The Life and Deaths of Ida Lane

The case of Ida Lane is known well enough in scholarly circles. Certainly she ticks the boxes of an outsider artist: no known tuition in arts of any form; no observed interest in having her work seen by others; an opaque tangle of cognitive and behavioural disorders. The last of these is by no means necessary to the outsider artist, but even experts in the field are powerless to the romance of a fractured mind – when it is not their own.

There is little overlap between art historians and mental health professionals, so Lane has been left largely to the former, rendered to us as ‘the darkened lane of our collective childhood, where we long to play but dare not even look’, according to popular art writer Jackson McCauley; she is, to influential outsider art scholar Mary Kazowitz, ‘Lady Aporia, the aphotic mirror to our exegesis’.

Her first glimmer in the public awareness was in an episode of TVN’s 1976 documentary series Perspectives. ‘There are a few roads in life we’re told not to venture down,’ the narrator leaves us with (in an earlier abuse of our subject’s name), ‘and Ida Lane is one of them’, accompanied by a shot of an actual country lane, enclosing twilight and a sustained bassy synth-note. This is the level at which the finding of Lane’s work, in a room in the east wing of Bromswood Asylum in that same year, was pitched: a half-hour ghost story shown after the ten o’clock news, harmless escapism from transport union strikes, a nail bomb in County Armagh.

Perhaps it was this unserious reception that hobbled her story from getting much proper attention across the following decade; perhaps it was that she did not appear to present anything sufficiently new from Austria’s Weismann, Hungary’s Balász¹The central European bias of the outsider artists already famed in academia was no coincidence. Even in post-war Britain, psychiatrists were extremely conservative in their diagnoses (if not their treatments) of the mentally ill (see Paul Carr’s TV documentary The Madness of Europe, 1992). Kazowitz suggests this to be the principal reason that Lane was not ‘discovered’ while secured at Bromswood: she never had a doctor who could see her work for what it was.; perhaps, as Elizabeth Aitkin suggests, even in the 1980s, society could not countenance the idea of mental illness in women being as complex and legitimate as in men; perhaps, as Gabriel Enkoute suggests, Ida presented the spectre so confusing, even in the 1980s, of someone not just non-white but half white.

In any case, after the 1976 discovery of Lane’s work in Bromswood²The asylum had been abandoned since its closure six years previously and was being surveyed for redevelopment as a hotel. A large cache of ‘bloody awful-looking’ (McCauley notes a surveyor as saying) drawings were found in the charge nurse’s office and passed to the local NHS trust, which still owned the site., Lane’s case survived the next thirteen years in the form of yellowing newspaper clippings and magnetic tape wound on forgotten newsreels. Until, quite suddenly, serious attention emerged from art theory quarters in the form of Kazowitz and McCauley³Lane features (along with the usual suspects from Germany and Japan) in Kazowitz’s essay in the seminal outsider art anthology The Outsiders, and has a whole chapter in McCauley’s mainstream book Art Brutus: The knife in the back of commercial art, published within a month of each other in 1989., among others. This drew the more firebrand elements of the psychology community and the first major paper on Lane, Professor Gareth Clarke-Wills’s ‘The impact of trans-cultural schizoaffective disorder and chlorpromazine on therapeutic art practice’, published in 1990 to a reasonable circulation⁴Much of this piece’s background on Lane comes from both this paper and Clarke-Wills’s 1992 follow-up (with J Arnold) ‘A return to therapeutic art practice: Heragactil and its variants’ affect on left anterior temporal lobe function’, both carried in the psychology (now neuropsychology) journal Autodidact.. Ida had arrived.

