“I am happy because everyone loves me.” Louis Wain
I came across Louis Wain a few years ago and have always found his work mesmerising, if unsettling. And I guess I fell into that trap of assuming Wain’s most psychedelic images were the product of his mind’s deterioration. An article entitled Cute Cats and Psychedelia: The Tragic Life of Louis Wain points out: we don’t have much evidence for his presumed psychosis.“Could Wain have suffered from dementia or did he have Asperger’s Syndrome?” goes the sort of refrain heard in other articles.
I am not convinced there’s that much evidence for those conditions. The claims about his mind seem highly speculative. Did he spent a longtime around cat poop, that gave him toxoplasmosis?
Ahah! Wouldn’t that be a fitting demise! It’s all rather convenient…
At the root of it the guy just liked cat pics.
Indeed his obsession is still present in our own time — our worship of the cat and seeing ourselves in and through cats is quite obvious.
We make the Egyptians look like rank supplicants. Today is National Cat day (yes we have a national cat day — although I am not sure which nation it’s attributed to, or if any cats themselves care). No doubt they’ll be a raft of cat memes, videos etc. Yet according to Wain, felines in his own days were considered “vermin.” He is partially credited in some quarters of improving the standing of cats; of making them prized pets.
Wain’s cats are frequently psychedelic. Sometimes they are morphing into flowers, or into smaller cats. Often they look anxious, or frightened, or amused. Sometimes they look like a dragon or a monster — they are beyond cat, and becoming something else.
Rather than always read Wain’s work as a total mental decline (his lucidity during the last period of his life is up for debate) we should look at his capacity for showing us something of ourselves via the feline form, as well as going beyond the cat and human. There is a trans-humanism to Wain’s work — playful and yet unsettling — breaking borders down to create something else. There’s a desire to escape, via psychedelia, from an unhappy life…
To transcend…via the catflap…
Further Reading:
