Raw Vision 100 by Raw Vision

RAWVISION100 WINTER 2018/19

EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Frank Maresca, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels SENIOR EDITOR Edward M. Gómez FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger ASSISTANT EDITOR Mariella Landolfi DESIGN Terrayne Brown EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Aoife Dumphy ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell, Daniel Wojcik PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd Letchmore Heath WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com

ISSN 0955-1182

6 17 18 28 32 38 46 50 56 62 72 78 88

RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world

FAREWELLS A tribute to Phyllis Kind

BILL TRAYLOR RETROSPECTIVE Smithsonian American Art Museum honours the great outsider

BILL TRAYLOR AND CONJURE An examination of Traylor’s roots in creole culture

SONG PEILUN Vast art environment in China

DAMIAN LE BAS A look at the life and art of the late Romani artist

DUBUFFET IN CHICAGO Jean Dubuffet’s famous visit to Chicago in 1951

ASPHYXIATING CULTURE The text of Dubuffet’s historic Chicago talk

JAPANESE ART BRUT New exhibition at Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

MASTER WORKS OF ART BRUT Five expert critics look at work from some of the greats

FRENCH ENVIRONMENTS Roadside and yard creations all over France by Bruno Montpied

RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions and events

GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE Notable venues around the world

COVER IMAGE: Artists featured in Raw Vision and Raw Vision Directors

Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) December 2018 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK, and distributed in the USA by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080. Periodicals postage paid at South Plainfield, NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Raw Vision c/o 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080, and additional mailing offices.

Raw Vision cannot be held responsible for the return of unsolicited material. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Raw Vision.

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD

WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE

UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD

MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS

BEST DESIGN MEDIA AWARD

Welcome to this 100th edition of Raw Vision. All those years ago I also welcomed readers to the first issue – a totally new concept at the time and one that began to bring outsider art out of the shadows. For so long it was known as ‘the dark side of the moon’ of contemporary art, little known and out of sight. It was estimated by Roger Cardinal that the contents of the first Raw Vision were known to about five people in the world. The most important aspect of Raw Vision is the support it has received and if it were not for our committed Directors making sure we saw through any hard times there is no way the magazine could have survived for 100 issues. We all owe them a great debt for their wonderful support over the years. It is quite incredible that outsider art has reached out today to almost all those with an interest in contemporary art and art in general. No longer seen as the marginal expressions of the insane or the uneducated, outsider art has proved it can stand up to the very best of any art and makes Dubuffet’s quote that art brut is better than cultural art have some substance. Before starting Raw Vision, Dubuffet’s philosophy was a big influence and the early publicity I sent out reflected much of his theories intermingled with spiritual themes. To me art brut and outsider art have always had a strong spiritual element and it is one of the factors that make it such a powerful field: ‘Art Brut is concerned with raw creation demanded by the human soul. The fulfillment of the potential that as children we all display. It pays no heed to local or international trends and styles or to cultural demands. Creation is a necessity of human existence and must be glorified as such. Art is for all.’ Even in those early years before Raw Vision was published there was a sense that it was under threat as our publicity also stated:. ‘It is vital that the real art brut is presented and essential qualities of its philosophy and truth recognised lest it is buried beneath the all pervading clamour of ‘culture’. Art brut is itself becoming a victim of the imitative process and if we are not careful it will become debased and devalued by the ever hungry chameleons of style and fashion’ . This last point is still valid but outsider art has become such a strong sub-strata of visual culture that however much it is imitated there is nothing that can stop the genuine article emerging, over and over again – as natural and inevitable as the grass growing. Long may it flourish! John Maizels 4

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AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRITAIN

R AW N E W S GUGGING

DR GUISLAIN MUSEUM

until Feb 17

until May 26

OUTSIDE IN

STANLEY LENCH

GALERIE DE LA TOUR

Sensations. Between Passion and Pain includes work by Johann Garber, Willem van Genk, Marc Lamy and Lies Hutting. MUSEUM DR. GUISLAIN Jozef Guislainstraat 43, 9000 Gent, BELGIUM www.museumdrguislain.be

Outside In and The Arts Society South Downs have announced The Andrew Edney Bursary, designed to support artists’ practice and development. Applications for the bursary will be open to Outside In artists in Hampshire or Sussex, to assist with everything from art materials to entering competitions and taking part in training. www.outsidein.org.uk

Stanley Lench

Showing until February 17 at galerie gugging, lightworks, 3 variations: lejo / leopold strobl / august walla presents new collages by Lejo, drawings by Leopold Strobl, and vintage and documentary photographs by August Walla. In philipp schöpke.!, showing through March 10, museum gugging presents an extensive compilation of the artist’s oeuvre. GALERIE & MUSEUM GUGGING, Am Campus 2, A-3400 Maria Gugging AUSTRIA. www.gugging.at www.galeriegugging.com

Marc Lamy

Lejo

Artist Support Day

until Jan 19

Forgotten artist Stanley Lench’s portraits of silent screen stars, playwrights and musicians, plus drawings and paintings of fantasy figures, and early portraits of his family. WARRINGTON MUSEUM & ART GALLERY, Bold St, Warrington WA1 1DR, UK outsiderartonline.com

ART ET MARGES

VENTURE ARTS

THE GALLERY OF EVERYTHING

Feb 21 – Jun 9

through Feb

until Jan 27

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Art et marges musée takes visitors through the cosmic labyrinths of Serge Delaunay and André Robillard in Intergalactic encounters. ART ET MARGES MUSÉE Rue Haute 314, 1000 Bruxelles, BELGIUM artetmarges.be

Eighty learning-disabled artists occupy several contemporary and historical settings across Greater Manchester in PERSPECTIVES, a series of exhibitions, happenings and creative exchanges presented by Venture Arts. www.venturearts.org

Olga Frantskevich

Kathy Wilmot

Galerie de La Tour presents German artist Markus Meurer, who connects found objects and materials that were normally considered trash, with wire into mythic creations, hybrid creatures of animal, man and machine. GALERIE DE LA TOUR Lidmanskygasse 8, 9020 Klagenfurt, AUSTRIA diakonie-delatour.at

André Robillard

Markus Meurer

Feb 28 – Apr 18

In Of a Life/Time, The Gallery of Everything presents the first international exhibition of contemporary tapestries by Belarusian artist and storyteller, Olga Frantskevich. Also featuring documentary diagrams by Benin draughtsman Ezekiel Messou. THE GALLERY OF EVERYTHING, Chiltern St, Marylebone, London W1U 7PS, UK www.gallevery.com

R AW N E W S

CANADA, FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY

CHRISTIAN BERST

JAPANESE ART BRUT AT HALLE SAINT PIERRE

KUNSTHAUS KANNEN

until Mar 2

until Apr 13

until Mar 10

Feb 10 – May 26

Immersive group show Du bison à la fusée invites viewers to enter a world created in art and music workshops by people with mental health issues. LES IMPATIENTS 100 rue Sherbrooke East, 4th floor, Montreal, CANADA impatients.ca

MUSÉE D’ART BRUT MONTPELLIER

Gerd Schippel Lippl

January 26 – March 2, Christian Berst presents a solo exhibition of the work of Oscar Morales. March 7 – April 13, Above and Beyond is a collective show which includes works by Madge Gill, Ionel Talpazan and Anna Zemankova. CHRISTIAN BERST 3–5, Passage des Gravilliers 75003 Paris, FRANCE christianberst.com

Naoya Matsumoto

Collective work

Anna Zemankova

GALERIE LES IMPATIENTS

Art Brut Japonais II features the works of 50 outsider artists from Japan, including Yu Fujita, Shinji Ishikawa, Norimitsu Kokubo, Naoya Matsumoto and Shinichi Sawada. HALLE SAINT PIERRE 2 rue Ronsard, 75018 Paris, FRANCE www.hallesaintpierre.org

GALERIE ART CRU BERLIN

Jan 10 – Mar 31

Kunsthaus Kannen’s annual sales show takes place until January 27. From February 10, Anonyme Zeichner (“Anonymous Drawings”) presents works by Anke Becker (Berlin). KUNSTHAUS KANNEN, Alexianer Münster GmbH, Alexianerweg 9, 48163 Münster, GERMANY kunsthaus-kannen.de

PRINZHORN

MARONCELLI 12

until Jan 20

until Jan 31

Musée d’Art Brut in Montpellier presents works combining painting and sculpture by Portuguese artist Mario Chichorro. L’ATELIER MUSÉE 1 rue Beau Séjour, 34000 Montpellier, FRANCE www.atelier-musee.com 8

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Until January 12, see works by Rudi Bodmeier. From February 8, works by Günter Neupel portraying fairytale creatures will be shown. GALERIE ART CRU BERLIN, Oranienburger Str. 27, 10117 Berlin, GERMANY www.art-cru.de

Travelling exhibition Extraordinaire! Unknown Works from Swiss Psychiatric Institutions around 1900 shows newly discovered works. PRINZHORN COLLECTION Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Voßstraße 2, 69115 Heidelberg, GERMANY sammlung-prinzhorn.de

Mauro Gottardo

Mario Chichorro

Günter Neupel

Heinrich L.

