Group Therapy

To complete this inauguration of this blog, I just want to quickly talk about Kim Noble, whose work initially got me thinking about technology, psychology and being a ‘mentalist’ (his word, not mine). Kim is doing his performance ‘Kim Noble Will Die” at the Bluecoat in Liverpool on the 14th May: come and see it if you can. The piece is described as a mulimedia suicide note and basically takes one of his manic depressive breakdowns as the subject of an hilarious and excruciating performance. I went down to Oxford University to hear him speaking as part of a panel on “The Inspired Illness: exploring the links between mental disorders and creativity in society”. It was wonderful to see him present his controversial work in the middle of Oxford University, encouraging a slightly bemused Oxford student to call his Mum and ask her about his illness. Incidentally his Mum denies that he has an illness and says thats ‘just how he is’. I wonder if its actually quite difficult for a parent to consider their offspring has a permanent mental disorder such as bi-polar?

Anyway, what’s great about Kim’s work is that he completely subverts the reality TV aesthetic of the media, giving us far too much ‘reality’ about his chaotic breakdowns. It exploits the ‘fly on the wall aesthetic’ of video blogging to the point of being highly disturbing. Check this link for a more eloquent commentary than mine. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/co… And follow this link to buy tickets for his show in Liverpool http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/

I am half way through this book: Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison. She’s a manic depressive and psychologist based in the US, who clearly has an intense interest in documenting the relationship between creativity and psychosis. So far she has talked a lot about Byron and about that almost cliched supposition that artists are more likely to be affected by a mental illness. I distrust this perspective a little given that some of the most eloquent and capable individuals that I know are artists. She talks about one particular study where:

“The highest rates of psychiatric abnormality were found in poets (50 percent) and musicians (38 percent), painters (20 percent), sculptors (18 percent) and architects (17 percent).”

I guess my task through this blog and current thread of thought is extracting the outdated romantic perspective on the insane Byronesque artist and viewing it from a more contemporary perspective, both in terms of the artistic media used (digital and new technologies) and the way in which we understand the issues around mental health.