And by Ida, of course, we mean her figures and wraiths which are now creeping shadow-men, now jungle beasts crouched on the wardrobe or coiling under the bedframe, now formless swathes of midnight chaos. Mostly they are this. In the photographs we find every square millimetre of Bromswood’s Room 18 crusted with charcoal. On the slats of the blinds, on the insides of drawers, on the glass of the lightbulb hanging from the three-and-a-half-meter ceiling which she must have worked at like some netherworld Andelucci in his basilica, all these demon-shapes dressed in her howling palette, the shades of which seem to exceed in range the hues of our entire spectrum while being of just one colour, which we so ineffectually call black.

But why are we so drawn to this morbidity, or to outsider art in general, which, even when positive in nature, can ring with a certain compelling loneliness? For one thing we are attracted to its indifference to us, to our viewing it⁵This appealing more to the original meaning of the term, stemming as it did from mental institutions across Europe and the world, before today’s ‘outsider art fairs’ and the hokey handicrafts of Richard Doddridge, Hannah Kristen, Kaito Yamashita and the ubiquitous (and actually rather wealthy) ‘Foz’., and so we are disarmed by its complete lack of pretension.  It is here, while so disarmed, that Ida’s snakes pull us beneath the bed.

Many have searched for it with aim to affect a dark enjoyment, like teenagers seeking a graveyard to lurk in, but on seeing it, all find palpably that it is not something that can be enjoyed, which after all is a subtle type of ownership. When you peer at it, it is enjoying you.

Amokamokamokamokamok, reads one of the many text-fragments found in Room 18, scrawled in tiny letters along the top of the skirting boards running around the walls. The 1976 Perspectives documentary used this as a counterpoint to the morbidity, an example of Lane’s ‘good’ side doing battle with her ‘bad’: am ok am ok am ok am ok am ok, this mantra ringing her little world as protection from the monsters of the psyche. Clarke-Wills, who had made a far deeper study of the recovered files, knew better. Lane, half Malay, had a relentless taste for a certain Malay word found in English. The text on the skirting board is amok amok amok amok amok.

To ‘run amok⁶A common etymology is that amok arrived in English via the Portuguese amuco or amouco^a in turn from the Malay amuk, derived from mengamuk (‘rampage’), this originating from one or a combination of India-based forms: (1) the Amuco (or Amouchi), a group of professional assassins from Malabar; (2) the Malayalam word amarkhan (‘warrior’); (3), the Sanskrit words amokshya (‘they who cannot be loosed’ – as from a vow, etc) or moksha, a word used in the samsara aspect of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism to mean, curiously, ‘eternal freedom from social programming’. An interesting, if somewhat flighty, parallel in English is the word monster sharing the same etymological root as demonstrate (Katsoros, 1986).

^aAmok’s transition to the Western palate came through Portuguese explorer João Bustos Calçarão, who noted while passing through Sarawak, ‘It has become known to me that any of the native population are able, upon no provocation, to assault and kill all those around. Those who do so are labelled Amucos, and their behaviour is a window to the savagery beneath all the Yellow Peoples’, to which postcolonial theorist Émile Vasquez (contemporary of Enkoute at Neesdon College) remarked, ‘The true savagery is Calçarão’s violence to the meta-ambivalence congenital to the praxis of the jungle-island life-paradigm’.’ is something Anglophones are familiar with in its general sense of havoc-causing, be it a child scattering its toys about or a man attempting to kill a number of people. The recovered observations and progress reports on Lane indicate a constant and spasmodic use of the word which was likened by one of her doctors⁷Doctor ‘OP’. Staff are referred to only by their initials in the files, parts of which are sadly illegible. to a psychosocially developed Tourette’s syndrome, although this was never officially diagnosed and taken to be more a subsidiary tic to her central psychoses. Early 1990s scholarship, however, placed great emphasis on this predilection of Lane’s.

