CHRIS THURMAN: When art is a reckoning with the divine

An evening watching extracts from SALT, the triple-bill by Cape Ballet Africa that was onstage at the Drama Factory in Somerset West earlier this month, convinced me of a couple of things.  

One was a (perhaps unfair) notion of artistic “progress”: after seeing the company perform the astonishing choreography in Kirsten Isenberg’s Reverie, Mthuthuzeli November’s Chapter Two and Michelle Reid’s Smoke, the addition to the programme of an old-school pas de deux from Giselle left me with the overwhelming sense that ballet — having come a long way from 19th century Romanticism — is a far more powerful art form when freed from its classical constraints and infused with elements of modern, jazz and contemporary dance styles.

As in most creative endeavours, mastery of tradition is a prerequisite to experimentation and innovation. It’s not that one simply leaves the old behind and embraces the new.  

The other abiding impression I took home with me after SALT was the admittedly rather gauche but nonetheless deeply felt conviction (I knew this already, but the reminder was welcome) that artists give us access to the divine. The Cape Ballet Africa dancers, while preternaturally graceful in their movements, were not trying to imitate airy spirits — on the contrary, they were thrillingly embodied, muscular, vulnerable, playful, sultry. Yet their individual and collective movements, deftly lit and accompanied by stirring music, enabled a briefly numinous experience.  

A few days later I was in the baking hot courtyard of the Stellenbosch University Museum, learning about a very different kind of otherworldly artistic encounter. Manuela Holzer’s Psychotic (In)Sight is an exhibition of sculptural and relief works made using melted black plastic and sand-casting techniques, accompanied by a short film showing the beautiful and haunting pages of a book produced by the artist during and between a series of psychotic episodes.  

Holzer resists the clinical use of the phrase “lack of insight” to characterise someone experiencing psychosis. While a medical practitioner would see this as a diagnosable symptom (defined as “the incapability of psychiatric patients to recognise and accept that they are suffering from a mental illness”), the artist turns the concept on its head.  

Visions

On the one hand, this body of work, which is also linked to Holzer’s doctoral studies, is curated to affirm that “first-person accounts may provide valuable insights into the experience of psychosis that have the potential to challenge stereotypes and stigma”. On the other hand, by conveying what psychosis is like from the inside, Holzer makes a claim for psychotic hallucinations to be understood instead as “visions”. This is not exactly second sight, but can instead by compared to artistic “ways of seeing”.  

Insofar as psychosis entails some disconnection from “reality” (the empirically observable material world), that is also the domain of the imagination or, to go back to those 19th-century Romantics, the sublime. In the film, Holzer describes her psychotic experiences in terms echoing the moments of exaltation and transcendence that many poets, musicians and visual artists have identified as their source of creativity: a heightened aesthetic, spiritual or otherwise-inspired state of mind in which “everything has meaning”.  

Without psychosis, some would argue, we would have had no William Blake, no Vincent van Gogh, no Robert Schumann.  

The difficulty for the individual experiencing manic psychosis, as Holzer narrates it, is not the moments of clarity and light — of revelation, epiphany, truth — but the descent back into the everyday world. This is the place of disappointment and doubt, mistrust and fear, self-hatred and sadness. It is here that art becomes invaluable, a means of processing the journey, recalling vivid insights while documenting the subsequent feeling of being lost and unmoored. In Holzer’s case, this is not just “art as therapy” (though it is partly that), nor indeed “art as science” (though her PhD project suggests it is partly that too). It is art as a reckoning with the divine.  

The female figures who are Holzer’s chief subjects merge with male archetypes of divine aspiration and failure, the fall from lightness into darkness — or perhaps merely into humble human form: Icarus, Satan and Jesus, whom the artist invokes as both “sun” and “the Son of Man”. 

• Psychotic (In)Sight is on display until December 6. 

This column originally appeared in Business Day.