Cabinet Gallery – London – April 22 2015

What is the relationship between the Symptom of Art and the Art of the Symptom. In the Twentieth Century, art took an entirely new direction, continually deconstructing its own form, reframing its own context, dissolving the boundary between presentation and re-presentation, and claiming its own sovereignty. Today this symptom appears to have reached its limits.

During the same period of modernity, a small movement within the field of medicine and psychiatry began to question the certainty of the symptom. Practices such as Psychoanalysis and Homeopathy have reinvented the field of medicine and disease. Picking up where the Greek Pharmakon and the Alchemical Magnum Opus left off, we are called upon to devise an Art of the Symptom for our times: an Autopoesis.

In a time where both the divine father and the nuclear father have dissolved, the pathway has been opened beyond neurosis toward psychosis and perversion. The art of the symptom is the construction of a “pere-version” or version of the father: a confrontation with the symbolic or social structure not as submission or rebellion but as intervention and invention. Creative destruction. Positive negation.

Dr Scott Von is a psychoanalyst and artist and Director of the New Clinic for Integral Medicine & Psychiatry in New York. He lectures and performs internationally on schizoanalysis and the symptom of art.