Unsigned (Gugging)
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- Unsigned (Gugging)
- 2011
- wooden platform with collages, drawings and photos between or under glass
The installation "Unsigned" works with the institutional framework and social structure of the House of Artists (formerly the Center for Art and Psychotherapy) at Gugging, Austria, which was well known during World War II as the center of an extermination program and later on as a place where psychiatric diagnostic drawing tests were conducted. In her installation, Kotátková works not with physical exhibits, but with the portraits and biographies of their creators, with fragments of the internal system of the clinic and the regulations of diagnostic practices, thereby disclosing the hidden mechanisms that comprise the backdrop to the patients’ output. She exposes the problematic nature of the relationship between a patient’s diagnosis and their creative work. As she herself says, the need to create within the realm of the clinic is less about enthusiastic artistic activity and more about building up a parallel existence to the performance of everyday activities, which—for their creators—have a fateful significance. In this example, Kotátková shows us that the experience of this “remedy” also relates to artistic creation, to which we naively ascribe a complete lack of restraint and personal freedom. J.S.