I was mooching about on the Guardian website a few days ago and I came across this announcement that Bobby Baker’s diaries Mental Illness and Me have just won the Mind Book of the Year award. I saw the contents of this diary in an exhibition at at The Welcome Collection in 2009 and the experience was deeply formative for my early thinking about links between art and mental health.
The shortlist for this year’s prize is quite formidable, but I was particularly pleased to see Candia McWilliam’s book What to Look for in Winter featured. I hauled a huge dog eared copy of this book around with me for several months earlier this year and often sat with tears in my eyes on trains and buses while I read the author’s account of her struggles with alcoholism and blindness. I’d have awarded this book the prize in a flash, but I can see why the brutal and immediate visual style of Bobby Baker’s drawings came out on top. As former Mind Book of the Year prizewinner John O’Donoghue points out, this book is deeply powerful as a meeting point between thinking, writing and making visual art about mental health issues.
I’ve had a few people ask me why the videos that I posted on the 20th June are currently offline. They were films about imaginary suicide jumps and were the product of my stay at The Vacuum Cleaner’s residency Ship of Fools; a project about art and mental health. We filmed them by throwing camera phones out of the windows of his tower block in Hackney and slowing down the footage that this generated.
On the 16th July somebody committed suicide by jumping from the 11th floor of the same tower block. It was a total shock to both of us and especially upsetting for James as he had to witness the aftermath. Out of respect for the deceased and his family and to help ease the trauma that we both felt, we have taken the videos offline for the time being. They currently remain private.
I went round to James’s flat on Saturday, for the first time since it happened. We had a really long conversation about what this series of events means ethically for us as artists making work about suicide and whether we can still take forward our plans to develop the videos. For me it was important to go through a process of defining our motives and clarifying what we would want our work to say to audiences.
James spoke to me about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the jump. He talked about being on the market just outside of his block and hearing people repeatedly asking the question ‘why would you do that?’ Yet we both agreed that the question for us would be ‘why wouldn’t you do that?’ I feel that until we overcome the taboo of suicide to understand that it can be a psychologically hardwired impulse that makes perfect sense to some individuals, we can never have a frank discussion about how to help.
For this reason James and I will keep working together on our jump videos, although we will expand to explore other sites. We probably won’t save any lives by making art (although you never know) but we might just slightly shift somebody’s understanding of the issues. Of course we will also be taking advantage of the morbid curiosity that makes suicide such a compelling subject for viewers and speculators, but nobody’s moral compass is ever perfectly tuned.
I’m pretty sure that if doctors started prescribing New York based radio show This American Life to depressed patients, they’d see some good results. I’ve become an avid listener since I rocked up in the big smoke, mainly because the shows are so good at making you feel like part of a conversation. Its great for alleviating loneliness, putting things into perspective and offering up some fascinating chat on a load of random topics.
Not that I am lonely as such, but of course big cities can be alienating and I am still finding my feet. Yesterday was my one month anniversary in my new city and I’m pretty amused that the babbling of a US radio show feels like my soundtrack to life here so far. I listened to a show about relationship break ups yesterday and it really got me thinking about people I’ve left behind in other cites I’ve lived in so far in my life.
But the jewel in the crown of my listening so far has to be The Psychopath Test, part narrated by the awesome Jon Ronson. The show essentially begs the question; how do you tell if someone is a psychopath? And points out the massive ambiguities that can arise when you attempt to give psychological disorders a fixed definition. One of points made to this effect is that often CEOs of big corporate organisations have all of the traits of full on psychopathy….. and based on my time spent working in large arts organisations I have to say I can totally believe it! Character traits included lack of empathy, manipulation, intelligence and grandiosity. Isn’t it interesting to think that the measure by which you possess these qualities could push you either to be highly successful or totally and utterly bonkers?
