Agnes Martin remains on view at New York’s Guggenheim Museum through January 11, 2017.
See the museum website for details and location.
It isn’t enough to say that Agnes Martin crafted what may be the perfect minimalist paintings. Rather, we do her life and work a far greater justice by acknowledging that in her own complex yet elegantly psycho-therapeutic solution to grappling with schizophrenia, Agnes Martin imposed on her life and art an obsessional ritual program of mapping successive pathways to renewed sanity and persistent order in her life. Schizophrenia and obsession were the treacherous Scylla and Charybdis that life forced Martin to circumnavigate. And she ultimately managed not only to find her way through the twin dangers, she did it by converting her personal and plaguing disconnection with space and discontinuity with time into a structural mapping of the most elegant and minimally-contained mannerist art likely ever produced.
I only partially mean mapping as a charting and identification of space. For Martin it is a mapping of the mind (or the painted mind) that secures personal and social connectivity and continuity — the very things that schizophrenia would deny her through its severely-imposed disconnection and discontinuity. “Mapping” is a concept that comes from R.D. Laing’s theory of the territorial claim on social roles that compel people to adopt lifestyles that might or might not fit them. It’s a mapping of lifestyles that comes with considerable social pressures, in terms of the mapping of individual vs. collective expectations — one mapped over the other. But Martin was quite literal in her interpretation of theories, in her work, mapping becomes a meticulous and exacting physical labor that enables her to counter the disconnection of schizophrenia, while embracing the safety of obsessive compulsion — all with the meshes of the grid. In her own complex yet elegantly psycho-therapeutic solution to grappling with schizophrenia, Agnes Martin imposed on her life and art the structure and motif of the grid as an infinite and eternal if obsessional ritual program of mapping successive pathways to recovered and renewed sanity and persistent order in her life.
I wonder if she was on antipsychotics and if so, did they affect her creativity? She lived to 95 which is s ripe old age by modern standards so maybe she had a mild version of sz.
That’s a good question. She was born in 1912 and the first-gen APs came out in the 1950s so she wouldn’t even have had access to APs until she was in her 40s.
There’s another great artist named Robert Blakelock
Who had sz. He’s popular now in some high end galleries in NYC. A lot of musicians like him, most notably trey Anastasio from phish. His works sell for big bucks.
I can’t help but feel that these meds are going to be responsible for my early departure, as well as loss of creativity. She looks happy in that picture which leads me to believe that it was taken prior to 1950.
I think it would be impossible to live to 95 with the current medications that we have.
I would take years of no creativity vs creativity and few years. I had the first one, life was intense. Now they’re all but memories.
Alas Ignorance is bliss
I have managed to be creative in spite of being on meds. It has been a matter of setting goals and pushing myself on an ongoing basis. And by ‘creative’ I mean that I’m a published author (first in Information Technology and then as a photographer) and that my photographs have been published nationally and internationally.
I’m still me under this layer of meds, I just have to work harder to push my way through them back up to the surface.
Creativity isn’t a black or white type of thing - its not all or nothing. For everyone at different times there is a range of creative impulses - from very uncreative to very creative. We all usually fall somewhere in the range - and some very creative musicians like Tom Harrell have schizophrenia, take medications and are also very creative - so I don’t think you can just say a blanket statement like “meds take away your creativity” - it will vary by time, person and medication and other factors too…
