Art Review – ‘Delirious: Art At the Limits of Reason’

Confusion. Instability. Disorientation. Irrationality.

What is delirium? For me, delirium is the feeling of fidgeting quietly but desperately on a dimly lit plane—losing track of time, forgetting where I began and where I will end up, what I have left off and what I will have to pick back up again. Delirium is a liminal space. Not only physically, but also temporally and emotionally. Delirious, on view at the Met Breuer till January, attempts to answer, or rather show, the essence of this ambiguous state of human emotion. Featuring roughly a hundred works by sixty-three artists from Europe and the Americas, the collection illuminates the artists’ different interpretations of delirium. These visceral works border insanity, and let me tell you, they are tearfully beautiful.

“Delirious times demand delirious art,” we are introduced, as printed on a bright red wall at the entrance of the exhibit. The word ‘delirium’ characterized the decades between 1950 and 1980, years affected by wars started by reasons nobody could answer; and by the uncontrollable spread of urbanization and industrialization. But was this a time of disillusionment, or was it in fact a time of a different kind of consciousness? Artists of the period recognized the human experience as far from order and rationality, and were compelled to represent the perpetual disruption in their visual narratives. Some artists overtly disrupted the pretense of regularity the late twentieth century had established, and some embraced and exaggerated its geometrics, mathematics, and science, only to expose its hollowness. Counterculture emerged, and art diverged and reproduced rapidly like bacteria. The beauty in human tragedy is that we crave and crawl towards art when we are disrupted and disturbed.

Like all great art, the collection offers an experience of what these artists’ may have felt, and embraced. Such experiences range from Frank Stella’s startlingly bright colored canvas, to Hélio Oiticica’s carefully organized mess of patterns, to Lee Loranzo’s perverse, militant crayon drawings.