We recently connected with Matt Bodett and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Matt, thanks for joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Most of my life I have followed a fairly straight forward path, this has included getting degrees, taking adjunct teaching positions, and maintaining a studio practice. As someone who was given a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder I was also told that most of those things would remain elusive and I would be pretty lucky to maintain any job, relationship, or lifestyle. But having proven them wrong I realized that my creative career has been very empowering. Through that career I have also learned that my belief about my diagnosis, or at least what I was told to believe, was not something that I alone felt, many others express the same hopelessness. So, about a year ago I opened the Center for Mad Culture. this has been quite a risk for me because I am trained to make art, not to be a director or administrator. As I move toward doin this full-time, and maintaining my studio career, I am feeling quite nervous about leaving the financial security I may have experienced in teaching. But, I also know that the life experience I have, and the knowledge I have fostered through personal research, can be most effectively used to help others by making this transition over time.

Matt, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I always knew I wanted to be an artist, that part always made sense. I received my undergraduate degree in printmaking and my graduate degree in drawing/painting. Immediately after that I began teaching as an adjunct, but still felt I needed to take my studio career more seriously. I moved from Idaho to Chicago in 2013 in order to develop a studio career that could match my ambition. Chicago immediately became a beautiful city for me to thrive in. It was here that I found an extraordinary disability community that engages the world in meaningful and transformative ways. This challenged me to think about how I was utilizing my art to express the world as I experienced it through madness. These fella artists, activists, and advocates gave me a confidence in my own voice which I hadn’t realized I needed. My work still continues to explore madness, especially as it relates to how we formulate ideas through language. I use historic art works, taken from the western cannon, to examine how we tell stories, who we tell those stories for, and who holds the power by telling those stories. By overwriting them I can examine schizophrenic language, a disruptive language, a deviant form of communication, to challenge the linearity of our culture. By doing so I hope we each begin to see how madness is just one more element to our larger cultural experience, and one which need not be pathologized.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I think there are many ways to support artists and creatives, but most of all it requires showing up. We live largely in a digital sphere which demands our constant attention and devotion. It is designed to encapsulate our waking life, but its rewards are few. If we can step away from those interactions, reduce them to the meaningful interactions that can be there, and stand in front of artwork that challenges us we can vastly change our horizons. I often think of this quote by Franz Kafka, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

I believe that too. I believe that good art provides not only the pain of the disastrous effect, but the power and solutions that lie beyond. Good art provides us with all time and all opportunity.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I certainly wish I knew more about mad studies when I was young. My own diagnosis came as a shock and there seemed to be so few resources to guide me through what I was experiencing. I knew that the way I was experiencing madness was not in line with what I was being told I should be feeling, but I didn’t know how else I was supposed to be. The Mad studies field has opened my eyes to the vast array of possibility when it comes to human experiences. I have found comfort and confidence which has risen to be artistic exploration in a meaningful way. I hope that I can pass that knowledge along to others through the Center for Mad Culture, though its library, visual art exhibitions, poetry readings, film screenings, and other events. There is a wonderfully evocative world for each of us to experience, and on our own terms.

Contact Info:

• Website: matt@mattbodett.com madculture.org
• Instagram: @mattbodett @centerformadculture

Image Credits
Images courtesy of the Artist