Ovartaci – born Louis Marcussen – apprenticed as a naturalistic craft painter before emigrating to Argentina in 1923. She travelled the country for six years before returning home in a frayed state. Upon her return, Ovartaci’s family admitted her to the psychiatric hospital in Risskov, where she lived and worked for the next fifty-six years. The artist took the name “Ovartaci” – essentially “Chief Lunatic” – as a play on “ovar,” a term of leadership in the hospital such as “Chief Psychiatrist,” and “taci,” derived from “tossi,” a colloquial term for a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Assigned male at birth, after years of requests for a sex change surgery and her own crude attempt, the hospital finally facilitated her female gender affirmation surgery. Ovartaci’s drawings and paintings feature groups of animal-like creatures with slim, elongated features. They often appear in mythological scenes that suggest earlier lives in Ancient Egypt, or in pagan circuses. Ovartaci also sculpted large dolls, costumed in both painted and fabric clothing. Dreams of escape run throughout her work, most overtly in her many drawn plans and cardboard and wood models of a helicopter that could fly beyond the hospital’s walls.
In the last years of her life, the artist began self-identifying as a man. Most of the recent critical literature on the artist refers to Ovartaci by using female pronouns, as we have done in this text, a choice not meant to deny the validity of other views.
In the last years of her life, the artist began self-identifying as a man. Most of the recent critical literature on the artist refers to Ovartaci by using female pronouns, as we have done in this text, a choice not meant to deny the validity of other views.
Ovartaci healed himself through his art. If there is one dictum that seems to recur
in presentations and evaluations of Ovartaci’s work, it is this one. As observers
of his work, we know that Ovartaci spent 56 years of his life in psychiatric institutions. Knowing this we marvel at the wondrous journeys he undertook – journeys in the time and space of a vast mental landscape. We marvel at his enthralling documentation of these journeys and at his production, which stretches from papier-mâché dolls, smoking devices and mechanical objects to decoration
and traditional painting. It is as if he creates a world of his own in which to live,
composed of thoughts and practices of a philosophical, aesthetic and religious
character. One of Ovartaci’s doctors, the psychiatrist Johannes Nielsen, who interacted with Ovartaci from the 1960s onwards, has often expressed these sentiments of admiration in very flowery ways. In a book called Flame people: The chief physician and the chief lunatic of Risskov, Nielsen is interviewed about his friendship with Ovartaci and utters pathos-ridden statements like:
was a whole other and better approach to the treatment of mentally ill. […] The studio is a refuge. There are no doctors here walking around observing or writing in journals. Work is done with joy and inspiration here, and the artists do not ask what is wrong with the patients. […] Ovartaci […] to a very large degree healed himself through his unique art – and thereby broke free from the straitjacket of the mind.
Nielsen further states; he praises Ovartaci’s spiritual freedom, claiming that he
led a “life many healthy people could be envious of ” and that he was happier
than most people. To sum up, there is something that Ovartaci accomplishes which is original.
But what is this ‘something’? Nielsen gives so many descriptions of this par -
ticular talent of Ovartaci’s, and yet these descriptions somehow all fail to hit
the mark. They are extremely loud, almost over-enthusiastic, and at the same
time esoteric and rather imprecise. What happens when a mentally ill person succeeds in treating him- or herself? What kind of accomplishment is this, and how does it make this person’s life liveable in a new way? Questions like these of course lead to further, more complicated questions about how we understand concepts like life, illness, treatment, art and so on. It is the premise of this book
that there is more work to be done on these questions. Can Ovartaci’s self-cure be described, analyzed and theorized in more precise terms? This is the core investigative path of the book.
ether. This does not mean that I will present a philosophical treatise on the question of the self-cure, but simply that certain core concepts must be clarified along
the way to allow for precision in analyzing Ovartaci’s work. When Nielsen claims
that Ovartaci succeeds in treating himself, there is an underlying assumption
that he was sick – that he suffered from mental illness. Nielsen qualifies Ovartaci’s
illness as a ‘psychogenic psychosis’, but he does not connect the implications of
Ovartaci’s illness with the question of his self-cure in any deeper way. He simply
acknowledges Ovartaci’s special talent to create art. This may be because Nielsen
in this respect first and foremost operated as ‘the great practitioner’, acting on
but not elaborating on the wider philosophical implications of what was unfolding before his eyes. Psychiatric patients can thrive from doing creative work: This
is the basic insight that Nielsen (in his own words) gained from Ovartaci and
which he refined and advanced over many years, thus becoming, in a Danish
context, a pioneer in creating facilities for art therapy. In creative work, according to Nielsen, patients are “activated”, which is good, and creative work provides them with an outlet for their frustrations, anxieties and so on. Under all circumstances it is important to focus on creative work as associated with the patient’s “healthy resources”.
approach where the ‘person’ comes first, not the ‘patient’. His anthropology has
to do with considering the human being as “so much more than a diagnosis”,
as Max Bendixen states in Flame people (and the whole project and text of this
book was initiated and finally approved by Nielsen himself ). Nielsen’s humanism effectively blocks out medical perspectives on art made by mentally ill persons: He does not believe that such art can be helpful as a diagnostical tool, and he finds categorizations such as (in the lingo of his time) ‘schizophrenic art’ and ‘manio-depressive art’ to be way too artificial and schematical. For Nielsen,
inside the patient that the doctor tries to treat medically there is a person
– a person who is able to express him- or herself (in drawing, painting, sculpture
and so on) and thus find relief from suffering. When such a person reaches a stage
where he or she can produce art, one should not ‘degrade’ this back into a diagnostical category.
