Raw Vision 110 by Raw Vision

RAWVISION110 SPRING 2022

EDITOR John Maizels BOARD of DIRECTORS Chairman: Bob Roth Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Frank Maresca, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Rosenthal ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels ASSISTANT EDITOR Mariella Landolfi FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger ADVERTISING MANAGER Susan Hirschhaut PRODUCTION EDITOR Aoife Dunphy ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P Borum, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernández, Paul Laster, Allison Meier, 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

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RAW NEWS The latest outsider art events, plus fond farewells

THE BEER CAN HOUSE A shining metallic creation catches the eye in a Houston street

NICK BLINKO An extract from the artist’s book delves into his ink drawings

EVA DI STEFANO A Sicilian journal spreads the word about the island’s outsider art

BEN WILSON Tiny chewing-gum paintings and huge wood sculptures by this Brit

DANIEL JOHNSTON Meaningful art and music by a creative powerhouse

PETER BUCH A whimsical, witty world tucked away on a Spanish mountainside

ZNUI Correspondence courses in 1900s Russia led to wealth of art brut

BOGOSAV ŽIVKOVIĆ An environment carved from the wood and stone of rural Serbia

BRITISH FOLKLORE A rich history of rituals and traditions recorded in oil paintings

RAW CLASSICS Autobiographical themes within an intriguing Bill Traylor work

REVIEWS A look around the most recent outsider exhibitions

GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE Details of notable international venues

ISSN 0955-1182

COVER IMAGE: John Milkovisch, The Beer Can House, Houston, Texas, photo: Larry Harris

Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) March 2022 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, and distributed in the USA by ePost Global, 18 Central Boulevard, South Hackensack NJ 07606. Periodicals postage paid at South Hackensack NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Raw Vision c/o 18 Central Blvd, South Hackensack NJ 07076

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.

MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS

BEST DESIGN MEDIA AWARD

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD

WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE

UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD

Jenenne Whitfield

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NEW DIRECTOR AT AVAM American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) in Baltimore has announced that Jenenne Whitfield will succeed Founding Director and Primary Curator, Rebecca Hoffberger. “We are so proud and delighted to have attracted as our new director such a devoted and credentialled artistic leader as Jenenne Whitfield who will now lead the American Visionary Art Museum forward and build on the indelible legacy of Founding Director, Rebecca Hoffberger," says Christopher Goelet, AVAM Board Chair. “Jenenne’s long tenure with the Heidelberg Project, one of our nation’s most respected mission-driven artistic endeavours, is a testament to her commitment to enliven local communities and give voice to the concerns of our day through original and inspired artistic expression, also core to AVAM’s mission.” Whitfield is currently the President and CEO of the Heidelberg Project (HP) in Detroit, and has worked with the outdoor artistic organisation for 28 years. Under her direction, HP (founded by Tyree Guyton) has come to be regarded as one of the most influential art environments in the world. She has extended its reach by participating in joint projects with museums, universities and other organisations throughout the world and, under her leadership, HP has collected over 27 awards, locally, nationally and internationally. Whitfield will formally commence her new role with AVAM in September. www.avam.org

CREATIVE GROWTH AT KOHLER

PRIMACHENKO PAINTINGS LOST IN UKRAINE CONFLICT Within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum – located about 50 miles north of Kyiv – was shelled and destroyed. The museum housed a significant collection of works by folk artist Maria Primachenko (1909–1997) who was born and lived in the nearby village of Bolotnya and was one of Ukraine's most prominent and beloved twentieth-century creators. Although 25 Primachenko paintings were lost, it is understood that ten were saved by a local man who ran into the burning building. The largest collection of Primachenko’s art is at the National Folk Decorative Art Museum at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra (The Kyiv Monastery of the Caves), a UNESCO World Heritage Site which, at the time of writing, is also under threat. 4

