Art Criticism - The State University of New York

woman that is portrayed in Hollywood film and American television. In Hysteria
2000, several video screens show modern women adopting the poses of
hysterical attacks first published in Charcot and Richter's Etude Clinique sur
La Grand Hysterie ou Hystero-Epilepsie. However, most of the installation is
contained in a room behind the video screens. The only access to this room is
through one of two padded doorways cut into a padded wall - an obvious
reference to the insane asylum aesthetic. Small windows in each of the doors
allow you to peek into the room before you enter.
Stepping through the doors you realize that the room was only a
fa~ade made of one wall. Inside the "room," paper and wax female figures
rotate, suspended from the ceiling. As the catalog notes, at the far end of the
room a video projection "inner-cuts three elements: interviews with women,
shown from the neck down, speaking about their bodies; talking heads of men
quoting doctor's clinical analyses from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries;
and close-up images of women's faces in expressions of hysterical paroxysm."67
This visual bombardment reflects on hysteria's influence on contemporary
society and women's thoughts about their bodies. Juxtaposing older
representations with late twentieth century representations of hysteria, Beth B
comments on the fact that soon even modern ideas of how women should behow
they should behave, and how they are medically treated - might one day
look just as absurd as nineteenth century medical treatments for hysteria do to
us now.
The historical progression of hysteria is succinctly summarized by
Dr. Philip Slavney of Johns Hopkins. Hysteria, he says, "was regarded as a
disease - an affliction of the body that troubles the mind."68 This is later
reversed, and with the influence of Freud and Breuer, hysteria "was believed
by many physicians to be an affliction of the mind that was expressed through
a disturbance of the body."69 In our present day, hysteria "has come to imply
behavior that produces the appearance of a disease," although, as Showalter
adds, "the patient is unconscious of the motives for feeling sick."70 While
some speculate that hysteria reached its height at Salpetriere under Charcot,
the best may be yet to come - under a different name. It would seem, given the
history examined here, that if hysteria is as widespread as it seems to be, then
we are indeed in the midst of another decadent era. If this is so, it may afford
opportunities for a better understanding of the context of innovative artistic
expression in our own period.
Notes
1 The "proper" medical term for this was globus hystericus.
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