CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/27/2017

'Not just anyone can go mad.' Carol Rama: Antibodies

“As Jacques Lacan so pithily put it on the hospital wall, ‘Not just anyone can go mad,’” Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer writes in Carol Rama: Antibodies. “It’s not such a casual, easy thing to do. Ties to the world and civil decorum can be so hard to break. And even if you do, only the truly possessed and determined few can render their madness into enduring art. It takes chutzpah. It takes idealism. It takes extreme individuality and bravery. Madness expressed in culture is a genius for outrageousness, a talent for thinking against the grain and launching oneself beyond consensus and convention, a flair for risk-taking and fearlessness, an uninhibited attraction to danger and violence (psychological and emotional, if not also physical), and a special capacity for living alone in one’s head and self-generating meaningful stimuli. Madness demands autonomy, enormous energy, and total commitment. One should be so lucky. Carol Rama was blessed with all these rare qualities in spades. Featured image is Il piede maschile... [The Male Foot], 2005.