The aesthetic appropriation of psychic states and disorders has a distinguished pedigree. André Breton adopted hysteria in the early days of the Surrealist movement, while his colleague Salvador Dalí preferred paranoia. Anton Ehrenzweig pressed Melanie Klein’s manic and depressive moments of an infant’s life into a theory of creative processes in his influential book, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Of course, Sigmund Freud himself set the modern trend for this sort of borrowing in his analysis of the psychic energy underlying Leonardo da Vinci’s peculiar genius, but the tradition reaches as far back as ancient Greece. From antiquity to early modern times, melancholia was a term within medical discourse referring to one of the four humors or bodily fluids that were supposed to govern a person’s temperament. Ideally these fluids would be perfectly balanced, but one inevitably predominates. The sanguine humor, produced when blood is the body’s dominant fluid, was regarded as the most favorable: it was associated with air, spring, youth, and cheerfulness. Melancholia, the effect of an excess of black bile, was the worst and was associated with earth, autumn, evening, and late middle age. The melancholic person is surly and miserly; he or she shuns company and is inclined to solitary study. In extreme cases, this temperament could become pathological, leading to insanity and death. Yet there were already inklings in Aristotle that melancholia could increase one’s powers of insight. Although in the Middle Ages it became allied to the deadly sin of sloth, the Renaissance Humanist Marsilio Ficino turned melancholia into an equivocal inheritance combining both the blessing of genius and the curse of madness. In the 1920s, art historians Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky, and philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin, wrote about Dürer’s famous print, Melencolia I, and its implications for the image of the artist. Julia Kristeva’s book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) has a central chapter devoted to Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, a picture of utter human dereliction with no sign of future transcendence.

Christine Ross’s book The Aesthetics of Disengagement briefly rehearses this history and builds upon it. It is an enquiry into the way contemporary artists explore the condition and intervene in the debates surrounding clinical depression—the modern form of melancholia. She argues that it has altered in more than name. In Freud’s time, melancholy involved unconsciously clinging to a lost object, refusing to mourn or to cut affective ties. In our own times, however, depression is associated with the loss of loss: the subject defends against loss by sinking into numbness, becoming withdrawn, disengaged. In a nutshell, Ross’s thesis is this: the melancholic paradigm of creativity is waning under pressure from the modern medicalization of melancholy, which reduces to a disease what was a creative response to loss. She tends to understand this as a wholesale change in the nature of our subjectivity, since she follows Michel Foucault in thinking that discourses are lived in the body. Yet, it seems to me perfectly possible for a reductive psychiatric science that dispenses pills to co-exist alongside psychoanalytic, literary, and artistic discourses that take a very different view of mental life. Rather than a radical shift in discursive formations from melancholia to medicalized depression, one might rather think in terms of a cultural antagonism.

How does this shift or antagonism manifest itself in art practice? While the melancholic artist overcomes feelings of loss, inadequacy, and frustration through an effort to create something out of meaningless fragments, the contemporary “depressive” artist enacts a sullen, uncommunicative paralysis. Yet this very enactment motivates an interesting strand of art practice. The works of art selected by Ross have a number of features in common, one of which is the refusal of intersubjective encounter with the viewer. Rather, the work performs the contemporary tendency to aggrandize the self to the detriment of others as an insurance against loss. The role this art plays, then, is to make us aware of this large-scale psycho-social pathology. It enacts a crisis of intersubjectivity. Ross points to recent performance and video art, for example, where “subjects are imprisoned in time; unable to learn from their failures, self-absorbed, and disengaged from the other” (xvi). She insists that the work is not in any way autobiographical or symptomatic. The artists themselves are not suffering from depression; rather they are carrying out an “aesthetic investigation of depressive symptoms” (xix) and engaged in a “critique of scientific dementalization” (xxvi).

The first substantive chapter, “The Withering of Melancholia,” concerns the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. For Ross, Rondinone is a transitional figure whose work is concerned with the loss of melancholy as a spur to creativity. While melancholia combines depression with intellectual insight and creative activity, clinical depression is the defeat of creativity characterized by lack of motivation, fatigue, low self-worth, and the drug-induced inertia of a dementalized body. The auratic quality of melancholia withers in the age of positivistic psychiatry. My allusion here to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the withering of aura in the age of mechanical reproducibility is not arbitrary, for Ross makes an interesting comparison between the melancholy allegorist brooding over meaningless fragments and Rondinone’s preoccupation with the meaninglessness of representation in an epoch in which representation takes precedence over reality. Ross wonders if, for us, melancholia might not lie in the tension between copy and authenticity. What I particularly admire about this chapter is the way that she lends Douglas Crimp’s essays on appropriation art a pathos lacking in his writing. She recognizes the tension at the heart of photography; it holds out the promise of authenticity but inevitably succumbs to the copy. Similarly, the subject’s desire for individual authenticity is pursued through identification with images, and so is doomed to fall under the stereotype. In this way, photography is poised between hope and despair.

Ross reads Rondinone’s work as a disclosure of the withering of melancholia and a critique of the way psychiatry has subsumed it under the category of depression. Her discussion of a 1995 installation at the Galerie Walcheturm in Zurich called Heyday is exemplary. The installation frames a view of the street outside the gallery in such a way that it could be mistaken for a video projection. Nearby, a self-portrait in the form of a dummy slumps dejectedly on the floor. The figure of the depressive artist is thus juxtaposed to an ambivalent image/reality. The piece, for Ross, is “indicative of a sensibility haunted by the image’s reduced capacity to represent in an unequivocal way” (8). Rondinone represents the contemporary artist’s “depressed” response to this situation.

A chapter called “The Laboratory of Deficiency” is a spirited and persuasive defense of Vanessa Beecroft’s controversial performance work and raises the vexed issue of gender in relation to depression. Although Dürer’s famous engraving depicted melancholia as a female allegory, melancholic genius was assumed to be male. Depression, on the other hand, seems to afflict women disproportionately. It is as if once the condition had been thoroughly sapped of creative potential, women were allowed to succumb to it. Ross’s account of Beecroft’s work, like Rondinone’s, involves a lurching between hope and despair. In this case, one encounters both a determination to attain a powerful feminine ideal and inevitable failure. Here, what generates depression is “the desire and necessary failure to be the ideal” (53). Beecroft’s squads of identikit models standing stock still often clad in little more than killer heels represent an ideal of personal power and control. Standing to attention, the young women achieve a fetishistic, Helmut Newman-like perfection. But gradually, over the course of the performance, fatigue sets in, their stance collapses, and the façade of perfection crumbles. The performance is not a photograph, so that—and here Ross quotes Jan Avgikos—“the perfect picture . . . quite literally falls apart” (59). The criticality of Beecroft’s work, argues Ross, consists in the disclosure of the contemporary persistence of these ideals of femininity and the performance of their failure. We witness the loss of idealization. The striving for an unattainable ideal and the consequent failure is thus shown to be a “normal” configuration of subjectivity (60). In this context, anorexia and bulimia can be seen as responses to the impossible position of young women who desire to conform to an ideal of contained slenderness in a society dedicated to consumption (75). For Ross, the work also discloses the end of the Freudian/Lacanian paradigm of conflict and loss and the introduction of what she calls the “performance-management-behavioral-cognitive model of independent efficiency” (92; emphasis in original).

One can easily see why Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) might be viewed as a work exploring the depressive conditions of lethargy and slowed time. Ross suggests that the slowed-down film gives the viewer a sense of perceptual deficiency as the narrative unravels and there is often nothing to see (148). For Ross, then, it critiques a notion of insufficiency defined as “cognitive, behavioral, and neo-liberal inadequacy” (147). New information technologies set us challenges with which we have difficulty coping. Ross seems to suggest here that while someone like Nam June Paik was manically inspired by this condition, Gordon is depressed. Personally, I experience the slow motion of 24 Hour Psycho as the filmic equivalent of Gerhard Richter’s blur. Hitchcock’s film is appropriated as a bit of popular culture from a past that is quickly disappearing. Nowadays, Psycho at normal speed seems unbearably slow. In fact, Ross comes close to saying this but only in relation to the oedipal scenario of Psycho. She says that Gordon’s version propels this paradigm into “illegibility, evanescence, disappearance,” and so announces its demise (149). This seems right, but does not accord well with the notion that it involves a failure to adapt. It is, rather, a monument to another age; its transformation of a horror film into a series of stills renders it, as Roland Barthes would say, “pensive.” Again, Ross comes very close to saying this too. Extreme slow motion, she notes, makes the film unintelligible and therefore open to aesthetic reception. She criticizes art history’s tendency to reduce works of art to objects of interpretation, for this bias prevents “prereflexive and nonlinguist understandings of art [and] devalues sensory-aesthetic appreciation” (152–3). Ross appeals here to what Jean-François Lyotard called the “figural” or sensory condition of art as opposed to its ”discursive” or language-like dimension. This is very welcome, but I feel it consorts uneasily with her tendency to conceive of works of art as interventions in debates. Although Ross is sensitive to the sensory qualities of these and the many other works she discusses, her rhetoric sometimes suggests a rather cognitive and instrumental view of art.

Despite the undoubted originality of this book, I could not help recall that in the 1930s Lacan was already railing against a mechanistic clinical psychiatry that did not understand the symptom in the context of the subject’s whole personality. His response was to attend to the aesthetic dimension, the style, of the person’s speech or writing, and he turned to the Surrealists for inspiration. I am not at all sure we inhabit such a very different discursive formation.