Talking art with Paul Herman

I have developed & maintained a theory about happiness that few I have engaged in the conversation agree with, indeed, I would say, few understand. I have suggested that the pursuit of happiness is a not only a fallacy but a self-defeating approach to life. Some of the feedback I’ve had agrees with the evanescent quality of happiness, the common experience that once achieved, its ability to give happiness disappears but that is only part of my point, the real point is that happiness only makes up a part of the satisfying whole that is the experience of life.

Many consider life more successful according to the quantity & quality of happiness that can be stuffed into the minutes that make up the affair of life, while I consider the more difficult emotional states such as melancholy or rage just as important to that successful experience. A good example is love; I think anyone who has experienced the mad state of falling in love agrees it holds a heightened awareness that is unique to that predicament. And yet, many who have tasted the god-like quality of being in love eschew the possibility of its repetition once they have tasted the fall from glory which is the pain & dejection of having one’s heart broken because of it. A good example of putting a greater importance on happiness than the possibilities offered by the range of emotion available to humans brave enough to feel it all.

I have read Jamison’s Touched with Fire whose impressively deep research into the connection between manic depression & art in such subjects as Lord Byron, Virginia Woolfe & Van Gogh point to a clear correlation. Her attitude however, is the common one & therefore illuminated some of my own thoughts without shedding new light on my ruminations. I am excited for this reason to discover the work of a Harvard professor called: Dr. Schildkraut who began his studies (in 1959) into the suicidal & famously gloomy abstract expressionists, Miro, Pollock, Rothko among others & the question of depression among artists as an ailment common to artists but ended with a sense that: “…depression was not a weakness but simply “one of the things that humans happen to be capable of experiencing.” It had its uses. “Depression turns you inward,” he explained. “In some senses the artistic calling becomes easier with a depressive illness.”

If there was a bright side to depression, Dr. Schildkraut saw it. “Depression in the artist,” he noted, “may be of adaptive value to society at large” — meaning it could inspire great paintings, symphonies and novels. That’s a controversial idea, insofar as it raises a moral dilemma: does treatment, while benefiting the patient, come at a cost to culture?

A victim of manic depressive syndrome is actually a bipolar personality meaning that as sad as the darkness through which no light can filter is, it is accompanied by it’s opposite: bouts of joy that a healthier, more stable, generally understood as ‘more realistic’ personality cannot imagine. Is one more ‘true’ than another? Is something in the middle, without the experience of either extreme, better? Or is it mere mediocrity? Dr Jamison pointed out a behavioural trait of victims of this emotional instability I found very interesting, self-medication with a drug such as cocaine is not used by a depressive as cure to depression but rather by the hippomanic (or the manic depressive in a state of hypomania) as an attempt to extend the sense of ecstasy.

My mother who is an art restorer, or as they are known nowadays: an art conservator, once had twenty or so coloured pencil drawings done by Jackson Pollock while in therapy. She was cleaning them in preparation for their sale (later stopped by court order of the Krassner foundation on the grounds of patient/doctor confidentiality) by the psychiatrist in whose office they were done. Apparently, in moments when old Jack the dripper was unable to express himself with words he drew instead. Dr Schildkraut discovered, & based all his later groundbreaking research on the fact he noticed that depressives who didn’t respond to talk therapy often came to life after taking certain drugs. A groundbreaking paper that he published in 1965 suggested that naturally occurring chemical imbalances in the brain must account for mood swings, which pharmaceuticals could correct, a hypothesis that proved to be correct.

So, should the artist who suffers with his questions “into direct and lonely confrontation with the ultimate existential question, whether to live or to die,” he wrote, “depression may have put them in touch with the inexplicable mystery at the very heart of the tragic and timeless art that they aspired to produce.” Be content with his bargain? Creative expression for personal torment? Or chemical balance & ignorance of his existential plight?