The Language Sickness Could Not Suppress : Two Swedish Museums’ Collections of Outsider Art

The purpose of this thesis is to study and analyse collections of outsider art in two Swedish Medical History Museums, Medicinhistoriska museet in Uppsala and Mentalvårdsmuseet in Säter. The work explores how the history of the museums, how art collections were established, the outsider artist as well as how the two museums work the collections today. The empirical part of the study is based on the fieldwork that the author conducted at the Medicinhistoriska museet in Uppsala and Mentalvårdsmuseet in Säter during two separate days in the winter/spring of 2022. Both observations of the museum room were made, as well as interviews with the two curators in charge of the art collections. Attentive observations and systematic notes from constitute the basis for the description of the material and immaterial features of the museum. For the chapters on the historical and cultural context concerning outsider art, art brut, psychiatric care and how the hospitals became museums, literary sources were used. The result of the study shows that outsider art made in a hospital is a very specific part of outsider art and art brut because of the very special conditions of an often locked psychiatric care unit. It implies that outsider art made in psychiatric care have not been seen as real art, not been viewed as interesting for the public. There has existed an authorised heritage discourse (“AHD”) in the hospitals and well as in the later museums which has led to the collections not been correctly taken care of, and research about the patients has not been made. Instead, the patients work has been stored incorrectly in attics, basements and in un-locked storage areas with only a few ”aesthetically pleasing” works showed in the museum. Further, the study shows how the art collections in the two medical hospitals correctly used and worked with, can be a part of removing the stigma around mental disease and people living with it. The conclusions to be drawn from this are that the complexity of the art collections of outsider art made in psychiatric care lie in the fact that mental illness, psychiatric hospitals, and outsider art have been under a stigma, as well as the fact that the patients’ stories being stories from the margin. This is a two-years master’s thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies.