Ahh, sorry. I might have grown too accustomed to The Google Age or something so here is elaboration:
- Philip K Dick was a science fiction writer, he was the guy who wrote the book Blade Runner was based on ("Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep") as well as a ton more besides. A lot of his later stuff has to do with these kind of conflicting realities. Like someone will find out that the world they live in is some kind of hallucination or lie, but then instead of figuring out what the "real world" is they just become trapped in this kind of existential doubt. How do you tell what's real when you can't even trust the evidence of your own senses?? "Martian Time-Slip" is probably my favourite book of his, it starts like generic science fiction (colonist earthlings trying to scrape out a living on Mars) and then there is this kind of violent schizophrenic breakdown (the same scene is repeated multiple times with changes, what really happened is never established) and as a result everything afterwards becomes kind of slippery and unreal.
"VALIS" was written after he had a kind of schizophrenic episode where he supposedly flashed back in time to ancient Rome and also got hit by a beam of pink light sent by a floating space satellite (God?) that told him his child was going to die unless taken to a doctor immediately. He took the kid to a doctor and found out he did actually have a life-threatening disease that would have killed him if not treated. He wrote an "exegesis" or testament thing expressing his strange religious philosophy. A central part of it was that the universe was a twin embryo where one of the twins died (Dick's twin sister died in birth) and that the presence of evil was due to this dead twin causing an infection in the world. VALIS goes into this stuff a lot.
"I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it" - P.K. Dick - Henry Darger was a janitor who wrote this very strange fantasy saga based around children. The children were enslaved and tormented by villainous adults and eventually there was a Child's Revolution or something and idk a whole fantasy universe based around this theme. He clipped out newspaper reports to do with dead or kidnapped children as evidence of a universal war between kids and adults. He also drew handmade illustrations for his books mainly consisting of collages of traced figures. A lot of the kids were naked and there might have been a whole paedophilia angle idk. I don't know much of his stuff.
- Theodor Adorno was a Marxist critic from the Frankfurt school who emigrated to the USA to escape Nazi persecution. While he was there he wrote "Minimia Moralia", a bunch of short fragmented essays about different aspects of everyday life or art. It's one of the most unrelentingly negative & paranoid books I've ever read. The recurring theme is that "life is not living", that existence has been fatally tainted by capitalism / fascism to the extent where even the most innocuous activities betray some oppressive aspect. I don't think he was insane at all but I thought there were some similarities to paranoid works by Dick etc.
- Fletcher Hanks was a Golden Age comic artist and abusive alcoholic. Most of his stuff has amazing colours and odd recurring patterns (eg people being crushed, bizarre muscle depictions, grimacing faces, people floating in space).
http://climaxyourmind.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/stardust_is_emphatic.jpg His stuff was reprinted recently in two books, I forget the name of his first one but I have the second called "You Shall Be Destroyed By Your Own Evil Creation" and it rules.
- Joe Meek was a British pop music producer. Kind of like Phil Spector. He did "Telstar" and a bunch of other songs with bizarre sci-fi production. Would record the sounds of flushing toilets and wooden blocks falling down stairs and turn them into pop singles. He killed his landlady and then shot himself.
- James Castle was a deaf & possibly mentally disabled midwestern man who used materials such as charcoal, soot, cardboard, old newspaper to create paintings and cardboard puppet constructions.
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/images/art/castle/Castle_cover.jpg.
- William Blake was a self-taught 18th century poet and illustrator. He wrote that poem Tyger Tyger Burning Bright Etc and all his stuff is pretty fantastic. Used to claim inspirations from highly detailed visions and spent his later years creating this complicated personal symbolic mythology of demons and gods battling for supremacy. Orc and Albion and Los. His "Prophetic Works" are like a really strange, dense mutation of christianity. He's one of my favourite poets I think.
- James Joyce had a schizophrenic daughter and his book Finnegans Wake was written entirely in a kind of strange pseudo-english language of allusion and reference (and really bad linguistic puns). All his stuff is great!!
Anyway yeah I get a lot out of all these people and generally think the appeal of "outsider art" or whatever is that it provides this kind of oblique view of the world that makes you look at things in a different way, that kind of pulls you out of yourself. I like this sensation!! I am just nervous about uh fetishising mental illness per se when really I think most of these people did their best work not because of insanity but maybe in spite of it. I kind of like people like Jack Kirby and TS Eliot and JG Ballard and Max Ernst and such because they were able to produce crazy shit while remaining very staid, regular people. I like the idea that inspiration isn't just reserved for psychotics or addicts, that regular folks could just create these odd and private worlds without having to destroy themselves in the process.
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Insanity and Art