Mad Skills

Mad Skills

Jean Dubuffet Madge Gill Johann Hauser Martín Ramírez Louis Soutter Adolf Wolfli Martín Ramírez and Life After Death Fall Museum Shows in New York

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The resident artists at Gugging, a retreat near the Vienna woods, are quite out of the ordinary.

Günther Schützenhöfer is showing me his stash of plastic toy trucks with all the secretive passion of a little boy. The collection is tucked away in a bureau drawer right underneath his beloved CDs — none of which have titles I recognize or seem to belong to any known genre of music — in his cozy and spotless room at the House of Artists at the Art/Brut Center Gugging. Situated on the edge of the Vienna Woods, about 10 minutes from the tiny Austrian town of Klosterneuburg and 12 miles north of Vienna, the House of Artists is home to 11 handpicked artists, all of them male and all of whom have a psychiatric history of greater or lesser severity. The house’s exterior is completely covered with exuberant occult imagery, inset with patches of text, by the artists. August Walla, a schizophrenic who lived here with his mother until his death in 2001 and whose reputation has soared in recent years, marked the surrounding street and trees with his signature crosses. The trees are also festooned with vividly painted nesting boxes and bird feeders created by Johann Garber, a current resident.

Set on the grounds of Klosterneuburg’s sprawling former psychiatric hospital, which accommodated 600 patients until it was shuttered in October of last year, the Art/Brut Center Gugging occupies two renovated buildings (only one is currently in use) and since June of 2006 has housed a museum. One area contains rotating exhibitions of Art Brut (also called Outsider Art), and another has a selection of “Gugging Classics,” works by current and deceased residents of the House of Artists, all of them for sale. There’s also a large and airy studio stocked with a trove of art supplies that’s open to the public and available to residents. The center attracts 15,000 visitors a year and is mostly federally funded, with a nonprofit arm whose donations go to a private company that runs the House of Artists and the museum. The house itself is about a one-minute car ride from the museum and is off-limits to all but friends and families of the artists and occasionally filmmakers or journalists.

I’ve been introduced to Schützenhöfer by 35-year-old Nina Katschnig, whose university thesis was on “Schizophrenia, Art and Art Therapy” and who has been involved with the center for over a decade. “What you learn at Gugging,” she says, “is to be patient. The artists are not like you and me.” Today Katschnig is the assistant director, under 53-year-old Johann Feilacher, a sculptor-cum-psychiatrist who has run Gugging since 1986. Like the other residents of the House of Artists, Schützenhöfer shares his room, in this case with the gentlemanly Franz Kernbeis. Their two cherrywood beds are set diagonally across from each other and are neatly made up with maroon bedspreads. On the inside door of the room is a sign that spells out a clear message: Günther muss alles selbst machen (Günther must take care of himself). Although his chronological age is 54, Schützenhöfer is developmentally arrested at about the age of 8; his dependency has been reinforced by living since childhood in psychiatric institutions where the nurses did everything for him, including brushing his teeth. He’s one of the few residents about whom Katschnig provides some clinical details, pointing out that he was treated roughly in other institutions and has been known to have tantrums — once he not only threw chairs but also threw a nurse through a door. When Schützenhöfer first came to Gugging, she adds, he was on enough medication “for a horse to topple over” and has since been slowly weaned to a lower dose.

Schützenhöfer wears suspenders and a T-shirt from which a small paunch protrudes, and when Katschnig comments that he has put on weight, he counters, “I like me fat.” He sports a mustache and a ravishingly sweet smile and speaks with strangled slowness, as if articulating words is a skill almost beyond his grasp. “Günther,” Katschnig tells me in an aside filled with exasperated affection, “is one of the slowest people I know. A snail is quicker than him.” Earlier in my visit, I’d watched him sign his name, forming each capital block letter with equal intensity and strain, inside a beautifully produced art book about the house that’s given as a gift to the center’s supporters. An introduction by Feilacher explains his vision of destigmatizing mental illness by making it “a matter of private concern” rather than prurient curiosity; succinct descriptions of the residents by Katschnig accompany examples of their artwork. Schützenhöfer’s signature looks more like that of a preschooler than of someone whose output Feilacher has slated to join the ranks of significant Art Brut: elementary yet distinctly charming small-format drawings of basic utensils and tools, like a fork, scissors, or a toothbrush in a glass, or objects of boyish appeal, like wheelbarrows and bicycles, made with gray or colored pencils. Several of Schützenhöfer’s drawings have been purchased by the collector Helmut Zambo, an Austrian businessman whose large holdings of contemporary art include work by paradigmatic Outsider Artists such as Walla, Louis Soutter, and Johann Hauser. Like all the art produced by the residents, Schützenhöfer’s work is immediately recognizable as idiosyncratically his own.