, May 1999, P. 154.) The art world seen from the point of view of madness is just a waste of time, money, and human energy. You may think that my art and life has been a waste too, but I have paid for it myself. I have met art dealers and curators who thought themselves more important that the artists they represented, a notion I found utterly absurd and deluded by a life of commerce and bureaucracy. I have seen billionaire art collectors with the taste of brothel and disco owners. I have seen art buyers with the greedy look of shoppers at Christmas, buying anything and everything with a name or a brand style without a second thought or even looking very hard at what they are buying. I have seen men and women with real intelligence, knowledge, and expertise ignored, marginalized, or quoted but never referenced because their work is not media-friendly or disrupts the market. I have seen so-called critics betray their stupidity with erratic and utterly subjective interpretations of art without any philosophical or ethical foundation. I have watched as idiot critics with no expertise in anything give forceful opinions on cinema, pop music, design, architecture, fashion, novels, politics, painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, installations, and God knows what else, their comments no more illuminating than those of a random person picked off the street.


I have seen frantic people at openings, but they were usually elderly women chasing the waiter for hor d’oeuvres or drunks running to the free bar, not passionate artists engaged in debate. I have seen deluded gigolo painters, who live the high life playing the part of the sensitive artist around rich, influential, and desperate middle-aged women. I have seen small petty tyrants thrust their way through the art world armed with nothing but criminal arrogance and egotism. I have seen artist’s (male and female) sleep their way up the academic and curatorial ladder, skilled in nothing but oral sex and flattery. I have seen talentless artists lauded in the short term merely because they are handsome, beautiful, or charismatic. Finally, some young artists never even have to work their way up the greasy-pole and kiss ass, because as the privileged children of famous artists, critics, or collectors, they are given a free run in the art world and are only finally dismissed if they blow their chances. Yet, in this world, I am the lunatic!

The Crucible of Childhood

 


“I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.”

Leonard Cohen


One night I was listening to ‘Up All Night’ with Dotun Adebayo – who had his monthly mental health phone-in on BBC Radio 5 Live. An old man phoned in and began to talk about his depression, how he had grown up in a care home and had been physically abused and unloved. His voice full of regret and sadness he told of his difficult fight with his demons, his recovery from depression, his happy early life with his wife and then their break up. Suddenly he said, for the last three years - he had been plunged back into black despair. Old childhood memories - which he had thought he had quelled and forgotten – had now re-emerged with a viciousness belying their age. Dotun wondered aloud how such a re-emergence could happen? Martin Seager the very wise psychologist co-hosting the show replied that it was in fact all too tragically common. Sitting in my bed - too stoned to feel my pain - I had to agree. I am a fucked-up boy - who became a fucked-up man. I spend my life trying to cling to certainties - and I fail every single time. My mind flails around with a thousand neurotic thoughts – just praying that my pre-psychotic thoughts do not come back too.

There is a zone upon this earth that my mind returns to like a reluctant witness. That place is Howth peninsula to the North of Dublin – in particular my mind returns to the house of my birth - Tara. Howth is not a bad place you might say – scenic, well to do and beautiful - but for me at times it was hell on earth. Many of these houses are in the million Euro price range - though there is also a strong working-class fishermen, farmer and rancher community in Howth as well.

           

Tara was built at the very start of the 1970s, it was at first a privileged home to grow up in with its; acre and a half of land, modernist design, flat roof, large glass windows, and trendy mix of conventional mahogany furniture with ultra-modern Swedish design and bourgeois knick-knacks, gold velvet curtains, Lladró ornaments, Capodimonte porcelain figurines of tramps and country folk, bronze sculptures of naked ballet dancers by the Italian born British sculptor Enzo Plazzotta and conventional though expressive oil paintings of the sea. I remember wondering as a boy why my mother who had bought all this art with my father – could hate my art so much. My friends liked to joke that Tara looked like the house in ‘The Brady Bunch’!

My parents lived on the second floor of the house, which had the master bedroom with large en-suite bathroom, very large living room cum dining room, main kitchen, guest bedroom, bathroom, study and a large enclosed outdoor patio. My huge bedroom with play area was downstairs along with another living room, kitchen, bathroom, and three spare bedrooms in which the various staff over the years lived. Just off my bedroom was a storeroom and on the other side of my bedroom was a door out onto the marble hallway and front door. Apart from my mother and father there were various housekeepers, governesses, au pairs, nanny's living with us. At the side of the house were two car garages where my father housed his Mercedes and my mother’s Toyota. Our house was on one of the main steep hillside roads leading up from Howth village and Tara itself was on a hill up from that – so were very isolated from others. This was fine - when our lives were protected by my father - but after his death it would come to haunt me. Because Howth was so exposed to the elements in the summer the cool breezes and strong sun were a delight, but in winter, the chilling winds cut through you.

