El sueño de la razón produce monstruos: On the Work of Javier Téllez

Javier Téllez spent his childhood in close proximity to “pathological” behavior. Both of his parents were psychiatrists, and his father received patients in the same room where he would play as a child.¹ This familiarity would eventually develop into a prolific body of work around a central goal—the articulation of a position of alterity? and a strategy—to give visibility to peripheral or neglected communities of individuals who live outside the parameters of a “normal” or “healthy” society. From an early age, Téllez often visited art museums and was struck by the “hygienic spaces (and) enforced silence” that reminded him of the hospital in which his father worked. Téllez developed this influence into an unorthodox artistic practice that simultaneously critiques the psychiatric institution and the art museum. For Téllez, “both institutions are symbolic representations of authority, founded on taxonomies based on the normal and the pathological, inclusion and exclusion.”² Téllez developed this influence into an unorthodox artistic practice that simultaneously critiques the psychiatric institution and the art museum. For Téllez, “both institutions are symbolic representations of authority, founded on taxonomies based on the normal and the pathological, inclusion and exclusion.”³

Téllez is perhaps best known for his collaborative films and performances with patients of psychiatric institutions—institutions that in his work are often situated in peripheral contexts where mental illness is directly tied to social class, reserved for the poor and underprivileged. This double marginality betrays an interest in the conflation of mental illness with a lack of productivity: while institutionalization precludes participation in a capitalist system of production, psychotropic therapy seems to be an ever more pervasive manner of numbing symptoms so as to allow individuals, both within and outside of the mental institution, to assimilate to the norms and behaviors required for participating in this system. The work that best exemplifies this situation of extreme marginality is Choreutics (2001), a two-channel video installation produced for Plateau of Humankind, curated by Harald Szeemann at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. The title is taken from the term coined by dance theorist Rudolf Laban to designate a formal analysis of movement that sought to liberate corporeal movements from the confines of classical dance. The piece deals with the extraordinarily high incidence of Huntington's chorea—an extremely rare, hereditary neurological disorder characterized by involuntary, jerky bodily movements, facial contortions and mental outbursts—in a few isolated fishing villages near Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, where the level of incidence is seven-hundred times higher than in other parts of the world.⁴ Despite the area's proximity to Venezuela's largest oil reservoir, the Venezuelan state has systematically neglected inhabitants of these villages, giving them scarcely adequate medical attention or social assistance. Isolation, poverty, and ignorance contribute to a vicious cycle in which the disease proliferates as carriers transmit it to their children, threatening the very sustainability of the communities.

Choreutics includes a documentary-style video shot by Téllez showing several extreme examples of villagers afflicted with the disease: a poorly clad, malnourished elderly man writhing uncontrollably on a bed; a young man in a decrepit room who seems at times to smile at the camera although his face is simply a mess of involuntary expressivity; and perhaps most disturbingly, a middle-aged woman (though probably younger than she appears) trying to smoke a cigarette, an operation that is made almost impossible by the ceaseless movement of her arms and mouth. Excruciating and unforgiving, these images are interspersed with those of a group of children from the same village passing a spinning top from hand to hand, still blissfully ignorant about which of them might develop the disease—the symptoms of which strangely mimic the game they are playing. The second channel of the installation shows a re-edited version of a 1972 film made by Dr. Avila Girón, a Venezuelan psychiatrist from Maracaibo, documenting the parents and grandparents of Téllez's subjects. Edited into sequences from the original film is a digital image of a spider web, which alludes to both the hereditary nature of the disease and to a medieval myth from southern Italy, whereby victims of tarantula bites engaged in frenzied dancing as a curative measure, despite (or perhaps because of) religious proscriptions against dancing. Although the exact origins of Huntington’s disease are ambiguous, it almost certainly originated in Europe. In these villages, it is popularly believed that it was spread in the nineteenth century by a Spanish sailor, after whose arrival local women began to give birth to sick children.⁵ “El mal de sambito,” as it is referred to locally, is perceived literally as the product of the violence of colonial “first contact,” further aggravated by postcolonial economic and social disparity. Téllez frames this little-known history by explicitly referencing ethnographic practices (and the fine line that always exists between fiction and documentary) in the context of the Venice Biennale, one of the art world's most conspicuous global events. In its foregrounding of colonial boundaries, systematic iniquities, and documentary procedures, Choreutics draws attention to those mechanisms of exclusion that still very much determine the dissemination of cultural knowledge despite claims of diversity within a “globalized” art system. It also inevitably conjures up Michel Foucault's periodization of the “Great Confinement,” in which social outcasts were isolated (and then neglected) in order to protect the values of a mercantile economy.⁶