Nielsen’s position combines the position of the medically
trained doctor with that of the listening peer, but its humanism also blocks out
some very interesting questions that one could pose concerning Ovartaci’s work:
Treating Ovartaci as a person who was unfortunately struck by some outside
trauma, but who has an artistic talent, does not do justice to the very radical
‘self-reconfiguring’ work he performs. Articulated in more precise terms: This
approach does not acknowledge the gravity of the illness suffered by Ovartaci,
or rather (in the first place) Louis Marcussen, and it does not account for the
imaginary and symbolic construction of ‘Ovartaci’. This construction is, as I see
it, fundamental; the move from Louis to Ovartaci is not performed out of some
contingent idiosyncrasy but is intimately related to the self-cure in question.
named Louis Marcussen (becoming Ovartaci), a process that also involves a shift
from the social mandate of an industrial painter to the social mandate of an artist
and from man to woman. I therefore focus on the fundamental conflict that
haunts Louis, and this focus is nourished by philosophical and psychoanalytically informed discussions on what it means to be a subject. As Nielsen, I take
it that Louis (or Ovartaci) suffered from mental illness, and I take this illness to
be real (not just a construction produced by the language of diagnostics or the
ideology of normality). However, I have another approach to Ovartaci’s illness
– I will read it in another way, based on different theories from the ones Nielsen
applies. As for the question of art as a medium of expression: Like Nielsen, I do
not believe that true art can be ‘reduced’ to diagnostical categories, and thankfully it is a long time since anyone has tried to make a grand scheme of different artistic expressions according to the underlying diagnoses of their bearers. But this should not rule out considerations on the very subject of artistic enunciation.
to do with expression and when mentally ill people express themselves they can
in fact come to thrive on “the deepest layers of the mind”. Once again, there is
a certain humanism in Nielsen’s approach. I wonder how Nielsen would have
related to more anti-humanistic approaches to art – approaches beginning from
the assumption that artistic expression is never in ‘in sync’ with its bearer, that
it transcends the intentions (and postulated deep layers) of this bearer when the
material itself begins to think in its own way. Furthermore, some works of art,
or some projects, cannot be fathomed without considering the self-experimental
wager they comprise. They are not about expressing who I (the intentional
bearer) am, but are investigations into what this writing, painting, sculpturing
subject is or can be. Ovartaci’s ‘art’, in a very broad sense of the term, is self
experimental. His works and projects perform a short-circuit between himself
(encompassing a certain instability of the subject called Louis Marcussen) and
his art (in which he explores the life of Ovartaci), and they play out in many practices, from everyday activities to artistic practices to forms of self-mutilation. It
is as if we are witnessing not only the production of this or that artwork, but the
very ‘construction site’ where life is transformed and artificially rebuilt. This
means that the humanist approach is ruled out – that we cannot understand
Ovartaci’s work by simply referring to his intentions, his person or even his
access to ‘deep layers’, but that we must fathom how the thinking performed at
the construction site of his works and projects format (or make possible) the very
position of the subject ‘employed’ at this site.
I have hinted, that his art must be understood in a very broad sense. For several
reasons, however, I do not find it fruitful to endorse the concepts of ‘art brut’,
‘outsiderart’ and the like. Of course, Nielsen does not subscribe to the notion of
outsiderart either, and the reason for this can once again be found in his humanistic approach: “Art made by the mentally ill”, he states when asked about
the concept of outsiderart, “must be judged in the exact same way as art made
by mentally healthy artists”, without specifying further what this means. My
reservation when it comes to outsiderart, however, has to do with the romanticization or idealization inherent in the concept of someone producing from the
source of raw spontaneity – someone being outside of ‘bad’ academization, even
outside of culture. In many evaluations of Ovartaci’s art, one can find this type
of statement. In a passage, paradoxically also praised by Nielsen, art historian
William Gelius, who was a museum inspector at Ribe Museum when it hosted
an exhibition of Ovartaci’s works in 1990, writes:
principles of harmony and all forms of academicism. They develop
without any form of consideration for an audience. In its total denial
of formalist revisions and aesthetic attire the expression – the painting
– becomes extremely direct. It holds an honesty so callous that we spectators suddenly experience many high-brow occurrences and much normal
art as affected, uninteresting and sterile. The artists of our century, for
example Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, gathered energy from works like
Ovartaci’s to accomplish the necessary rebellion against tradition and
the incessant job of piercing through the rotten stage curtain of neatness and indifference.”
in various interesting ways by modernists and avant-garde artists and theoreticians in the 20th century. However, many of these evaluations effectively worked
as mere projections of these artists’ own hopes and aspirations, and their own
longings for sources of renewal. In a seminal text on this subject, art historian
Hal Foster critically assesses the modernist reception of outsiderart, which
began in the late 1910s and early 1920s. I follow Foster when he describes how
modernists such as Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet and others, inspired by psychiatrist
and art historian Hans Prinzhorn’s influential Artistry of the Mentally Ill from
1922, saw in the art of psychiatric patients (as well as the art of children, ‘primitives’ and other outsiders) some of their own fantasies: They recognized a strong
expressive urge, which for Klee had to do with pure, spiritual vision, and which
for Dubuffet had to do with transgressing cultural conventions. These approaches,
Foster writes, “bespeak modernist fantasies either of a pure origin of art or an
absolute alterity to culture, and they obscure more than reveal the import of the
art of the mentally ill”. Looking closer at the art of the mentally ill, the idealizations of the modernists do not hold, as Foster argues. First, the psychotic is not
pure and unscathed à la Klee, rather “the psychotic is scarred by trauma”. In
cases of schizophrenia, there are violent ruptures in the body image, and one
could also add the problem of uncontrollable thoughts and hallucinations invading the subject from without. Therefore, one cannot claim that these subjects
thrive on pure expressivity of spiritual vision; rather, hallucinatory visions would
be (over)compensations in the place of disintegration.
