While I’m here and am seemingly having a bout of Saturday night insomnia…. I’ll deal with the psychotic cats that I mentioned a couple of posts ago. Just so I’m not keeping you in suspense or anything……
A couple of weeks ago I popped over to Manchester and decided to buy the latest edition of Cabinet Magazine. I love Cabinet but it’s hella expensive. Seven pounds a pop! However Brian Dillon is their UK editor who never fails to please… and there always texts on really interesting themes. My favorite in the current edition is an article by Adam Jasper on the nineteenth century artist Louis Wain. Initially a painter of upstanding and gentlemanly anthropomorphized cats, which earned him money and fame, Wain gradually slipped into schizophrenia during later life. This transition is evidenced by the enormous change in his cat portraits, which according to Adam Jasper are now used as a text book demonstration of the optical effects associated with psychosis. Jasper quotes Hans Prinzhorn in asserting that “such dense edge-to-edge work (was) motived by a kind of horror vacui, as if the confrontation with the void was being fought out on paper.”
Its funny how I can’t stop staring at these crazy felines. They are fascinating… but maybe not the greatest thing for me getting obsessed with if I ever intend to sleep tonight….