Feb 8 – Mar 16

Side effects is a personal exhibition that presents Mauro Gottardo’s work, from his very first creations. MARONCELLI 12 Via Maroncelli, 12 – 20154 Milan, ITALY www.maroncelli12.it

R AW N E W S

USA

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

PURE VISION

until Mar 18

until Feb 24 and Mar 19 – Jul 28

until Feb 1

Roy Gabbay

Horace Pippin

Optician’s trade sign, New York, 1915–1925

OUTLIERS IN LOS ANGELES

John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night is the first exhibition of the work of Jamaican Intuitive John Dunkley (1891–1947) ever presented outside his native country. In parallel exhibition Paa Joe: Gates of No Return, a selection of architectural models by Ghanaian artist Paa Joe represent extant castles and forts on West Africa’s Gold Coast. From March 19 – July 28, Made in New York City: The Business of Folk Art presents around 100 works of art by selftaught artists, telling the story about New York City as the centre of America’s financial and commercial world. AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM, 2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023 www.folkartmuseum.org

Outliers and American Vanguard Art focuses on three periods over the last century when the intersection of self-taught artists with the mainstream has been most fertile. Bringing together 250 works, the exhibition includes over 80 schooled and unschooled artists and argues for a more diverse and inclusive representation in cultural institutions and cultural history. LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036 www.lacma.org

AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM

Outsider Insight is a group exhibition at Pure Vision Arts, New York’s first specialised art studio and exhibition space for people with developmental disabilities. PURE VISION ARTS 114 West 17th Street, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10011 www.purevisionarts.org

CREATIVITY EXPLORED

THE GOOD LUCK GALLERY

Jan 10 – Mar 7

Jan 12 – Feb 24

In Parenting: An Art without a Manual, American Visionary Art Museum focuses on the transformative and complex art of parenting. The 36 featured artists include Morton Bartlett, Daniel Belardinelli, JJ Cromer, Alex Grey, Jordan MacLachlan and Ray Materson. AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM 800 Key Highway, Baltimore, MD 21230 www.avam.org 12

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Helen Rae

Marilyn Wong

Allen Christian

until Sep 1

Marilyn Wong: Catching Spirit focuses on recent works on paper by Wong, which translate an enduring captivation with pop culture into densely layered compositions. CREATIVITY EXPLORED GALLERY 3245 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. creativityexplored.org

Composed using coloured pencil and graphite, Helen Rae creates dense, profoundly fractured drawings. Working out of First Street Gallery – a progressive art studio for adults with developmental disabilities, now in Upland, California – for the last 30 years, Rae utilises fashion magazines as a point of departure. The Good Luck Gallery welcomes Rae back for her third solo exhibition. THE GOOD LUCK GALLERY, 945 Chung Kind Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012. www.thegoodluckgallery.com

R AW N E W S

USA

Alfred Neumayr

The Outsider Art Fair will return to the Metropolitan Pavilion for its 27th New York edition. The fair will showcase 66 exhibitors, representing 37 cities from seven countries, with seven first-time galleries. Highlights include a memorial booth dedicated to the late dealer Phyllis Kind, organised by Edward M. Gómez, and OAF Curated Space “Good Kids: Underground Comics from China” co-curated by Brett Littman and Yi Zhou, featuring zines by underground Chinese self-taught artists. Metropolitan Pavillion, 125 W. 18th Street, New York, NY 10011. outsiderartfair.com

A new, 10,000 square-foot gallery, which exhibits works created by adults experiencing intellectual and developmental disabilities has opened in Portland, Oregon. The gallery, which doubles as a maker-space with painting, drawing, ceramic, textile and digital media studios is named the Portland Art & Learning Studio and currently serves close to 200 artists. THE PORTLAND ART & LEARNING STUDIO 4852 NE Martin Luther, King Jr Blvd, Portland, OR 97211. portlandartandlearningstudio.com

Alfred Neumayr: Mythical Creatures showcases work by Neumayr, primarily created with Indian inks or pencil – which the artist applies and scratches out, thins down or mixes. The resulting images resemble geographical formations, photos from outer space, fantasy worlds or mythical creatures. RICCO/MARESCA GALLERY, 529 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011 www.riccomaresca.com

CHICAGO CALLING AT INTUIT

FOUNTAIN HOUSE GALLERY

until Feb 10

Jan 11 – Feb 20

Bill Traylor RAW VISION 100

Angela Rogers

Joseph Yoakum

TRAYLOR AT SMITHSONIAN until Mar 17

Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor is the most comprehensive look at Bill Traylor’s work to date, featuring 155 of Traylor’s most important works. SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM 8th and F Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004. americanart.si.edu 14

NEW GALLERY IN PORTLAND, OREGON

Portland Art & Learning Studio, photo: Paul Landeros

RICCO/MARESCA GALLERY Jan 19 – Mar 9

Outsider Art Fair, New York, 2018

OUTSIDER ART FAIR, NEW YORK Jan 17–20

Intuit’s Chicago Calling: Art Against the Flow exhibit garnered a strong reception, prompting the museum to extend it for another month. It will then travel to Halle Saint Pierre (Paris, March 23 – August 2), Prinzhorn Collection (Heidelberg, September – January 2020), Collection de l'Art Brut (Lausanne, March 6–August 30, 2020) and Outsider Art Museum (Amsterdam, September 2020 – March 2021). INTUIT: THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART, 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60642 www.art.org

Knotted, Pieced & Wound features contemporary fibre artworks. The exhibition, organised by Sarah Margolis-Pineo, highlights a diverse range of materials from found objects to handcrafted textiles and objects. It includes artists drawing from traditional fibre practices, as well as innovative new methods of working with familiar materials. FOUNTAIN HOUSE GALLERY 702 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY 10019 www.fountainhousegallery.org

GROUNDED WITNESS TO A WORLD IN TRANSITION The Smithsonian American Art Museum honours the life and art of Bill Traylor TOM PATTERSON

Untitled (Yellow and Blue House with Figures and Dog), 1939, coloured pencil on paperboard, courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum

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eventy years after his death and 40 years after his work came to the attention of a national audience, Bill Traylor’s (1853–1949) remarkable creative legacy is being celebrated with a major exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, DC. Traylor has come to be acknowledged as one of America’s most important

artists, so this recognition seems long overdue. The landmark show encompasses 7,500 square feet on the museum’s first floor. For a man who spent his life in servitude and abject poverty, the exhibition goes a ong way towards doing him posthumous justice. Opened in the Autumn of 2018 and on view until March 17, 2019, it is accompanied by and critically

Untitled, c. 1939–42, coloured pencil on cardboard, courtesy of Jan Petry and Angie Mills

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inset, top: Untitled (Radio), c. 1940–42, opaque watercolour and pencil on printed advertising paperboard; inset, below: Untitled (Red Goat with Snake), c. 1940–42, opaque watercolour and pencil on paperboard, both courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum 20

fleshed-out in a 444-page monograph that shares the title Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, published by SAAM in association with Princeton University Press. The book stands as a major contribution in its own right – essential reading for anyone who wants to understand American art in the twentieth century. The project represents seven years of sustained effort on the part of Leslie Umberger, SAAM’s curator of folk and self-taught art. Except for an insightful introductory essay by contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall, Umberger is the sole author of the book, which breaks new ground in the scholarship on Traylor. In conjunction with the exhibition, Jeffrey Wolf’s informative and poetically evocative documentary film Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts premiered at the museum on September 30. A shorter, related film Wolf made serves as an introductory element in the exhibition. The outlines of Traylor’s story should be familiar to anyone reasonably knowledgeable about twentieth-century American art, and especially to folk- and outsider-art audiences. And yet much of what we thought we knew of that story turns out to be wrong, or at least significantly incomplete. The exhibition and Umberger’s scrupulously researched book fill in many gaps while overturning some long-held assumptions, misinformation and misguided theories about the artist and his work. Born into slavery in Alabama eight years before the American Civil War broke out, Traylor is known to have created more than 1000 works of art during the last decade of his life – images based on his memories, observations, daily experiences, and dreams. Most, if not all, of his surviving work dates from a crucial four-year period from 1939 to 1942. The exhibition’s 155 drawings have been carefully selected – not just for their visual strength or to reflect the range of themes he addressed – but, more importantly, for what they reveal about the artist’s life, his relationship to his place and time, and the ways in which his art changed and developed. All of these works are also included in Umberger’s book, along with a further 50 of his drawings that help shed further light on these particulars. As an artist, Traylor was uniquely positioned in the overlap of multiple realities – cultural, social, and historical. The only known body of visual art by an American with first-hand experience of enslavement, his work offers a sometimes painfully revealing window into these overlapping worlds. A black man perpetually vulnerable in a viciously white-dominated society, he saw enormous historical changes locally and devised his own visual language for recording and commenting on them.

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Traylor spent his childhood with members of his immediate family on two plantations in adjoining southern-Alabama counties. After 1865, when Union forces reestablished control in the South and ended the slavery system, he and his family continued to work as plantation labourers and tenant farmers into the early twentieth century. Records indicate that he was married three times, including one common-law marriage, and fathered about 15 children. After his third wife died in the mid 1920s, he moved to the state capital, Montgomery. Within a few years, in his eighth decade, he found himself unemployed and homeless on the streets of Montgomery’s segregated black commercial enclave, the Monroe Street business district. By the late 1930s, he could regularly be found sitting outside a pool room, where he passed his time drawing on salvaged paperboard. In the spring or summer of 1939, Traylor happened to attract the attention of several young, progressively minded artists – all white – who sometimes visited and made sketches in the district. They had formed a local coalition called New South, with its own gallery and art school. All of them took an interest in Traylor, and one of them, Charles Shannon, started assembling what was to become the largest surviving collection of Traylor’s work. In February 1940, they mounted a substantial show of his drawings in their gallery, where Shannon painted a mural portrait of Traylor seated at his makeshift drawing table. Shannon’s written observations and latter-day interview comments about Traylor make up the most important account of Traylor’s life. Had it not been for the efforts of New South, and Shannon in particular, it is likely that Traylor’s art would have been lost to art history. But Umberger rightfully points out that this discovery story has been overemphasised. In the first part of her book, she makes a worthy effort to compensate for this imbalance through her consistent focus on Traylor’s “personal journey”. Acknowledging that “many facts of his life will never be established and the artist’s personal agenda will ultimately remain hidden and enigmatic”, Umberger writes at length about the historical and cultural circumstances within which Traylor lived and made his art. She fills in a richly detailed background, presents the most complete picture of his life to date, and casts revealing new light on his art. Positioning his work firmly within a cultural context, she rejects any notion of him as an outsider. opposite: Figures and Construction with Cat, c. 1939–42, gouache and pencil on cardboard, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