of art in direct vision, Dubuffet inscribes them into a narrative of an opposition
to academic art – a radical outside in opposition to the established codes of society. Klee’s aesthetic essentialism is transformed into a dualism of inside and
outside. But what is really at stake – returning to Foster’s perspective – is a question of just one world out of joint that is experienced in a rather intense way by
(some of ) the mentally ill. There is disintegration in the world of the outsider;
there is a fundamental rift in his or her world, which at the outset is the very same
world, composed of the self-same social structures (family structures, institutions and so on), the same treasury of signifiers (the material of what Jacques
Lacan calls “the symbolic order”) and images, as the world of the ‘insider’. This
makes some of Dubuffet’s statements rather unwarranted, for example when
he fathoms the outsider as a radical version of the Romantic genius (the one
who stands for a “completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely
reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artist’s own impulses”).
As Foster argues, and I follow him here, the mentally ill or troubled artists that
Prinzhorn presented as “schizophrenic masters” certainly did not long for
transgression of convention, but rather for there to be convention and symbolic
texture, as they were the ones who experienced the disintegration of this texture.
and symbolic order, the art of the mentally ill seems concerned to find
such law again, perhaps to found it again […] For to their horror this
is what these artists often see – not a symbolic order that is too stable,
that they wish to contest as such (again as posited by avant-gardist logic),
but rather a symbolic order that is not stable at all, that is in crisis, even
corruption. Far from anticivilizational heroes, as Dubuffet wanted to
imagine them (“insanity represents a refusal to adopt a view of reality
that is imposed by custom”), these artists are desperate to construct a
surrogate civilization of their own, a stop-gap symbolic order in default
of the official one that […] they perceive to be in ruins.”
In some sense, with the mentally ill there is a prospect for a much more subversive approach to culture than Dubuffet imagines: Dubuffet sees a wellfunctioning culture, which must be smashed (“I believe very much in the values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness”), but in the artistic expressions of the mentally ill, of schizophrenics and paranoiacs, we have
access to culture as already flawed, already in crisis – while we can simultaneously witness their struggle to restructure it. They are truth-witnesses, not to life
without culture, but to life in a culture in crisis. Fundamentally, Klee, Dubuffet
and others somehow also understood this; this is what Foster argues. They saw
the crisis registered by the madmen and outsiders as an evental site where a new
dialectics of the subject and the social were played out. Still, they somehow failed
to see the scope of what was registered by the outsiders, as well as the fact that
strong forces against this ‘culture in crisis’ were already in the making, most
violently in the disavowal of both madmen and modernists and their Entartete
Kunst by the Nazis in the 1930s.
completely outside of culture. This is the thesis that I will build on in different
ways in this book. One can thus speculate on a space of common interest between
madmen and modernists, if being a modernist has to do with accepting a crisis
in culture and therefore an unfoundedness of symbolic texture. The alliance of
the outsider and the modernist must – in my view, following Foster – however be
recast in ways that are more adjusted to the disturbed reality of the madman and
less romanticizing in its approach. Such an alliance, in the form of a research
program, has for example recently been proposed by Germanist Eric Santner
in his breath-taking analysis of the remarkable Daniel Paul Schreber, who suffered three serious nervous breakdowns in fin de siècle Germany.23 Santner examines Schreber’s psychosis as a sensitivity towards a certain decay in symbolic texture (also later detected by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida,Pierre Bourdieu and others); he investigates, through Schreber and his illness, a way in which traditional rites of social inscription are experienced as becoming
ineffective; and he also explores Schreber’s method of working through this crisis
by constructing his “own private Germany”, as the title of Santner’s book goes.
Santner analyzes the coordinates of modernity, thus developing a very broad
analysis of cultural and symbolic texture after the Enlightenment; but as I read
him, he is also concerned with accepting the 20th-century modernist challenge
of confronting what the madman registers (feels, thinks, encounters, experiences etc.) to make it possible to form a new vision of culture in (and possibly
beyond) crisis. This is a renewal of the alliance of the madman and the modernist, allowing for a perspective from which to describe, analyze and theorize both
historical and present-day pitfalls and potentials of the modernist project. My
approach to Ovartaci’s work builds on such a perspective. My analysis, however,
does not unfold as a grand theory of a broad landscape of thought, as in Santner’s
approach; rather, it focuses more exclusively on the work of Ovartaci. I concentrate in particular on the ‘ethical’ problems that relate to self-subsistence and the question of navigating through crisis.