In 2004 Téllez worked with a group of female patients at the Rozelle Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Sydney, to create a two-channel video installation entitled La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Rozelle Hospital) based on Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. This was Téllez's first work to address explicitly how gender is inscribed within historical constructions of mental illness. He asked his collaborators to rewrite the intertitles from Dreyer's film, which were then edited back into the original film footage. The altered Jeanne d'Arc was then projected opposite a 16mm film (Twelve and a Marionette, 2004) made up of individual monologues of the women's experiences within the mental health system. The intertitles written by them tell the story of a new patient of the hospital who suffers from delusions of grandeur and believes she is Joan of Arc. The martyr's trial is in this way transformed into the story of the process of institutionalization, with references to the psychiatric interviews, medication, and release forms that are part and parcel of this process.

Dreyer once wrote that “Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring.”⁷ He put this dictum to practice in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc with its extreme use of close-ups of the actress Maria Falconetti's pained countenance—principally shot from above—as well as of her interrogators' faces, bathed in harsh shadows and filmed looking down at their victim. In Téllez's own 16mm film, each woman's narrative begins with a series of frontal, side- and back-head shots, referring obliquely to physiognomy—a founding principle of psychiatry that claimed that certain facial features and expressions were tied to specific types of mental disease. While writings about Dreyer's work often celebrate his treatment of female victimization by a dominant patriarchal system, accounts of the sadistic techniques he used to extract such realistic performances are seldom included. In the making of Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, 1943), it is said that he left actress Anna Svierkier tied to the stake while the rest of the crew broke for lunch, and that while filming La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc heforced Falconetti to kneel on a stone floor until the physical pain resulted in the facial expression Dreyer required for the take. It is not insignificant that Falconetti never made another film, and eventually succumbed to mental illness herself before committing suicide in 1946.⁸ Lars von Trier, a self-declared Dreyer admirer, has employed similar strategies, most notably in the filming of Dancer in the Dark (2000), spawning accusations by Björk, the leading actress in the film, of misogyny. The director responded by calling her “a mad woman.”⁹ When asked about the potentially exploitative nature of his lens-based practice, Téllez maintains that “the question of ethics is always at the core of representation,” and that 'according to Levinas, ethics is a devotion to the other: "I have to forget myself to access the other.'"¹⁰

Téllez has said that one of the most interesting elements of his collaboration with these women was their ability to imitate the voices of the psychiatrists and staff. “This ability is seldom present on the other side—the language of the institution can never mimic those subjected to its dominant discourse.”¹¹ As anthropologist Michael Taussig writes, “mimicry corrodes the alterity of which my science is nourished. For now I too am part of the object of study.”¹² In Enlightenment epistemology (from which modern psychiatry itself emerged) the experience of alterity is described as “wonder”: the subject is confronted by an unfamiliar object that destroys the conceptual framework to which he or she would normally have recourse. And it is precisely this momentary lapse of understanding that drives the rational faculties forward in the acquisition of knowledge, in an act of domination. Mimesis represents a very different sort of impulse: it is a passive yielding to, or even a merging with, the unknown in order to better understand it. In “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1935)—a text cited by Téllez as highly influential on his work—Roger Caillois describes “an overwhelming tendency to imitate” within nature, as manifested in insect morphology (with certain animals merging with their physical surroundings in an often-vain attempt at self-preservation) as well as in mental illnesses such as schizophrenia (where the afflicted individual fails to distinguish between an integral self and the physical space that surrounds, envelopes and threatens to dismantle a stable sense of identity).¹³ The issue of mimicry is pervasive throughout Téllez's work as both a means of exposing certain ideological structures of the psychiatric institution and, more generally, as a way of signaling the unbinding of a model of subjectivity based on an antagonistic distinction between exteriority and interiority, self and other.