For the first six and a half years, I lived an incredibly privileged and sheltered existence. Then one day in October 1977, while on a Christmas shopping trip in London with my mother – my father died of an aneurysm in the toy department of Harrods.  From that day on - our lives fell apart. Our glorious home - which had been such a luxury - suddenly became for my mother an impossible burden.

This is where I have to get a bit boring because one of the oddest things about my childhood was its Dickensian mixture of conspiracy, insanity, poverty, wealth, legal battles, foster homes and starvation.

When in the early 1980s my half-brother tried to get the social workers to check up on us in Tara – they refused to believe that someone with our money could be living with no food, no heat and no electricity in a mansion in Howth!

I do not want to bore you with all the details of our legal affairs. However, a brief synopsis is required. When my father he died, he was still officially married to another woman whom he had three children with – so my father’s estate had to be divided up amongst four children and two women. This in a Catholic country that still did not recognize divorce - never mind have laws to deal with such situations. My mother was looked after well - she was left another two houses in Coolock, over £35,000 worth of jewellery and tenancy of Tara until I turned twenty-six – when I would inherent it. In the meantime, another house was purchased for me in Clontarf by my trustees, (my mother and my oldest half-brother), the rent from which would provide for my education and clothing. The combination of the death of my father, her legal battles with the estate, and the difficulty of looking after a small boy alone – all served to break my mother’s mind. My dad had been both a lover and father figure to her and after his death - she simply could not live without him. It was only for me that she went on living. Eighteen months after my father’s death - my mother was committed for the first time to a mental hospital.

Almost from the start, my mother started fighting with my half-brother, her own family - and her solicitors - whom she rapidly hired and fired. One week we could be jetting off to Spain or America on holiday and the next we would be renting out a room in a hotel in Dublin because my mother felt we were being spied on in Howth. Then she started accusing my au pairs of stealing from us, then her own family of stealing from us. Then the au pairs were fired, our family told to go to hell - and we lived alone. Then she said that my father’s family and her family were planning to lock her away and steal my money. Then she was in and out of hospital, and on and off meds, high and low, hysterical and loving, angry and fearful, paranoid and right. Then my relatives wanted me to give them permission to have her committed for life – I refused. Then one by one she sold her houses, our furniture, her mink coats (those we didn’t miss) her jewellery and eventually one week to Christmas and with no money she pawned even the engagement and wedding rings my father had given her to cover her shame. That is something I will always give my mother – she has always tried to put on a good Christmas no matter what. It is very hard to hate someone you love so very much. Though sometimes you need hate to survive. However, at some stage I think you have to let go of that hate. I forgave my mother years ago, but do you honestly think I can ever forget? Even if I tried I couldn’t. Even today new memories some sweet some sour - bubble up from the dark recesses of my brain.

So anyway, by the time we sold Tara in August 1983 it was in a sorry state and a zone of pure terror for me. When we left the grass in the garden had grown up to two feet high, rats ran around it at night, the roof was leaking, the walls were full of damp, the central heating didn’t work, the electrics were shot, and three quarters of the furniture and fittings had been either stolen by others or sold by my mother for food.

Tara is to this day my crucible. It is where I was abandoned me to an empty, cold and dark modern house with a mad woman. It is where the silver spoon of my birth was rammed down my throat so hard I gagged. It is where I learned to fear women, hate money, hate other people and hate myself. It is where I gave up on ‘society’, God and privilege – and ran the other way towards my fantasy world of art.

It was only in 1997 that I returned to Howth. I had not gone back since my mother and I had been forced to sell - because we had literally been starving on and off for three years - in the vain hope we could hang on to it. I returned only when at the age of thirty-one - my first girlfriend Helen persuaded me to go back. It was a moving experience, but mostly for what was not there – my past. The roads were still narrow, twisting, banked with thick grass verges and densely lined with wild bushes and high walls. My girlfriend commented to me that: “you feel like a trespasser on these roads!” The houses were large, dreadfully fashionable - and quite beyond my budget by then. After the exhausting walk up the hill of Howth, we came upon my old house. However, the Surrealism of Tara at that moment - was the banality of the ordinary - not the shock of the Gothic. Where was the evidence of my pain on the landscape? Where was my presence gone? It was then that I realized that the zone upon this earth that I returned to was in that part of my brain - that insisted on remembering my past. Moreover, no matter how hard I tried to put myself beyond my past - I could not escape it. When in 2012, I returned to view Tara (with my second girlfriend Carol) and found the house demolished and replaced by flats, I felt devastated. In my youth, I had dreamed of turning Tara into a museum dedicated to my art – now all I had were my warped memories. 

