Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts

Hysteria is alive and well in our present time and is apparently spreading contagiously: especially the second decade of the twenty-first century has displayed an ever-increasing interest in the term. A quick Google search opens the gates to sheer endless swathes of discussions on hysteria, covering almost every aspect of public discourses. The arts—as it is often in such cases—seem conspicuously involved in and engaged with this hysterical discourse. Surprisingly, while the strong academic interest in hysteria throughout the twentieth century and most prominently at the turn of the century is well known and much discussed, the study of how these discourses have continued well into twenty-first-century art practices, is largely pressing on a blind spot. It is the aim of this volume to illustrate how hysteria was already well established within the arts alongside and at times even separately from the much-covered medical studies, and reveal how those current artistic practices very much continue a century spanning cross-fertilization between hysteria and the arts.

Johanna Braun is an artist, scholar, curator, and Principle Investigator of the postdoctoral research project “The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator” [J 4164-G24], sponsored by the Austrian Science Funds [FWF], and situated at the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University and the University of Vienna (2018-2020).