“Paranoia”, at the Freud Museum, might easily make a person paranoid. The former home of the twentieth century’s most famous psychoanalyst, in leafy Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, has been invaded by a motley gang of contemporary artists collectively bent on unsettling anybody who should happen to come calling. Visitors are made to feel suitably unwelcome by a small planting of signs along the garden path that leads to the entrance. Below the twinned blue plaques proclaiming that Sigmund and Anna once lived here, Daniel Baker – perhaps the only Romany gypsy artist at work in Britain today – has erected a number of wooden posts carrying handwritten warnings: “Keep Out”; “No Trespassers”; “No Travellers”.
Having run this short gauntlet of ironised prejudice and hostility, visitors find themselves in the spacious stairwell of the house. Freud’s own possessions – his collections of masks, ancient glass, pictures and what have you – have been interspersed and occasionally draped with all manner of works of art on the theme of paranoia. Paul Ryan, an artist whose oeuvre is largely made up of sketchbooks, tiny detailed notes and drawings amounting to a kind of oblique diary of his life, has imagined the worst thing that could possibly happen to him: a fire that destroys everything. His Unspeakable Library is an artist’s nightmare given tangible form. Having managed to appropriate an unwanted display case from the Imperial War Museum, he has sandwiched sheet after sheet of unreadably charred fragments of paper between the glass panels of its pull-out drawers. The chest that stands next to Ryan’s work – a piece of Freud’s own furniture, this time – has been festooned with a hangman’s rope. There is nothing to indicate who was responsible for this, nor any explanation. There are numerous similarly surreal...