BILL TRAYLOR, CONJURE AND INTENTIONALITY How well can anyone know this artist and his work, and read the symbols of his faith? RANDALL MORRIS

ince the appearance of his work in “Black Folk Art of America, 1930–1980” at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1982, there has been much interest in Bill Traylor (1853–1949). Despite all the new information, books and exhibitions devoted to him, particularly in the last decade, mystery still surrounds certain aspects of the artist and his work. Most unanswered questions concern the level of his involvement with Conjure, the AfricanAmerican religious practice, symbols from which seem to manifest in many of his drawings. From the beginning of African enslavement to the aftermath of emancipation and post-Civil War racial unrest, there was a widespread – although unofficial and little-researched – Creole religion in America. Sometimes called Conjure, it later became known as “hoodoo” in its desacralised and current form. In his book, Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson called it “the old-time religion”. (1) The practice of this religion was an enslaved people’s spiritual survival strategy, using cultural resistance to create and find a common ground under the most oppressed and destabilising circumstances. It was not dogmatic, it was fluid, and it was the worldview that black Southerners grew up with, more orthodox early on and more grassroots in the present. This was the world in which Traylor grew up. The discourse around Traylor’s life exposes both strengths and weaknesses in the methodology of presenting the work of an important artist who was never professionally interviewed or researched in his lifetime. The two most powerful areas of his biography are the context of his cultural immersion and the drawings themselves. They make for a dangerous territory. Some say intentionality can never be deduced, and some say that when the work is fed from the sources of the culture, as Traylor’s certainly was, and enough common factors emerge, a cultural intention can be found. There is a flaw in the word “intentionality” in that it conflates two very different concepts: what the artist

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“intends” the specific work to say, and how and why the art is made. We can also include the question, “For whom is the work being made?” When the mainstream uses the word “intentionality”, it usually refers to what the artist intended the work to mean. This is not usually seen as a necessarily good thing. The mainstream wants to deal with the art purely formally, and this often strips it of any meaning at all. We are left with several choices of path. One, widely held in the more commercial infrastructure of the field, is that Traylor’s work is more or less what it appears to be – that what you see is what you get. Granted, this is a rather outmoded viewpoint that can be summed up in the following statement by one of its proponents: “Sometimes a horse is just a horse”. Those who follow this line seem to ignore the underlying violent, ambiguous or culturally specific tones in some of the drawings. The second viewpoint is that, though till now left unproven and uninterpreted, some of the drawings give evidence that Traylor himself was either a Conjure man himself or was portraying Conjure in his works. The third, and strongest, viewpoint is that the drawings were produced from the perspective of someone living within the Conjure culture; that there are enough images evident in the Conjure language, but thus far there is no actual proof that Bill Traylor was a Conjure man – yet many of the drawings seem to be in a Conjure context. By now, it should surprise no one that traces of Conjure culture show up in the work of nearly every self-taught, African-American artist living in America. This is because it was not a sub-culture within AfricanAmerican culture – it was the pervasive culture itself. Evidence and proof of this can be found in the Georgia Works Progress Administration interviews and those in other states with former slaves; in the writings of Southern authors of those times; in the music and vernacular storytelling of the period; and in the various forms of artworks, from grave embellishments to yard shows or spirit yards, still being maintained

Probably the last portrait taken of Bill Traylor, c. 1948-49, photo by Horace Perry

today. Conjure wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just a culture known to a few black people. It was the culture. And it was the culture for which Traylor was making his drawings. However, it was not a static culture in either the New World or Africa. When Traylor was growing up through the times of slavery and post-slavery, the roots of Conjure could be seen as a Creolised religion, taking a basic pan-African morality stance mixed with European and Indigenous-American influence. After slavery, the religion became less orthodox,

manifesting as what became known as hoodoo or Conjure at around the time that Traylor was sitting on the street in Montgomery, Alabama, making his drawings. This change came about because of the social ramifications of black people leaving the rural South and trying to assimilate into urban, predominantly white, American society and leaving their old lives behind them. We will never know all there is to know about Traylorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s complex drawings. The most pertinent reason

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Bill Traylor at work on Monroe Street, Montgomery, Alabama, c.1939-40, photos by Jean and George Lewis, courtesy of Caroline Cargo Folk Art Collection

for this is that key aspects of the post-slavery era that he grew up in have been suppressed, have disappeared, or have been disavowed by his cultural group in an attempt to survive and assimilate into an extremely hostile environment. This is not to say Traylor himself was or was not a Conjure man. We can establish that he drew for black people and the community around him, because photographs give us proof of that: the Montgomery street was where he situated himself and was most productive. His drawings are like a visual form of oral culture, telling stories that, at least in the earliest phases, he drew from his life and those of the people around him. The people in the drawings chasing each other with deadly axes were not accidental, whimsical or aimed at amusing white people. They were drawn for Traylor and his people. There are those that believe there to be empirically provable images of Conjure in the artist’s work. However, with very few exceptions, these images or “performances” tend to be part of a narrative about Conjure and Conjure people rather than instruments of Conjure themselves. In Pattern, Structure, and Logic in Afro-American Hoodoo Performance, Michael Bell gives four of the tenets of Conjure performance: one, to cause a result; two, to heal a result; three, to protect against harm; and four, to discover the workings of Conjure on oneself or others. (2) None of these aspirations are clearly fulfilled by a Traylor drawing. By the time he was in Montgomery, the religion had desacralised but there are strong indications that he had a deep

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knowledge of the “old religion”. Looking at Traylor’s body of work in its entirety, there is an obvious and sizeable group of drawings for which there are no ready explanations. Other drawings are portraits of people in ambiguous situations that suggest the presence of powerful forces. There is the constant presence of hoodoo icons with his use of plants and snakes, red eyes, fingerpointing and iron objects. We see humans merged with plants. We see the codified colours that still possess their original meanings of importance: danger, anger, amuletic protection, and so on. There are three drawings of the ring shout ritual, a central performance of this pre-hoodoo religion. One can never recreate a man from his drawings, as art can never be a perfect mirror of a life. Artmaking can be an act of ephemeral self-exorcism, and it is this aspect of the scholarship on Traylor that is the riskiest, such as attempts to equate generalities of his drawings with incidents and histories within an oral culture. The artist is only abstractly present in such discussions and cannot corroborate them. The goal would be to sift the information in an empirical way so that “possible” yields to “probable”, then to ”more than likely”, with very clear defences and demarcations between the territories. In this way, the interpretations of scholars could be monitored more accurately, from the subjective to the objectively obvious. In Black Belt America, we can conflate mystery with its close relative, secrecy. If they are twins, they are not identical. There is no way to look at the work of any

Traylor’s work on show in the exhibition Bill Traylor, People’s Artist, New South Gallery, Montgomery, February 1940, photos by Jean and George Lewis, courtesy of Caroline Cargo Folk Art Collection

self-taught African-American artist without factoring in the impact of secrecy. Secrecy would be the older twin – or even the parent, because it is secrecy that creates mystery. However, in Traylor’s case, secrecy didn’t arise from a sense of visual stagecraft; rather, it was an established method of self-protection against potential white hostility. Racism can never be removed from this narrative. Traylor was not setting out to create a sense of artistic wonder in his audience. Remember, until collector Charles Shannon began accumulating his works, Traylor’s audience was completely black. His people. Secrecy is not so much sacred secrets. It is more like, “I can’t tell you this because you can’t conceive what it’s like to be me in my world.” It’s Joseph Yoakum saying, “If you see it, it’s there”. Essentially, this is what Traylor projected to Shannon, with or without Shannon understanding. Traylor created an oral version of himself that would not offend Shannon, that would confuse, shock and disillusion him less. Secrets have sources and answers. Mysteries do not. What should interest us now in the drawings of Traylor, other than their stark, enigmatic grace, is any attempt to get closer to separating speculation from

what was in plain sight. This might liberate future discoveries from any scholastic generalities that have become entrenched in the literature, to be passed on from art historian to writer to curator to the public, over and over again. There is enough about Conjure in the Traylor drawings that can be empirically discussed. We cannot prove that Traylor was a hoodoo man, but we can conclude that his amazing drawings had some degree of familiarity with the content of hoodoo because he was, in essence, drawing his culture – a Conjure culture. There will never be real closure on the subject because of a cultural distance from Traylor’s immediate memories and concerns. His body of work contains manifold hidden meanings. It remains masterful in its entirety, and exquisitely ambiguous in our tragic loss and lack of assurance of meaning. Notes 1. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and AfroAmerican Art and Philosophy. Random House, USA, 1984. 2. Michael Edward Bell, Pattern, Structure, and Logic in Afro-American Hoodoo Performance. Department of Folklore, Indiana University, 1980. Randall Morris is an independent scholar, curator, and co-owner of Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York City.

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UNFINISHED UTOPIA Twenty years in the making and still only half-complete, a castle stands in a remote corner of China with a message for future generations MARIELLA LANDOLFI

Visitors interact with the monuments of Yelang Valley, just as the artist intends, photo: Alamy

n a secluded valley in Guizhou province, south-west China, there is a sight to behold – a sight seemingly centuries old and untouched by modern life. In fact, Yelang Valley, a castle of stone statues, dates back to just 1997 and is the creation of 78-year-old artist Song Peilun. It covers almost 20 hectares of land and, although Peilun has been building it for over two decades, Yelang Valley is still a work in progress and he says that he will not live to see its completion. A former Chinese professor, Peilun gave up his academic career in 1996 and took a job in Florida, USA, consulting on a Chinese-culture theme park. While stateside, he visited the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota – it made a great impression on him and he noticed the parallels between Native American culture and that of ethnic minorities in Guizhou. He

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returned to his homeland a year later with thoughts of creating a village of art exhibitions in Guizhou, but relations with a business partner turned bad, and instead he dedicated himself to what he really wanted to do: build a castle. He was motivated, he says, by his strong aversion to city life. He wanted to re-introduce a forgotten, primitive culture to the world; an oasis untouched by commercialism and the modern-day motivation of quick success and instant gratification. Yelang Valley certainly has the feel of a bygone age – an imposing, tiered fortress of piled stones, it gives the impression of having emerged from the soil of the hillside. A maze of craggy towers and totems reaching up to the skies; figures and faces, with staring eyes and gaping mouths, standing sentry; crumbling walls and arches, and winding steps – all interspersed with lush,

