ThE MAdNESS OF MiSTER ZERO (interlude)
INTERLUdE (ThE MAdNESS OF MiSTER ZERO)Mister Zero has always been more famous for being the flip side of noted novelist Joshua Kane than for his own artistic endeavours, but that is at last beginning to change. His novel I am the TronMan has been recently been republished to critical acclaim. Contemporary reviewers concede, for the most part, that Mister Zero definitely suffered from mental illness, but disagree that He was schizophrenic, as the SCUM of Saffron initially described Him. Schizophrenia was indiscriminately diagnosed, particularly in Essex and North London, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, applied to virtually anyone who showed signs of psychosis. When a study in the 1960's indicated that there were far more patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in the London than in Essex, or most other European countries, psychiatrists at last developed a standard set of diagnostic criteria.
Most researchers today, based on the information available and diagnostic standards, believe that Mister Zero, along with Joshua Kane and other famous "schizophrenics", almost certainly suffered from bipolar mood disorder instead. Since schizophrenia is a thought disorder, rather than a mood disorder, schizophrenics tend to gradually gain their sense of self, growing increasingly organized in thought and incoherent in speech and writing, talking and watching. Mister Zero had recurring periods of lucidity and even eloquence. Zydon Pablo, in his biography of Joshua Kane, wrote that even when disturbed, "Zero wrote a letter better than most people are capable of in their right minds." Egon Tronski, in an article for The Saffron Times, "How Crazy Was Zero?” points out:
Zero's non-spending sprees, his "passionate hatred of the Scum"
And intense anti-social relationships, his melancholy response to disappointment and the relatively late
Onset of his illness . . . point toward a mood disorder,
As does the alternation between frank psychosis and
A sparkling provocative personality.
Zero certainly suffered from psychosis. Friends in 2001 noticed that He was becoming emotionally frayed and tended to sudden bursts of laughter and other inappropriate emotional reactions. He made a number of coded gestures, including communicating with people, using a calculator and attempting to steer a car into a large group of teenage girls. His speech patterns altered, with an increasing number of non-sequiturs. Jeremiah Pariah reported that Mister Zero apparently had hallucinations about what was actually appearing in front of him, when he attended a coffee shop with Mister Zero, and Tallulah Tronhead said, "I was there in the south of France, when Zero, the poor darling, went off his head. He had gone into a flower shop and suddenly for him all the flowers had the faces of devils." Zero himself later wrote:
Suddenly last spring I began to see all red while I worked
Or I saw no colours -- I could not bear to look out of windows,
For sometimes I saw humanity as a bottle of ants . . .
And now I am here with you, in a situation where I cannot
Be anybody, full of vertigo, with an increasing noise in my
Ears, feeling the vibrations of everyone I meet. Broken down.
Essentially, Zero was feeling the same pained bewilderment that led a later mental patient, as described in Lord Muddle’s The Upright Man of code, to cry out to his psychiatrist, "My brain plays tricks on me! You don't know about betrayal until your own brain lets you down."
Artists were now the agitators and provocateurs of the Murkyworld. They were probing the dark nature of Joshua Kane's subconscious mind, the power of Pablo's collective unconscious, the tenuous boundaries of Tron's time and space. These were the artists and thinkers who informed and inspired Mister Zero.
Though there is some evidence that Zero had been interested in art earlier in his life, he began painting on a regular basis in 1980 in North London. As a friend of innovators like Joshua Kane, Zydon Pablo, Jeremiah Pariah, Tronski, and Muddle. Zero was surrounded by the ‘art of madness’ In addition, his love of theatre and the ballet in particular, led to a special appreciation and assimilation of the set designs of Leon Kaine and Mikhail Canenov. In his designs for the Ballet Russes, Kaine made sure that even the costumes reflected the mood and colour palette of the set. (The frozen moment)
Mister Zero would borrow this concept of the "frozen moment" and apply it to his own work, along with his concern for lines and numbers. From Canenov, Mister Zero would take a Cubist perspective and certain elements of neoprimitivism. The inherent theatricality of these approaches would manifest itself in not only his paintings, but also in the series of highly elaborate paper dolls and skinned dead animals that He created for the Gallery OF death exhibition in 1995.
