This article explores representations of the artist Willem de Kooning who, during the last few years of
his creative life, produced a large number of paintings at the same time as he was thought to be suffering
from Alzheimer?s disease. My focus is on the way that these representations mobilize themes which
Jane Goodall identifies as belonging to a discourse of anxiety. In a bid to suggest that the artist is
uniquely positioned to adapt to the progression of the disease, commentators betray a particular
concern with the relation between will and intuition. This relation is negotiated, first, by privileging
the hand of the artist as a body part possessed of a brain and a will of its own and, second, by drawing
on neurological explanations of the nervous system which have the effect of removing ?will? from the
sphere of voluntarism. Although these representations go some way to refigure conventional notions
of artistic identity and creative processes, the reliance on neurology supports an elitism which justifies
the exclusion of certain figures (the insane, the naive, the computer) not just from the subject-position
?artist?, but also from the category ?human?. |