Peilun’s masterpiece is enmeshed with the natural environment, photo: Alamy

green trees, shrubs and grass, and balanced on the bank of a meandering river. The creation seems at once like an organic, geological manifestation, and the painstaking endeavour of an ancient civilisation to protect itself and to celebrate its existence. Although much smaller and less palatial, Yelang Valley bears some resemblance to Angkor – now an archeological site in today’s north-west Cambodia, it was the capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to fifteenth centuries. It boasts monumental towers, thousands of sculpted figures and huge faces, as well as imposing Buddhist temples such as Angkor Thom. Peilun does not cite Angkor as an inspiration; he says that his work is intended as a homage to Guizhou’s local Nuo religion, which originally practised

sacrificial rituals to expel evil spirits and pestilence. Yelang Valley’s origins are also embedded in Chinese legend and the bedtime stories of castles and monsters that Peilun’s grandparents told him when he was a child. More recently, he has been influenced by history books, art exhibitions and even his granddaughter’s drawings. He has succeeded in creating a magical world, but – as younger visitors sometimes find – it can seem like a frightening place, with glaring, stony creatures lurking around corners. However, during the hot days of Guizhou province’s Summer, children forget any eeriness and play happily in the river that runs through Peilun’s park. The artist revels in this, wanting visitors to interact with his art, to almost become part of it and

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Inspired by ancient Nuo masks, the huge faces keep watch over the valley, photo: Alamy

EVERYTHING PAINTED GOLD Damian Le Bas Jr surveys the life and art of his father, a leader of the Roma Revolution DAMIAN LE BAS, JR The Original English Roma Punk In Berlin, 2017, ink and collage on recycled packaging, 13 x 9 in. / 32 x 23 cm

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The Council Tenants, 1990, oil pastel on paper, 29.5 x 21.5 in. / 75 x 55cm

Damian Le Bas with Roma Armee, Berlin, 2017, photo: Delaine Le Bas

“D

amian Le Bas is a tribe of one”, remarked the writer, critic and jazz singer George Melly in 1992. He had his reasons. Melly was opening a show of works by Le Bas at the Horsham Arts Centre, a glass-fronted theatre in one of the wealthiest corners of southern England. The invitation featured a drawing called

The Council Tenants, in which wide-eyed faces stared from the windows of orange and purple terraced homes, and on display was a vivid portrait of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, which Melly later acquired. The family of Le Bas’ wife (and my mother) Delaine, were in attendance, so the private view was full of Gypsies. Someone pointed at

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above: Gypsyland Europa (detail), 2016, ink on printed map, 53 x 37 in. / 136 x 94 cm

opposite: Roma Armee drawings for an animation project, 2017, ink on paper, 8 x 6 in. / 21 x 14.5 cm

George Melly’s ring and shouted, “Dik at the fawni mush, it’s got a yawk in it!” (“Look at the ring man, it’s got an eye in it!”). Socialites and social housing; pastel drawings and plasterers; world travellers and Romany Travellers. It was a night emblematic of Le Bas’ artistic life. It isn’t hard to see why Damian Le Bas (1963–2017) was often viewed – and viewed himself – as an outsider, nor why he hated any attempt to simplify, reduce or pigeonhole him or anyone else. Little about his life was straightforward. Le Bas was born in Sheffield in 1963, bearing an old Huguenot surname. Most of his mother’s family was Irish Catholic by descent, while his father’s side had connections

to London as well as Derbyshire Romany ancestry. When he was ten, the family relocated to West Sussex, and by his teens he was an ardent supporter of three different football clubs: Sheffield United, Chelsea and Brighton. His friends would tease him about his split loyalties, but for him it was about staying true to his widely spread roots. In his art as in his conversation, he elevated the mixedness of the human condition to the status of the sacred, and the kaleidoscope of humanity remained central to his work until his death in December 2017. After a turbulent time at school, Le Bas left early and fell in with some of the local scallywags and scoundrels in

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DUBUFFET’S ANTICULTURAL POSITION IN CHICAGO During an important trip to New York, a Chicago stopover unexpectedly emerged as a defining time for Jean Dubuffet DEBORAH COUETTE

Jean Dubuffet at his exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago, December 27, 1951 © Archives Fondation Dubuffet, Paris, photo by Nathan Lerner

“There is superheat in Chicago, a supercharge... My works speak to them, better than any words could. Without their needing to say a word, their faces and their behaviour let me know [that] we – they and I – are on the same wavelength.” – Jean Dubuffet, 1984 (1)

n October 1951, Jean Dubuffet set off with his wife Lili on board the SS Île-de-France ocean liner to spend six months in the USA. The journey ahead

promised great things for the artist. His work had been introduced to the American art scene in 1947 by gallery owner Pierre Matisse, and was to be celebrated with an exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago from December 18, 1951, to January 23, 1952. However, this event was not the main reason for Dubuffet’s trip. He had left Paris primarily to go to East Hampton, near

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New York, to stay in the residence – known as The

particular ideas – but I am less and less interested in

Creeks – of Alfonso Ossorio. The American-Filipino

formulating and communicating them”. (5) However,

painter and collector had offered Dubuffet the chance

the artist later relented and on December 11 wrote: “I

to install the 1,200 pieces of his art brut collection in

am working diligently to prepare my lecture, in which

The Creeks. Ossorio was also going to finance a book

my anticultural positions will be revealed. I plan to

that Dubuffet was intending to write on art brut. In his

have my notes transcribed by typewriter and to make

autobiography, written on the eve of his death in 1985,

several copies, in advance, before the conference.” (6)

Dubuffet notes: “After being carefully packed in crates,

The lecture developed some of the ideas that he

the pieces were shipped ahead so that an attendant

had already expressed in “In Honour of Savage Values”,

could install them and I could get straight to work

a lecture he had given in January 1951, in France. From

when I arrived.” (2) However, Dubuffet had not long

1945, Dubuffet had turned away from what he called

alighted in New York when the plan fell apart.

“cultural art” in favour of art brut. The work of the self-

The site at The Creeks was not yet ready to receive

taught, of mediums, of psychiatric patients and of

the collection and, as for the book project, it had been

other individuals living on the margins of society

put on hold. Accommodated in a house of Ossorio’s in

was, for him, the only true art. Now, with “Anticultural

New York’s Greenwich Village, Dubuffet’s frustrations

Positions”, he had the opportunity to declare his true

were not over. The French artist, less a misanthrope

beliefs to the American public. He denounced the

than a loner, had issued the condition of being

weight of tradition, rejected artistic heritage and

“exempt from any involvement in social circles.” (3) But

condemned culture, stating that, in his opinion, it was

it was not to be so: “We had barely spent a night there,

nothing more than a “dead language” and an obstacle

when there was a knock on the door to ask me to join

to the growth of individuals. He advocated the party

some visitors, one of whom was Jackson Pollock.

of the clean slate. With a sharp quill, he defended art

Ossorio was fond of long, nocturnal discussions bathed

that is not borrowed but is directly connected to

in whiskey. Despite promises, I was trapped where the

current life. He praised the value of savagery and

conversations of aesthetes flowed.” (4)

instinct as opposed to analysis and reason.

The next day, Dubuffet left Ossorio’s house. He

Dubuffet had distinct memories of his Chicago

moved to an apartment in Charles Street and found

stopover, writing in his autobiography: “Just before

a studio in the Bowery district of Manhattan. He then

Christmas, as planned, 32 of my paintings were shown

devoted himself to his painting and to conscientiously

at an exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago and I gave

preparing a lecture for The Chicago Arts Club event.

my speech. It set out paradoxical views – about artistic

Dubuffet wrote the lecture, “Anticultural Positions”,

creation, the inanity of the notion of beauty, the value

in English, and the speech itself turned out to be one

of irrational approaches – which unexpectedly made

of the most significant elements of the trip. At first,

a great impression on the audience because even now

he had been against speaking. He was suspicious

they get mentioned and cited.” (7)

of cultural institutions, at odds with their academic

His words certainly left a mark on the American

conversations, and resistant to all attempts of

art scene, capturing the attention of major artists,

promotion and publicity. In September 1951, when

including Claes Oldenburg and later Keith Haring.

William N Eisendrath, co-chair of The Arts Club of

In his diary, the young Haring wrote that Dubuffet’s

Chicago’s Exhibition Committee, urged Dubuffet to

text was among the few literary references to his

go ahead with the lecture, the artist responded: “The

philosophy: “I have read [...] many instructive texts [...]

conference project disturbs me a bit, and I do not

but few have had such a simple, profound effect.” (8)

really know how to react, not because I have no idea

It was in Chicago that Dubuffet’s ideas had the

about art – on the contrary, I have very specific and

deepest impact of all, garnering the support of artists

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opposite: The first page of Jean Dubuffet ‘s notes for his talk at The Arts Club of Chicago, December 1951

Rather than creating followers, Dubuffet’s influence was to reinforce the validity of the unique identities of different artists... such as George Cohen, Cosmo Campoli and Leon

ensuring that the ideals which feed my work are not

Golub. Disillusioned by the cultural values of post-war

distorted, I end up with satisfactory results.” Pleased

America, many young Chicago artists were already

to be excluded from the celebrations held by the

embracing individualism and exploring a new kind

French state, Dubuffet continued creating, unaffected

of art that was embedded in the unconscious and the

by culture, movements and trends. Meanwhile, around

deep aspects of human existence. They rejected the

this time in the mid 1960s, the Chicago Imagists – such

representational and were inspired by primitive art,

as Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson – were inspired by the

adopting its spirit and inventing their own versions.

ideas of Dubuffet and began to champion art brut

Dubuffet’s lecture – whether they heard it first hand

artists, including Joseph Yaokum, Martin Ramírez

or read it afterwards – was extremely exciting for

and Henry Darger.

them, reinforcing as it did their own dissatisfactions, values and ideas. For them, the fact that he was European gave his words even more validity. The lecture did not lead to the imitation of

Overall, the twentieth century was a period in art history that was particularly rich in individuality, protest and subversiveness. In the plethora of disputes that emerged in this “rebel century”, from anti-art to

Dubuffet’s work but to a shift in artistic feeling and an

professional art, Dubuffet stands as one of the most

emphasis on spirit and nature. It encouraged the use

emblematic figures of the spirit of dissent against

of different techniques, as well as a wide variety of

culture and the rules of art – and his “Anticultural

materials, including objects from the natural world.

