“Art should be observed from fresh perspective.  In order to provide a fresh view on my drawings I decided to look for a crazy genius. I asked patients of a mental institution to diagnose my drawings by defining their titles and hanging orientation.”

Irgendwie aus dem Kopf is a collaboration between an artist [she who made the drawings] & patients of a mental institution [who decided how the work ‘is seen’
(thru naming and orienting)]. This collaboration knowingly plays with the idea of the ‘tortured genius’, a layman’s link between creative genius & mental illness [a cultural trope nowbacked up by science].Here, though, one can’t really create a clean line between where creation “begins”and “ends”. If there is a tortured genius present, who is it actually?

Is it she who drew, or the individual patients who took these found objects and gave them meaning? Was what they saw/interpreted already presentin the work, or was it a fabrication of their own? The answers remain unknown, as it can be argued that Irgendwie aus dem Kopf (as a whole) and the (individual) drawings weren’t ‘completed’ until a patient named it & oriented it: what the viewer sees/interacts with is what came out of the head of the patient concerning that drawing. 

Before the intervention of the patients, the drawings existed, but as unoriented objects in space, like a hammer or a rock. It wasn’t until another consciousness ‘bestowed meaning’ upon them, connected these external objects to the ‘movements of the soul’, the interior world thru which we all experience The (exterior) World, in which some are ‘trapped’ (in the form of the disorders affecting the collaborators) that the drawings came into their current identities.

 For example: in the drawing Der Schnitt, there are red and black forms with a blank white space in between. The individual who named and oriented it (diagnosis: borderline, depression) saw in it ‘a gaping cut which reveals what lies underneath’, with the black ‘frame’ representing oppressive fear, and the blank middle ‘nothingness’. The emotional content of this individual’s interpretation of these (essentially) abstract forms gets at the heart of the collaboration, and the questions raised by it. 

Though in times past, the conditions these patients are diagnosed with used to signify a kind of freedom (another way of seeing/connecting things, ideas) to be taken (at least somewhat) seriously, they are now seen as ‘less-than’: rather than a freedom in perception, it’s a kind of ‘false’ perception, not to be trusted, to be disavowed. But, here, this mode of perception is consciously placed as the correct one.The connections the patients have made (what they see in the drawing) are an intervention between the artist as-such, the work as-such (form, line, color on the page), and the viewer. 

Through this intervention of the individual patient’s interpretation of the image, the viewer now sees it as they did, taking on (in a way) the subjective position of the patient (or, at least, seeing the image thru their eyes before seeing it thru their own); thereby raising another question: if I see as they see, then who is ‘mad’ and who is ‘sane’? The presentation of Irgendwie aus dem Kopf ‘breaks the 4th wall’ (separating us from) of the abstract/undefined, romanticized ‘madness’ which tortures geniuses by (anonymously) cataloguing the patient’s diagnoses and placing them next to the decisions (that the viewer is told) they’ve made about the drawing; in doing so, it shifts the ‘way of seeing’ the drawings [as opposed to viewing them ‘au naturale’ (meaning: without this intervention, or only with the ‘normal’ intervention of the artist herself {in which she decided the orientation and titles, which someone at some point has to decide})].

 Most importantly in Irgendwie aus dem Kopf, with background information about the concept of the interventions, the viewer never actually views the drawings as-such: rather one is making connections between what they see, the intervention of the patients (which can include an embedded formal analysis as in Der Schnitt), and knowledge of the patient’s diagnoses; all combining to the ‘final movement’ of the collaboration: making the viewer consider the relation to their own perception.