Bart Marius
UNHINGED A User’s Guide
What is psychiatry and how might we imagine a museum of psy chiatry? That is roughly the essential question underlying this collection of texts that accompanies our new exhibition. Let’s start at the beginning. Psychiatry is not just the science that concerns itself with psychological problems. It is also a form of treatment, and a psy chiatric hospital is a physical place where people facing these issues are accommodated. Most importantly, psychiatry is about people who are suddenly confronted by something unfathomable on their life journey, something that paralyses them, that saddens, frightens or exhausts them. Psychiatry is also taboo, a stigma that weighs upon anyone who suddenly finds themselves facing it. The idea of exhibiting psychiatry might initially seem to have a distinct whiff of the freak show about it. As a museum, we are aware of this. However, we have rejected the option of avoiding the issue by telling a chronological story with historical exhibits. After all, chronology implies evolution. And evolution means that there was once a bad way of doing things that has grown into a better way. That is not the story we want to tell. But we are certain that we do have a story. Why we are telling that story in a museum, what it might be about and how we are going to present it as a whole is something we will try to sketch out in this introduction. MUSEUM
Two people, Boris Groys and Lucas Devriendt, were sources of inspiration and confrontation in our search for the story we wanted to tell and the way we might present it. Art philosopher Boris Groys is not interested in historical museums. His work is only intended to prick the conscience of contemporary art museums and to highlight their social and even political significance. The fact that he seems to dismiss all other museums as uninteresting is a thorn in our side. ‘Precisely at this time, it seems quite interesting to ask what a museum is and thus to benefit from the new, problematic character of the museum. The museum is often understood as a place of memory, where
U N H I N G E D — 13