Positions” remains a valuable manifesto that has lost

Rather than creating followers, Dubuffet’s influence

none of its passion, effectiveness or relevance.

was to reinforce the validity of the unique identities of different artists, some of whom had been dismissed as mere novelties up until then. The lecture first appeared in a small mimeographed pamphlet published by Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis, then as a foreword in the catalogue of Dubuffet’s exhibition at the World Houses Galleries in New York, in 1960. It was only in 1963 that Dubuffet himself translated the text into French, to be published by the Galerie Beyeler in Basel in 1965 along with the original version in English and a German version. While revising those different versions, Dubuffet remarked that his “Anticultural Positions” still had an impact: “The President of the Republic recently invited all the artists and writers that represent French

Notes 1. Dubuffet Jean, “Artist’s Statement” in Jean Dubuffet: Forty Years of his Art, Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Gallery at the University of Chicago, 1984, p. 11. 2. Dubuffet Jean, Biographie au Pas de Course (1985), Paris: Gallimard, 2001, p. 62. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Jean Dubuffet to William N Eisendrath, September 21, 1951, Arts Club records, Newberry Library, Chicago, in Art Brut in America. The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet, 2015, p. 55. 6. Jean Dubuffet to William N Eisendrath, December 11, 1951, copyright: Archives Fondation Dubuffet, Paris. 7. Dubuffet Jean, Biographie au Pas de Course (1985), Paris, Gallimard, 2001, pp. 62–63. 8. Haring Keith, July 7, 1986: Montreux, translated from English by Stéphanie Alkofer, Journal, Paris, Flammarion, 2012, p. 170. [Keith Haring Journals, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2010.]

contemporary culture to the Elysée Palace, and I had the honour of not being invited. You see, by going to the trouble of making my views well defined and of

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Deborah Couette is a PhD student in Art History at the Paris 1 PanthéonSorbonne University and Head of the Archives at the Dubuffet Foundation, Paris.

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JEAN DUBUFFET

ANTICULTURAL POSITIONS I think, not only in the arts, but also in many other fields, an important change is taking place, now, in our time, in the frame of mind of many persons. It seems to me that certain values, which had been considered for a long time as very certain and beyond discussion, begin now to appear doubtful, and even quite false, to many persons. And that, on the other hand, other values, which were neglected, or held in contempt, or even quite unknown, begin to appear of great worth. I have the impression that a complete liquidation of all the ways of thinking, whose sum constituted what has been called Humanism and has been fundamental for our culture since the Renaissance, is now taking place, or, at least, going to take place soon. I think the increasing knowledge of the thinking of so called primitive peoples, during the past fifty years, has contributed a great deal to this change, and especially the acquaintance with works of art made by those peoples, which have much surprised and interested the occidental public. It seems to me that especially many persons begin to ask themselves if Occident has not many very important things to learn from these savages. May be, in many cases, their solutions and their ways of doing, which first appeared to us very rough, are more clever than ours. It may be ours are the rough ones. It may be refinement, cerebrations, depth of mind, are on their side, and not on ours. Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery. I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness. Now I must say I don't mean to say that the Occident lacks these savage values. On the contrary! But I think that the values held up by our culture don't correspond to the real frame of mind of Occident. I think that the culture of Occident is a coat which does not fit him; which, in any case, doesn't fit him any more.

I think this culture is very much like a dead language, without anything in common with the language spoken in the street.

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This culture drifts further and further from daily life. It is confined to certain small and dead circles, as a culture of mandarins. It no longer has real and living roots. For myself, I aim for an art which would be in immediate connection with daily life, an art which would start from this daily life, and which would be a very direct and very sincere expression of our real life and our real moods.

I am going to enumerate several points, concerning the occidental culture, with which I don't agree.

One of the principal characteristics of Western culture is the belief that the nature of man is very different from the nature of other beings of the world. Custom has it that man cannot be identified, or compared in the least, with elements such as winds, trees, riversâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; except humorously, and for poetic rhetorical figures. The Western man has, at last, a great contempt, for trees and rivers, and hates to be like them. On the contrary, the so called primitive man loves and admires trees and rivers, and has a great pleasure to be like them. He believes in a real similitude between man and trees and rivers. He has a very strong sense of continuity of all things, and especially between man and the rest of the world. Those primitive societies have surely much more respect than Western man for every being of the world; they have a feeling that the man is not the owner of the beings, but only one of them among the others.

My second point of disagreement with occidental culture is the following one. Western man believes that the things he thinks exist outside exactly in the same way he thinks of them. He is convinced that the shape of the world is the same shape as his reason. He believes very strongly the basis of his reason is well founded, and especially the basis of his logic. But the primitive man has rather an idea of weakness of reason and logic, and believes rather in other ways of getting knowledge of things.

That is why he has so much esteem and so much admiration for the states of mind which we call madness. I must declare I have a great interest for madness; and I am convinced art has much to do with madness. Now, third point. I want to talk about the great respect occidental culture has for elaborated ideas. I don't regard elaborated ideas as the best part of human function. I think ideas are rather a weakened rung in the ladder of mental process: something like a landing where the mental processes become impoverished, like an outside crust caused by cooling.

Ideas are like steam condensed into water by touching the level of reason and logic. RAW VISION 100

I don't think the greatest value of mental function is to be found at this landing of ideas; and it is not at this landing that it interests me. I aim rather to capture the thought at a point of its development prior to this landing of elaborated ideas. The whole art, the whole literature and the whole philosophy of Occident, rest on the landing of elaborated ideas. But my own art, and my own philosophy, lean entirely on stages more underground. I try always to catch the mental process at the deeper point of its

roots, where, I am sure, the sap is much richer. Now, fourth. Occidental culture is very fond of analysis, and I have no taste for analysis, and no confidence in it. One thinks everything can be known by way of dismantling it or dissecting it into all its parts, and studying separately each of these parts. My own feeling is quite different. I am more disposed, on the contrary, to always recompose things. As soon as an object has been cut only into two parts, I have the impression it is lost for

my study, I am further removed from this object instead of being nearer to it. I have a very strong feeling that the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. My inclination leads me, when I want to see something really well, to regard it with its surroundings, whole. If I want to know this pencil on the table, I don't look straight on the pencil, I look on the middle of the room, trying to include in my glance as many objects as possible.

If there is a tree in the country, I don't bring it into my laboratory to look at it under my microscope, because I think the wind which blows through its leaves is absolutely necessary for the knowledge of the tree and cannot be separated from it. Also the birds which are in the branches, and even the song of these birds. My turn of mind is to join always more things surrounding the tree, and further, always more of the things which surround the things which surround the tree. I have been a long time on this point, because I think this turn of mind is an important factor of the aspect of my art. The fifth point, now, is that our culture is based on an enormous confidence in the language â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and especially the written language; and belief in its ability to translate and elaborate thought. That appears to me a misapprehension. I have the impression, language is a rough, very rough stenography, a system of algebraic signs very rudimentary, which impairs thought instead of helping it. Speech is more concrete, animated by the sound of the voice, intonations, a cough, and even making a face and mimicry, and it seems to me more effective.

Written language seems to me a bad instrument. As an instrument of expression, it seems to deliver only a dead remnant of thought, more or less as clinkers from the fire.

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As an instrument of elaboration, it seems to overload thought and falsify it.

I believe (and here I am in accord with the so called primitive civilizations) that painting is more concrete than the written word, and is a much more rich instrument for the expression and elaboration of thought.

I have just said, what interests me, in thought, is not the instant of transformation into formal ideas, but the moments preceding that. My painting can be regarded as a tentative language fitting for these areas of thought. I come to my sixth and last point, and I intend now to speak of the notion of beauty adopted by occidental culture. I want to begin by telling you in which my own conception differs

from the usual one. The latter believes that there are beautiful objects and ugly objects, beautiful persons and ugly persons, beautiful places and ugly places, and so forth. Not I. I believe beauty is nowhere. I consider this notion of beauty as completely false.

I refuse absolutely to assent to this idea that there are ugly persons and ugly objects. This idea is for me stifling and revolting. I think the Greeks are the ones, first, to purport that certain objects are more beautiful than others. The so called savage nations don't believe in that at all. They don't understand when you speak to them of beauty. This is the reason one calls them savage. The Western man gives the name of savage to one who doesn't understand that beautiful things and ugly things exist, and who doesn't care for that at all. What is strange is that, for centuries and centuries, and still now more than ever, the men of Occident dispute which are the beautiful things and which are the ugly ones. All are certain that beauty exists without doubt, but one cannot find two who agree about the objects which are endowed. And from one century to the next, it changes.

The occidental culture declares beautiful, in each century, what it declared ugly in the preceding one.

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JAPAN IN FOCUS A decade after presenting a groundbreaking show of innovative Japanese works, Switzerland’s Collection de l’Art Brut revisits a country whose selftaught “auteurs” have earned international renown EDWARD M. GÓMEZ

above: Itsuo Kobayashi, Untitled, 1982/89, ink on paper, 11 x 17.32 in., / 28 x 44 cm, Galerie du Marché, Lausanne opposite: Toshio Okamoto, Untitled (Man), 2015, ink on paper, 21.42 x 30.2 in., /54.4 x 76.7 cm, Yamanami Kōbō, Kōka, Shiga Prefecture

In 2008, the Collection de l’Art Brut presented Japon, an exhibition of drawings, ceramics, performance-art costumes, and objects made by such Japanese autodidacts as Takashi Shuji, Shinichi Sawada, Eijiro Miyama and Takanori Herai. (In fact, the Swiss museum’s involvement with art made by Japanese “auteurs” — literally, “authors”, using a French term it employs to refer to art-makers — began with an earlier exhibition, Art Incognito, in 1997. At that time, in Japan, the French term “art brut”, later adapted phonetically into Japanese as “aato buryutto” アール・ブリュット, had not yet become common, hence the title of that earlier show.)