However, it should be equally clear that I do not find it futile to produce detailed
analyses of the destinies of subjects that have suffered serious mental disturbances and crises. The very way their worlds disintegrate is interesting because
of the general information on subjectivity it can reveal to us. And the way they
manage to reconfigure their worlds is interesting for a theory of what happens in
the zone of dis- and reintegration: What kind of questions are posed, and what
kind of thinking (ethical, religious, aesthetical and so on) is performed in this
zone? The avant-garde looked to outsiderart for new and revolutionary forms of
life, as if these forms could be delivered to them directly by madmen, children
and other ‘outsiders’; it sought in this way to explode art and make it into (new)
politics. I would rather opt for another way of thinking through the potential of a
work such as Ovartaci’s: Its originality and strength does not come from being
unbound by institutions and academic rules. Rather, it lies in registering crisis
and in the work of reconstitution: In finding a singular way to make life liveable
in a very serious situation. Articulated theoretically: The work does not aim for
transgression of culture (even though on the surface it seems to do so), but rather
for transgression of an already critical and transgressive state of culture itself.
can vitalize the outlook of ‘normal’ artists. It probably can; outsiders can surely
function as a source of inspiration, even if the outsider is constructed along
another artist’s fantasies, for example the fantasies of necessity in one’s expression, radical belief in one’s visions, or creative flow and spontaneity in one’s work
etc. My focus, however, is less this potential of vitality and more the very conditions of Ovartaci’s productivity. This means that I will go into more detail on
Ovartaci’s fundamental conflicts (more so than has been done before), and from
the basis of a reading of these conflicts I will approach the stuff of his wild, imaginative life and work. I think this approach provides a more complete picture of the ‘practice’ of Ovartaci, while avoiding the pitfalls that I have argued against: I do not want to romanticize madness and its alleged raw spontaneity; neither do I want to domesticate and ensnare the work in simple diagnostical categories, as Nielsen warned about. Rather, I aim for a reading of the very practice, ripe with both conflicts and solutions, of the self-experimental work of Ovartaci.
The Danish art historian and critic
Rune Gade has coined the term, “existentially integrated art”, to describe the
character of Ovartaci’s production. I find this term fruitful. It was invented
as a response to the 2017 exhibition of Ovartaci’s work at Kunsthal
Charlottenborg, an exhibition site for contemporary art in Copenhagen, where
Gade, among other critics, problematized the way the so-called ‘white cube’ of
the museum, with its spacious rooms and white walls, seemed to drain the work
of its intensity. In Ovartaci we do not find a productivity that is
intentionally gallery-friendly, with an eye to its curation in the open, public
and talkative space of the museum. Instead, it is first and foremost a
selfcurative work – work made as a response to certain existential problems.
The art is integrated into the existence of its maker in a rather radical way,
which means that it is in some sense performed as a series of private
meditations, practices or rituals. Getting access to this private world is part
of what is captivating about Ovartaci’s work: There is, for example, something
touching about seeing his hospital bed, which he decorated in the 1930s. As
Ovartaci himself says much later, in 1968: “Imagine that they bring the bed out
here, to the museum – this I had never thought of when I made it”. However,
staying with the concept of existentially integrated art, an utterance
(decorating your bed) can easily be private, in that it was never meant to be
addressed to someone in particular, and yet still be of interest for an
analysis of the coordinates of existence. The decorated bed can address
questions of existence as such. There can, for example, be a bridge from the
idiosyncratic practice of decorating your bed, and to what it means to be a
sleeping, dreaming being, wanting to sleep well in a beautiful bed, warding
yourself from evil forces. In the case of Ovartaci his decorated bed is part of
the larger construction of a lifeworld, and as such it is in dialogue with the
crises he suffers, the forces he fights. To get to this level of the utterance,
it is necessary to engage in ways of analyzing his art that also thrives on
philosophical perspectives. With Ovartaci one must do this because of the very
character of the crises and questions he himself investigates – and which makes
him work not only with art or artistic practices, but with a broad palette of
aesthetic, religious and philosophical practices and modes of thought. (Today,
we find an abundance of ‘thematic’ exhibitions at art museums, where a broad
theme is investigated by combined contributions from several disciplines.
Ovartaci’s theme would be “existence”, and he himself could contribute all the
artifacts for such an exhibition).
What can
be gained by analyzing Ovartaci’s selfexperimental reconfiguration? If the
idea that Ovartaci treats his own illness through art is well known, my reading
tries to fathom in detail how this is done, focusing on Ovartaci’s fundamental
conflicts and strategies for reconfiguration. I want to gauge the very stakes
of his subjective turmoil and his desperate and creative attempts to subsist.
One could ask if my project ultimately still has to do with defending the
efficacy of arttherapy. As may be understood from my discussion of what goes
beyond art in Ovartaci’s work, however, my reading is not performed for the
purpose of defending art therapy or delivering it a showcase, as the conflict
under which Ovartaci suffers is played out at a level of existential crises
which cannot be understood simply from the premises of this approach. While I
support and sympathize with what is theorized and practiced under the banner of
arttherapy, there is something in it (at least in Nielsen’s version) that aims
at removing suffering, based on a vision of happiness as modeled on an ideal of
‘living well’ (remember Nielsen’s claim that Ovartaci may have been happier
than most people). Therapy has to do with healing, but as I read Ovartaci he is
never ‘healed’. There is something unbearable in his life; as he writes in one
of his notebooks: “if life was unbearable, death speaks with a mild, caring
voice”. He finds a ‘cure’ for himself, but what I mean by ‘the cure’ does not
have to do with removing the fundamental conflict; rather it describes the
ability to find a modus vivendi given the existence of such a conflict.
Suffering is reconfigured, not left behind.