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The Threat of War

John Martin, photo: Ryan Whelan

May 21, 2022 – May 2023 Creative! Growth! is the first exhibition to consider the history of Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. Held at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, it will be guest curated by Matthew Higgs. Creative Growth is the preeminent centre for artists with disabilities in the USA and has become a model for similar centres nationally and internationally. The exhibition will consider the organisation’s history and legacy through the lens of the present. There are a number of discrete solo presentations by key artists who were – or remain – affiliated with Creative Growth, including Judith Scott, Dwight Mackintosh, William Scott, Dan Miller, Monica Valentine, Tony Pedemonte, Nicole Storm and John Martin. JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS CENTER 608 New York Ave, Sheboygan, WI 53081, USA www.jmkac.org

Kantonale Irrenanstalt Waldau, patient at the open door of the “Varek cell” ( Varek = seaweed)

R AW N E W S FOUNTAIN HOUSE GALLERY

Miguel Colón

until Jun 15 In The Nude as Landscape, the unclothed human figure is explored as it relates to the wider natural world. In what manner do a body's textured folds of skin, muscles, wrinkles and scars call forth associations with elemental manifestations such as rivers, clouds, trees, hills and valleys? In this thought-provoking exhibition, the artists of Fountain House Gallery, working in a variety of mediums and styles, investigate the mystery of the body and its connection with mythical or actual expressions of nature. FOUNTAIN HOUSE GALLERY 702 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY 10019, USA www.fountainhousegallery.org

PRINZHORN COLLECTION

GALERIE ATELIER HERENPLAATS until May 28 The classical music ensemble Domestica, from the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, have selected six artists who have inspired them from the Galerie Atelier Herenplaats studio. Works by Livia Dencher, Monique Bouman, Reginald Drooduin, Jeroen Pomp, Antoine Monod de Froideville and Brenda van Vliet will be shown next to videos in which the musicians play alongside the artwork, in an exhibition titled Sound & Color. GALERIE ATELIER HERENPLAATS Schietbaanstraat 1, 3014 ZT Rotterdam THE NETHERLANDS www.herenplaats.nl

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Jeroen Pomp

until Jul 31 Behind Walls: Photography in Swiss Psychiatric Institutions from 1880 to 1935 poses such sociopolitical questions as: What messages did the medium of photography convey? Are mental illnesses visible in photographs? Were patients asked for their consent? The exhibition is supplemented by works from the Prinzhorn Collection,which reflect everyday life in mental institutions around the year 1900 from the perspective of patients, as well as works created in corresponding Swiss institutions. PRINZHORN COLLECTION Voßstraße 2, 69115 Heidelberg, GERMANY www.prinzhorn.ukl-hd.de

Walla, Tischtuch

R AW N E W S GALERIE GUGGING until Jun 12 In its new exhibition MELLITIUS.!, galerie gugging presents a selection of works by renowned Gugging artist August Walla, dedicated to his passion for food. Walla is one of the most internationally renowned art brut artists and this show promises exciting rarities from the great master of colour. For Walla, everything he used in life – such as oil cans, books and milk cartons – was also working material. Food-inspired works by Gugging artists Alois Fischbach, Helmut Hladisch, Heinrich Reisenbauer, Gunther Schutzenhöfer and Oswald Tschirtner are also displayed. GALERIE GUGGING Am Campus 2, A-3400 Maria Gugging, AUSTRIA www.galeriegugging.com

ART BRUT AT LILLE MÉTROPOLE until Dec Marcus Eager and Michel Nedjar recently donated almost 300 works by 47 art brut artists to the LaM. The two collectors selected works by creators who already figure in the collection, in order to complete ensembles, as well as works by artists emblematic of present-day art brut but previously absent from the Museum’s collection. It is these works, generously donated to the LaM between 2016 and 2017, that the show Planètes brutes. Marcus Eager et Michel Nedjar, globe-trotteurs and donors presents and brings into dialogue with pieces long present in the Museum’s collection. Featured artists include Guyodo, Miroslav Tichy, Claire Teller, Pierre Petit and Johnson Weree. LAM – LILLE MÉTROPOLE MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE, D’ART CONTEMPORAIN ET D’ART BRUT, 1 allée du Musée, 59650 Villeneuve d’Ascq, FRANCE www.musee-lam.fr