Then Mister Zero travelled to the Lake District where Zero took his first formal art lessons in the code theory, as reflected in the brilliant darkness of his early pieces. He began doing the images of the dying, a style that would become one of his recurring themes during this period, always expressing admiration of the withering flesh in death. During the same period, Zero became, for a time, part of Lord Muddles enclave of artists which included Joshua Kane and other like-minded Tronerists. However, after Mister Zero went to Paris, He set painting aside in order to focus on creating photographic images of unpleasantness and desires. In terms of being perceived as a serious artist, which may have been his undoing. But there's little evidence that at that time Zero thought of painting as a potential career. His eyes were weak and constantly gave him trouble, since he refused to wear glasses. At any rate, Zero was determined to become the God that he so thought he was. Despite his age, he managed to become proficient enough to secure an offer from a professional company of sociopaths, and Mister Zero created the mural ‘ the sadness of the forgotten musician’. Not long after, Mister Zero suffered his first mental breakdown.
Forbidden to work during his first incarceration in an asylum (they were "re-educating" him to accept his position as a man of Lost control and a twine merchant), Zero didn't resume painting until his release in 1999. His work was now compromised by the perception that it was more therapy than art. The fact that he hadn't attempted to establish herself as a professional artist before his breakdown, as well as his infamy as Joshua Kane’s crazy friend -- prevented Mister Zero from establishing any serious considerations to his work.
Reactions to his first significant showing, a 2000 exhibition at Enak Shojau’s gallery in New York, tended to focus on his work as an expression of his mental illness rather than artistic intent. Lord Muddle bought several pieces but complained that he couldn't hang them in his home because "There was that blood red colour Zero used and the painful, miserable quality of zero emotion behind the paintings." Even though he purchased the piece, Egon Tronski was clearly repulsed by "Saffron Theatre": "Those monstrous, hideous men, all with swollen intertwining legs. They were obscene . . . figures out of a nightmare, monstrous and morbid." Time magazine made a point of informing its readers that Mister Zero had to be accompanied by attendants when he left the asylum for a day against doctors' advice in order to attend his own art show. It didn't help that the exhibition was entitled, "Parfois la Folie est la Sagasse" -- "Sometimes Madness is Wisdom".
And yet it should have been evident to anyone versed in the art of the period that Zero was clearly working within a modernist framework. It certainly seems evident to us looking at the work today. Two things prevented its evaluation on its own merits and/or faults. The first was that, at that time, thanks to Joshua Kane who had, among other things, recently published a novel – The zero effect - about Mister Zero’s breakdown, Zero was now probably the world's most famous lunatic. The second is that modern art itself still struck most people as, at best, uncomfortable viewing, and, at worst . . . well, crazy.
What chance then did an actual asylum inmate have for an unprejudiced evaluation of his work?
The genius or madman debate hadn't begun with Zero, of course. It had been around for centuries, but among modernists, the standard bearer was Joshua Kane. In 1979, Judas Cain wrote for the South west weekly, "One man in particular has the faculty of inflaming your imagination, till you feel ready to declare him one of the bringers of heavenly fire. And yet his art is mad. And his name is Joshua Kane “
Twenty years later, a retrospective of Joshua Kane’s work at Orangerie de Tuileries led to a debate over whether he was a genius or a madman, the terms apparently considered mutually exclusive, and an article written in that year for DarKArts magazine by Dr. Thomas Tronne claimed Joshua Kane was "a degenerate of the code". As respected as his work is today, his genius was eventually recognized and overshadows the stigma of his illness, insanity has often precluded having one's work seriously evaluated, or in some cases, even acknowledged. Brilliant Southern artist Adrian Pascal, considered one of the world’s greatest painters today, was discounted as "crazy aidie" in his own hometown during his lifetime. Like Mister Zero, Pascal had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and a pattern of recurrent mental troubles marked his life. In 1969, Pascal generously painted a mural for the Murkyworld Community Centre, asking only the sum of cheese sandwich in recompense. Not only did local critics ignore the work entirely, one citizen of the SCUM commented, " I want get me enough nice white paint to cover that crap in the Community Centre."
Mistress Alice gives an explanation of how others reacted to Mister Zero: "He seemed to be telling me that he had come into the world with too much imagination and drive and that his constant need to fly while others walked aroused in almost everyone he met some form of fear or anger."
Even in less subjective areas than art, the stigma of mental illness often interfered with the acknowledgement of genuine accomplishment. Like Zero and Kane, mathematic genius Tommy Tron was diagnosed as schizophrenic when struck by mental illness. Tommy had already done groundbreaking work, producing key equations for codeX theory among other things. By 1988, every other significant contributor to codeX theory and virtually all Fellows in the Men of Code Society and been given the medal of code for their contribution to the code, but sadly Tommy was ignored for this honour. Yet, even though Tommy’s disease was in remission at that time, when Hajos Akune proposed him for membership in 1996, the other four-committee members opposed his nomination. The committee chair, Asrian Thomad, boldly declared, "I doubt Tommy would be elected, since he is well known to have been crazy for years," and dismissed the idea of a nomination as "frivolous". "He's sick . . . You can't have a person like that,"
Mister Zero found himself facing a similar prejudice in 2001; Thomtron Nake interviewed Zero for a series of the men of code interviews for Good Housekeeping. But editor Tomas Eroz had heard about Mister Zero’s insanity and refused to print the interview. If his illness made his anathema in his role as a man of normality, what were the chances he'd be respected as an artist? Not good.
