On the 8the October the Dr. Guislain Museum and Janssen Research
& Development, LLC, announced that Janos Marton, director of
The Living Museum in Queens, New York, has been named the 2015
winner of the Dr. Guislain "Breaking the Chains of Stigma" Award.
The award honors Dr. Marton for his extraordinary efforts and
distinctive ability to nurture creativity of individuals living
with mental illness and for establishing a groundbreaking and
flourishing artistic community within a mental health care
setting. He will be recognized for his contributions tomorrow
during a ceremony and concert in his honor at the Opera House
Ghent, in Belgium.
Over the last 30 years, Dr. Marton has fostered an environment of
artistic expression at The Living Museum located within the
Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. At The Living Museum, people with
mental illness are encouraged to transform their experiences to
artistic expression, a shift that can have profound implications
for a patient's overall well-being. Driven by a desire to empower
his patients, Dr. Marton is the curator of the largest collection
of art by people living with a mental illness in the United
States.
Through The Living Museum, Dr. Marton has positively impacted the
lives of many patients, volunteers, students, artists and mental
health professionals. To date, this concept of creating an artistic
atmosphere for mental health patients has sparked similar creative
centers regionally and globally, from Long Island to Switzerland to
Holland.
Living Museum - Art Asylum
"If Dr. Janos Marton ran the world, there would be protected
spaces everywhere for people with mental illness to create
paintings and sculptures, drawings and lithographs, installations,
murals and collages, poetry and novels, songs and symphonies.
The abandoned buildings on the grounds of old state hospitals
would be turned into sheltered workshops. Warehouses in urban
centers, where the mentally ill pace the streets and scrounge meals
from garbage cans, would become safe harbors, working studios
filled with color and form. Delusion and hallucination, pain and
sorrow, fear and manic exuberance would find their outlet in
something quite simple, the creation of works of art."
This is what Erica Goode of the New York Times wrote summarizing
our ideas. Today, as we look back on 30 years of art produced in
the space by artists of mental illness, we experience the same
miracle. Many hundreds worked here during this period, accumulating
one of the most surprising, enchanting and profound collection of
art in the U.S. The Living Museum is located in Queens, New York,
and is part of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center; a large state owned
and operated mental health facility for people with severe
disorders. The Museum serves as an asylum for its members, enabling
them to transform their vulnerable identities from that of mental
patient to that of artist."The miracle can't be perceived from the
outside. It's only another huge building with barred windows and a
closed door. But when the door is opened and you cross the
threshold, the barrier is broken. For once you feel the physical,
not the literary sensation of having gone through the looking glass
Of stepping into another reality, another language of fluid
structures."(Luisa Valenzuela in the Village Voice, 1986).
The Museum is conceived not as an art therapy project, not as
recreation but as a space where art is created and presented to
visitors, mental health practitioners, workers, fellow artists and
through various public venues to the world at large. This is art
with an implicit message: mental illness, as debilitating as it can
be, is a unique source of creativity. The same energy that
fuels destructive and self-destructive tendencies, can be channeled
and used to create great art. This is a message worth trumpeting
into the wide world, since most people, neither in mental health
nor in the arts, are fully aware of it. Significant art does not
occur in the political or in the decorative domains, nor is it
fueled by the desire to become famous, but rather it happens in the
non-historical sphere reserved for the artists whose work touches
us at a level rooted in the core of human existence. It seems to
come from a deep place, untouched by conscious choice, but rather
guided by a genuine need for expression.
We have enough evidence of the last thirty years to argue that
people with severe mental illness are often in a privileged state,
best described as "being in the flow". To be immersed in the
process forces you to shut out the world around you, at the same
time it enables one to enter a state where communication with
external forces occur. It also makes the artist vulnerable and in
need of protection. That's why art asylums, like the Living Museum,
are necessary.
Finally, quoting Carin Kuoni: "…the actual art at the Living
Museum is immaterial. It is a conceptual performance piece that
takes place in the formless and fleeting sphere of trust in the
patients, the prejudice of the spectators, and the actual
experience of the artists in the space." In addition, we argue with
Joseph Beuys that the old concept of art based only on the picture
or sculpture is somewhat worn out: In an age of declining values
and growing material expectations, with science and technology and
increasing specialization encroaching on every side, the crucial
priority is to develop an anthropological concept of art, which
would embrace all forms of human expression, especially in our
case, that of healing.