As with Clarke-Wills, Arnold and others, we only have the files, artworks⁸Numbering 65 drawings and 25 photographs of Lane’s room and possessions. and some scattered hearsay with which to establish a picture of Lane, and consequently it emerges to be as shifting and amorphous as one of her lurking charcoal figures. What we know biographically derives from the sessions spent with her during treatment. Lane⁹‘Ida Lane’ was the name of a music hall singer active from the mid 1930s and known to have sung in wartime ENSA shows. Much of the staff at Bromswood would have been ex-Forces and so likely familiar with Ida Lane (note that even this was merely a stage name). It was common practice at Bromswood for unnamed committals to be given the monikers of popular entertainers. Separate records list cabaret singer Gloria Suchet and comedian Rodney Walts as residents at the time.<sup>a

a</sup>Walts’s biographer recently stated that this was actually him. arrived in Britain at some time in the late 1940s from Malaya, having left during the aftermath of the Japanese occupation. Her date of birth was unknown but the year 1935 was a recurrence during discussions, so she is noted as possibly 17 at the time of committal to Bromswood in 1952. She was understood to be the daughter of a British Army officer who had been stationed in Malaya and spent the Second World War as a POW to the Japanese. Lane was with her father during his internment¹⁰This was proposed in the notes due to the common presence of soldiers or soldier-like entities in the drawings, generally portrayed in a very negative light (see drawings #51, #58 and #61, and the photograph of the back of the bedroom door). There are very few accounts of the Bromswood staff using her work as a means of analysis; this is one of them. and returned with him to Britain a number of years after Japan’s surrender, possibly in 1949. Her committal to Bromswood occurred following a breach of the peace offence in London. Her father was uncontactable at the time and never subsequently found; it was presumed that her mother had never travelled from Malaya, if she survived the occupation, and may never have had any relationship with Lane.

From the files we see that in her first few years in the asylum Lane was merely despondent, although she evidently had a comprehension of English. Following no change in her disposition she was in 1955 put on the new antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine, which many psychiatrists believed would revolutionise psychiatric care and, as they saw it, abolish insanity altogether. Around this time Lane began to produce drawings on paper. She started speaking more, and ‘amok’, became a common theme in her speech and art, although the drawings were not recognised as such and always destroyed, despite Lane’s elaborate attempts to hide them. There are indications of several instances of ‘ducking’, or holding a patient’s head underwater, during all of which she said nothing. This silence was taken to be a sign of her worsening condition and over the next few years she became subject to the menu of ‘physical interventions’ favoured by psychiatrists of the time, including ECT¹¹Electroconvulsive therapy. Known to many of us through Daniel Leifey’s visceral performance in the 1978 film A Difficult Year (directed by Kristoff Aaronson). We can imagine Lane’s experience to have been similar. ECT’s benefits are still a matter of debate. Due to the use of anaesthetic it is today at least visually a different practice and still used on occasion in Britain, while its use elsewhere is reportedly seeing a year-on-year increase. and insulin therapy¹²Or insulin coma treatment, as it was then known, in which large injections of insulin were used to induce the body to burn up its sugar and so reduce blood-sugar levels to the point of coma. The belief was that comas were beneficial to the troubled mind and it was used predominantly to treat those deemed schizophrenic. The nature of the benefit was never properly substantiated and the practice came to be responsible for at least 44 deaths across the asylum system (Jameson, 1993)., and she was even mooted for a pre-frontal leucotomy (a lobotomy), but this was being phased out as a practice towards the end of the 1950s.

With 1959 came the Mental Health Act and a move away from the asylum system by seeking to replace it with increased reliance on the new antipsychotic medications. ‘As we cracked the enigma code, so too have we cracked madness’, proclaimed Conservative politician Michael Answell¹³One of the earliest public references to the enigma code. Information on much of the code-breaking work of the Second World War was not officially released until 1974, so Lord Answell’s statement was fittingly enigmatic and lost on many. Incidentally, or perhaps not, Bromswood Asylum lay in his constituency.. Lane’s art came to instead be identified as ‘occupational therapy’ and she was for the first time permitted to keep her drawings, which she amassed prodigiously. Her behaviour had come to oscillate between periods of depression and heightened mania but proceeded in predictable cycles¹⁴Clarke-Wills’s diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder is drawn largely from the episodic alternations between mania, hypomania and depression in Lane’s reports. The designation ‘schizoaffective’ is an attempt to reconcile a combination of different conditions manifested in the same patient, predominantly a mixture schizophrenic behaviour and mood disorders..