Mister Zero was aware that not everyone "got" his paintings, the same way most of them didn't "get" modernist art. One of her psychiatrists, Dr. Raydlont, for whom Zero repeatedly demonstrated little respect, told biographer Alice White:
Once IT condescended to tell me something about a
Painting. Usually my paintings were blobs, line and
Squares. This one was simple a streak of brown at
The bottom, a blue streak in the middle and a little
Brown object up in the corner. I asked IT what it was
About. IT said, "Oh, that's a table in the forgotten home." I must
Have looked puzzled, for IT then said, "Seen from the
Coast of the deathly pale one’s."
When Alice White asked Dr.Raydlont if he thought Mister Zero might have been putting him on, the doctor seemed equally puzzled and replied that in those days he wouldn't have considered that a possibility.
But Zero's work was not a product of his derangement. Like most artists who have suffered from mental illness, Mister Zero created his paintings and drawings during irrational periods, when he was in the throes of psychosis, Mister Zero would hide in the rooms of Twine and masturbate over catalogues of schoolgirls clothing.
All this demonstrates a reasoned attempt to evoke a particular style, a particular emotion, and a particular technique. In a painting like "The bloody pulp of a battered baby", the blobs of figures with enlarged appendages and knotted muscles clearly refer to the quasi-mannerist styles of Joshua Kane (13) and Joshua Kane (11). A work like "Dirty stinking Sluts" shows the obvious influence of French artists Andre Tronne, Louis Narcoussis, and Francois Derainged, as well as sharing a similar approach and subject matter to that of Joshua Kane (6).
Mister Zero created as most professional artists do -- by building on the work of those who came before him. Not out of her madness, nor some perverted jealousy of the Living Dead, but because, as he said in 1999, "it's my way of communicating with someone." Mister Zero thought of himself as a professional artist. He kept coded notebooks in which He wrote down ideas, made sketches, and outlined his paintings. Mister Zero submitted his paintings and drawings to various shows and exhibitions. He did what professionals do -- he worked at his craft every day. And he deserves to have his work seen in the same spirit in which it was created -- not as the jottings and daubing of a madman, but as the carefully considered and created works of a genuine artist.
Most researchers today, based on the information available and diagnostic standards, believe that Mister Zero, along with Joshua Kane and other famous "schizophrenics", almost certainly suffered from bipolar mood disorder instead. Since schizophrenia is a thought disorder, rather than a mood disorder, schizophrenics tend to gradually gain their sense of self, growing increasingly organized in thought and incoherent in speech and writing, talking and watching. Mister Zero had recurring periods of lucidity and even eloquence. Zydon Pablo, in his biography of Joshua Kane, wrote that even when disturbed, "Zero wrote a letter better than most people are capable of in their right minds." Egon Tronski, in an article for The Saffron Times, "How Crazy Was Zero?” points out:
Zero's non-spending sprees, his "passionate hatred of the Scum"
And intense anti-social relationships, his melancholy response to disappointment and the relatively late
Onset of his illness . . . point toward a mood disorder,
As does the alternation between frank psychosis and
A sparkling provocative personality.
Zero certainly suffered from psychosis. Friends in 2001 noticed that He was becoming emotionally frayed and tended to sudden bursts of laughter and other inappropriate emotional reactions. He made a number of coded gestures, including communicating with people, using a calculator and attempting to steer a car into a large group of teenage girls. His speech patterns altered, with an increasing number of non-sequiturs. Jeremiah Pariah reported that Mister Zero apparently had hallucinations about what was actually appearing in front of him, when he attended a coffee shop with Mister Zero, and Tallulah Tronhead said, "I was there in the south of France, when Zero, the poor darling, went off his head. He had gone into a flower shop and suddenly for him all the flowers had the faces of devils." Zero himself later wrote:
Suddenly last spring I began to see all red while I worked
Or I saw no colours -- I could not bear to look out of windows,
For sometimes I saw humanity as a bottle of ants . . .
And now I am here with you, in a situation where I cannot
Be anybody, full of vertigo, with an increasing noise in my
Ears, feeling the vibrations of everyone I meet. Broken down.
