Terry Williams’s (b. 1952) soft sculptures of fridges, telephones, cameras and clocks convey his keen observation of the world and an impulse to replicate what is meaningful through either familiarity or fascination. Williams’s playful sculptures constructed from scraps of fabric pieced together and bound with wool and cotton stitching form a cast of animated characters. Often anthropomorphic to the point of displaying human attributes such as genitalia, Williams’s sculptures have extraordinary pathos—perhaps due to the artist’s instinctive approach to construction and their lumpy, bulging appearance. Commonplace objects are transformed into enigmatic, hard-to-ignore forms. Kellie Greaves’s (b. 1972) practice similarly engages in a process of translation and interpretation, as she often looks to pre-existing designs or photographs, such as book illustrations, to form the basis for her works. Her work extends to the realm of purely abstract exploration, where form and colour are entirely self-referential preoccupations. Choosing colours largely from the secondary and tertiary palettes, Greaves’s ability to combine unusual colours to form harmonious compositions is striking and her sensibility with colour gives her simple compositions a deeper complexity. The discipline of life-drawing provides Lisa Reid (b. 1975) with a structure to pursue her interest in recording the human figure. Her pen and ink drawings are carefully observed yet intuitive renderings, and provide further insight into the practice of an artist who is known for her meticulously faithful and densely coloured depictions of family and celebrities. Reid has participated in life drawing classes for over a decade to hone her drawing skills and develop kinaesthetic aptitude. Jack Napthine (b. 1975) produces drawn recollections of his past and present daily life in the manner of a visual diary. Light fittings from remembered environments feature prominently as do multiple and varied locks. Napthine’s drawings have a bold economy; he uses thick texta-pen to depict simplified linear designs usually accompanied by text recording the names of friends and family. Seen en masse, his works resist temporality. The reappearance of motifs or narratives throughout his oeuvre conveys the feeling of a timeless present; Napthine’s recollections of school events or social outings are touchstones with which to orientate daily interactions. Julian Martin (b. 1969) has been experimenting with the pastel medium for over 20 years. His practice inhabits the zone between abstraction and representation, and ranges from bold self-portraits to quasi-cubist depictions through to pure abstraction. Martin focusses on flat planes, velvety pastel surfaces and the subtle use of tone and contrast. He is a remarkable colourist. The works selected here illustrate Martin’s consistent reinterpretation of everyday objects like candle holders and tools which transcend their quotidian context to become elemental and magical. Curator Alex Baker recently wrote of this aspect of his work: ‘Martin practices a kind of Pop Art in reverse where pop imagery takes on the glyph-like form of cave painting, rock art, or a Gottlieb pictograph’.3 The work of Martin Thompson (b. 1956) and Andrew Blythe (b. 1962) displays a similarly indexical approach. Both artists produce detailed repetitive patterns that indicate intense efforts of concentration, perhaps as a counter to the multiple stimuli of daily life (certainly when viewing the works one experiences a meditative state). For over 35 years, Thompson has produced meticulously executed ink-based drawings on graph paper that are constructed using mathematical formula. In recent years these have become progressively ambitious and elaborate. New Zealand curator Sam Shepherd draws parallels between Thompson’s work and that of American abstractionist Agnes Martin, by suggesting that the act of making work is a personal screening device against a chaotic and imperfect world. Fellow New Zealand artist Andrew Blythe uses select motifs—the word ‘no’ and the symbol ‘x’—to fill the pictorial plane with markings that result in graphic and rhythmic patterns. Such saturation of motifs denies their otherwise nihilistic meaning: here they are solely graphic forms.
One of Dubuffet’s central claims for art brut was its transgression of established rules and conventions. American cultural theorist Hal Foster has reversed Dubuffet’s reading and proposed instead that the works reveal a desire to repair, replace and reinvent a symbolic order to restore equilibrium.4 While both Dubuffet and Foster refer explicitly to the work of artists with a mental illness, Foster’s analysis is instructive when considering the work of both Martin Thompson and Andrew Blythe—who appear to create stability and orderliness through repetitive patterning. Current curatorial strategies that breakdown the distinctions between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’—while making significant headway concerning stigmatisation— have the effect of losing what curator Lynne Cooke describes as the ‘unique and crucial agency’ this art has to challenge the ‘monocultural frame’.5 The artists in Everyday imagining do implicitly challenge dominant paradigms and existing value systems, however what is of perhaps more significance is that their work triggers a consideration of the interpretative bias with which we view the genre and those within, alongside or tangential to it. Joanna Bosse, Curator
1. The most obvious recent example of the disintegration of the inside/outside designation is Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 Venice Biennale exhibition ‘The encyclopaedic palace’. 2. Maclagen, D, Outsider art: from the margins to the marketplace, Reaktion, London, 2009, p. 41. 3. Baker, A, ‘Julian Martin’s abstraction with a lower case ‘a’’, Julian Martin: transformer, Arts Project Australia and Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 2014, p. 15. 4. Foster, H, ‘Blinded insights: on the modernist reception of the art of the mentally ill’, October, vol. 97, 2001, pp. 3–30. 5. Cooke, L, ‘Orthodoxies undermined’, Great and mighty things: Outsider art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2013, p. 213.