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Johnson Weree

Walla, SEMMELN

Meanwhile, a new galerie gugging has opened in Marco Simonis Bastei10, a café in central Vienna. The first exhibition – Human, Table and Chair – runs until June and includes works by Oswald Tschirtner, August Walla, Heinrich Reisenbauer, Arnold Schmidt and Leopold Strobl amongst others. www.marcosimonis.com/bastei-10

THE BEER CAN HOUSE A beer-loving Houston man used his empties to create a local landmark of beauty and renown PETE GERSHON

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above: a tin sign on a wall in The Beer Can House says it all opposite: street-facing signage spreads a positive message and shows the house number, 222, in Roman numerals below: The Beer Can House is on a regular residential road

all photos: Larry Harris, unless otherwise stated

hen there’s a breeze, you can hear it before you can see it, as you head north on Malone Street in Houston’s west end. A gentle metallic tinkling. Pleasant. Then you see it – an otherwise unremarkable mid-century bungalow sandwiched between monstrous, three-story town houses. Except this bungalow seems to be heavily draped in Christmas tree tinsel. But closer up, you see that it is decorated entirely in beer cans. It is The Beer Can House. Starting in 1968, when he was 56, until just before his death in 1988, John Milkovisch covered his garden with intricately decorated concrete, and clad his house in an armour of flattened aluminum cans. He linked the

leftover rims with wire hooks and hung them like chain mail curtains from the gabled roof, and surrounded the plot with a picket fence studded with glass marbles that allowed sunlight through, creating an iridescent glow. Milkovisch was an upholsterer who worked on railroad cars, a practical man who decorated his house intuitively on his days off and after his retirement. He told anyone who asked about his creation that he did it because he hated mowing the lawn and painting the house. But he loved to drink beer – whatever was on special. A pop culture icon for over 30 years, The Beer Can House is now owned and maintained by The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art in Houston, and – since

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above and opposite: garlands of beer can lids hang from the gables and eaves of the house, while flattened empties cover the walls

“The art students come here and call it art – but I say ‘no way’.” 14

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a meticulous restoration ending in 2008 – it is open to the public most weekends. Before cutting an orange ceremonial ribbon festooned with can tops, Mayor Bill White declared The Beer Can House to be an example of Houston’s “fun, quirky alter-ego to the high-architecture downtown skyline”, adding that “often what some regard as strange at the time, turns out to be the most memorable aspect of a city or culture.” “The art students come here and call it art,” Milkovisch told The Houston Post in 1980. “But I say ‘no way’.” Inside, the house has been converted into a tiny museum displaying his early experiments with beer cans, his work bench and his customised tools. Appliquéd words on a wall, show his attitude to his work: “This curtain idea is just one of those dreams in the back of my noodle.” Born in 1912, John Martin Milkovisch left school after eighth grade and went to work at an upholstery business downtown. He lived with his parents until he married Mary Hite in 1940, and the couple moved into a small, gabled bungalow that Milkovisch’s father had built two blocks away at 222 Malone Street. Milkovisch bought the house in 1942 and lived there for the rest of his life. For decades, the house and household were pretty typical of the blue-collar neighbourhood. By 1968, Milkovisch had paid off his mortgage and used some of the extra money to buy a metal patio

cover to shade the back garden. The heat of the Houston summer can be withering, and a man needs a cool spot to sit, relax and sip a beer (Milkovisch always had at least a half-dozen cases on hand). For a solid floor beneath the awning, he arranged painted concrete paving slabs and filled the spaces between with poured cement, into which he embedded marbles in starburst patterns. He followed suit with a curved sidewalk leading from the patio to the driveway and to the backdoor of the house, embedding it with concrete rocks in shades of brown and black, as well as bricks, shells, wire mesh, bits of broken glass and chipped ceramic, and hundreds of marbles. By 1972, virtually every inch of the property was covered with decorated concrete, all the way to the curb. Like many who lived through the Depression, he was loath to throw anything away. “While I was building the patio, I was drinking the beer,” Milkovisch told writer Joseph Lomax. “I knew I was going to do something with them aluminum cans because that’s what I was looking for.” (1) He estimated that he saved 17 years’ worth of cans, piling up bundles of them in the garage and attic. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when Milkovisch began working with beer cans as a decorative medium. A picture dated 1976 shows a quilt-like screen of Budweiser can labels forming an arch over the driveway. Two years later, a similar screen, flanked by can-top garlands or