 

Life with my mother in those days was like being in a twenty-four hour, seven days a week horror movie. Even the undoubted happy moments were only snatched from the chaos of my mother’s illness and our dire finances. I lived on edge day by day, monitoring my mother’s moods like an inmate eyes up a sadistic guard. Daytime could be utterly awful, but it was the night-time that utterly terrified me. I would go to sleep only to be woken up at 3am by my mother screaming and demanding my attention. We would go upstairs to the living room and I would try to calm her down. She would pull out legal documents that she wanted me to read, she would accuse her solicitors of corruption, libel, conspiracy and the illegal tapping of our phones. She would accuse my father’s first family of murder, brainwashing, bugging our home, killing our dog Misty, attempted rape – just about anything in fact - and the same went for her own family. All the while, I would try to reason with her. I was a bright eleven-year-old, but I was not a trained barrister, accountant, psychiatrist or priest!  However, I really did try to make sense of it all. It was a futile exercise – I still do not understand. Sensing the irrationalism of my mother – I became a defence barrister to practically the whole of Irish society. Sometimes my attempts at reasoning - calmed her down – or at least made her question herself. However, usually it only made a bad situation worse. She would accuse me of disloyalty, betrayal and then start to attack me verbally; I was an ugly shit, a bastard, a fagot, a talentless idiot, a retard – she wished I had never been born and sometimes she wished she had aborted me at birth. The words I remember most – not the slaps that accompanied them. The first time I ever remember my mother mentioning sex was when I was about eleven and she claimed a man we knew had tried to rape her! Later in my life, she warned me to stay away from women who would manipulate me, use me for my money and were nothing but whores.

The crucible of childhood was where in compensation; I planned the defence of Howth with my army of imaginary soldiers whose movements I plotted on wargaming tables, I planned my entry into the army, I planned my career as a defence barrister, I rehearsed my interview with Clement Greenberg, planned my retrospective in MoMA, thought up my rejection speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature and planned the day I would be a sultan to a thousand women – who all adored me! What I gave myself in my mind – was greater than anything the world could give me – so I for once did not need it. I became so good at crawling into little cubbyholes, building camouflaged forts in the garden - and retreating into a corner of my mind - that still had hope. Amidst the chaos of my life - art befriended me and took me to a safer place.

It was at the age of about eleven I vowed to make the kind of art that a kid like me might need in the future! I imagined a lonely boy in the Hampton's on Long Island or in a country estate in Oxford - living a similar life to mine, coming across my work, and feeling just a little less alone - the way I had felt when I first read the wonderful Charles Dickens.

These days I have thought more and more, that my hatred and fear of women artists was the result of my mother’s demonic attempt to stop me painting. For years, she had been blithely unaware of my growing passion for art. However, by the time I was about ten she could not ignore it. Art in her mind was for queers and art losers. Her brother Bob had been offered a scholarship to art-college back in the 1960s - but their father had said over his dead body. Therefore, my mother seemed both repulsed and threatened by my creativity – it was somewhere I could escape from her presence – at least in my mind. She even blamed others in our family for encouraging this stupid ambition. For my mother my life would be a failure if I did not become either a barrister or brain-surgeon (it is odd - but it has just occurred to me that a brain surgeon might have saved my father and a barrister might have saved us.)


“Are you fucking retarded? Fucking scribbling on paper! You will never be a great artist! Your sister Avril got someone who works in NCAD to look at your work and she said you’re not a prodigy!” These were just some of the kinds of things she would say.

Then there was the day (probably in mid 1983) when I showed my mother my drawings – oil pastels of nudes, landscapes, still life’s, and a copy of a beautiful Renoir painting of his black haired wife breastfeeding. When she came across this, she said, “Oh is that me?” “No”, I said, “it’s my sister!” It was a knee jerk reaction – yes it was partly about my half-sister who had been breast-feeding, but the model with her raven hair - did look like my mother - but it was also a copy of a pre-existing image (like in many of my later works – I was working in a simple form of coded representation rooted to my subconscious.) However, I was not going to let my mother think I had wanted to paint her! She was a monster! “You fucking brat!” My mother screamed and grabbed a pile of my drawings and began to rip them up. I pleaded with her to stop - but she kept ripping them up. I sobbed uncontrollably – as my whole world fell apart in front of my eyes.

