David Bowie in Gugging: what the pop star learned from the outsiders

It was only a brief visit. In September 1994, David Bowie spent two days at the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna—better known as the "House of Artists." The pop star arrived almost anonymously, but with Brian Eno and André Heller, who had arranged the appointment.

Bowie had an inkling of what awaited him; the inmates of the institution, however, knew him nothing. Nevertheless, for a brief time, a close relationship developed between these dissimilar individuals: on the one hand, the mentally ill men, "permanently hospitalized outsiders," who, under the careful guidance of their psychiatrist Leo Navratil, were capable of impressive literary and pictorial works that would soon cause a stir in the art world under the term "art brut." On the other, the pop singer, seeking inspiration for new musical outbursts and particularly interested in the "messages from the darkroom of madness."

At Gugging, people who had been marginalized by society were able to express themselves, develop, and open up with all their senses. Bowie mingled with them in amazement, talking with them, letting them show him their tools, laughing with them, casually and unpretentiously. He sat at the table drinking coffee together and sketching in his sketchbook.

The encounter with the artists was precious to the artist "beyond pop-star self-promotion," according to the book "Sternenmenschen," which author Uwe Schütte dedicated to Bowie's visit to Gugging. "Gugging was an incredible experience," Bowie recently said. It's safe to assume that the experiences at Gugging influenced "Outside," arguably Bowie's most difficult album.

In "Star People," Uwe Schütte interweaves Bowie's experience with his own experiences as a visitor to Gugging. In a stimulating and groundbreaking essay, after many interpretive detours and atmospheric descriptions of the institution's world, he comes to the following conclusion: Gugging provided a fascinating model in the field of visual arts for what it means to stand outside the dominant art scene. Bowie then had to adapt these insights "to the requirements of creating advanced pop music."

The Gugging artists will hardly have grasped this idea and failed to comprehend the musician's search for the futuristic, surreal space in which "Outside" moves. Their relationship with Bowie, however, was cordial and characterized by curiosity. This is also evident in the sensational photographs by Christine de Grancy in Schütte's book. The artist with the camera, who worked for the Burgtheater for decades, unobtrusively accompanied Bowie, the painters August Walla and Oswald Tschirtner, the poet Ernst Herbeck, and other inmates (she herself did not live to see the publication of her photos in the book; she died last month in Vienna at the age of 82).

Thus, images emerged from the innermost depths of Gugging, as described by the writer Gerhard Roth, for whom the House of Artists served as a source of inspiration and literature for many years. Roth, like Bowie, attributed the special atmosphere to the extraordinary personality of the psychiatrist Navratil: Schütte writes that schizophrenia was, for this psychiatrist, a false consciousness, as it were: "An ideology on a small and individual level, whereas political ideologies represented a schizophrenia of the collective consciousness."

Bowie's interest in the institution wasn't just as an artist, but also for very personal reasons. He had a terminally mentally ill half-brother, and he harbored his own fears. Schütte writes that he tried to overcome these by constantly transforming himself, wearing masks as an artist, "in order to always be one step ahead of the general danger of schizophrenic personality destruction, which he believed was genetically anchored in him."

David Bowie certainly learned a lot about himself in the House of Artists. And "Star People" is a wonderful book of pictures and thoughts about people who are indeed "outside" normal social order, but for whom imagination and a joy for the different offer unexpected artistic escapes and detours.

Uwe Schütte: Star People. Bowie in Gugging; with photographs by Christine de Grancy. Starfruit-Verlag, 2025. 248 pp., CHF 38.90.