The collaborative nature of Téllez's practice is meant to “create a flexible space where those represented can intervene in their own representation.”¹⁴ The most engaging aspect of Twelve and Marionette has less to do with conventional aesthetic or conceptual concerns imposed by the artist than with the subtle insight of these particular “consumers” of the health service as they address issues of Stigmatisation and repression with humor, cynicism, anger, self-valorization and sometimes resignation.¹⁵ One woman complains of the patronizing treatment received from a community nurse who inquires about her “delusional belief systems''; she responded that “the world is full of delusional belief systems.” Another criticizes social imperatives requiring her to be happy and well-adjusted despite the domestic violence she endured as a child, a violence that is arguably derived from the same sort of patriarchal structure within which she has been observed, diagnosed, and treated for several decades (during the course of which “not much has changed,” she says). Several of the women speak about their mental illness in positive, even emancipatory terms, as a means towards greater self-understanding and control of the mind and body. However, rather than romanticizing or redeeming the “pathological” as that which is repressed within constructions of normalcy, this set of narratives examines the very impulse behind such constructions, and how these are constantly shifting in relation to broader social anxieties. There is a large body of research to support the historical construction of mental illnesses, particularly in relation to gender (as, for example, in Elaine Showalter's discussion of hysteria as a “female malady”).¹⁶ In response to the potentially therapeutic aspects of his practice, Téllez has said: “The point of my work is not to cure psychiatric patients; perhaps the cure is really for those who go to see the work in the museum, those who consider themselves normal….”¹⁷

This boundary between the “pathological” and the “normal” is always slippery in Téllez's work, and he has often cited an early, significant childhood memory in which he attended a carnival at the Bárbula Psychiatric Hospital in Valencia, Venezuela—an institution where his father worked and practiced unconventional, progressive methods of treatment—and watched as patients and psychiatrists exchanged their respective uniforms in a symbolic inversion of their daily roles. The use of the carnivalesque as a means to demystify the relationship of power between the patient and the institution figures prominently in Téllez's work, which he has described as “documentation of fictional re-enactments that take place within the mental institution.”¹⁸ His use of masks intends to obscure and destabilize the fixed identities assigned to the mentally ill in medical literature and in the popular imagination, while carnival events are inserted into the controlled environment of the museum or other art events—a subtle homage to Hélio Oiticica—in order to blur the distinction between performers and spectators.¹⁹ Humor operates as a subversive element not only to mock and denaturalize hierarchical structures, but also to break the solemnity that inevitably accompanies distinctions between “us” and “them.”

For the 2005 edition of InSite, a public-art biennial that attempts to negotiate one of the world's most contested borders (Tijuana-San Diego), Téllez collaborated with residents of the CESAM State Psychiatric Hospital in nearby Mexicali. Their aim was to organize a spectacular event that would surpass the parameters of the domain of public art and enter into the realm of mass media. Titled One Flew Over the Void, the work staged a live circus act that culminated in David “Human Cannonball” Smith hurdling over the fence dividing the Playas de Tijuana from the Border Field State Park, San Diego in the first-ever human projectile over an international border.²⁰ Initiated by the slow march of patients down to the beach, holding placards with phrases such as “La realidad entre la sanidad mental y la perdida de la razón es muy tenue” (“There is a very fine line between mental sanity and the loss of reason”), and accompanied by a melancholic trumpet solo from the traditional mariachi ballad of the prodigal son (“El hijo pródigo”), the event took on a raucous, chaotic tone as patients congregated on a stage to perform under the direction of a rowdy MC and a rather distracted ringleader. If by spectacle we mean the substitution of images for authentic social relations, then what better way to cross a border that is non-negotiable in real life than to confine the act to the realm of pure fiction and to represent it filmically? Like so many of his other works, this one exists as both the event and its filmic representation, but additionally as a sort of popular legend that became familiar to many individuals outside of the original context in which it occurred.

