ARTFILE

One way to read the show 'Madness & Modernity' at the Wellcome Collection, is via the astigmatic gaze of the Viennese diarist Peter Altenberg, whose striking 1909 portrait by Gustav Jagerspacher adorns a publicity brochure for the exhibition.

Enlisting Altenberg as proxy, Altenberg as 'blogger' avant la lettre, a hard drinking night owl and indeed periodic inmate of Viennese 'sanatoria' himself, focuses the entire panoply of cultural signs and symptoms to be found in the Vienna of 1900, and lets today's visitor keep a protective distance and objectivity from this disturbing assortment of paintings, and medical bric-a-brac.

Room 1 though is dedicated to 18th century Vienna, and 'examples of the interaction of art, architecture and madness' as the blurb puts it. Four of Franz-Xaver Messerschmidt's celebrated series of busts collectively known as The Grimace (c.1770) feature here. Made in the twilight of his life, these bald heads appear to be the product of Messerschmidt's paranoid sensibility, and their titles hint that he was not just depicting his own hypomanic states (probably due to Crohn's disease), but also cocking a snook at academia, for 'The Ultimate Simpleton' 'An Arch-Rascal' 'A Lecherous and Careworn Fop' and 'A Hypochondriac' might easily be the commissioned heads of Roman Emperor's caught ridiculously off guard.

Accompanying Messerschmidt's egregious busts, David Bickerstaff's video installation Narrenturm provides a fascinating glimpse of the internal lay-out of an early asylum, 'The Tower of Fools'. Constructed in 1784 under the supervision of Emperor Joseph II, from the outside it resembles an enormous Martello tower or Colosseum, circular corridors effecting the controlled vertigo of a 'disciplinary institution'.

'Control' is a key concept explored through some of the objects in this show, albeit wrapped up in its usual velvet glove 'therapy'. A "lightning-cage" (c.1890), some photos reproduced from J-M Charcot's Paris Journals of abnormalities such as microdactylism, mylopathy and gigantism (material glibly described here as 'a source-book for artists searching for new iconographies of the body') and waxwork busts of two idiotic brothers, summon up the presence of the helpless unfortunates who would have been locked up behind the original isolation cell door from 'Am Steinhof' psychiatric hospital on show in Room 2, 'designed for thickness and durability, as well as for surveillance'. It is sobering to think that such types of 'sub-humanity' would have been liquidated by the Nazi regime after the Anschluss, in line with their racial purification policy.

Room 6, 'The Patient Artist' containing Frau St's newspaper ornes from the Prinzhorn Collection of outsider art and Josef Radler's overwrought water colour's documenting his 12 year stint as a patient, the self-styled 'court painter to six states, to many farmsteads, now painter of fools', adjoins neurasthenic portraits by Kokoschka, Schiele and Max Oppenheimer (Rooms 4 & 5) in an effort to build the thesis of the pathological artist/pathological patron, a mirroring turned outwards to reflect on the entire city, the implication being that fin-de-siecle Vienna was little better than a municipal "loony bin", psycho-analysis and modernist architecture its cure. Consequently, the ground-plan leads you past some period designer chairs from Purkersdorf Sanatorium into a cul-de-sac or inner sanctum where Freud's couch is evoked (Room 3), surrounded by Egyptian knick-knacks, and pictures, the archetypal site of an altogether very different kind of 'Final Solution'.

The way through the exhibits invites a return to Room 1, where Bickerstaff's film continues to loop, mimicking the circularity of the asylum passages it follows, passing vitrines of endoskeletal remains, framed charts, and a hat & coat rack which form a banal backdrop occasionally cut up by scary retinal flashes, representing intrusive thoughts perhaps?

Despite the frisson served up by 'Madness & Modernity', the viewpoint it adopts is limited, and the focus on either Vienna's abject or its rich and neurotic, excludes a whole social strata, ie the proletarian working-class: cabbies, street-sweepers, chamber maids, pastry chefs, factory hands, even policemen responsible for the day-to-day running of such a city. Their narratives are conspicuous by their absence, for in having to set aside mental distress in order to get to work on time (literally hang onto a job), they might be seen as disruptive ripples in the neat topological theme of Vienna as collective madhouse.

'Madness & Modernity -mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900', the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd., London NW1 2BE; 1 Apr-28 Jun 2009.