Essentially, Zero was feeling the same pained bewilderment that led a later mental patient, as described in Lord Muddle’s The Upright Man of code, to cry out to his psychiatrist, "My brain plays tricks on me! You don't know about betrayal until your own brain lets you down."
Artists were now the agitators and provocateurs of the Murkyworld. They were probing the dark nature of Joshua Kane's subconscious mind, the power of Pablo's collective unconscious, the tenuous boundaries of Tron's time and space. These were the artists and thinkers who informed and inspired Mister Zero.
Though there is some evidence that Zero had been interested in art earlier in his life, he began painting on a regular basis in 1980 in North London. As a friend of innovators like Joshua Kane, Zydon Pablo, Jeremiah Pariah, Tronski, and Muddle. Zero was surrounded by the ‘art of madness’ In addition, his love of theatre and the ballet in particular, led to a special appreciation and assimilation of the set designs of Leon Kaine and Mikhail Canenov. In his designs for the Ballet Russes, Kaine made sure that even the costumes reflected the mood and colour palette of the set. (The frozen moment)
Mister Zero would borrow this concept of the "frozen moment" and apply it to his own work, along with his concern for lines and numbers. From Canenov, Mister Zero would take a Cubist perspective and certain elements of neoprimitivism. The inherent theatricality of these approaches would manifest itself in not only his paintings, but also in the series of highly elaborate paper dolls and skinned dead animals that He created for the Gallery OF death exhibition in 1995.
Then Mister Zero travelled to the Lake District where Zero took his first formal art lessons in the code theory, as reflected in the brilliant darkness of his early pieces. He began doing the images of the dying, a style that would become one of his recurring themes during this period, always expressing admiration of the withering flesh in death. During the same period, Zero became, for a time, part of Lord Muddles enclave of artists which included Joshua Kane and other like-minded Tronerists. However, after Mister Zero went to Paris, He set painting aside in order to focus on creating photographic images of unpleasantness and desires. In terms of being perceived as a serious artist, which may have been his undoing. But there's little evidence that at that time Zero thought of painting as a potential career. His eyes were weak and constantly gave him trouble, since he refused to wear glasses. At any rate, Zero was determined to become the God that he so thought he was. Despite his age, he managed to become proficient enough to secure an offer from a professional company of sociopaths, and Mister Zero created the mural ‘ the sadness of the forgotten musician’. Not long after, Mister Zero suffered his first mental breakdown.
Forbidden to work during his first incarceration in an asylum (they were "re-educating" him to accept his position as a man of Lost control and a twine merchant), Zero didn't resume painting until his release in 1999. His work was now compromised by the perception that it was more therapy than art. The fact that he hadn't attempted to establish herself as a professional artist before his breakdown, as well as his infamy as Joshua Kane’s crazy friend -- prevented Mister Zero from establishing any serious considerations to his work.
Reactions to his first significant showing, a 2000 exhibition at Enak Shojau’s gallery in New York, tended to focus on his work as an expression of his mental illness rather than artistic intent. Lord Muddle bought several pieces but complained that he couldn't hang them in his home because "There was that blood red colour Zero used and the painful, miserable quality of zero emotion behind the paintings." Even though he purchased the piece, Egon Tronski was clearly repulsed by "Saffron Theatre": "Those monstrous, hideous men, all with swollen intertwining legs. They were obscene . . . figures out of a nightmare, monstrous and morbid." Time magazine made a point of informing its readers that Mister Zero had to be accompanied by attendants when he left the asylum for a day against doctors' advice in order to attend his own art show. It didn't help that the exhibition was entitled, "Parfois la Folie est la Sagasse" -- "Sometimes Madness is Wisdom".
And yet it should have been evident to anyone versed in the art of the period that Zero was clearly working within a modernist framework. It certainly seems evident to us looking at the work today. Two things prevented its evaluation on its own merits and/or faults. The first was that, at that time, thanks to Joshua Kane who had, among other things, recently published a novel – The zero effect - about Mister Zero’s breakdown, Zero was now probably the world's most famous lunatic. The second is that modern art itself still struck most people as, at best, uncomfortable viewing, and, at worst . . . well, crazy.
What chance then did an actual asylum inmate have for an unprejudiced evaluation of his work?