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Japon turned out to be an influential exhibition, prompting other European institutions to also present what came to be known both within Japan and overseas as “Japanese art brut”. Halle Saint Pierre in Paris; the Museum im Lagerhaus in St. Gallen, Switzerland; the Outsider Art Museum in Amsterdam; the Wellcome Collection in London; and the 2013 Venice Biennale all went on to show such art. It also turned up at art fairs and in galleries in Europe and the United States. In all of those instances, given certain language and cultural barriers, presenters outside Japan of “Japanese art brut“ had to work with Japan-based

Takuya Tamura, Untitled, 2016, felt-pen on paper, 30.2 x 21.4 in. / 76.7 x 54.44 cm, Yamanami Kōbō, Kōka, Shiga Prefecture

Kazumi Kazuo, Masato and I, Going to YokohamaTogether, n.d, ceramic, 14.76 x 10.6 x 9.44 in. /37.5 x 27 x 24 cm, David and Sabrina Alaimo

intermediaries in order to learn about who was producing this kind of art and seek opportunities to show it. Often, they collaborated with what are known as “social-welfare organisations” in Japan, which house art-therapy workshops in which disabled persons take part. Some such institutions have embraced the art brut label to identify and promote some of their participants’ creations. For better or worse, especially within Japan, art brut has come to be associated almost exclusively with artworks produced by disabled persons. Meanwhile, outside the country, “Japanese art brut” has tended to group — and obscure — the individual creative voices of its makers under a broad art-brand label. Given my Japan-related background, Sarah Lombardi, the director of the Collection de l’Art Brut, invited me to undertake fresh research about Japan’s art brut creators and to assemble a new exhibition of their works for the Swiss museum. Its goals: to showcase more vividly the individual artistic visions of such “auteurs” and to call attention to genuine art brut makers in Japan, whether they are associated with facilities for the disabled or completely independent of them. This time, too, the CAB sought to develop all-new, direct relationships with selftaught artists, institutions, galleries, and collectors. Lombardi notes, “This project expands our research

about Japan at a time when its discovery of art brut is in full swing and even as, in Japan, the concept of this kind of art is still relatively new.” During several research trips to Japan, I met and studied the creations of a wide variety of self-taught artists around the country. I shared my findings and critical analyses with Lombardi and my curatorial colleagues at the CAB. We decided to call the museum’s new exhibition Art brut du Japon, un autre regard (Art Brut from Japan, Another Look), a title suggesting that we would look not only at more recent artistic productions from Japan but also propose to examine them in a new way. In fact, this “new” way of looking at and thinking about them employs some well-established, criticalanalytical criteria, which the French modern artist Jean Dubuffet, art brut’s pioneering theorist in the 1940s and the CAB’s founder in the 1970s, had articulated. Thus, in considering how technically or thematically inventive the Japanese works we were examining might be, we also looked for what made them original and unique. To what extent each artmaker’s works express a distinctive creative, philosophical, spiritual, or even enigmatic vision — this criterion was important as we selected the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and other productions of twenty-four “auteurs”.

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Momoka Imura, Untitled, after 2013, fabric and plastic buttons, variable dimensions; David and Sabrina Alaimo

Earlier this year, I travelled to Japan to round up many of the more than 170 artworks (some are very small) that were being loaned to the exhibition by various individuals or institutions and take them to Tokyo, where a specialised art-handling company prepared them for shipping to Switzerland. Weeks later, I was present in Lausanne, along with Pascale Jeanneret, a CAB staff curator, who also plays vital registrar and exhibition-management roles, and Morgane Bonvallat, an intern who had earned a master’s degree in museum studies at the University of Neuchâtel, when three big crates containing the artworks arrived from Japan. Out of these treasure chests sprung large abstract compositions in ink and washi (traditional Japanese paper) by Hiroyuki Doi; multicoloured-grid drawings of people and animals by Takuya Tamura; Nana Yamazaki’s strange garments made of embroidered, puckered fabric; mixed-media masks by the reclusive artist known as “Strange Knight” (who died this year and always wore a mask); and much more. Bonvallat recalls, “The moment when the crates were opened was exciting. At last, we could discover the pieces we had been working on for months, but we also were quite taken by the way the Japanese shippers had packed each object with precision.” Custom-made containers for each artwork, she notes,

had been fitted together in each crate like threedimensional puzzle pieces “to within one millimeter” of snugness between them. Art conservator Mijanou Gold, CAB’s collections technician, and Marie Ducimetière, an intern working with her in the museum’s conservation department, recognised the fragility of many of the works from Japan. Gold observes, for example, that “the contrast between the weight” of Kazumi Kamae’s ceramic sculptures of fluid, multi-limbed figures, with numerous faces, “and the fineness of the little scales, like grains of rice” that cover their surfaces, “is substantial”, while Ducimetière, a recent graduate of the Haute École Arc in Neuchâtel, where her conservation studies focused on scientific, technical, and horological objects, notes that “the greatest challenge” in handling such works lies in putting them in their assigned places. “One wrong move could leave a mark” or otherwise harm them, she says. As my colleagues and I became familiar with the appearances and physical characteristics of the works to be exhibited, some of which were borrowed from sources in Europe, Lombardi asked me to tap into my background in graphic design to develop the design of the exhibition (known as its “scénographie” in French). Since we had to place many objects in a loftlike chamber in the attic of the Château Beaulieu,

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MASTER WORKS OF ART BRUT Celebrating the publication of Raw Vision’s one-hundredth issue, with a gallery of some legendary artists’ creations

ounded in 1989, Raw Vision quickly became the world’s leading publication reporting on the latest discoveries and news, helping to guide critical discussion, in the related fields of art brut, outsider art and self-taught art. Now, in commemoration of this, the publication’s one-hundredth issue, the magazine looks back in order to look ahead: the following descriptions and analyses of emblematic works by five definitive, canonical art brut artists – Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger, Aloïse Corbaz, Johann Hauser and Martín Ramírez – have been written by well-known specialists whose research has contributed significantly to our understanding of these art-makers’ creative visions and accomplishments. These short texts offer newcomers to this kind of art a hint of its richness and diversity, even as they remind experienced collectors and informed aficionados about the remarkable qualities that make it so intriguing – and unique. 62

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MARTÍN RAMÍREZ: Untitled (Tunnel with Cars and Buses), 1954, crayon and graphite on pieced-together paper, 52 x 23.1 in. / 132.1 x 60.6 cm, private collection, © Estate of Martín Ramírez

orn in Mexico in 1895, Martín Ramírez created all of his artworks while confined to two psychiatric

institutions in California, from 1935 through 1963, the year of his death. Since his work was first exhibited in 1952, Ramírez has won admiration for having constructed a singular visual language that perfectly integrates the figurative and the abstract. His drawings are filled with images of horse riders, Madonnas, and animals; sometimes they are framed by stage-like settings featuring stairs and curtains. Ramírez also produced many landscapes inspired by his memories of his homeland, which he left for the United States in 1925. These images are dominated by colonial buildings, vernacular architecture, and linear patterns that depict mountains, hills, canyons, fields, and canals. Long trains running through tunnels that seem to connect Mexico and California are the central subjects of some of his mural-sized landscapes. Some of his other landscapes depict highways full of cars and buses crossing over bridges that end in tunnels surrounded by mountains and Italian cypresses. These works reflect Ramírez’s fascination with the evidence of modernity that he witnessed in the United States, as well as the impact of popular visual culture on his own formal vocabulary. The landscape presented here offers a beautiful example of Ramírez’s highly developed sense of design and harmony, and of the technical ability with which he manipulated colours, lines, and space. His conjoining of three pieces of pristine white paper, which he glued together with a regular adhesive (as opposed to his normal use of recycled materials), suggests that Ramírez had ample access to art supplies when he created this drawing in 1954. With its delicate lines traced in pencil and coloured with crayons, and controlled in intensity to achieve subtle tonalities, this artwork shows a skillful use of the media to which Ramírez had access. The impressionist luminosity of this drawing and, in it, the absence of both the proscenium-like frame and patterns of repeating and concentric lines that characterise most of Ramírez’s works imbue it with a powerful sense of freedom and joyfulness.

Víctor M. Espinosa is the author of Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art (University of Texas Press, 2015).

This text was written in memory of the art collector Stephanie Smither (1941–2016).

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MASTERWORKS

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ALOÏSE CORBAZ: Untitled, between 1941 and 1945, coloured pencil on wrapping paper, 23.43 x 16.73 in. / 59.5 x 42.5 cm, Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; photo by Morgane Détraz, Atelier de numérisation, Ville de Lausanne

hanks to Dr Jacqueline Porret-Forel, a Swiss general practitioner who was very close to Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964) and passionate about her art, Jean Dubuffet discovered the work of this art brut creator, who was born in Lausanne,

Switzerland. Shortly thereafter, in 1947, Porret-Forel went to Paris to show Dubuffet some of the drawings that had been made by this patient who had been sent to Cery, a psychiatric hospital in Canton Vaud affiliated with the University of Lausanne. In 1920, Corbaz was transferred to the Rosière asylum in Gimel, east of Lausanne, where she remained until the end of her life. The untitled work by Corbaz (who is better known simply as “Aloïse”) seen here was made between 1941 and 1945; a private collector donated it to the Collection de l’Art Brut in 2017. Like the majority of works produced by this creator, it depicts a couple in an embrace, but the degree of sensuality and eroticism conveyed in this representation is particularly strong. Here, not only does the female figure have luxurious long hair and an opulent red cape with ermine border but she also wears a very décolleté dress that reveals a glimpse of her generous bosom. As for the man, he is depicted, as is often the case, in black boots – one of the recurring attributes of masculine figures in Aloïse’s work. He appears to be naked; she did not dress him in his usual soldier’s uniform. The lovers have almond-shaped, blue eyes, without pupils, which are some of the main characteristics of the look of Aloïse’s subjects. The color red prevails in this composition, symbolising love. In the upper left-hand corner, one sees an organ and its keyboard – a reminder of a time when the artist took singing lessons with the organist of the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Lausanne. In the hollow of the red cape, Aloïse has drawn a man and a woman with a child. As is often the case, she has written a caption, which says, “Gürtelrose, Marie Louise Stuart, Sirène Louksor dans les Rubens fiançailles, Vierge de Séville bébé” (“Gürtelrose, Marie Louise Stuart, Luxor Siren in the Rubens marriage-engagement period, Virgin of Seville baby”). [Editor’s note: The German word “Gürtelrose” means “shingles”.] This drawing makes tangible the fantasy love that Aloïse felt for German Emperor Wilhelm II, most notably by way of its marriage or engagement and maternity themes, as well as that of the passionate love that guided all of Aloïse’s artistic production.

