Learning From Madness

"[Learning from Madness] make[s] strong contributions to the growing body of scholarship on modernism, both Latin American and global...Cabanas presents a history of patient art little-known outside Brazil and argues for how it disrupts conventional definitions of 'outsider art'. In this context, creative production by the mentally ill was in continuous dialogue with the development of modern art, thus denying its oppositional status, while at the same time spotlighting its specific site of production and discursive frame."--Baptiste Brun "Art History" "Backed by historical analysis, the final two chapters raise a much needed and welcome critique today . . . . To escape a paradoxical repetition of the effects of domination, which Cabanas associates with the comparisons between globalized contemporary art productions and that of others that escape Western canons from near and far--a phenomenon which she elegantly calls monolingualism of the global, echoing Derrida--, she proposes ways of doing that mine the gap between the distanced/situated and take part in actual co-creation, where psychiatric patients are producers together with those who approach them or want to show their work."--Baptiste Brun "Les Cahiers du Musee national d'art moderne, No. 152, Summer 2020 (translated)" "Kaira Cabanas's study is an efficient antidote to what she calls the 'monolingualism of the global'--the current tendency in modern and contemporary art institutions to welcome the art of the 'other' but only as framed by Western cultural codes. Warning against the fraudulence of this new universalism, she focuses on the extraordinary case of Brazil, where from the early 20th-century on the reactionary discourse of degeneration plummeted, works of art produced by psychiatric patients were given a status similar to those of professional artists, and the very concept of an 'outsider artist' was cast off. Goethe's motto, 'What is inside, is outside, ' as quoted by Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa, is the Ariadne's thread linking the five case studies examined in this brilliant book."--Baptiste Brun "Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study" "Eloquently argued. . . . Cabanas demonstrates the uniqueness of Brazilian interactions with the art of psychiatric patients, and in the process challenges both long-held assumptions about outsider art in its various critical manifestations and recent constructions of a contemporary global art. Recommended."-- "CHOICE" "Cabanas's Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art, in turn, examines the influence of the art of psychiatric patients on emergent theories and institutions of modern art in Brazil from the 1920s to the 1960s. Brazil's singular impulse to position the art of the insane not as expressions of pure alterity but as internal to a local discourse of modernism provides a cogent model of provincial specificity by which Cabanas rethinks notions of 'inclusion' as they play out in the 'global' contemporary."-- "Art Journal" "Skillfully written, Learning from Madness presents original research to the fields of Brazilian art, transnational art, curatorial studies, and to the history of modernism. By arguing that the production of art in and around psychiatric settings plays a vital part in the general constitution of Brazilian modernism, Cabanas breaks new ground in its field not only in terms of the subjects her book addresses, but also, and more crucially, by offering a methodological blueprint for critical art-histories aiming to engage in debates over alternative readings of modernism, transnational perspectives on art, and the emergence of the notion of global art."--Baptiste Brun "Sergio B. Martins, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro" "[Learning from Madness] is an important text for not only the study of art and psychology, but for that of La

Kaira M. Cabanas is associate professor in global modern and contemporary art history at the University of Florida, Gainesville.