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Book Reviews
| Belinda Robson, Recovering Art: A History of the Cunningham Dax Collection (Melbourne: The Cunningham Dax Collection, 2006). ISBN 0-646-46275-X. 63 pp.
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| The Cunningham Dax Collection comprises a large number of artistic works produced over more than sixty years by people with mental illness. The Collection is now accommodated and selectively exhibited at a permanent gallery site in the Melbourne suburb of Parkville. An excellent website (http://www.daxcollection.org.au) provides a guide to the history and scope of the collection. |
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In this short but informative and engaging history Belinda Robson tells us how the collection came about. She is eminently qualified to do so, having completed an accomplished doctoral study of the career and influence of Eric Cunningham Dax, one time Director of the Mental Hygiene Department of Victoria (1951–69). Robson shows why the story of this collection is also the story of changing ideas about mental illness and especially about the status of people with mental illness. The startling changes in that status in the half century after the end of the war do much to explain the rocky road along which the Dax Collection has had to travel since the 1960s. |
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Before his arrival in Melbourne in 1951, Dax was an English psychiatrist, Superintendent at Netherne Hospital, where he had become interested in the possible uses of art as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool. Artistic work produced by patients to this time had been collected in patient records, or thrown away. While there had been growing interest, in Europe especially, about the art of the mentally ill, this had been generally in the context of the aesthetic significance of such products. As Robson shows, Dax wished 'to test the idea that if people experiencing mental illness were given the opportunity to create art works, they could recover more quickly' (p. 7). At Netherne he employed a part-time artist as art therapist. He also began collecting the works systematically, analysing them for patterns and meanings, which he wrote up in a book, Experimental Studies in Psychiatric Art, published by Faber in 1952. |
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In Victoria Dax continued his interest, promoting the extension of art therapy in a number of hospitals through the institutional authority he possessed there. Drawing on her interviews with Dax—as well as interviews with artists employed in the hospitals, and patients and artists whose works are included in the collection—Robson traces the developing enterprise of art therapy. Dax had brought some paintings from Netherne with him; now he added other pieces as he visited the hospitals under his control, encouraging the art programs. |
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Inevitably there were tensions over the objectives and control of the enterprise. There was conflict between the aspirations of art therapy and the work of occupational therapy. There was also disagreement over the functional and aesthetic values to be applied in judging the worth of the art being produced. Psychiatrists looked to the work for its value in a clinical and therapeutic setting. The artists working in the programme looked at the product for its expressive and aesthetic value. Robson notes the impact that changing ideas about art itself, evident in the democratic and consumer oriented aspirations of the new National Gallery of Victoria (opened 1968) may have had in breaking down the barriers that psychiatry tended to construct in its approach to the art. |
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The contextual history of the collection's origins is thus related closely to the changing fashions of both psychiatry and artistic values in the post-war period. The latter half of the book is largely preoccupied with the survival of Dax's collection after his move from Melbourne to Tasmania in 1969. Without the personal interest of the Director of Mental Hygiene the large archive of work he had collected over the years was within a short period of time threatened with destruction. In 1972 Dax visited Melbourne, rescuing about three thousand paintings from a rubbish skip at Royal Park Hospital. This was the basis of the collection that has been preserved. But the subsequent history is not one of physical survival alone. What emerges from Robson's account is the subtle interplay of changing ethical values around the status of the mentally ill, the role of psychiatry, the privilege attached to clinical records, and the privacy and copyright interests of those who produce artistic products. Through detailing the lengthy process that has resulted in a permanent home for the works, under professional curation, Robson documents a history of the collection's fragility. For now the collection seems safe. It is an archive that could never be collected in our day with its altered conception of the rights of the mentally ill.
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| MARK FINNANE
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| GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY |
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