In Search of “The White Area”: Some Notes on Art in Clinical Space

Would you consider looking at two paintings instead of reading a more ritualized abstract? In the first painting, the poet W. B. Yeats shows passages from his autobiography to his friend, the poet and painter George Russell. Russell is appalled to read that there is hardly a single fact accurate: “If you show me the manuscript,” he tells Yeats, “I will correct the facts.” Yeats airily dismisses the offer: “Oh, I do not want accuracy. I only want a picturesque sentence” (Kiberd, 2003). The second painting is an image I cherish in my mind for years: a photo of the Teatro del Mondo (the theater of the world) created by Aldo Rossi, the late Italian architect, for the 1979 Venice Biennale. Built in the Venice tradition of floating theaters, Rossi created a theater on water, a raft tugged by a boat. Within the panoramic view of Venice, there is a “huge piece of carpentry,” which looks like a stageset of a child's dream memory: some big connected play-cubes made of light brown wood on a metal grid of scaffolding, and a blue pointed tower. For Rossi, this theater goes beyond the context of Venice. It is like “the Marine buildings in Maine, the wonderful tall light houses—‘the houses of the light’—that observe and are observed …. [in a] Venetian method of construction … that seeks fantasy only in the real” (Rossi, 1979).