NICK BLINKO’S UNIVERSE In a recent book on Nick Blinko, Colin Rhodes explores the carnivalesque world within the British artist’s intense drawings. Here Raw Vision publishes an edited extract

ick Blinko is first and foremost a visual artist. He has been drawing for as long as he can remember, and even the recorded releases of Rudimentary Peni, the anarcho-punk band he formed in 1980, are characterised as much by his images, including cover art, posters and booklets, as by his musical contributions. Blinko’s art is visually intense, characteristically consisting of crowded shallow picture spaces with countless figures and objects dredged, as it were, directly from the artist’s unconscious. His iconography speaks at once to history and the fluidity of time, and to the treachery of orthodoxy and ideology, as in works that point simultaneously

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to the established Church, cruelty and diabolical realms. A Blinko work is inevitably compelling and has a compulsive beauty that seems to pull in the attentive viewer like some hapless astronaut approaching a black hole. Looking at a single one of his drawings can feel like an obsession. But then these are obsessively wrought representations, crafted by a psyche that at times experiences the world in its raw, living and transformational state, in which birth, growth and destruction are mere facts, with neither moral order nor hope of redemption. When he is drawing, Blinko works continually, undaunted by the physical and mental strain caused by these marathon sessions. “I work

Counsel of Voices, 1986, 12 x 16.5 in. / 30 x 42 cm opposite: Mosaic Parasite, 1987, 10 x 10 in. / 26 x 25 cm all artwork: pen and ink on paper; courtesy: Henry Boxer Gallery

Crucified Mite, 2019, 17.5 x 12.5 in. / 45 x 32 cm

Untitled, (reproduced in the Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric album booklet), 1983, 10.5 x 12 in. / 27 x 30 cm

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Talon Hommonculi, (reproduced in the Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric album booklet), 1985–86, 11.5 x 12 in. / 29 x 31 cm

Each new viewer reactivates and recompletes the image through the act of looking.

long hours,” he says. “It can be 16, and I’ve notched up a few 18-hour days.” At such times, the hold of the outside world is tenuous and vague. The inner world of the picture is paramount. Because of his extraordinarily sensitive psychological antennae, Blinko has been hospitalised in the past and subjected to the “normalising” pharmacological regimes of contemporary psychiatric medicine. Yet, the artist’s need to make pictures is often stronger than the desire for any sense of wellbeing brought by therapeutic drugs that can also adversely affect his ability to work. “The periods of not working in otherwise productive times causes some anxiety,” he explains, “and not working due to meds is demoralising. I still make attempts, but they are slight and possibly worse than not working. Then other drawings begin to please, but they lack the repertoire of previous drawings.” In the pursuit of image-making, he is therefore prepared at times to forego medication and so risk total psychological exposure. Looking at Blinko’s work over the last four decades, it is of little surprise that the art that really excited and inspired him in his younger years was the kind of detailed, figurative nineteenth-century material that most modernists (though not, significantly, the likes of George Grosz or Max Ernst) had rejected in the early twentieth century. “I have an almanac, or really a year's worth of Punch magazine from the early twentieth century,” he says, “I got it at the beginning of my pen and ink endeavours.” This was still the great age of picture engraving in the mass media, before photographic reproduction marginalised that form, and Blinko remarks on the power of the different styles the volume contains. A great deal of Blinko’s imagery comes from the so-called “thumbnails” he has produced consistently over the years. He considers these to be in the category of “originals” to which he aspires, affording, as he puts it, “varying degrees of vigilance against contagion” from artistic influence. This is because the thumbnails are sheets of generative visual symbols noted down quickly as they erupt from the artist’s unconscious, as myriad collections of discrete image and text. Together the thumbnails constitute a resource from which Blinko is able to draw when compiling his artworks. These are not hallucinatory images, but more properly automatic, or unthinking, in the manner of surrealist techniques of abandoning conscious control in order to allow a