In
Ovartaci’s case the two very broad strategies of his selfcure are ‘cutting
off ’ – or eliminating the source of harm, culminating in his selfemasculation
– and ‘adding’, constructing a prosthesis, a new symbolic position (as ‘Ovartaci’)
and a new body. These efforts go beyond what one can reasonably theorize
from the outlook of Nielsen’s arttherapeutical approach. All in all, this is where
a zone between the cure that is not only therapy and the work that is not onlyart is realized: In the oeuvre of Ovartaci my reading carves out the ‘art’ of selfreconfiguration – the recreation of life at the site of breakdown. This recre - ated life is not an escape from ordinary, bourgeois existence, as some outsidertheorists may want to see it, because it does not ensue from the choice between an inside and an outside. Rather, it relates to the very non-possibility of an ‘ordinary’, well-ordered life. In Ovartaci’s universe, there is a certain crisis in his symbolic and imaginary reality, which I shall analyze thoroughly in chapter one, and his madness, along with the abovementioned strategies, are attempts to restructure it. When Louis turns into Ovartaci what is accomplished is not an escape, but an original self-reconfiguration that does not erase suffering, rather converts it into something liveable and manageable.
off ’ – or eliminating the source of harm, culminating in his selfemasculation
– and ‘adding’, constructing a prosthesis, a new symbolic position (as ‘Ovartaci’)
and a new body. These efforts go beyond what one can reasonably theorize
from the outlook of Nielsen’s arttherapeutical approach. All in all, this is where
a zone between the cure that is not only therapy and the work that is not onlyart is realized: In the oeuvre of Ovartaci my reading carves out the ‘art’ of selfreconfiguration – the recreation of life at the site of breakdown. This recre - ated life is not an escape from ordinary, bourgeois existence, as some outsidertheorists may want to see it, because it does not ensue from the choice between an inside and an outside. Rather, it relates to the very non-possibility of an ‘ordinary’, well-ordered life. In Ovartaci’s universe, there is a certain crisis in his symbolic and imaginary reality, which I shall analyze thoroughly in chapter one, and his madness, along with the abovementioned strategies, are attempts to restructure it. When Louis turns into Ovartaci what is accomplished is not an escape, but an original self-reconfiguration that does not erase suffering, rather converts it into something liveable and manageable.
Overtaci
on the Couch. By Brian Benjamin Hansen.
Ovartaci : The Signature of Madness. Aarhus University Press, September 2022
In the
course of 56 years living in a psychiatric hospital in the small city of
Risskov, Denmark, a self-taught artist born Louis Marcussen (1894–1985)
christened themselves anew as Ovartaci.
The
moniker translates roughly to Chief Loon, and was a winking nod to the
hospital’s hierarchy of doctors (Chief Physician, for instance) as well as to
the artist’s unique identification within the hospital microcosm within which
they lived and created for most of their life.
Indeed,
it was within those hospital confines that Ovartaci began their artistic
journey in the 1930s and it was there it would end with the artist’s death at
the age of 91. During the intervening decades, the Danish artist devoted
themselves to creating a chimerical and wholly unique world, filled with women
and animal figures, often melding species together into mythical and majestic
creatures.
The
artist worked in drawing and painting, even making a number of handmade dolls
that filled their hospital room. Marked by allusions to ancient and mystical
societies, these hybrid beings were influenced most pronouncedly by Ancient
Egyptian: its mythology, hieroglyphs, art, pyramids, and, perhaps most
centrally, its beliefs in the transcendence of the soul. A cat-woman frequently
appears in these works, too, a likeness that conjures up ready comparisons to
the goddess Sehkmet.
Yet
Ovartaci has remained largely unknown outside of specialized circles since the
artist’s death in 1985. Now, however, the artist’s fascinating creations are
primed for a wider appreciation, as a number of Ovartaci’s works are currently
on view in “The Milk of Dreams,” the curated exhibition at the 59th edition of
the Venice Biennale.
In an
exhibition statement, curator Cecelia Alemani noted that “the mutant bodies
convoked” by artists including Ovartaci “suggest new mergers of the organic and
the artificial, whether as a means of self-reinvention or as a disquieting
foretaste of an increasingly dehumanized future.”
Indeed,
Ovartaci’s artistic world seems prescient of a future even still yet to come,
and the works themselves are only further illuminated by the artist’s life
story.
Identified
as male at birth, Ovartaci had trained as a house painter, leaving Denmark in
1923 for work in Argentina. Wandering that country for six years, Ovartaci
returned to Denmark both physically ravaged and mentally distraught. The
artist’s family had them committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1929.
In the
Risskov hospital, Ovartaci began to develop a belief system that would fuel
artistic experimentations. During these years, the artist committed themselves
to Buddhism and a belief that the soul traveled and reincarnated across
countless lives, unencumbered by confines of culture, gender, or species. The
artist detailed what they believed to be their own past life existences as a
tiger or an ancient Egyptian working on the pyramids.
By the
1950s, Ovartaci began to identify and live as a woman and repeatedly entreated
the hospital for gender reassignment surgery. In 1951, after the request was
refused, the artist made their own crude attempt with carpenter’s tools, a
harried act that needed medical treatment and sunk the artist into a
depression.
Eventually,
as hospital policies shifted, Ovartaci’s gender confirmation surgery was
completed in two parts in 1955 and 1957. The artist was also moved to a private
room and given access to a studio where their creations proliferated. (In the
last years of their life, Ovartaci began to again identify as male.)
Ovartaci’s
creatures are not meant to be monstrous, but elegant and distinctive, and they
presage the idea of identity as existing in a state of continuous flux.
Oftentimes, the hospital appears in the artist’s works as a complex reference:
the artist fought against the confines of hospital life but simultaneously
found creative freedom in its domain.
When
Ovartaci died at the age of 91, the Risskov psychiatric hospital was left in
possession of countless creations. Today, many of those works are in the Museum
Ovartaci, an art and historical museum that encompasses the historical Risskov
Psychiatric Hospital and devotes itself to the art produced by patients of the
hospital. (The museum lent numerous works for display at the Venice Biennale.)
Although
many commentators have cast Ovartaci as an Outsider artist, Mia Lejsted, the
director of the museum, thinks the characterization is too limiting for the
artist’s complex reality.
