Product Description
The Toy of the Spirit is the first publication of Australia’s greatest Outsider Artist, Anthony Mannix. Material is drawn from his 30-year practice of creating hand-written artist books and is the first time it has been widely available to the public. Mannix’s work centres on the documentation and investigation of his experiences of schizophrenia and, what is for him, madness’ implicit creativity and value. Mannix’s texts range widely in approach, employing humour and poetry, diaristic reflection, images, heart-felt emotion, anthropological cataloguing, description and explanation. By turns visionary, philosophical, experimental and erotic, Mannix’s writing, in all its varied manifestations is an anthropological engagement with his journeys through unconscious worlds. He is, as he suggests, an anthropologist of the unconscious.
REVIEWS
“This is a wild and provocative adventure into the nature of psychosis and the unconscious…The book is also a meditation on what Mannix believes to be society’s warped view of mental illness and its attitude towards the mentally ill in hospital…The Toy of the Spirit is a dazzling and intricate entry point to the psychedelic playground that is [Mannix’s] inner world.” BARNABY SMITH, Australian Book Review (paywalled)
