Martin Erhard – upper world and underworld. Order and perversion

Abstract

This Section of Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences appears in each issue of the Journal and is dedicated to all forms of creative production born of an intimate and individual urge, often secretive, unbound from the conventional art system rules. Through short descriptions of the Outsider art work of prominent artists and new protagonists often hosted in community mental health services, this section intends to investigate the latest developments of the contemporary art scene, where the distances between the edge and the center are becoming more and more vague. Key words: Outsider art, personality disorders cluster a paranoid schizoid schizotypal, psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapies, sexual deviations, violence/aggression.In the Art Brut-collection of the Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer, which was exhibited in the Museum De Stadshof Zwolle in 1996/1997, there are four peculiar drawings by an artist labelled as 'anonymous ' (Museum De Stadshof, 1996).In a highly systematically ordered fashion, these drawings offer a glimpse at a gargantuan subterranean location hosting every kind of sexual deviation and torture. A combination of lair, prison, reformatory and brothel provides insight into a panopticon of perversion. Some rooms bear names like 'rape chamber' or 'wheel of pinching and shame'. In various cells, it becomes clear that the targets of the devious schemes are children ('resting rooms: first to sixth grade'). In some designated areas, the sexual activities include dogs and goats. However, there is also a coffee room, an entertainment room featuring a cinema and classrooms complemented by offices for teachers. The only aspects of the dungeon actually sketched out are floor plans, corridors, tunnels and other architectural features. The artist neither depicts men, women, children or animals, nor the torture devices. It is the short descriptions alone that evoke the picture of cruel torturing and create a contrast to the scrupulously clean geometric style.This horrific location is located 400 m below the surface, accessible only through a single vertical shaft into the earth. It is characterised by its creator simply as the 'great amusement park' or the 'paradise of pleasure'. When it comes to naming the gruesome events taking place there, the artist is not at a loss for words either: 'Where one atrocity follows the other', unaware 'adolescent adventurers' are killed in various ways by the 'most wicked libertines', who 'take pleasure in sex murder'. It is the 'home of love and sin imbedded in the valley of thickly overgrown foothills'.Fifteen years after the drawings came into possession of Arnulf Rainer, a considerable omnibus volume (provided by the same former neighbour of the artist who sold the first share of drawings to Rainer) was acquired and later sold by Galerie Susanne Zander in Cologne. In the process, the identity of the -thus no longer 'anonymous' -artist was revealed. The creator of the drawings, which must have required an enormous amount of time to produce, was identified as Address ...