Session 8: Bicycles, Art and De-Centring the ‘Subject’

Session 8: Bicycles, Art and De-Centering the ‘Subject’
Chair: Christine Montross
Madwomen on Bicycles: Femininity, Scandal, and Paradox In Australian Women’s Fiction.
Majella Stewart
Forestdale, Australia

From Kate Grenville’s eloquent fictionalisation of Bea Miles’s affluent childhood in Lilian’s Story, to Alexis Wright’s exploration of Aboriginality and institutionalisation in Plains of Promise, Australian women writers have explored madness, sexuality, and institutionalisation in a wealth of compelling and often disturbing ways. For all this, however, and in spite of their depth of feeling, it is the paradox plaguing notions of feminine madness that conveys the full measure of madness’s illusory qualities in these novels.
There is a discernible unease in texts that examine those elements of feminine behaviour that constitute madness and those benign doppelgangers dismissed as congenial misdemeanours. Being ephemeral, madness exhibits its own porous impermanence, lending itself to any number whimsical symptoms in response to an infinite number of social permutations. What appears guileless and refreshing in one time and place looms ominously in another. The madwoman on the bicycle might take endless moonlit rides around the bay, as she does in Grenville’s novel, as an escape from an intolerable life: a therapeutic salve. She might, however, as is also the case in Grenville’s narrative, betray a latent lunacy, a monstrous vehicle for madness, in that unseemly, nocturnal pumping of knees and thighs.
It is perhaps Wright’s Plains of Promise that best conveys the relationship between scandal, femininity, and madness. Ivy Koopundi, deemed hysterical at the death of her child, mourning too loudly and too publicly the loss of her baby, is institutionalised and becomes an aphasic ruin. She remains so until she is liberated, paradoxically, by the choreographed hysteria of middle-eastern dance. Ivy’s highly sexualised, frenzied movements, allow her to recover her voice and her sense of self. It is her return to a normal, ordered life outside the asylum that reduces her to her final bestial form. It is, paradoxically, in the celebration of the unconventional that the mad feminine conveys its estimable lucidity and the mundane that reduces it to a demented shell.

In appendix I, “Madness, The absence of an Oeuvre” (1972) of the new complete edition of Foucault’s History of Madness (2006), the author spoke of madness as an “excluded language” of the social sciences, a language that was incompatible with the establishment of the oeuvre. It is a “blind spot” that displaces notions of coherence and understanding, notions central to the formation of an art historical canon: a canon wherein the art historian can conclude the purpose and value of its said objects. If art history’s purpose is the construction of “codified measures of confinement” (similar to the role of the madhouse) which result in the creation of grand narratives of understanding, how then can it accommodate madness, something, which according to Foucault, is made up of the “words of the excluded”? If madness is the “absence of an oeuvre” and art history the presence of all oeuvres, how can the twain be reconciled?
This paper attempts to address the issue of madness, its representation, and its relation to art historical enquiry. In the first part of the paper, I will consider representations of madness in the history of art, looking specifically at how canonical images have presented the idea of madness. In the second part of the paper, I will examine the ways in which art history has a sought to accommodate or avoid the concept of madness. By this I mean, if art history posits itself as a reasoned enquiry, how then can it include unreason? Both sections draw on Foucault’s archaeological treatment of madness in History of Madness and his Archaeology of Knowledge (1972).
In all, I hope to show that art history can only accommodate the category of madness into its ever-expanding canon by firstly, reducing it to a set of chronological concerns, something in need of “administrative control” and secondly, by reducing it to a negation of reason itself, thereby maintaining it in a power field controlled by a reasoned historical enquiry. Finally, this paper will try and put forth a proposition that moves beyond the idea of art history as a “disinterested search” for truth and shows, in its embeddness, its own uncovered madness.

No abstract is presently available