Artist Simon Raven was hosted by Professor Victoria Tischler from the School of Psychology, in a fascinating six-month residency in which he explored satire in disability art.
Following a diagnosis of bipolar, Simon Raven uses his creativity to explore how humour, irony and exaggeration can be used to challenge prejudicial attitudes towards people with disabilities. Collaborating with Professor Tischler, Simon’s art during his Fellowship manifested itself in various forms – satirical performances, music and even a perfume. The residency culminated in a performance of ‘Why choose bipolar’, in which Simon, in a gold Elvis suit, attempted to sell the notion that choosing to be bipolar might offer unique career opportunities.
We chatted with Simon about his influences, art and how it informed his Fellowship at IAS.
At school, art classes were an oasis of calm in a busy day, a day that I found difficult. Art was the class where I thought, ‘Thank goodness, there’ll be a sort of peace.’
I first went to Manchester and studied philosophy but I dropped out after a year and changed course to do art. I went to Oxford University then the Royal College of Art to do a masters, and ever since then I’ve worked as an artist. I’ve consistently been quite stubborn in sticking to doing art.
As a branch of humanities, art really is constantly renegotiating who we are and what we believe and what’s considered valuable or not. And in particular disability art is often relegated – it’s not what curators really want to do but they have to do it and so they give it to their junior curators. Even satirising it, people just don’t see the satire in it at all. So that’s been quite enlightening in a way, and frustrating as well.
My theory is that there’s two attitudes towards disability and bipolar: disabled people are either manically amazing, wonderful, inspiring and all the rest of it – like a manic sort of disassociation; or then there’s the depressive disassociation which is ‘I hate those people, they’re unworthy of benefits’ etc. So there are these two poles and they’re not actually that far from each other really – they’re both dissociating from the fact that disability is quite normal, most people at some point are or become disabled or they know someone who is.
Probably the most interesting things culturally when I was growing up were humour and satire on television, things like Monty Python and comedy in general. I got into disability satire when I was at the Royal College of Art and a good friend, Aaron Williamson, who works in disability art, and I worked on some projects together.
Humour is a very good defence and it’s also a good way to take the seriousness out of a situation and replace it with a sort of humility. Freud talked about how comedians go up on stage and then they undermine themselves from a place of privilege and I often think about that. And with disability it’s often the opposite, people are sometimes thought of as lesser than they are. So comedy in that respect becomes redoubled.
“A small painting alluding to The Scream by Edvard Munch – 'the screen' of a laptop and a square-shaped digital icon on a mobile phone. The work evokes a feeling of being constantly drawn back to the screen, in the way that a painter might be drawn back to a blank canvas.”
Victoria Tischler used to work at the Nottingham Institute of Mental Health, and I had a studio fairly near and was very much involved in the arts scene. There was a sculpture commission that she had arranged for that building and I really went to town on it. It was a very interesting process and then I didn’t get the commission. But I emailed them and said I’d really like to still work with you. And they got back to me and they said I could. So I did a painting commission for the Institute of Mental Health and I got to know Victoria.
Then I was doing a PhD in Newcastle and bumped into her at the train station and we had a great conversation. I saw that she was looking for someone to do research at Surrey in the School of Psychology and I thought that’s all the things I’m interested in. Because I knew her, I got in touch and asked if I applied would she be interested. And she gallantly said yes and it’s been wonderful, good fun.
It was excellent. I’d dropped out of my PhD because I was diagnosed bipolar which was quite a blow, and the Fellowship with Surrey at IAS was the first thing since then that I thought, oh good, I’m back, I haven’t lost my artistic practice, I can still be engaged with academics and research at a good level. Having had a hiatus for a few years of trying to be a waiter – which I’m not very good at – it was like getting back on track.
I’d never visited Surrey or Guildford before. My practice is often spurred by going to a place and researching its history or exploring it, and going to a university that wasn’t one I was actually attending allowed me to think about my experience through quite a few universities with undiagnosed bipolar. It was kind of wistful; you can’t help but imagine yourself back at that time of first being a student.
It was interesting to me to work in the School of Psychology to see how those places feel. Victoria organised chats with lots of different faculty staff and students and those were really enjoyable. Every conversation at some point turned round to AI so it was interesting to see how staff and students were dealing with it.
Most days I visited the cathedral in the morning, had a coffee in the café, and walked around when it would be totally empty. I did have lots of grandiose ideas about being a sort of parachutist who’d arrived in the cathedral, blown off course from Las Vegas. I was thinking a lot about how to deal with manic grandiosity and how to ground it.
“An image of an angel plummeting while singing karaoke didn't quite work so I turned the canvas upside down – the image of a ghostly octopus or diving bell formed. I thought of the sudden absence of squashed moths on car headlights at night, and how pesticides and climate change might have reduced this phenomenon. Perhaps it is an angel squashed like a moth on impact with earth or the canvas.”
The first day in Surrey I stayed in part of the campus away from the main campus – Manor Park – and to get to where the School of Psychology is, you have to walk up a highway and then Guildford Cathedral comes into view. It has a 12-foot gold angel statue on its spire, pointing. And it looks a little bit like Elvis in a gold suit. I was having all these grandiose ideas, and I thought maybe I could play a sort of fallen counterpart to this golden angel. I had this Elvis suit from a previous performance, so I thought I’d be a golden Elvis figure in the psychology department.
I did a few performances out of the window of my room so that people walking by, if they looked up, as with the angel sculpture, they would see this golden figure and wonder what on earth was going on. I enjoyed that for the fact that it was sort of similar to bipolar – a non-visible condition that is very visible to the person experiencing it.
Victoria and I are doing an article in a book on psychology and art. There’s already been one edition and Victoria’s inviting me to contribute to the second edition, so we’ll have a chapter in there.
We’ve also got an article in a psychology magazine, which is a report on the residency from her perspective and then from mine. She wrote her report quite quickly and then sent it to me. I was on the train coming back from Surrey and I was still buzzing from the event and thinking about what I could have done better. I was typing away very quickly the whole journey, so I thought I’d just use that text because it was not overthought.
A song and ‘bad music’ video made in response to The Nest space on the University of Surrey campus.
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