In 1962, however, she attacked a nurse and was put on a new form of chlorpromazine called Heragactil¹⁵Chlorpromazine was sold as Thorazine in the US and Largactil in the UK. Smithson & Brown obtained the licence to develop derivatives of Largactil in 1961 and among their products was Heragactil^a. As with other antipsychotics of the time, Heragactil was in essence a sedative, but it was intended to be more targeted in effect, leaving motor function uninhibited and working solely to ‘quieten’ (or so the promotional literature put it) certain parts of the brain. Clarke-Wills and Arnold suggested in their collaborative article that this permitted other parts of the brain to become ‘louder’.

^aStaff nicknames for the drug included ‘terrorgactil’ and ‘pterodactyl’ due to the swooping visions reported by some patients. Smithson & Brown never accepted this side-effect publicly. Kazowitz makes a perhaps flowery comparison between Heragactil-drugged Lane and the Greek goddess Hera, wife (and sister) of Zeus who is often engaged in acts of maddened vengeance. The motive for this attack was either unknown or unrecorded¹⁶The difference between the unknown and the unrecorded is something with which we must constantly contend while forming analyses from Lane’s notes, and a difference probably ignored by many of the more bombastic commentaries, be they psychological, sociohistorical, art theoretical, or popular. It is, if we are honest, the death of many of our understandings regarding Lane., but her violent episodes became more frequent, as did her recourse to the mantra ‘amok, amok, amok’, and it was agreed to increase her dosages. She started covering her bedroom walls in charcoal, redrawing it as fast as the orderlies could wash it away. Large dark patches began to appear in different parts of the asylum¹⁷Ron Baedeker used the photographs of Room 18 and computer imaging techniques to produce a pioneering 360-degree collage that stimulated much analysis. It reveals the walls on both side of Lane’s bed, when viewed in their entirety, to show beneath the other drawings the emerging outline of feline paws, anatomically relatable to a big cat’s, which if rendered to scale would produce a twenty-six-meter-tall tiger. This is exactly the height of Bromswood’s clock tower.. She would make marks across her face and body to effect what looked like tiger stripes, provoking more ducking¹⁸The practice of ducking was not officially sanctioned and references to it in Lane’s notes are either sly, ‘Took Room 18 for bath this PM’, or dressed in slang-terms such as ‘cucking’^a and ‘the Deluge treatment’^b.

^aA more direct reference to the ‘cucking-stools’ or ‘ducking-stools’ of Middle-Age witch trials of which ducking is disturbingly reminiscent. In fact the practice was used only in small part for ‘witches’ – it was deemed proper for troublesome women of all varieties.

^bPerhaps referring to the Biblical flood and the ‘wicked and corrupt’ (Genesis 8:14) who were to be washed away., and by 1965 she would answer only to the name ‘Hantu’.

