What Arthur Bispo do Rosario did in his robes, banners, and objects was what he believed to be a divine mission. But for decades, reading the works he made in hospices, where he lived 50 of his 80 years, is that they are works of art like any other that are exhibited in museums. The condition raises a complex discussion of how these institutions welcome plays not produced for them.
Diana Kolker, curator and educator at the Arthur Bispo do Rosario Museum in western Rio de Janeiro, says that at this crossroads, it is undeniable that the production of the boxer, also from Japaratuba, in Sergipe has had a profound impact on contemporary art.
This is one of the two main overlaps of the exhibition about the artist that Itaú Cultural opens in São Paulo on the 18th, the date commemorating the National AntiAsylum Day and the International Museum Day.
Kolker and Ricardo Resende called up around 50 names that had some affinity with Bispo’s work. This is the case of embroideries by Leonilson, textile studies by Rosana Paulino and Sônia Gomes and paintings on brown paper by Maxwell Alexandre, which revisit the universe he created in the former Colonia Juliano Moreira, in Jacarepaguá, with all sorts of fabrics and object found there.
The scope of Sergipe’s work today has to do with how often he has performed in formal arts institutions a survey conducted for the current exhibition shows that his pieces have been featured in at least 150 exhibitions around the world.
But the exhibition of her work is also a vector of the debate about mental health and the flags raised by the psychiatric reform, defends the organizer of the exhibition. To some extent, this supports the central core of Itaú Cultural’s gathering of more than 400 pieces by the artist himself, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Kolker states that Bispo’s work was first seen outside of the asylum context in a text by Samuel Wainer Filho in the 1980s. Written in the context of the antiasylum struggle, it denounced the violent treatment of psychiatric patients in Brazil since the 19th century, in other words: Bispo also influenced the direction of mental health discussion in the country. “This agenda is not exhausted and must be launched, especially at a time when so many are in a fragile situation,” she says.
To show what the artist’s production space looked like, the museum reproduced the ambiance of Bispo’s cell with an almost compulsive accumulation of objects in the space. His purpose was to take a grand inventory of mankind’s creations to present to God at the Last Judgment. The company was run by voices only he could hear.
Bispo did this during one of the most horrific times of the asylum model in Brazil. Electroshock, lobotomy and imprisonment called “cake” in which several people were imprisoned and tortured together were part of everyday life in the Colonia Juliano Moreira.
But documents show he always found ways to exercise some autonomy there, either by refusing drugs or creating a barter network to procure the materials needed to create the pieces.
Incidentally, Bispo is not the only artist who has experienced this context that is remembered. Both he and Aurora Cursino and Judith Scott, who also lived in psychiatric centers, are the subjects of newly published books. The Center Pompidou in Paris has just received an “Art Brut” collection, which also includes works created in these places.
What seems to be fueling this interest is the very impact the pandemic has had on mental health, Kolker speculates. “It’s important to look at this place outside of the stigma of insanity as something that belongs only to the other who is in danger,” she says.
Solange de Oliveira, researcher and author of Arte por Um Fio: Arthur Bispo do Rosario, cites a number of other reasons for this growing interest in the production of artists like Bispo. Among them the market interest in expressive and contemplative work. Since she began researching niches in 2012, these artists have increasingly appeared at major international auction houses, she says.
In her opinion, this mediation from psychiatry to museums often extinguishes the intention of the subjects themselves. Bispo, for example, has repeatedly said that his work is not art. “I wonder if we can at least consider that these people have a different perspective on these creations?” Oliveira asks.
In the book, she even chooses to move away from the schizophrenic perspective that dominates the debate about Bispo’s work to explore the relationship between coats and Sergipe’s celebrations. In these popular festivals, which carry the religious tradition that was fundamental to the artist, the making of clothing is an activity reserved for men.
There is also a signature embroidery of the state, Irish lace, which has no reverse side and which Oliveira says permeates all of the artist’s work. “When you take a cloak off him, one of the first impulses is to turn him inside out. He has no knots, no degrees.”
Exploring what she calls “Memory of Origin” is an attempt to avoid falling into the trap of limiting Bispo’s production to a diagnosis, as well as disputing how his works get into museums.
She recalls a photographer’s account of the work of Judith Scott — about whom Oliveira also published a book — whose son was committed to a psychiatric hospital. He wondered if the authors of these pieces could also circulate in the corridors of the museums where they were on display.
Diana Kolker, organizer of the Itaú Cultural Show, says that whenever she is faced with a discussion about how to present Bispo in this formal art regime, she tries to move away from a place of authority that represents what he has done in life as a label looks. After all, the artist himself did not want this for his work.
She says the best way is to try to think like Arthur Bispo do Rosario himself and to unravel uniforms, sheets, fabrics. “Didn’t he actually reject what modern thinking usually calls art?” asks the organizer. “Maybe he took this psychiatric hospital uniform, pulled the strings, opened it up and presented this other thing. It makes us ask not only what art is, but what it can be.”