This legend was, of course, fueled by all of the baggage—historical, cultural and economic—that accompanies this particular place on the map. And like the figure of the mentally ill, threatening and undesirable in proximity but also idealized through a long association with a freedom from social constraints that is thought to spawn creativity and genius, the idea of Mexico as a cultural construct within the North American imaginary is a romanticized image of an underprivileged other, precarious, lawless, dangerous, and yet seductive. Just as First World economies are sustained by the illegal labor that is a consequence of these borders, the construction of identity often depends upon identifying and then marginalizing what one is not through an act of negation and ultimately exclusion. But then, as Taussig asks, “what does…a compulsion to become Other imply for the sense of Self?... Is it conceivable that a person could break boundaries like this, slipping into Otherness, trying it on for size? What sort of world would this be?”²¹

Notes

¹ This essay's title references the title of a plate from Francisco Goya's Caprichos series (1803), which can be translated as “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”
² Michèle Faguet and Cristobal Lehyt, “Madness Is the Language of the Excluded: An Interview with Javier Téllez,” C Magazine, no.92 (Winter 2006): 27.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Donald C. Drake, “The Curse of San Luis,” The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, August 26, 1984.
⁵ Researcher Nancy Wexler has confirmed the existence of Justo Antonio Doria, the Spanish sailor to which the spreading of the disease has been attributed, but has found no evidence of Huntington's in his children's death certificates. She only has been able to trace the disease back to two Venezuelans in the 1830s, but suspects the gene originated in Europe. See D.C. Drake, “The Curse of San Luis.”
⁶ See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 38–64.
⁷ Carl Theodor Dreyer, quoted by Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum, My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 138.
⁸ “Falconetti's daughter stated that the reason her mother hadn't made other films was because she believed the arduous physical conditions she had to endure in the making of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc were typical of filmmaking.” Michael Koller, “La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc,” Senses of Cinema, no. 5 (April 2000), https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/cteq/passion/.
⁹ Nigel Reynolds, “Film that sent Bjork ‘mad’ wins Palme d'Or,” The Daily Telegraph, May 22, 2000.
¹⁰ Faguet and Lehyt, “Madness Is the Language of the Excluded,” 27–28.
¹¹ Ibid., 29.
¹² Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993), 8.
¹³ Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (Winter 1984): 17–32.
¹⁴ Faguet and Lehyt, “Madness Is the Language of the Excluded,” 27.
¹⁵ One of the women called Wart says: “I really hate the term consumer because that's what they call us people with the mental illness.' According to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors site, “Consumer is the term most frequently applied to a person who receives mental health services. The term is sometimes used more generically to refer to anyone who has a diagnosis of mental illness. Not all persons with mental illness accept this terminology, however.” “Glossary,” National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors.
¹⁶ See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
¹⁷ Ivo Mesquita and Viviana Kuri Haddad, eds., Diálogos Impertinentes. Quinto Simposio Internacional de Teoría sobre Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City: Editorial Patronato de Arte ContemporáneoA.C., 2007), 244.
¹⁸ Faguet and Lehyt, “Madness Is the Language of the Excluded,” 30.
¹⁹ In “Javier Téllez: Institutionalized Aesthetics,” Flash Art, no. 225 (July/September 2002): 96. Raul Zamudio discusses Téllez's use of the carnivalesque in relation to Hélio Oiticia's series of parangolés or capes, publicly worn by samba dancers at the 1965 exhibition Opinião 65 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. According to Anna Dezeuze, “The irruption of the poor into the bourgeois atmosphere of the museum caused such a scandal that the director had them evicted.” Anna Dezeuze, “Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés,” Art Journal (Summer 2004): 59.
²⁰ The title makes reference to Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, based on his own experience of working in a psychiatric institution.
²¹ Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 33.



Originally published in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 18 (Summer 2008): 46–53. Published with permission from the author and Afterall.