Sarah Lombardi is the director of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. RAW VISION 100

MASTERWORKS

he reclusive Chicago artist and author, Henry Darger (1892–1973), spent most of his childhood in orphanages and evidently was profoundly and permanently affected by this traumatic institutional upbringing. The posthumous

discovery of this devoutly Roman Catholic hospital janitor’s visionary work led him to become to be renowned as one of America’s greatest masters in the field of so-called self-taught art. He is best known for the epic panoramas he created after 1940 using carbon-traced images, watercolour and collage; in fact, many were painted on the reverse sides of reconfigured smaller works he had executed a decade earlier. Typically, Darger would join several older works together to form a diptych or triptych, then flip them over and paint a long scene on their blank reverse sides. Despite the majesty of these newer, sometimes eleven-foot-wide vistas, the older two-, three- and occasionally four- or five-panel works on the recto sides often seem to suggest deliberate narratives. In terms of their violent action and recognisable characters, the earlier works are thematically more connected than the later works to scenarios in Darger’s 15,000-page manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

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HENRY DARGER: Are unsuccessivly attacked by glandelinians and narrowly escape capture, circa 1930–40, collage, graphite, carbon, watercolour and pencil on paper, 19 x 24 in. / 48.26 x 60.96 cm, collection of Robert A. Roth

As with many of Darger’s multi-panel works, the piece reproduced above can be read from left to right or from right to left. The far-right panel’s text says, “THEY GET LOST IN THE WILDERNESS IN THE DARK THEY ARE NOT SCARED THOUGH.” Darger depicts the seven Vivian siblings, the heroines of The Realms of the Unreal..., and their honourary sister, Gertrude Angeline, disguised in grey Glandelinian garb, against a pitch-black sky that can be glimpsed through the branches of ghostly trees. The girls’ blond hair and yellow skirts, as well as their red socks and collars, stand out against the dark, sombre background. Their spying adventure is about to begin. In the middle panel (“THEY FLEE FROM A STRANGE FIRE PHENOMENON At Collis Junction”), the little spies flee from a fire set by the godless Glandelinians (a common occurrence in The Realms of the Unreal...). In the yellow flames floats the spirit of a martyred child slave. On the far left (“Are unsuccessivly [sic] attacked by glandelinians and narrowly escape capture”), the Vivian sisters engage in heavy combat against Glandelinian soldiers. Above them, five mutilated child slaves hang from nooses tied to a long tree branch, some apparently still alive. Still, Darger assures us, the grisly culmination of the Vivian Girls’ spying expedition will result in their safe getaway.

Michael Bonesteel is the author of Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings (Rizzoli, 2000).

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ART WITHOUT ARTISTS French environments such as the Palais Idéal and Picassiette are well known, but Bruno Montpied’s inventory of French spontaneous environments reveals hundreds more creations across the country BRUNO MONTPIED

André Pailloux (b. 1943), in front of his garden bristling with colourful reels, with his bike loaded with assemblages, Olonne-sur-Mer in Vendée (Pays de la Loire)

here is a rich tradition of outsider environments in France, often in rural areas. Some of the environments no longer exist, but many are still standing; the oldest are over 200 years old, while others are still under construction. Over 300 such sites and their autodidactic creators feature in the book Le Gazouillis des Éléphants (“The Chirping of Elephants”). All of the sites were built with no expectation of 72

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recognition or profit. Many of the creators started their projects after retiring, while others exist on the margins of French society; the majority had no artistic training or significant contact with art and culture other than through advertising and mass media. Any reference to art history is diffused and distant, and the techniques used often derive from the creators’ original occupations. Since the 1960s, there have been several French

André Hardy’s (1921–2013) polychrome cement statues, showing an Andalusian figure and various animals, Saint-Quentin-des-Chardonnets (Orne, Normandy)

Roger Lemière, gorilla with snake statue in cement, Lamasquère (Haute-Garonne, Midi-Pyrénées); since destroyed

books on autodidactic builders and sculptors whose work is naive or brut. However, these books have only covered about 40 French sites, and have typically featured artists such as Ferdinand Cheval (1836–1924), Raymond Isidore Picassiette (1900–1964) and Abbé Adolphe-Julien Fouré (1839-1910) – for example, Les Inspirés et leurs Demeures (“The Inspired and their Homes”) by Gilles Ehrmann, with its preface by André Breton. By contrast, Le Gazouillis des

René Escaffre’s (1921–2008) statue of a mason (the profession of the creator), cement, Roumens, Lauragais (Haute-Garonne, Midi-Pyrénées)

Éléphants features many more artists and highlights the work of ordinary people, focussing on creators who were rural workers or craftsmen. Their art has unfolded beyond the beaten track, outside the commercial world and outside the codes of scholarly art. They are not necessarily people who articulate their thoughts and theories verbally – their silence allows their work to reveal the unspoken. Many of the creators have taken RAW VISION 100

Yves Floc’h, Windmills, masks and whirligigs 2012, Normandy

up the tools of their former profession and began to carve or erect a pictorial message to the world in their own immediate environment. These non-conformist environments created by regular people originate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when individualistic consciousness emerged among artisans in France. The creations show traces that they are descended from the mansions and princely parks of the Ancien Régime in the eighteenth century, through the medieval-style properties of the nineteenth century, to the gardens and housing estates of working people in the twentieth century. The naive and eccentric creations 74

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found along the roadside were not realised out of nothing. The authors of these open-air works have a wealth of rural folk art, both secular and religious, around them from which to take influence. Some have referenced the official ‘professional’ art in the squares of towns and villages, creating naive, polychrome, cement alternative versions. In recent times, there has also been the influence of regional and national media, particularly television. Creative common people use materials that are within their reach and cost them nothing. They are surrounded by mass culture, and sometimes behave towards it like predators, seizing it and shaping it for a new use that suits their whims. They take

Joseph Donadello (b. 1927), statues representing various characters, some from mainstream culture, Saiguède (Haute-Garonne, Midi-Pyrénées)

left: Bernaud Aubert, heads of Kennedy and De Gaulle, Maine-et-Loire, 2009 below: André Morvan, sculptures from his orchestra, made from tree trunks and branches, Ploemel (Morbihan, Bretagne)

objects, pictures and trinkets that are “kitsch”, sometimes popularising cultural icons, creating new relationships between these images. Popular outdoor creation in the space of everyday life is “art without artists”. The Czech-American architect and social historian Bernard Rudofsky wrote, in his book of the same name, about there being “architecture without architects” in traditional vernacular urbanism. Indeed, creators of such populist architecture are not recruited from professional artists. Their art arises naturally, almost unnoticed. However, making works visible from the road implies an underlying desire to be noticed – but it is not an invitation for the passer-by to invade

the environment. There are exceptions to this though... André Morvan arranged statues around the terrace of his Bar du MontSalut in Ploemel. A former carpenter, he utilised tree stumps and branches that had suggestive forms to create Arcimboldo-esque arrangements, with striking results. In an interview with Marc Décimo around 1999, Morvan, said, “I collect pieces of wood and I fix them with nails to form animals and people. Keeping them under the sun, the wood would eventually crack, so I scorch and oil them. What guides me? These are often images seen in newspapers.” The site was active until 2013, with commercial signs drawing passing motorists into the bar, and the RAW VISION 100

EXHIBITIONS

Norimitsu Kokubo

Yoshihiro Watanabe

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ART BRUT JAPONAIS II Halle Saint Pierre, 2 Rue Ronsard, 75018 Paris, France September 8, 2018 – March 10, 2019 Eight years after its first successful show of Japanese art brut works, the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris has filled two floors with new discoveries and new artistic languages. It includes the return of ceramicist Shinichi Sawada, with his advanced styles of working in clay and in paper. Sawada has received much recognition since the first show, with his ceramics appearing at the Venice Biennale in 2013. Curators Martine Lusardy and Mizue Kobayashi realised this exhibition after months of selecting and gathering the featured works. Coming from workshops or working independently, the creators, often confronted with mental or social isolation, use varying techniques and materials, sometimes even bypassing the most traditional models of ceramics or origami. One such artist is Yoshihiro Watanabe, whose works feature twice in the exhibition. Watanabe can only construct his artworks for a period of two weeks each year when the oak leaves are just right – too wet and they will not hold, too dry and they will crack. His small origami creatures (oriha means folded leaves in Japanese), including elephants and mice, were only recognisable as dry leaves on closer inspection, so it is recommended that you look at these original creations up close! The works on view are compelling, intriguing and remarkable. A major coup here is Norimitsu Kokubo’s eightmetre long drawing (from memory) of everyday life in a city. 78

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With a disregard for traditional perspectives, Kokubo draws on the paper from all directions, so that the work can be viewed from a multitude of stances. You could easily be absorbed for hours in Kokubo’s take on the world with his very distinctive style of drawing. One of the larger installations downstairs, draped from floor to ceiling, showcases Kazu Suzuki’s unique, colourful weavings created using a loom. Suzuki only makes three of these a year due to the time it takes to create his art and his dislike of rushing. This form of re-working pieces features quite heavily in the works of many self-taught artists across the world, but the lighting and installation really enhance this piece, reminiscent of the Museum of Everything’s Judith Scott show of 2011 in London. Works in pencil and crayon by Yasuhiro Kobayashi depict simple, graphic drawings of the Sapporo city skyline. Opposite to the usual building up of a picture over time, Kobayashi stripped back layers of his skyline over a number of years. This makes for an interesting view, leaving you with a time-lapsed portrait of a diminishing city. I am disappointed not to have seen its first outing eight years ago, but this exhibition shows the real depth of work still created within the self-taught field in Japan, and these artists deserve the recognition they are starting to receive within the outsider and contemporary art fields. The accompanying catalogue features texts in French and English, and is worth purchasing for the images alone. Jennifer Gilbert