“We
never use the term ‘Outsider artist’ to describe Ovartaci here at the museum,”
Lejsted said. “It does not matter whether you are ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the art
world, and perhaps Ovartaci is showing us a third place to be.”
Self-Taught
Artist Ovartaci Made Fantastical Creations in a Psychiatric Hospital for Over
50 Years. Now They’ve Found a Home in the Art World. By Katie White. ArtNet News,
June 8, 2022
The
pictures of Louis Marcussen, known as Ovartaci (1894–1985), are gentle, full of
mild comfort and great kindness. There is hardly any image in which the hybrid
human-animal creatures appear monstrous. These figures are graceful, with
narrow waists, elongated limbs, female genitals, and catlike faces; they often
move through the pictures in packs. Visions of femininity and animalism blend
into a kind of queer Mannerism. Their process of becoming both animal and woman
testifies to a satisfying intensity and the desire to use the lines of flight
to avoid the normalization of body and soul.
As supple and light as they may appear, the pictures are painterly exercises in resistance to being forcibly identified as a man and as a human being. Ovartaci’s works are of dissident incarnations, dehumanized and animalized, as if they were an escape from the humiliation and suffering that must be imputed to someone who spent their life in psychiatric institutions, someone who were granted their deep-seated desire for gender reassignment surgery only when they turned their male genitals into pulp with a chisel. When it comes to the questionably named “Outsider Art,” one cannot avoid dealing with the person and his fate as well. Born in Jutland in 1894, Ovartaci trained as a decorator, then emigrated to Argentina in 1923. In 1929, under adverse circumstances, they returned to Denmark, distraught, where they was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a psychiatric ward—which they did not leave until their death fifty-six years later. In the institution, Louis Marcussen started painting and soon began to call themselves by the gender-neutral name Ovartaci, which in the Jutlandic dialect means something like “chief idiot” and can be understood as an ironic commentary on the institutional hierarchies at the sanitarium. As the “chief idiot,” they were granted special privileges. They lived in a single room, and the doctors supported them in their artwork. The psychiatric institution participated in the production of the “condition-bound art” that it promoted, giving it a specific resonance that would be completely different outside the world of psychiatry.
One of Ovartaci’s paintings, Untitled (no date), is of the psychiatric institution in Risskov. Superimposed over the naive-realistic depiction of the building complex, with doctors hurrying along its paths, is a ghostly, transparent creature with bat-like wings. Other spectral beings—including a painter with an easel—populate the picture, covering the reality of the asylum with the translucent skin of a vision. Ovartaci also turned their immediate surroundings into a reality interwoven with visionary lines of flight. The asylum walls, the bed, cans, books, and containers were painted over with their phantasms of deviant incarnations. They literally surrounded themselves with the hybrid woman-animal creatures they created. They decorated their room with drawings of figures, which they cut out and painted on both sides; then, using eyelets, they hung them in various arrangements along the walls. Besides those figures, they created larger-than-life dolls made of papier-mâché, which they dressed up, giving them joints, moveable eyes, or other small, mysterious mechanics.
The dolls are doppelgangers full of longing, fantastical soulmates, and tenderly loved girlfriends. Ovartaci lived with them and kissed them, too. In a testimony to the complete fictionalization of the self, they covered their mirror with a portrait of one of these dolls so they could see their imaginary self in it. All of these works insist upon the desire for a differently populated world, for “a people that does not yet exist,” for an environment full of dissident incarnations. To accomplish this, their “visionary art” adapted Indian and Egyptian pictorial language; written text, hieroglyphs, and Chinese characters are also integrated, giving the images a poetic and spiritual charge.
As supple and light as they may appear, the pictures are painterly exercises in resistance to being forcibly identified as a man and as a human being. Ovartaci’s works are of dissident incarnations, dehumanized and animalized, as if they were an escape from the humiliation and suffering that must be imputed to someone who spent their life in psychiatric institutions, someone who were granted their deep-seated desire for gender reassignment surgery only when they turned their male genitals into pulp with a chisel. When it comes to the questionably named “Outsider Art,” one cannot avoid dealing with the person and his fate as well. Born in Jutland in 1894, Ovartaci trained as a decorator, then emigrated to Argentina in 1923. In 1929, under adverse circumstances, they returned to Denmark, distraught, where they was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a psychiatric ward—which they did not leave until their death fifty-six years later. In the institution, Louis Marcussen started painting and soon began to call themselves by the gender-neutral name Ovartaci, which in the Jutlandic dialect means something like “chief idiot” and can be understood as an ironic commentary on the institutional hierarchies at the sanitarium. As the “chief idiot,” they were granted special privileges. They lived in a single room, and the doctors supported them in their artwork. The psychiatric institution participated in the production of the “condition-bound art” that it promoted, giving it a specific resonance that would be completely different outside the world of psychiatry.
One of Ovartaci’s paintings, Untitled (no date), is of the psychiatric institution in Risskov. Superimposed over the naive-realistic depiction of the building complex, with doctors hurrying along its paths, is a ghostly, transparent creature with bat-like wings. Other spectral beings—including a painter with an easel—populate the picture, covering the reality of the asylum with the translucent skin of a vision. Ovartaci also turned their immediate surroundings into a reality interwoven with visionary lines of flight. The asylum walls, the bed, cans, books, and containers were painted over with their phantasms of deviant incarnations. They literally surrounded themselves with the hybrid woman-animal creatures they created. They decorated their room with drawings of figures, which they cut out and painted on both sides; then, using eyelets, they hung them in various arrangements along the walls. Besides those figures, they created larger-than-life dolls made of papier-mâché, which they dressed up, giving them joints, moveable eyes, or other small, mysterious mechanics.