space for the unconscious to manifest. There are a number of qualities common to Blinko’s work. It is characteristically made using very fine nibbed ink pens that lend themselves to minute detailing. The scale of his works tends to be relatively small, with even the largest pieces being only around 60 cm in their longest dimension. However, because of the intensely packed detailed work they contain, they can feel monumental and even overwhelming to viewers as they get up close. Blinko’s tightly packed, shallow picture spaces exhibit a horror vacui (in art history, literally the filling of the whole of a picture surface with detail) similar to Medieval and Renaissance art, from the carpet pages of illuminated manuscripts to French engraver Jean Duvet’s apocalypse series from the 1550s. Horror vacui is also typically present in much visionary and mediumistic work, in which the overwhelming plenitude of the non-corporeal world imposes itself on the artist’s senses, as in some of the work of William Blake and much of the production of Madge Gill and Raphaël Lonné. It is also often a feature of outsider art, from Adolf Wölfli, Peter Meyer and Edmund Monsiel, to Johann Garber and Ben Augustus. There is, perhaps, a sense that the densely woven fabric of works such as Black Ice Cascade conceals as well as reveals. Space in images like these is entirely pictorial. It functions like some upended twodimensional object denying received ideas of pictures as metaphoric windows through which to view a scene in space. If we extend the metaphor, such works could also be seen as closing off the viewer’s access to the space behind the image; throwing a veil, as it were, before the void. Blinko’s creative work can be usefully addressed using the Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque”. Conceived in his critique of the work of the sixteenth-century French writer, François Rabelais, Bakhtin reached back to the Medieval European practice of Carnival, in which for a brief moment each year the strict feudal social order was cracked open. Carnival is a kind of communal performance that exists at the borders of life and art. It is characterised by excess, grotesqueness and the suspension of secular and religious order. As with Carnival, so with a Nick Blinko drawing. Every participant object in the work – including the artist himself, who is always necessarily the invisible participant-viewer inside the picture – exists

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OUTSIDERS FROM A SMALL ISLAND Based in Sicily, Osservatorio Outsider Art is the only Italian-language journal on the subject. Colin Rhodes talks to founder, Eva di Stefano

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CR: What led you to deciding to set up Osservatorio twelve years ago, and has the journey been easy? EdS: I believe it is a true miracle that we have reached this point. It was mainly due to the enormous passion for the subject of everyone involved. It hasn’t been easy, as our chequered publishing history shows. Initially, I also chose to link my teaching of History of Contemporary Art at the University of Palermo to the theme of outsider art, which I believe constitutes an important chapter in the history of twentieth-century visual culture, and which has been neglected above all in Italy. My passion for these creations began after some chance meetings with “unclassifiable” artists and an exciting visit to Lausanne’s Collection de l’Art Brut. My students and I conducted research in the field. We also committed to the protection of works otherwise destined to be lost or destroyed. The journal was a result of the activities of these young explorers of art on the margins. It started in 2010 as a bi-annual online journal on the university website, born of the desire to create a tool for bringing material together and disseminating critical knowledge in the field. The trust and collaboration of the Collection de l’Art Brut was fundamental for its growth, first with

opposite: covers and inside pages of Osservatorio; inset: Di Stefano in 2020, photo: Fabio Mantegna