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Rudi Bodmeier

Miodrag Pavlovic

EXHIBITIONS

John Dunkley

RUDI BODMEIER Innocence Galerie ART CRU, Oranienburger Str. 27, 10117 Berlin, Germany November 23, 2018 –January 12, 2019 On entering Rudi Bodmeier’s exhibition at Galerie ART CRU, we are greeted by a motley crew of figures who, from a distance, present themselves as a cartoonish assortment of buxom female forms. Upon closer inspection, we find each figure distinct in character; their assigned roles conveyed through costumes and accoutrements. Four separate groups of these laminated cut-outs, ranging between 40 and 60 centimetres in height and confidently executed in black marker and coloured pencil, form the main part of the exhibition with the gallery’s walls providing the setting for their drama. Amongst Bodmeier’s cast, we meet players such as Die Eitle Froschkoenigen (The Vain Frog Queen) and Reiterin Frau Pferd (Rider Mrs. Horse). In this world, realism is abandoned for exaggeration and theatre, and at times this strangeness can be unsettling and overwhelming. Crocodile nurses confront us with a dissonance, by showing a dangerous reptile inhabiting the uniform of a caring professional. Anthropomorphic elements continue throughout the work and inanimate objects, becoming entangled with the human female form to create odd hybrids reminiscent of the wildest visions of Hieronymus Bosch. Wine bottles, chairs, church steeples and shower heads present themselves as human appendages. Many of their poses are reminiscent of vintage pinups or show-girls, but their female attributes are often altered and mutated; we find multibreasted females, elongated breasts peeping out from an underskirt and fierce metal studded nipples which imbue these uncanny fantasies with unnerving characteristics. These works on display at Galerie ART CRU are just a small selection of Rudi Bodmeier’s significant artistic output, which for many years he was forced to keep a 82

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clandestine endeavour. With such a rich practice, hopefully this is the beginning of their break-out and that we’ll see a lot more of Bodmeier’s bizarre interspecial creatures. Sheena Malone

JOHN DUNKLEY: NEITHER DAY NOR NIGHT and PAA JOE: GATES OF NO RETURN American Folk Art Museum, New York October 30, 2018 – February 24, 2019 The self-taught painter and sculptor John Dunkley (1891-1947) is regarded as one of the key figures in a group of innovative autodidacts known as the “Jamaican Intuitives”, a label that was first used to identify them in the late 1970s by the late David Boxer, an art historian and artist who served for many years as the director and chief curator of the national art museum in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. Today, most of the members of the definitive generations of the Jamaican Intuitives, whose works Boxer studied and promoted, are deceased. Organised by the independent curators Diana Nawi and Nicole Smythe-Johnson (who is Jamaican) and originally presented at the Pérez Art Museum Miami last year, this exhibition is the first of its kind to be shown outside Dunkley’s homeland. Boxer the main essay in its catalogue. In it, he explains that little is known about Dunkley’s early life. He did spend time working in Central America and returned to Jamaica in the 1930s, opening a barbershop in Kingston. His work was later discovered by cultural figures who regarded it as an authentic expression of Jamaican identity. With their evocations of the fecund earth and enigmatic nocturnal scenes, Dunkley’s mixed-media paintings on cardboard or wood panels suggest affinities with the dream-influenced, modernist, Surrealist images. Dunkley depicts plants as lush, living, mysterious growths in a world filled with procreative energy and primordial powers.

His carvings in Jamaica’s indigenous wood, lignum vitae, or in mahogany, portray the rural folk he knew. AFAM is also presenting large-scale architectural models of old castles and forts that still exist on Africa’s west coast. Made by the artist Paa Joe (born 1947), from Ghana, they refer to places that were once used in the European gold trade and as way stations for Africans who were sent as slaves to the Americas during the colonial era. This exhibition has been organised by AFAM’s curator, Valérie Rousseau. Edward M. Gómez

20th COLONY OF NAIVE and MARGINAL ART Museum of Naive and Marginal Art, Jagodina, Serbia November 12, 2018 – January 20, 2019 For the last twenty years the Serbian Museum of Naive and Marginal Art has organised a ten day working vacation for outsider and self-taught artists. Held in the Serbian mountain resort of Zlatibor, a holiday village is transformed into an art colony with the works produced being added to the permanent collection at the museum. Artists attending in recent years have included Julia Sisi from France/Argentina, Raymond Morris from Britain and Samaneh Atef Derakhshan from Iran who joined with Serbian artists, sharing their experiences of creativity. This year artists included Daniel Concalves from Portugal whose intense geometric compositions are gaining international attention, Marc Bourlier from France whose wooden constructions bristle with little figures and Anuj Saini, Nek Chand’s son from India who made a statue from local waste materials. One of the Serbian artists to take part was Miodrag Pavlovic, one of the last painters in the country working in the charming classic naive style once so prevalent in the Balkan countries. John Maizels

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BOOKS

L’ART BRUT Citadelles & Mazenod, Paris Edited by Martine Lusardy with contributions from Michel Thévoz, Maria Azzola, Deborah Couette, Marc Décimo, Thomas Roeske, Lauren Danchin, Randall Morris, Gustavo Giacasa, Lucienne Piery et al. ISBN 978-2-85088-762-8 With almost 600 pages and a price tag of €200, this opulently illustrated tome with a host of international writers covering different aspects of art brut and outsider art must be the most extravagant book yet produced on the subject. The standard of reproduction is superb, almost overpowering, as the different sections cover many aspects of the field. Thévoz’ introduction, The Birth of a Notion gives the background to Dubuffet’s concept while Décimo provides the main historical narrative covering psychiatric, popular and mediumistic creations and Piery covers the development of Dubuffet’s Collection de l’Art Brut. An essay by the late Laurent Danchin compares the work of psychiatric patients with that of mediums and unique individualists while Couette covers the great collections and Lusardy presents a long chapter examining folk art and outsider art in the USA. Other sections in this massive book cover world environments (by this reviewer), while Randall Morris looks at the spiritual basis for much for the work of the African diaspora its contrast with that of the European heritage. Giacasa surveys the most well known of disability art studios, from Gugging to Creative Growth, while Azzola writes on the important role of language and writing in so many works. Thomas Roeske looks at the theories and context of the personal mythologies that many artists create. The text is in French but the strength of this book lies in its visual impact. Meanwhile, the publisher is looking at the possibility of producing an English-language version. John Maizels 84

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„...TROTL BIN ICH NICHT”: Kreatives Schaffen in der Landesheilanstalt Salzburg 1849-1969 Elisabeth Telsnig, author; Oskar Dohle, Ulrike Feistmantl, E. Telsnig, editors; Land Salzburg, Austria, 2018 ISBN 978-3-9503422-8-4 Published in German by the government archive of the Austrian state of Salzburg, this book, whose title means “I am not an idiot” or “I am not a fool”, offers a fascinating look into the personal files of patients who were treated at the staterun psychiatric hospital in the city of Salzburg from 1849 through 1969. Written by Elisabeth Telsnig, an art historian who has worked with mentally and physically disabled persons, and written extensively about the Austrian art brut creator Josef Hofer, it summarises a years-long project that she oversaw, in which she and a team of researchers combed through 27,800 patient files. In 153 of them, they discovered drawings, writings, sheets of mathematical calculations, and elegant oddities like the pieces of found, printed paper, covered in plain-pencil handwriting, that “Female Patient 18” had produced, probably in the early 20th century, employing a cursive script she invented herself. ...Trotl bin ich nicht examines such productions by more than fifty patients. As Telsnig pointed out at a panel discussion at the 2018 Outsider Art Fair Paris this past October, at which she presented this new book, one of its functions turns out to be the way in which it helps us understand how what were once regarded as the unclassifiable, incomprehensible creations of mentally ill persons, when considered from an aesthetic point of view, can be appreciated as examples of art brut — or, without being so labelled, simply for their enduring, enigmatic character, whose secrets, she noted, may never be known. Edward M. Gómez

AUTOSAIDO JAPAN (OUTSIDE JAPAN) Nobumasa Kushino, East Press, Tokyo, Japan, 2018 ISBN 978-4-7816-1713-8 C0070 Nobumasa Kushino, a gallery owner based in Fukuyama, in southwestern Japan, is one of the most active promoters of works made by self-taught artists and creative types living in spirit — or in actual circumstances — on the margins of Japanese society. His books reflect the wide-ranging scope of his interests and of what he is willing to label “outsider” in a particularly Japanese context. Some of the individuals he examines might more precisely be described as “mavericks” or “eccentrics” by nonJapanese observers rather than as “outsider artists” per se. Several of his subjects assemble found or cast-off materials to decorate the exteriors or interiors of buildings. More interesting are those like the older artist known as “Strange Knight”, who lived reclusively north of Tokyo. Before his recent death, he had made thousands of colourful masks. He always wore a mask when he went out. Kushino also examines psychologically intense, ink-on-paper drawings of faces made by the artist Shinko; wildly decorated fantasy vehicles crafted by Sendan Joshomaru and by Ryuichi Maruo; an irregularly shaped concrete form the autodidact builder Keisuke Oka is erecting in a Tokyo neighbourhood; and a scraggly, rocky structure the outsider Takashi Yoha oversees in Okinawa, in the far south of the country. Kushino calls Yoha “the Japanese Cheval”, alluding to Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924), the postman who built the Palais Idéal out of stones in southeastern France. Kushino shows that, in Japan, peculiar artistic expressions abound on the margins of mainstream, conformityminded society and culture. Edward M. Gómez