Kazowitz was the first to identify this name as a reference to the spirits or folk-demons of Malaysian and Indonesian myth, traditionally believed to possess people to varying ends, depending on the hantu. The one associated with amok is Hantu Belia, the tiger spirit. This was called upon more as a literary device in Kazowitz’s essay, but Clarke-Wills made this one of the core aspects of his analysis in ‘The impact of trans-cultural schizoaffective disorder and chlorpromazine on therapeutic art practice’. He notes, drawing from Eugene Baharom’s earlier work on the phenomenon, that amok has in fact been a clinically diagnosable condition since 1849, being initially identified as a ‘culture-bound syndrome’ that arose in the specific milieu of the Malay Archipelago’s ancient island-societies, their animist beliefs combining with close-knit social structures and an acute sense of personal honour. This pathogenesis, or the belief in it from traditional theorists of amok, was enough to permit learned people to see Malays as inherently murderous. Later came the counter-claim (made foremost by Baharom herself) that the only thing culture-bound was the method, while the desire to kill blindly was a response to any number conditions that emerge (in varying forms and to varying degrees) all over the world¹⁹As Hitam Abdullah killed nine fellow government officials with a parang in Kuala Lumpur in 1903, so Bernie Kopelman killed nine fellow postal workers with a hunting rifle in Denver in 1984. Baharom draws on hundreds of examples and shows ably how the same behaviour is refracted through different cultural lenses, with these ‘lenses’ sometimes happening to stifle the behaviour altogether and so creating the false impression that some societies are free from amok. For example, depression and alienation are no higher in the US than in the UK, yet the incidence of mass killings against targets discriminate or otherwise, at times ending in the death or suicide of the attacker, is significantly higher in the US. In an argument that is of course highly politically charged in the US, Baharom says this difference is very simply because firearms are always nearer to hand in that country, particularly in the family setting, and so the amok that is latent everywhere can here be realised in that localised (and very effective) form, accounting for the disparity of mass killings between the US and UK. The only alternative explanation would be to assert that Americans are innately disposed to mass slaughter^a, in the way that Malays were historically seen by the British^b.

^aAlthough US gun-rights advocates are equally avoidant of this explanation, it seems.

^bThe Victorian viewed the ‘amoking’ Malay’s use of the traditional parang blade as some kind of cultural love of the particular kind of violence it wrought. In the Algerian War of Independence. The Front de Libération Nationale’s use of the ‘douk-douk’ pocket knife was seen in strikingly similar terms by French colonists. What outsiders cannot help but see as an inherent love of certain method is often merely the use of what is to hand. Perhaps in the same way that a language itself, when heard but not understood, can sound falsely to be spoken with a certain kind of relish.. Amok is the simple effect of complex but common causes, and is manifest across all humanity.

Or only half of humanity. It is notable how few of history’s mass killings, attempted or successful, were conducted by women. This happens so rarely, despite the conditions of isolation and alienation being at least as present for women, that Clarke-Wills suggests of Lane’s case that her infatuation with amok was not a fulfilling of these conditions, per se, but something she had at some point come to understand as part of her original culture and then become fixated on as a means of holding onto her home while marooned in a foreign environment²⁰While ironically seeming to have a conception of amok that has been accentuated through European eyes – probably her father’s. Clarke-Wills highlights this as a pertinent example of how Lane is not simply of one culture and displaced into another; she rather sits between them, subject to the distortions that each has of the other.. She then portrayed this imagined notion of madness through an artistic leaning that was further fuelled by unusual medications. ‘Madness’, says Clarke-Wills, ‘was a way for Lane to comprehend her loss of self, and so she became mad […] This brand of madness²¹Clarke-Wills (a psychologist, remember) uses this word advisedly. ‘Madness’ here is the notion of the thing, with all of its vagueness, romanticisation and inadequacies. His diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder is separate from his claim that Lane was using the idea of amok, at least initially, rather than suffering it. was culturally masculine, or perceived as such by her, and thereby she could cling to the paternal figure she had lost by revealing him (and his British-imperial conception of amok) through her behaviour.’

Behaviour which was in the late 1960s becoming severe. While much of the asylum population was making increased use of new ‘open door’ policies, Lane was put under constant observation²²This is to be within eyesight and arm’s length at all times. It is very rare in mental healthcare. on two occasions in 1967. This saddening decline in Lane’s case was enough, if we are truthful, to keep her in the imaginations of theorists into the mid 1990s and eventually to propel her across the Atlantic where she gained a degree of popularity in American scholarship, prompting what is now known as the Second Wave of ideas on Lane.