then-director, Lucienne Peiry, and now with the current director, Sarah Lombardi. The support of great and generous scholars, like the late Roger Cardinal and Laurent Danchin, has also been important. However, the university world has not shown a lot of interest. When I retired in 2013, there was no chance of institutional continuity, so two ex-students founded a small publishing company, called Glifo, to keep the journal alive, including moving to a print version and covering its costs. This adventure lasted two years and four issues, but was not financially viable. Subsequently, I had the good fortune to find support in Palermo at the International Marionette Museum, a prestigious institution that originally came into being from a magnificent private collection of traditional puppets. It enjoys public funding and has its own publishing arm, and we have been co-publishing since 2015. It is a good solution that I hope will allow us to continue for the next twelve years! Why “outsider art” rather than “art brut”? Were you tempted to invent an Italian language equivalent? The main reason is that in the Italian language the term “brut” echoes “brutto” which means “ugly”. This affects

below: traditional Sicilian puppets at the Antonio Pasqualino International Puppet Museum, co-publisher, photo: Chiara Vaglica

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Filippo Bentivegna, detail of the Enchanted Castle (possibly The Mother Goddess), in Sciacca, 1920–1955, photo: Enzo Cucchiara

its reception and, in the past, has certainly been an obstacle to its spread. Besides, I find that the term “outsider art”, though today much debated, has a more contemporary flexibility and more immediate comprehensibility, in addition to being an international concept. Not to mention the fact that Italians generally love English terms! Is there a particular reason why Sicily might be a good place from which to publish the journal? During research, Sicily proved a particularly fertile territory for art brut, defined according to Dubuffet’s narrow criteria. We keep making new discoveries that we present in almost every issue of the journal. Sicily seems like a territory where eccentric and creative

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individuals still succeed in carving out their own clandestine space. This may owe something to Sicily’s mixture of the pre-modern and post-modern, with its still-living traditions enshrined in its material culture, and the survival of its ancient imaginings, exemplified in myths and archaeological sites, and a modern history of marginalisation and conflicted relationship with progress. Many of these artists have experienced uprooting and emigration, and draw on the heritage of popular culture, inventing individual creative solutions, no longer recognisable to the community at large. Another anthropologically interesting element, present in the work of various artists, is the tribute to a powerful and original female figure, an evocation of matriarchal energy, alluding to the myths and divinities

Patrizio Decembrino, Patrizio’s Chapel, in Sant’Angelo di Brolo, c. 1970s, painted concrete decorated with pottery, photo: Massimo Ricciardo

of archaic Sicily: the re-emergence of an archetypal symbol, rooted in the imagination of our island. For instance, one of the best-known artists Filippo Bentivegna – who made thousands of stone heads in his Enchanted Castle in Sciacca – conceived his work as a tribute to the Mother Goddess, considered by him as his bride and the lady of his stone people. Do you think Osservatorio has its own particular approach or character? I believe that one characteristic has been putting articles by young researchers alongside texts by well-known international experts, as an opportunity for growth. Another is interdisciplinarity, which I see as a necessary approach to this artistic phenomenon. You now offer a print-to-order version at a cost, but the journal is primarily a free online download. Why? Our main purpose is popularisation. Even charging a small fee for a download poses an obstacle. By contrast, free downloading grows continually, even if just as a result of curiosity. Many of the readers are students;

the number of degree dissertations on these themes in Italy is growing and our journal is a good reference tool. Tell me about the collaborations and projects that Osservatorio has been involved with. Do you see it as a broader project than just a journal? Since the beginning, the journal has set itself the task of activating the awareness and protection of outsider environments in Sicily, therefore acting beyond the pages. The other key commitment is disseminating the concepts of art brut and outsider art in Italy and bringing together the different parties. Osservatorio actively participates in the National Festival of Outsider Art, which started a few years ago almost covertly in a small place in Umbria. It is growing and is held annually in a different city, with the participation of a lot of specialised studios, starting with La Tinaia in Florence. What have been the highlights of Osservatorio’s first twelve years? Validating our local outsider heritage around the world has been one of our main aims. I believe we partly

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STOPPING TO LOOK An extract from a recent interview gives an insight into the life and work of London-based artist Ben Wilson, aka ‘The Chewing Gum Man’ DAVID CLEGG