Everyday imagining: new perpectives on Outsider art 1 October 2014 to 19 January 2015 Curator: Joanna Bosse Text © 2014, the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne. Images © 2014, the artists. ISBN 978 0 7340 5022 9 The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia Email potter-info@unimelb.edu.au www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au Patron Lady Potter AC
Everyday imagining: new perspectives on Outsider art
Everyday imagining: new perspectives on Outsider art Most attempts to define the category of Outsider art include caveats about the elasticity of borders and the impact of evolving societal and cultural attitudes. Not determined by any formalist or ideological traits, the term is commonly used to describe anything outside the mainstream art world and its institutions produced by people with limited or no artistic education. The oppositional dialectic of inside/ outside is increasingly acknowledged as redundant and, in a world marked by cultural pluralism, many question the validity of the category.1 Whilst acknowledging the problematic status of so called Outsider art, this exhibition doesn’t seek to resolve ambiguities but looks beyond to examine one of the key assumptions underlying interpretations of contemporary art within the genre. While there is little consensus about the use of the term (demonstrated also by its many synonyms including self-taught, vernacular, autodidact art, visionary art), its antecedent is widely acknowledged as art brut—a similarly fluid classification of art that was conceived and brought to popular attention in the mid-1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85). Dubuffet was drawn to what he considered the raw and unmediated nature of art made by the institutionalised mentally ill, which he perceived as arising directly from the inner self of the artist unaffected by cultural or societal influences. Dubuffet’s interests followed that of the European Romantics and the Surrealists in looking to forms of creativity outside the academy, such as primitive art and the art of children, in the search for a primal form of creativity—the modernist grail of ‘pure vision’. Like them, he was guided by the mode of Expressionism, which romanticised the idea of the ‘artist loner’ and privileged turning inward upon the self in lieu of the outside world. Art brut reinforced the links between exceptional creativity, marginality and mental illness, and this remains a powerful legacy that underlies interpretations of contemporary Outsider art. The notion of a pure form of creativity that expresses an artist’s psychological state is a prevailing view that traverses the divergent range of creative practice that falls under the label. Significantly, this preconception leads to critical misinterpretations of the agency and intention of the artist. Everyday imagining: new perspectives on Outsider art presents the work of seven Australian and New Zealand artists whose work convincingly argues against the idea that interiority lies at the heart of their practice. The exhibition challenges this view by highlighting artists’ active engagement with the external world through their investigations of day-to-day experience. Not only does this interpretive bias limit our access to the multi-dimensional meaning of what we call Outsider art, but it is a form of private projection based on socio-cultural stereotypes. As art historian David Maclagan points out: ‘the imaginative recreation of states of mind that we seem to find in the work we call ‘Outsider’ has as much to do with our assumptions about ‘inner worlds’ and how they might be expressed in art as it does with the actual mindset of the individual artist’.2 The work of Andrew Blythe, Kellie Greaves, Julian Martin, Jack Napthine, Lisa Reid, Martin Thompson and Terry Williams demonstrates their interest in the here and now. Ordinary objects such as clocks, hand-held tools, light fittings, book illustrations and common symbols are used as important touchstones and emblems for the day-to-day reality of lived experience. For these artists, it is the external world and their relationship to it, which provides ample exploratory ground. There is value and meaning in the everyday.
Left to right
Front
Andrew Blythe Untitled 2012 synthetic polymer paint on paper 88 x 116 cm Courtesy the artist and Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland
Jack Napthine Untitled 2008 fibre-tipped pen on paper 42 x 59.4 cm Courtesy the artist and Art Unlimited, Geelong
Terry Williams Untitled 2011 fabric, cotton, stuffing and fibre-tipped pen 18 x 20 x 13 cm Private collection, Melbourne
Julian Martin Untitled 2011 pastel on paper 38 x 28 cm Courtesy the artist and Arts Project Australia, Melbourne
Lisa Reid Untitled 2002 pencil and watercolour on paper 66 x 50 cm Courtesy the artist and Arts Project Australia, Melbourne
Martin Thompson Untitled 2014 fibre-tipped pen on paper diptych: 67.5 x 135 cm Courtesy the artist and Brett McDowell Gallery, Dunedin
Kellie Greaves My little Japan 2010 synthetic polymer paint on paper 59.4 x 42cm Courtesy the artist and Art Unlimited, Geelong