The dolls are doppelgangers full of longing, fantastical soulmates, and tenderly loved girlfriends. Ovartaci lived with them and kissed them, too. In a testimony to the complete fictionalization of the self, they covered their mirror with a portrait of one of these dolls so they could see their imaginary self in it. All of these works insist upon the desire for a differently populated world, for “a people that does not yet exist,” for an environment full of dissident incarnations. To accomplish this, their “visionary art” adapted Indian and Egyptian pictorial language; written text, hieroglyphs, and Chinese characters are also integrated, giving the images a poetic and spiritual charge.
The works testify to a different way of using images that can be interesting to contemporary art. They want to create the reality they depict: a healing milieu, instead of the societal violence or internal imbroglio they stem from. When Ovartaci paints for something insistent inside of them, which they must help in order for it to live, then they offer a resonant space for everyone whose desire for expression wants to be formed alongside the cultural norm. What is aesthetically persistent in psychotic images are forces that culture is unable to comprehend, forces that tend to undermine it and make its gradual weakening appear promising. Thus, the desire-driven images of “schizos” repeatedly challenge art as a way of becoming.
Louis Marcussen, known as Ovartaci (b. 1894; d. 1985), lived and worked in Aarhus. Solo exhibitions of Ovartaci’s work have been presented at Kunstforening Møllen, Grenaa (2019); ARoS, Aarhus (2015); Museum Prinzhorn, Heidelberg (2013); Het Dolhuys, Haarlem (2010); and Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent (2010). Ovartaci’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the 59th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2022); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2017); KØN Gender Museum, Aarhus (2017); Museum of the Mind, Bethlem (2019); Museum im Lagerhaus, St. Gallen (2019); Art Sonja, Seoul (2019); neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin (2020); Massimo De Carlo, London (2020); and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (1979).
Kathrin Busch is professor of philosophy at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Her research focuses on French philosophy, art theory, and aesthetics. She publishes on topics such as knowledge of the arts and the aesthetics of passivity, incapacity, and sensibility. She launched the Berlin funding program for artistic research (kuenstlerischeforschung.berlin) and has collaborated on various art projects, most recently curating the exhibition Radical Passivity: Politics of the Flesh at neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin (2020).
Queer Lines of Flight: Ovartaci. By Kathrin Busch. Mousse Magazine, March 28, 2022.
The
artist Ovartaci was a patient at the psychiatric hospital in Risskov, near
Aarhus, Denmark. Ovartaci's real name was Louis Marcussen. He invented the name
Ovartaci during his stay at the hospital inspired by other titles at the
hospital: ‘chief psychiatrist’ and ‘head nurse’. He saw himself as the most
important patient – ‘overtosse’.
As a young man, he trained as a house painter before going to Argentina for 5 years where he worked, vagabondised and experimented with narcotics. Returning to Denmark Louis Marcussen was ill and physically ravaged, and his family felt they could no longer be responsible for his actions. He was sent to the psychiatric hospital at Risskov and diagnosed a schizophrenic. He died in 1985, at the age of 91, after a total of 56 years' hospitalisation.
In the early part of his hospitalisation, he took up his craft. He painted the walls of his room, he painted and created tall, slim figurines of women and he made models and dolls – some with moveable parts. He planned and built his own helicopter and at the beginning of the 1950s he started his battle to become a woman – he became his own creator.
Ovartaci saw the female as a refined being with a full control of her body and sexual desires. This was his reasoning for wanting the gender change to a woman. In the last years of his life, the spark was gone. His visions and fantasies were weakened. He distanced himself from his work and applied to his gender identity again. He insisted on being addressed as a man and reverted to a masculine look.
Ovartaci's work was a fully integrated part of his life. He did not have the modern-day artists’ self-conscious and targeted thoughts about exhibitions and an audience for this art – nor an art world ‘outside’.
His art was created under very special conditions. A life of deprivation where the closest relations were the hospital staff and where he had to fight for his personal and private space among many other patients. At the same time, this sheltered life gave him a kind of freedom – Ovartaci could concentrate on his many artistic projects without having to think about elementary needs. In the middle of all this, he battled paranoid illusions from time to time, where he went back through a previous life and imagined worlds and beings that were as real to him as the bed he slept in.
As a young man, he trained as a house painter before going to Argentina for 5 years where he worked, vagabondised and experimented with narcotics. Returning to Denmark Louis Marcussen was ill and physically ravaged, and his family felt they could no longer be responsible for his actions. He was sent to the psychiatric hospital at Risskov and diagnosed a schizophrenic. He died in 1985, at the age of 91, after a total of 56 years' hospitalisation.
In the early part of his hospitalisation, he took up his craft. He painted the walls of his room, he painted and created tall, slim figurines of women and he made models and dolls – some with moveable parts. He planned and built his own helicopter and at the beginning of the 1950s he started his battle to become a woman – he became his own creator.
Ovartaci saw the female as a refined being with a full control of her body and sexual desires. This was his reasoning for wanting the gender change to a woman. In the last years of his life, the spark was gone. His visions and fantasies were weakened. He distanced himself from his work and applied to his gender identity again. He insisted on being addressed as a man and reverted to a masculine look.
Ovartaci's work was a fully integrated part of his life. He did not have the modern-day artists’ self-conscious and targeted thoughts about exhibitions and an audience for this art – nor an art world ‘outside’.