One notable Second Wave figure, floating somewhat hazily on the art-psychology fault-line (Lane was drawing such people, by this time), was Linda Pearlman. She claimed with the fanfare afforded by her university that Lane had entered Bromswood completely sane and developed what could be described as mental disorders through isolation, medication and aggressive physical intervention. In fact this is little different from what Clarke-Wills suggested six years earlier, but Pearlman was able to build it on several analyses of the asylum system that had emerged in the intervening period, all suggesting this experience of ‘entering sane and leaving crazy’, in her words, to have been commonplace.

Still in 1996, a stranger notion came from Ron Baedeker, architect of a theory named (it is unclear if this came from Baedeker himself, but he has happily claimed it) the ‘Commie Hypothesis’, which pertains to the motif growing in the art of Lane’s worsening years: marauding rifle butts; military boots tapering at their tops like the viewer is cowering at their toes; helmets blocking out the sun. She is recorded as addressing the asylum staff as soldiers, transposing their positions into military ranks, and, crucially to Baedeker, doing so in terms that explicitly addressed their being British, expressing the racial contempt she perceived in them. With this in mind Baedeker suggests that she did not arrive in Europe with her core trauma as the Japanese occupation of Malaya; he says it was rather at the hands of the British having suffered the first years of the Malayan Emergency²³The Japanese occupation of Malaya lasted from 1941 to 1945, while the Malayan Emergency^a is considered to have spanned 1948 to 1960. There is overlap that allows room for Baedeker’s hypothesis.

^aThe rise of communist groups in Malaya who sought to expel British colonial forces due to economic unrest following the occupation. as, he says, part of some probably familial connection to members of the Malayan National Liberation Army. A pitying British army officer brought her home and subsequently abandoned her. Kazowitz later said this theory has ‘too much romance to be true’.

But the Marxist connection was received well in Montréal, where radical thinker Adrian Gourac was becoming a vociferous champion of Lane’s work. His book, La Femme dans les Murs²⁴‘The Woman in the Walls’, published in 1998^a with its title taken from of an earlier poem by Gourac.

^aEnglish translation made by Stephanie Auclat, 1999., proclaimed Lane to be ‘the lurking tigress in the tall grass of Subconscious; the true agent of art brut’. Her cultural displacement and alienation, says Gourac, provided her with an expressive space almost completely free of the inherited and tired tropes with which other art is constructed. This means that her art is not simply raw in its lack of education; it is also raw in a primordial sense – it is before the shapes and figures imprinted on us through enculturation. This is why, Gourac argues, it seems to always shift as it is viewed, never quite a wholly comprehensible object or scene. The standard vocabulary that restricts other art to being no more than different configurations of the same ideas is not present. He likens it to a sentence made without words. The book gained a cult following in avant-garde circles of Canada and then Europe, and its ideas were solidified (and bombasticised) in his next publication, Le Manifeste du Tigressisme²⁵Originally co-written with Anatole Djebar, although his name has been expunged from it by popular awareness and probably by Gourac as well. The manifesto was cannily released simultaneously with an English translation produced (somewhat idiosyncratically) by Gourac. The aims laid out on the first page are as follows:

1. Tigressism rejects the correlation of the uneducated with notions of ‘the past’ or of ‘stupidity’ and instead holds the future of art and humanity to be illumined through the steady deconstruction of learned forms to the ends of superior animalistic intelligence.

2. Tigressism rejects any and all separation of the masculine and feminine wherein amok is supposed to be merely carried by the surrogate Lane when she is in fact its manifestation on the physical plane.

3. Tigressism rejects the relegation of magic to the canvas or story-book and instead rejoices its quiddity in the eyeball, the blister^a, the bedpan, the scream, the walls.

^aAuclat later rendered this herself as ‘blister pack’..