From that day on – I drew in secret from my mother - hiding my drawings under my bed - and later locked behind my bedroom door. From 1983 – 1989, I hardly ever showed my mother any of my drawings or paintings.

Another night - after another row - my mother smashed my favourite Capo-di-Monte figurine of a Bohemian artist painting out of doors. “You are not going to become an artist! Wasting our fucking money on art! Are you a fucking mad? They all think you’re a joke!” The worst thing is I think she was right – her views then are similar to those in the art world today.

By the way, do not get me wrong – similar things have happened to others like Chaïm Soutine and Egon Schiele. However, this is my childish egotistical sob story – not theirs!

So why the hell did I not stop! Why am I still painting? Because painting is entwined in my mind like a taproot. Most of my other dreams failed - because I had to bargain and compete in the real world to achieve them. I wanted to lead the Irish army – but I knew they would not let a twelve-year-old - just become General! I would have had to do years of grunt work! I could not become a defence barrister - because I could not even leave my bedroom, I could not become a sultan because – I could not find a single man, woman or living thing on earth to love me. So art it had to be.

Did it delight me when I read of so many male, white, geniuses - and hardly a single female? Perhaps it did. I thought of women as destroyers of male creativity, censors and judge and jury. I viewed women as predatory destroyers of men like Salomé, Judith, Medusa or the Sirens and ultimately as Femme Fatales like who sought nothing but male destruction.

So, in my art I listened to and spoke with long dead men of talent, originality and understanding. I had no father to teach me how to be a man, so these old masters were the closest thing to a male role model in my life. Their paintings spoke to me of a world of beauty, order, meaning and safety – so far removed from the life I knew. These artists took the manure of their existence and made something of beauty. Reading about the rejected and sometimes cursed life of painters like Géricault, van Gogh, Gauguin, Modigliani and Pollock gave me hope that no matter how hard the life of an artist was – something good could come from it.

As a child my mother never took me to art galleries, my mother didn’t put my drawings up on the fridge door, my mother never praised anything I did, my mother never hugged me, my mother never kissed me. So, when I see books like The Artists Way on book-shelves I nearly puke. I don’t make art because I have a God given talent, I don’t paint because I want to bring beauty to the world and I don’t need a book to tell me how to be creative – I need one to tell me how not to be creative! I do not need a pep talk to make me feel entitled to paint. I do not paint and draw because I think being an artist is an important, noble, sexy or cool activity – except for a few geniuses it is not. That is why I have almost come to hate the word ‘artist’ – it is the purest form of bollocks in most cases. I create because I can do nothing else and want for nothing else. I create because as the great English painter Frank Auerbach might have said - I have a lump in my head - and I have to get it out somehow.

Thankfully long before my mother’s death, I had forgiven her and we had established a loving relationship. I realized my mother was not a monster – she was the victim of schizophrenia. From about 1984 onwards - my mother had come to accept my vocation and bent over backwards to help me with money for art materials, art classes and art related travel.


However, I do not think there ever will be a time when I do not revisit the crucible of my childhood – pondering on how I became such a mal-formed flower. Everyone has their crucible – the locus of their misery. The crucible of childhood was where I prayed to God night after night - for salvation from our poverty stricken, insane, money-vomited life of shit. I prayed for my mother to get better, I prayed for food, I prayed not to be bribed with presents by my mother, I prayed not to be bribed with presents by my family, I prayed not to be hit by my mother, I prayed my family could all just get along, I prayed for the return of my dead father, I prayed that people would love my art, and I prayed for my dog Misty to come back to me. I prayed for a lot of things. Few of my prayers were answered.

My life as a citizen of Ireland ended in those years. My life has never really recovered. I live like an invalid outsider in a three-bedroom house - which I leave only a few times a week. I have no real ambition, no hope and no faith. I paint and write in the same compulsive way some men play chess, tend their gardens, collect memorabilia or take drugs in order to forget their pain. I have tried in my art to find answers to unanswerable questions and express the inexpressible – the taboo, the insane, the obscene, the illegal, the blasphemous and the slanderous – namely all the sordid reality of life that is never given shape in the sham of society or the distraction of art. Why? Because of the repressed rage of my childhood that went uncared for by others.