A touch of Bedlam
In my top ten for last year I listed my visit to the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, a fabulous small museum in south London which really shows you how it should be done. What I did not list was the Wellcome Collection's Bedlam exhibition that first led me to Bethlem, largely because, while I was lucky enough to go to the opening, I did not get the chance to visit properly until the beginning of this month (so it may yet make the 2017 top ten). With both visits now behind me, I'd like to offer some reflections here on these two enjoyable and thought-provoking displays.
Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond at the Wellcome Collection (which closed on 15 January) looked at the changing history of mental health treatment and attitudes in Britain through the history of its most famous institution - Bethlehem Hospital. Readers of this blog should know that Bethlehem Hospital became known colloquially as Bedlam in the 17th and 18th centuries, and was immortalised in Hogarth's final print of his Rake's Progress, which also features ‘my’ longitude lunatic. But Bethlem moved a number of times. The Moorfields site pictured by Hogarth was its second location, and it later moved to what is now the Imperial War Museum in St George's Fields, Southwark, before its current site at Monk's Orchard in Beckenham.
Bedlam used these different sites to look at the opening up of asylum buildings and of changing attitudes to mental health and its treatment, using the Wellcome's usual powerful mix of science, historic art, social history and contenmporary art. The show opened with an installation piece by Eva Kotátkova 'Asylum', which aimed to look at 'archaeological' layers of psychological effects using drawings, scraps of paper, wire structures. To me it somehow felt like a deconstructed institution, made from everything but the walls, and reminiscent of David Hockney’s wonderful sets for the Rake's Progress opera, which of course also ends in Bedlam. The installation also created some fabulous shadows.
Following this the exhibition assembled a collection of prints, objects, books, manuscripts and archival materials to look at the institution's changing history, and occasionally to compare it to the city of Geel in Belgium which has provided a sort of 'care in the community' approach to mentally ill pilgrims for centuries. I particularly enjoyed the glass lantern slides put together by Bethlem chaplain and first real historian of the institution, Revd Edward O'Donoghue, as well, of course, as the familiar prints and texts from the 18th century that looked at Bedlam as a reflection on society. Moving into the St George's Fields period, it was wonderful to see the inmates become more visible through artworks, letters and activities, with the painter Richard Dadd being the most well-known example. The exhibition showcased some examples of the wonderful collections of 'outsider' art held at a number of hospital archives.
The Museum of the Mind is based at the hospital's current home in Beckenham and shares its building with the Bethlem Gallery, which provides a venue specifically for artists who have worked with or about mental health. At the museum entrance you still meet Cibber's arresting sculptures of melancholy and raving madness, which originally graced the 18th-century Moorfields building. The Wellcome worked closely with both institutions in developing Bedlam, and the last part of the exhibition similarly considers the role of art therapy, and showcases a number of artists looking differently at mental health and its treatment. The ending of the exhibition seems particularly apt with Madlove: A designer asylum creating a new model asylum from the ideals of patients, and encouraging visitors to fill out their own 'Pocket Asylum' booklet to take home for future use.
It was a joint event between the Wellcome and Bethlem that first took me to the latter, to my shame and joy, as it's a wonderful institution that I should have visited long ago. The main Museum of the Mind looks at the history of mental health through its archives and collections, putting central emphasis on the voices and productions of patients. A special exhibition, The Weight of History, alongside looked at key objects in the institution's history, while Reclaiming Asylum in the gallery downstairs, featured a number of artists whose work makes the asylum space their own. The Wellcome blog ran a series called 'A Drop in the Ocean' during the Bedlam exhibition, which featured a number of the Bethlem Gallery artists.
The project that has stuck with me ever since, and which I was lucky to hear Sue talk about at the joint event, was the Bethlem Wood Library. This uses wood from the grounds to make a record of the hospital, inspired by the German enlightenment collections that made books out of each wood, the book becoming a box to hold productions from all parts of the tree. Likewise, a piece in the exhibition upstairs used the old honours boards of the hospital to make a memorial cabinet. In using the materials of the hospital itself, the living breathing grounds, this project seemed to me to sum up the wonderful work of the museum, the gallery, and the Wellcome exhibition, in thinking about how material culture has recorded, impeded, healed and made wonderful the history of mental health.