Mad Skills

Jean Dubuffet Madge Gill Johann Hauser Martín Ramírez Louis Soutter Adolf Wolfli Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring From Raging Bulls to Miserable Drips

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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.

In the past, when it came to Outsider Art, “the story of the artist had the same importance as the product,” says Feilacher, an intense man whose face might have come out of a Dürer engraving and who’s wearing brown cords and a navy sweater when I meet with him at Gugging on an overcast late-winter morning. After serving me espresso and cookies, Feilacher explains his perspective: “Psychiatrists like stories. But I’m interested in the genius of these people and not primarily in their illnesses. These people have the same rights as any talented artist, including the right to make money with it.” Feilacher, who has sole discretion over choosing the artists who live in the house, has actively worked toward creating a competitive market among collectors for the art of Gugging residents past and present. He has devised an arrangement that evenly splits the proceeds from sales between the center and the artists, who use their earnings for cigarettes, sweets, and annual vacations. He proudly points out that the work of Hauser, whom he considers one of “the best artists of the 20th century,” has exponentially appreciated in value in two decades.

Other than the house’s staff of five, who see to it that the artists get their medication three times a day (an outside psychiatrist comes every other week to write prescriptions), have freshly washed underwear, brush their teeth, and take showers, Katschnig is the most personally involved with the artists. Several of them, including Schützenhöfer, Heinrich Reisenbauer, and Johann Korec, choose to work at the large wooden table in her spacious office rather than in the museum’s studio or in the house itself. When Katschnig first came to Gugging in 1997, she set about matting and reframing 150 works by Oswald Tschirtner, a resident who died last May. Tschirtner’s elongated and wittily laconic drawings of cephalopodic figures — all head and feet — still hang casually about the place, with one unusually large mural greeting visitors to the gallery.

Katschnig is clearly attached to the artists. She has a light, skilled touch, unostentatiously intimate and unintrusively solicitous. Our first stop in the house is the bedroom of Garber, the unofficial consigliere, who possesses a megalomaniacal confidence and faith in his own talent that the others lack. (Later, as we’re leaving, he presents me with a nail-brush marked with dots, his initials, and the initials of the house, all with a collector’s assurance of the gift’s inherent market value.) There are stuffed animals on his bed, and although he shares the room with two other artists — Reisenbauer and Korec — he has filled it to the brim with hundreds of his own paintings and drawings. In his artistic zeal, he also paints objects and the abandoned stove in the basement workspace. Garber works in different sizes and two styles: One features brightly colored acrylic paint and speckles of dots, while the other involves India ink and a feather pen on paper. With meticulous, tiny images of flowers, animals, fronds, trucks, and helicopters, he covers the paper from edge to edge “in an effort to deny empty space,” as Colin Rhodes, who has written and lectured widely on modern and contemporary art, observes in his book Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives. At least four of the Gugging artists are obsessed with helicopters, as if responding to their own confinement and isolation with a graphic symbol of freedom and flight. In a style reminiscent of his drawings, Garber has filled one of the walls in his room with hundreds of hanging trinkets — troll dolls, key chains — of the sort you might find in a souvenir shop.

After we visit Garber, Katschnig takes me to Karl Vondal’s room. The newest addition to the house, Vondal has lived here for only six years, in contrast to the decades of the other residents. A stringed guitar made of matchsticks and wool, representative of the work he did when he first arrived but no longer does, decorates the wall over his bed. Katschnig looks on with genuine interest as he proudly shows us his latest work: a giant piece of oak tag beginning to resemble one of his extraordinary fictional maps. To create these works, he draws figures with a gray pencil, then fills them in with colored pencils, which he blurs with his fingers until the pigment is almost transparent. Like Garber, Vondal extends his drawings to cover the entire surface of the paper. His cosmology includes busty mermaids, who sit on swings or ride horses, palm trees, and airplanes, all interspersed with sections of script and enlarged penises. He also depicts sexual intercourse in its many modes; he titled one of his works The Sex Mania. Vondal used to work on small pieces of lined paper that he rolled up and carried in his pocket, later gluing them together on one canvas. More recently he has begun working with a large backdrop. Vondal, who is 54, tells Katschnig that he finds me “schön” (pretty) and wants to know my age and whether I can still get pregnant. He then pats his maroon bedspread for me to sit down next to him on the bed and gleefully points out a tower of a penis on his work in progress, as if to say, “Behold priapic man!” Katschnig translates my response, which is to admire the organ’s majesty while expressing doubt as to its size. Later, as we leave the house, Vondal, sitting at a table in the hall smoking and paging through a tabloid, stops us to share a photo of a voluptuous female, whose physical virtues he rapturously dilates upon like an adolescent boy encountering his first pinup.

When it’s called for, Katschnig maintains a respectful distance. I ask her to introduce me to the doleful, unsociable Reisenbauer, whose drawings I have a particular fondness for. Their single motif is obsessively repetitive but delicately nuanced rows of objects, including umbrellas, chairs, pears, and cars. If you look closely, you see minute variations from one object to the next — the curved handles on a series of umbrellas vary in length, say, or each is drawn only in penciled outline except for one, which is colored lemon-yellow. There’s something both rigid and fluid — a push-pull — about Reisenbauer’s work that’s oddly soothing without being inert, as if the artist requires a sense of order for his own sanity but at the last minute is moved to insert a bit of whimsy, a flight from anxious exactitude. Warning me that the artist isn’t inclined to welcome visitors, Katschnig stands with me in the entrance to the bathroom where Reisenbauer is shaving. She coaxes him to emerge — he has the recessive look of a bank clerk, albeit one with haunted eyes — and conveys my appreciation of his work, only for him to mumble a hello with a downward gaze, then go back to shaving.