The manifesto is strongly reminiscent of the mid twentieth-century examples from Jean-Baptiste Proveaux and Alain Lavazza²⁶Whose movements, örültégisme and blanchisme respectively, did not last even into the 1950s, although there is a case for the political dimension of Lavazza’s blanchism diffusing into far-right elements in Switzerland and northern Italy in the 1970s.. The degree to which it is either parodic or utterly serious is difficult to know with Gourac, but certainly there is a lineage to be traced from Proveaux’s conscious building of his movement around the discovery of László Balász. Gourac equally declares outsider art (claiming, as everyone does, to possess the true definition of the phrase) to be the unequivocal future of art and indeed all human consciousness²⁷This notion is clad in a Marxist revolutionary framework of dialectical materialism that has since been much criticised, especially by Marxists. They also did not appreciate Gourac’s recourse to the near deification of Lane (he at one point calls her ‘the Jungle Madonna’), and nor did the psychologists.. Through this eccentric soapboaxing he succeeded in popularising Lane to the point that there were even a number of devoted ‘tigressists’ in Quebec and surprising locales of the world²⁸Martinique; New Caledonia; São Tomé (to name a few). The effect of the internet’s rise on such artistic movements is an interesting and under-researched field. It was on the one hand hugely enabling, making face-to-face contact obsolete in the expansion of an idea, but equally it provoked very immediate and concerted cynicism that the more insular artistic communities of the last century did not have to contend with, such that they could become quasi-religious in character even when they were founded as a joke. In the twenty-first century, emergent artistic -isms soon dissemble into algorithmic categorisations for social networking content, and ultimately to targeted advertising. ‘Liking’ tigressism currently induces sidebar ads for Tiger Power energy drink., and this coalesced with a peak of academic chatter in the year 2000 – as Lane was thirty years before at the peak, or nadir, of her recorded psychoses, producing work now no longer of any discernible form or subject.

In March 1970 it was announced that Bromswood was due to close that summer. Lane was informed. In her records we find the final note under the 1^st of April: ‘Room 18. Dead. Morning. Do not clean.’

It is as if Lane had become so inured to the institution that she had become a projection of it, or it a manifestation of her, and with its death came hers, her frail body hunched in the charcoal-deep of Room 18.

But, as we all now know, the east wing of Bromswood housed private sleeping quarters for just 17 patients. We now know that the facility’s heating system was converted from coal to gas in 1926 and no fossil fuels were stored on site after that date. We now know that the photographs of Lane’s bedroom walls were printed on a specific type of resin-coated paper that was not on sale until 1971, years after many of them were purportedly inserted into Lane’s records.

You are posed with a question. If you have been presented with something that, through your understanding of the context provided, comes to appear in a certain way and in turn conjures certain ideas and even feelings within you, as would, say, a piece of art that you have been informed was produced by someone with no artistic education, then would the emerging falsehood of that thing, its context, the entire world built around it, make the ideas and feelings arisen from it equally false? When all perceptions of art and indeed life are suspended by such threads of context, prejudice, ideology, the fact that your mother sang it to you, told you it was true, when you were six years old, then what is the meaning of the emotions we draw from it? What, then, of our beliefs when the nature of simply being alive and perceiving is to be lied to, again and again, by ourselves and others?

The details that undo Lane’s case emerged through the work of a researcher²⁹Whose identity was withheld for a number of years in a perhaps overly cautious bid to avoid reprisal from militant tigressist factions. We now know it to have been Jack Althorpe, recently appointed Director of Factual Programming at TVN. for another TV documentary, this one to have been broadcast in 2001 and set to coincide with the opening of her estate to the public in a purpose-built gallery and a nation-wide publicity campaign. It became clear, right at the moment when her story was to ascend into wider public knowledge and even a place in the canon of great twentieth-century artists, that Ida Lane was a phantom.