Wilson in his home studio with his tile paintings in 2021

all photos: Thierry Bal, unless otherwise stated

DC: How did you start making art? BW: Both my father and mother were artists, so it’s in my blood. They encouraged me and my brothers and sisters to make art and take risks. I’d made huge clay pots at home since I was three. I'd used blocks of clay up to my waist. I loved the excitement of the activity – the life of it – pull it apart, put that bit on, see what happened. Then I got to school and they gave us a little bit of clay and said, “This is how you make a coil pot.” From that day at school, I was at odds with the education system.

road [in Barnet, North London]. I started a foundation course, but soon started making art next door in the grounds of an old theological college. Using materials I could find in the woods, I built an art environment. A huge wooden chair, a tower, a giant male figure, and a table about ten feet high, with a walkway connecting the various parts. No-one knew I was doing it – I was trying to let the work evolve out of the place. The head caretaker found me one weekend and there was mayhem. Eventually, the college decided enough was enough. Part of the reason my work survived there for so long was that it was hidden, though people discovered it and enjoyed it, children played on it. Over time, some people vandalised and burned it, though

Why did you decide to go to art school? It seemed a nice thing to do, and it was just up the

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Wilson with one of his huge wooden sculptures in Muswell Hill, London, in 2021, photo: David Clegg

some of the work lasted for years. I planted some new trees and it became a natural environment once more. Is there a philosophy behind your art making? I made a considered choice to work outside the system. I had friends who were into punk rock and I understood that – the anarchy movement, punk fanzines. That was a big movement, and I identified with it. Direct action is part of that, and I just wanted to make art. I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of creating art as a product – although, of course, that can create financial problems. I wanted to make art that had a social function. Something for and about people that was accessible and understandable without lots of heavy

theory. I liked that people discover the work, but it wasn’t up to me to say what they should make out of it. The next space I worked in was Hadley Wood in Barnet. Hadley Wood is ‘common ground’ so I didn’t have to get permission to work there. I could make sculptures and environments in the wood that people could just come across. How important is it for you to work with the materials that you find on the site? For me, it's about respecting a place. If you spend enough time in a place, it starts to tell you what to do. The chewing gum is already part of the environment, in the sense that I haven’t brought it in. When I started,

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Who is the Desperate Heart of Daniel Johnston?, 1994

all images: ink and marker on paper, 8.5 x 11 in. / 21.5 x 28 cm, courtesy: The Daniel Johnston Trust, unless otherwise stated

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Johnston, Dallas, 1998, photo: Ted Degener

US artist Daniel Johnston achieved cult status with his deeply personal and honest drawings and music PAUL LASTER

inger-songwriter and self-taught visual artist Daniel Johnston (1961–2019) was a cult figure both in the alternative music scene and the contemporary art world. He had a big, international following of admirers, some of them famous. An unlikely celebrity, Johnston produced art and music until his untimely death at the age of 58. He created prolifically, compulsively – drawings, album covers, collages, songs – pulling inspiration from all areas of popular culture, from comics to adverts, as well as from his own life experiences and related feelings. Born in Sacramento, California, Johnston grew up in New Cumberland, West Virginia, the youngest of five siblings. He recalled first making drawings in a cartoonish style when he was three years old, and then composing music from around the age of nine. As an adult, after experimenting with psychedelic drugs, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was then institutionalised intermittently for extended periods of time. In the documentary film My Dinner with Daniel (1988), Johnston says that he wasn’t really passionately into music until high school, when he discovered The Beatles and decided he wanted to be one. He identified with the character Sergeant Pepper because he led the Lonely Hearts Club Band. In a later interview, Johnston reflected on the onset of his mental illness, “When it happened in Junior High, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was a loner. I turned to art. I just went to the library and looked at books and listened to a ton of records. I just had to be alone, as if I was dead.” His 1978 drawing Sgt Pepper presents a dismembered head with a sardonic smile. After dropping out of college, Johnston went to live with his brother Dick in Houston and got a job