Although Katschnig and Feilacher play down the psychopathology of the artists, the house has the feel of a psychiatric unit — if a well-endowed and aesthetically conceived one — and many of the residents appear visibly disturbed. Their illnesses strike me as varied, running the gamut of psychoses — schizophrenia, acute paranoia, manic depression — as well as encompassing developmental retardation. Katschnig and Feilacher firmly refuse to discuss specific diagnoses, insisting that they never publicize the “story of the psychological illness” to protect the artists’ privacy and also on the slightly disingenuous grounds that it should be of no interest.

To my mind, it’s not entirely appropriate to skip over the matter of personal history completely, since Art Brut first gained public notice largely because of the biographical narrative of the artists: Adolf Wölfli, for instance, considered one of the most talented, was a Swiss farm laborer who began to molest young girls and was prone to hallucinations and violent fits of anger; institutionalized in an asylum near Berlin, he created a prolific output of pastels and collage. Martin Ramirez was a self-taught Mexican-born artist whose mental illness confined him to an institution in northern California for the last 15 years of his life. And Madge Gill, an English housewife and medium, believed that her drawings were guided by unseen spiritual forces.

I find it quite surprising that there’s no conventional therapy at Gugging, just the artists’ interactions with one another and with their art. Katschnig and Feilacher are intent on treating the residents of the house, which Feilacher characterizes as “a reserve for introverted masters,” as artists pure and simple, without regard to the details of how they came to be here. I’m ambivalent about this approach. I have little doubt that Jean Dubuffet, the founder of Art Brut, would have approved of treating the residents as artists rather than patients: “There is no art of the insane,” he once wrote, “any more than there is an art of dyspeptics or an art of people with knee complaints.” Still, there’s a slight assembly-line attitude toward the artists, an unspoken pressure for them to produce creative work that can be displayed and eventually bought by institutions and individuals — possibly at some cost to their well-being. The artists leave their daily output in a tray in the house office; the day I’m there, Katschnig picks up several postcard-size scrawls done by the one resident who has failed to come through, commenting that he “just doesn’t try.” And it’s not clear to me that ignoring the difficult and in some cases tortured circumstances that have impelled the work is doing the artists a service.

It’s worth noting that the House of Artists wasn’t always thus: It was originally called the Center for Art and Psychotherapy. It was started in 1981 by Leo Navratil, a psychiatrist who oversaw the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic, which employed two doctors for 1,000 patients. In his practice and in his writings, Navratil advocated drawing as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool as well as a window into the nature of mental illness. He selected 18 residents for their artistic potential and provided them with a smaller and more nurturing setting to pursue their gifts. Unlike Feilacher and Katschnig, Navratil believed that it was “symptomatic of our patients’ art that their creativity stems from the psychiatric disorder they are being treated for. That’s what feeds the originality of their works, their forms and inventions. Psychosis plays an import role in their art.”

Navratil referred to the residents as “patients” and paid scant attention to the valuation of their art beyond the encouragement and praise of the staff. All the same, he was in the habit of publicizing the hospital and the artwork by giving it away to interested artists like Dubuffet. In 1970 Navratil and Otto Mauer organized the first exhibition of work by Gugging artists, showing the work of more than 20 patients at a gallery in Vienna.

The emphasis changed after Navratil retired in 1986 and Feilacher took over. Feilacher doesn’t accept the view that certain kinds of illness make for higher degrees of creativity and has set his mind to shifting the emphasis away from the artists’ pathology and toward their art — including, no less important, its commercial viability. The shift began with renaming the residence the House of Artists and replacing “patients” with “artists.” Zambo, the collector, supports this approach: His relationship to the residents’ works is strictly — some might say ruthlessly — utilitarian, almost as if the house was a spawning ground for potential new Outsider stars. “Of course they are ‘sick,’” he says briskly, “but it has nothing to do with their talent.”

To the average viewer, the work of Outsider Artists may look infantile, incoherent, impenetrably private, or boringly repetitive — the sort of ham-handed production that’s taped on a refrigerator by a doting mother. Although Outsider Art still frequently meets with distrust or derision, this idiosyncratic genre — which is separate and distinct from folk, naive, and Sunday-artist productions — has a long and respectable lineage and is increasingly selling for high prices in Europe and the U.S. Feilacher turns a tad contemptuous on the subject of American collectors: He calls New York a “trash pot” and pronounces its annual Outsider Art Fair “terrible.” Which didn’t stop Katschnig from bringing the work of some Gugging artists (including Vondal, Schützenhöfer, Leonhard Fink, and Laila Bachtiar) to the fair last year, fetching what she considers to be disappointing sales totaling $3,000.

Perhaps the most direct way of assessing the value of Gugging’s mission is to go straight to the source: Is Günter Schützenhöfer, say, who survived indifferent and abusive behavior in various institutions before Feilacher rescued him for the sake of his art, happy? To judge by his high-spirited, unconstricted drawings and his gentle smile — which breaks across his face with a heartrending radiance — I can only conclude that he is.

"Mad Skills" originally appeared in the May/June 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Culture+Travel's May/June 2008 Table of Contents.