His art was created under very special conditions. A life of deprivation where the closest relations were the hospital staff and where he had to fight for his personal and private space among many other patients. At the same time, this sheltered life gave him a kind of freedom – Ovartaci could concentrate on his many artistic projects without having to think about elementary needs. In the middle of all this, he battled paranoid illusions from time to time, where he went back through a previous life and imagined worlds and beings that were as real to him as the bed he slept in.
Today we understand the meaning of Outsider Art, ‘raw art’ and ‘rough art’, all labels referring to the concept of Art Brut, a definition given by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe all the art created outside the boundaries of official culture (Abadie, 1986; Davies, 2009) and studied by Roger Cardinal in his book Outsider Art (Cardinal, 1972). But 70 years after this concept was introduced, is it still reasonable to ask if Outsider Art really is outside the art world, or should it be considered as inside?
In the last few decades, there has been an increased interest in art created by people with mental illnesses. At the Museum Ovartaci we have experienced the interest first-hand from other branches of art, a large part of the cultural institutions and private collectors. We believe it is reasonable to ask: why on the one hand Outsider Art is considered outside, while on the other, we see great qualities in this type of art and happily show it in modern-day art institutions? Is it the knowledge about the marginalised and mad artist seen in a romantic light? (Beveridge, 2001) Is it the spontaneity and genuineness of the unpolished work? In my opinion, it should be the latter and for that reason, one needs to be very careful in one's approach. The art should be treated in the same way with empathy and respect for the artist and the origin of the artwork.
Personally, I have never liked the term Outsider Art, because ‘being an outsider’ says more about the artist's place in a man-made pattern in the art world and society than about the artwork as such. Art Brut, on the other hand, focuses on the work and describes it as raw and unedited as part of the qualities.
Irrespective of whether you know about Ovartaci's background and the story of his life, his work will always be etched on the viewer's imagination. Everybody is touched by his work. Inevitably this raises the question why a certain insight into his life and biography will add several important dimensions to his art. However, it is important to see the art and the artist rather than his illness – and at the same time see the work and art as giving access to a third-place that is neither outside nor inside.
Mia Lejsted is Director of the Museum Ovartaci, Aarhus, since December 2004. The Museum holds two collections: one about the history of psychiatry and an extensive art collection. The Museum also provides a framework for and practises a great deal of social responsibility. Over the past decade, the Museum has undergone major changes organisationally and developmentally. Today, it is an independent institution that is facing even greater change.
The art of Ovartaci: outside or inside? By Mia Lejsted. National Center for Biotechnology Information. January 11, 2021
OVARTACI
(1984-1985 | Denmark)
Louis Marcussen was born at Ebeltolf, Denmark on 26 September 1894. Louis grew up with a large number of siblings – some of them died in an early age or had various disabilities – in one of the most beautiful houses in Ebeltoft.
Already in his youth Louis was absorbed with yoga, Buddhism and literature. He sought control of body and mind and was described as a shy and reserved young man.
(1984-1985 | Denmark)
Louis Marcussen was born at Ebeltolf, Denmark on 26 September 1894. Louis grew up with a large number of siblings – some of them died in an early age or had various disabilities – in one of the most beautiful houses in Ebeltoft.
Already in his youth Louis was absorbed with yoga, Buddhism and literature. He sought control of body and mind and was described as a shy and reserved young man.
After elementary school Louis started his apprenticeship as a house painter. He completed his apprenticeship at age of 19 in 1913 and worked as a painter until he emigrated to Argentina in 1923.
Louis’s first job in Buenos Aires was as a house painter together with a fellow Danish travelling companion. At one point he stayed with Indians in the jungle in the Northern provinces. This has caused speculation if he became acquainted with intoxicants at that time and thereby sowed the seeds of a psychosis.
Louis returned to Ebeltoft and his family. Not long after his return, his family felt obliged to have him committed to a mental hospital. Louis was hospitalized at the mental hospital in Risskov and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Louis was a psychiatric patient for the next 56 years and gave himself the name Ovartaci. He saw himself as the most important patient or “Overtosse” – a role corresponding that of a consultant psychiatrist.
In 1932, Ovartaci was transferred to the psychiatric care centre of Dalstrup at Djursland.
During his stay at Dalstrup Ovartaci was very productive first as a house painter and later he began his artistic work, which continued until a few years before his death. For instance he painted all walls in his room with tall, slim female characters and created figures and dolls.
After his return in Risskov, Ovartaci started his long struggle to become a woman in 1951.
He saw the woman as a noble creature and he only wanted pure spiritual love. He started by requesting castration which was granted. However Ovartaci was not satisfied with the result and requested having his penis amputated, which was not granted.
When Ovartaci still did not get his way, he took matters into his own hand and tried to amputate his penis with a razorblade. His courage failed him and he result was just a flesh wound. This was embarrassing to him and later the same year he completed the operation using a plane in the joinery workshop of the hospital. Despite this, he was still not happy and kept insisting on a sex change operation with the creation of a vagina.
The operation was granted and carried out in two phases in 1955 and 1957. Ovartaci was 63 years old. After this he became a calmer patient and dressed in women’s clothes and grew his hair long. He insisted on being addressed “Miss” and wanted to be moved to the women’s ward.
Ovartaci’s official approval as an artist happened in 1979 when he was invited to contribute to the exhibition “Outsider” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.
In his final years Ovartaci’s visions were weakened.
At 6:35pm on 25 November 1985 – at the age 91 – Ovartaci died peacefully in his sleep at the psychiatric hospital in Risskov.
Ovartaci.
By Gloria Marchini. Outsider Art Now, April 18, 2017.
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