ARTIST PROFILE

Janek Rous

  • Czech Republic (b. 1981 in Prague)
  • Currently in Prague, Czech Republic.
 I was keeping myself awake by a loud and regular clapping of my hands

I was keeping myself awake by a loud and regular clapping of my hands

  • 2015
  • audioinstallation, 00:13:50

  • Jeleni udrzoval 20jsem 20se
  • P1070702f
  • P1070685f
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    I was keeping myself awake by a loud and regular clapping of my hands | 2015

… /// Are you sleeping? No, I´m not, I might forget everything. /// I´m studying psychology. My father wanted me to go to an art school and he and mum used to have a lot of arguments about it. In order to compensate for it a little bit I started dealing with mental disorders resulting from direct contact with works of art. The disorder is called after an 18th-century writer who described it using his own experience, however medicine began to deal with it seriously only many years later. The disease manifests itself the following way: people feel suddenly dizzy after looking at an art object, they suffer from hallucination or they panic and they often have to be sent to hospital. It used to be colloquially called "the inability to bear the beauty of the world" and it could break out for example when watching a vast landscape. This did not use to be a common phenomenon but nowadays it happens almost daily. Many hospitals in towns with great galleries and museums have special wards designed especially for those patients. In our town we have one, too. Department of Psychiatry IV. The people who are mainly affected are usually of my age, mostly under 40. A syndrome has been described and named after a Baroque painter, according to which the sight of a painting might cause strong erotic feelings which might result in spontaneous orgasm. All this is well described on Wikipedia. I feel I somehow unpleasantly understand it. /// Are you sleeping? No, I´m not, I´m watching beauty in hospital. /// …