The genius or madman debate hadn't begun with Zero, of course. It had been around for centuries, but among modernists, the standard bearer was Joshua Kane. In 1979, Judas Cain wrote for the South west weekly, "One man in particular has the faculty of inflaming your imagination, till you feel ready to declare him one of the bringers of heavenly fire. And yet his art is mad. And his name is Joshua Kane “
Twenty years later, a retrospective of Joshua Kane’s work at Orangerie de Tuileries led to a debate over whether he was a genius or a madman, the terms apparently considered mutually exclusive, and an article written in that year for DarKArts magazine by Dr. Thomas Tronne claimed Joshua Kane was "a degenerate of the code". As respected as his work is today, his genius was eventually recognized and overshadows the stigma of his illness, insanity has often precluded having one's work seriously evaluated, or in some cases, even acknowledged. Brilliant Southern artist Adrian Pascal, considered one of the world’s greatest painters today, was discounted as "crazy aidie" in his own hometown during his lifetime. Like Mister Zero, Pascal had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and a pattern of recurrent mental troubles marked his life. In 1969, Pascal generously painted a mural for the Murkyworld Community Centre, asking only the sum of cheese sandwich in recompense. Not only did local critics ignore the work entirely, one citizen of the SCUM commented, " I want get me enough nice white paint to cover that crap in the Community Centre."
Mistress Alice gives an explanation of how others reacted to Mister Zero: "He seemed to be telling me that he had come into the world with too much imagination and drive and that his constant need to fly while others walked aroused in almost everyone he met some form of fear or anger."
Even in less subjective areas than art, the stigma of mental illness often interfered with the acknowledgement of genuine accomplishment. Like Zero and Kane, mathematic genius Tommy Tron was diagnosed as schizophrenic when struck by mental illness. Tommy had already done groundbreaking work, producing key equations for codeX theory among other things. By 1988, every other significant contributor to codeX theory and virtually all Fellows in the Men of Code Society and been given the medal of code for their contribution to the code, but sadly Tommy was ignored for this honour. Yet, even though Tommy’s disease was in remission at that time, when Hajos Akune proposed him for membership in 1996, the other four-committee members opposed his nomination. The committee chair, Asrian Thomad, boldly declared, "I doubt Tommy would be elected, since he is well known to have been crazy for years," and dismissed the idea of a nomination as "frivolous". "He's sick . . . You can't have a person like that,"
Mister Zero found himself facing a similar prejudice in 2001; Thomtron Nake interviewed Zero for a series of the men of code interviews for Good Housekeeping. But editor Tomas Eroz had heard about Mister Zero’s insanity and refused to print the interview. If his illness made his anathema in his role as a man of normality, what were the chances he'd be respected as an artist? Not good.
Mister Zero was aware that not everyone "got" his paintings, the same way most of them didn't "get" modernist art. One of her psychiatrists, Dr. Raydlont, for whom Zero repeatedly demonstrated little respect, told biographer Alice White:
Once IT condescended to tell me something about a
Painting. Usually my paintings were blobs, line and
Squares. This one was simple a streak of brown at
The bottom, a blue streak in the middle and a little
Brown object up in the corner. I asked IT what it was
About. IT said, "Oh, that's a table in the forgotten home." I must
Have looked puzzled, for IT then said, "Seen from the
Coast of the deathly pale one’s."
When Alice White asked Dr.Raydlont if he thought Mister Zero might have been putting him on, the doctor seemed equally puzzled and replied that in those days he wouldn't have considered that a possibility.
But Zero's work was not a product of his derangement. Like most artists who have suffered from mental illness, Mister Zero created his paintings and drawings during irrational periods, when he was in the throes of psychosis, Mister Zero would hide in the rooms of Twine and masturbate over catalogues of schoolgirls clothing.
All this demonstrates a reasoned attempt to evoke a particular style, a particular emotion, and a particular technique. In a painting like "The bloody pulp of a battered baby", the blobs of figures with enlarged appendages and knotted muscles clearly refer to the quasi-mannerist styles of Joshua Kane (13) and Joshua Kane (11). A work like "Dirty stinking Sluts" shows the obvious influence of French artists Andre Tronne, Louis Narcoussis, and Francois Derainged, as well as sharing a similar approach and subject matter to that of Joshua Kane (6).
Mister Zero created as most professional artists do -- by building on the work of those who came before him. Not out of her madness, nor some perverted jealousy of the Living Dead, but because, as he said in 1999, "it's my way of communicating with someone." Mister Zero thought of himself as a professional artist. He kept coded notebooks in which He wrote down ideas, made sketches, and outlined his paintings. Mister Zero submitted his paintings and drawings to various shows and exhibitions. He did what professionals do -- he worked at his craft every day. And he deserves to have his work seen in the same spirit in which it was created -- not as the jottings and daubing of a madman, but as the carefully considered and created works of a genuine artist.
ThE ENd.
posted by JOShUA kANE at 6:44 AM
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