Art of Survival

“One of my mottoes is ‘Art Saves Lives,’ ” says Judith E. Vida, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Pasadena who has surrounded herself with art for a quarter of a century. “Every piece [in my collection] has helped me live another day.”

For Vida, 54 (“and proud of it”), that’s not just a flip turn of phrase.

“This is art that says there is something that matters in the world out there,” she explained by phone from her office, “and it matters staying alive for.”

On Sunday, Vida--a past president of the Southern California Psychiatric Society and a founding member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles--will be at the Laguna Art Museum to deliver a talk with an intriguing title: “Life Lessons: What One Psychoanalyst Learned From Contemporary Art.”

Observers may be surprised that the art Vida finds so meaningful tends to be conceptual in approach rather than expressive in a traditional sense.

Artists collected by Vida and her husband, Stuart Spence, include Kim Abeles, Allen Ruppersberg, John Baldessari and Jim Shaw, as well as obscure individuals whose work also appeals to the couple on an emotional level.

“People in the art world look at me very strangely when I say that everything we learn that matters, we learn from the art we see and collect,” Vida said. “They say, ‘Come on!’ But it really is true. . . . Often the stuff we’re drawn to turns out [also] to have a lot of personal significance to the artist.”

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Though the bulk of the collection is in the couple’s home, a few pieces have migrated to Vida’s office. One is Meg Cranston’s “Inconsolable,” made from layers of silk stretched over a frame. Cranston, a critically acclaimed Los Angeles artist, rubbed the pink top layer with a brick until it frayed, exposing the slightly abraded green silk underneath.

“This is a picture of traumatic injury that says that real [psychic] damage happens and it doesn’t ever go away,” Vida explained. “The title addresses that. There’s really bad and hard stuff that happens, and it . . . has to be respected.

“It’s interesting how people grappling with hard stuff in their lives find their eyes drawn to it. ‘Gee, what is that?’ they ask. I tell them, and it’s moving to them--it confirms their reality.”

Another piece in Vida’s office is a series of photographs by little-known Los Angeles artist Bruce Metro, documenting his action of digging a hole in a forest and then filling it in.

Vida is struck by the fact that the first and last photo in the series are virtually interchangeable.

“If you hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t know anything had happened,” Vida said of the digging project. “That is the most accurate depiction of the work done in this office. You have to be here” to perceive the changes that occur in therapy. “It’s not as if people come out with a new nose or a different hairdo.”

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A watercolor of a group of girls playing in a fountain--by another obscure artist, Brian Smith--tends to strike viewers as “such a gentle depiction of an innocent exuberance,” Vida said. “It’s what freedom looks like.”

Although the art in her office plays no official role in her practice (“it’s for me, not for didactic purposes”), from time to time she brings it into the consulting room to illuminate a particular issue.

The art, she said, helps to convey the notion of “constructing an authentic life not based on imitating what other people do or doing what’s correct or polite.”

“From time to time I’m able to persuade people they really are a lot more creative than they believe they are. I find conceptual art in people’s lives as they live them.”

* “Life Lessons: What One Psychoanalyst Learned from Contemporary Art,” a lecture by Dr. Judith E. Vida. Part of the Good Morning, Laguna series, Sunday at 11 a.m., at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. $3 plus museum admission ($5 adults, $4 students and seniors, free for children under 12). Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. (714) 494-6531.