In the ensuing furore, Kazowitz, Pearlman and Baedeker fell from circulation, their academic stock destroyed, while McCauley and Gourac used the revelations to generate further theories and books³⁰McCauley published a book in 2003 detailing the complex conspiracy by which the British Secret Service had hoodwinked his peers into accepting the idea of the Ida Lane hoax, in his belief because Lane’s work held hidden clues as to the depth of British atrocities committed during the Malayan Emergency. Gourac published a pamphlet in 2005 that hailed the hoax as the greatest ‘mass-deceptive art piece’ in history and espousing the messianic qualities of its conductor, whom he believed to be alive and living in the Kalahari Desert. Gourac was last seen boarding a plane to Windhoek in 2006.. No one, however, has broached the fact that the drawings are materially the same as they ever were, and what this means.

The person who produced them is unknown. They must have entered the empty Bromswood in the early 1970s, after the institution closed but before work on the hotel conversion began in 1976. They covered the walls of ‘Room 18’ (in several layers) took and developed photographs then planted these along with fabricated records and drawings in the charge nurse’s office, and other locations³¹The individual clearly had intimate knowledge of the institution’s layout and workings. They may have planned it over considerable time and visits, or have been another patient. Althorpe speculates that it was one of the nurses. Whatever the truth, it was unlikely to have been part of the plan for the walls of ‘Room 18’ to be washed clean during initial work on the hotel, although this may have aided the hoax in the long run. Work stopped suddenly in 1977 after a visit from the buyer. It is not known what he saw..

We must ask ourselves: When the drawings are without doubt the work of a talented and unnervingly original artist, in what sense were they ‘fabricated’? Does Lane show us with phantom hands just as she did with real ones that authenticity is not a requisite of truth? The likes of Gourac represent the more eccentric end of Lane’s impact, but in their acceptance of both the hoax and the truthfulness of its works – are they wrong?

Daily we contend with what cultural theorist Françoise Melchiot calls ‘the nearby corpse of influence’, ignorable at first, when we are young, but eventually appearing from the corner of our eye to move, crawling daily nearer until it fills our senses, assaulting them, and we realise that it is we who have been moving towards it all along. All our lives we have sought its traditions and falsehoods, impelled by education, ignorance, reality and make-believe. This is the essence of what we try to negotiate through art. So perhaps what we are told by ghosts, our own ghosts or others’, is realest of all, because it is delivered by fear. Perhaps it is that clichéd yet ineffable thing: the lie that speaks the truth³²This phrase is commonly accredited to surrealist Juan Arroyo, but he had purloined it from dadaist Pepillo Barnetta who in turn had taken it from a poster for the 1931 American film Lying with Truth, a pulp noir about a callgirl named Mandy Truth..

Bromswood remains derelict. We cannot know for certain which is the room from the photographs, but periodically new pieces are found by those with a macabre curiosity for the place, glimpsed in forgotten corridors and dayrooms. These explorers emerge clutching drawings on scraps of wallpaper or on prescription slips for Largactil, Haldol, Heragactil, the signatures made to coil outwards and ensnare. They produce images of surfaces that were not blackened on previous visits: curled-up forms inside cupboards and crawlspaces; unidentified sigils etched on the back of the clock tower’s face, as if marking some occulted function of time; charcoal figures laid out on treatment tables, rent by an erupting inner darkness for their limbs to extend along floors and up walls.

These images appear on forums and become objects of obsession, a web of infinite detail into which the explorers move eagerly, desperate to discern some code that will lead them finally to Room 18.

It eludes them, of course, and likely always will. But perhaps there is solace to think that in their unreality both the room and Ida³³Whose name has perhaps been mocking us all along: Ida Lane – eidolon. are joined. She remains there still, hunched and solidifying in the minds of those who search. In her works they saw her, a woman’s mind and story, and felt such void-black awe. They were told she was false. And then, horribly, wonderfully, they continued to see.

‘The Life and Deaths of Ida Lane’ appeared originally as ‘The Unwitting’ in Patricide 6: The Outsider
Featured image by Mike Peel
Posted December 2020