at Astroworld, a local amusement park. He would stay up all night writing songs in the garage, which drove Dick nuts. He wanted to send Johnston home to their parents, but his sister took him in – until he drove her nuts too. Before she could ship him home, he ran away, bought a moped and got a job at a concession stand selling corn dogs in a travelling carnival show. His family had no idea where he was. Johnston went on to draw Speeding Motorcycle (1984) in which a character speeds away from death – represented by two skulls – while pleading, “Get away from my life!”. The artist-musician first acquired a fan base in Austin, Texas, in the 1980s by handing out cassette tapes of his simple, heartfelt songs while working at McDonalds, and by performing at local indie music venues. His fame grew in 1985 when he appeared on MTV’s The Cutting Edge – a music programme featuring lesser-known acts – and considerably more when Nirvana's Kurt Cobain famously wore a t-shirt featuring Johnston’s drawing of a big-eyed frog, at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards. In 1985, two of his songs were included on the soundtrack of Larry Clark’s film Kids. The artist’s creative beginnings, rise to fame and ongoing struggles with mental illness were the subject of the 2006 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston which showed that music and art were the only true ways for him to express himself. While many of his songs were sad remembrances of unrequited love, his drawings usually revealed who he wanted to be or how he thought he was being treated. His obsessively produced, streamof-conscious pen and marker works were regularly exhibited, including in a group show at Dinter Fine Art in New York in 2005, solo shows at the Clementine Gallery

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Speeding Motorcycle, 1984

I Dream of Good Vs Evil, 1990, ink on paper

and the Whitney Biennial in New York both in 2006, and at the 2008 Liverpool Biennial in the UK. In 2021, the exhibition “Daniel Johnston: Psychedelic Drawings” was one of the main attractions at the New York Outsider Art Fair (OAF). Curated by Gary Panter – himself a respected artist and cartoonist – it was held at the Electric Lady Studios, the legendary sound recording studio used by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Kanye West, among others. Andrew Edlin, New York gallerist and Outsider Art Fair-owner, describes what caught his attention in Johnston’s work: “What I found most remarkable ... was that he was really unaffected – there was no pose – and I think that struck people as so refreshing. That is one of the most appealing things about outsider art. People see that it’s not pretentious; it’s not self-conscious.” Several of Johnston’s drawings in “Daniel Johnston: Psychedelic Drawings” feature Captain America, including the 1990 piece I Dream Of Good Vs Evil. In the 2003 short film, Daniel Johnston, a Superhero in Paris, Johnston says: “Captain America is my favourite superhero that I draw. I keep trying to draw Captain America. ... I’d like to be professional enough someday to be really great at drawing Captain America and draw for Marvel Comics. That’s my dream, but I know that I’m an amateur. I sell those drawings, though, and it’s unbelievable how much cash I can get. My music is zilch. I make no money from my songs, but I can make a drawing and it sells.” Lee Foster, manager partner of Electric Lady Studios and collector of Johnston’s work, says, “One thing that Daniel did very well, I think a lot of us as adults would lose, is that he could say ‘this is where it hurts’, and he wasn’t afraid of it. He wouldn’t avoid it or deflect. ... And that honesty comes through in everything he does. It’s very endearing. It’s very charming. It’s just very honest.” Much of Johnston’s hurt may have stemmed from the trauma and negativity he experienced when he

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Eternal Punishment!, 1985, ink on paper

was becoming an adult and only wanted to make music and draw comics, as well as later on at the hands of doctors and family members who kept him on medication and tried to control him and his obsessions. The drawing Hulk Will Smash (2000) depicts another of Johnston’s favourite superheroes, and in a 2007 documentary for the Domino Festival in Brussels, he says, “I would like to be the Incredible Hulk because no one could win against me and I’d smash them all and I think it would be a lot of fun.” In the drawing, Hulk says, “Hulk will smash! Hulk will smash!” And a man responds, “Where are you going to get food, Hulk?”“Where you going to get love?” says a woman. “You’ll never escape,” says an older man. “Who cares,” replies a wild-eyed rabbit. His 1980s drawing My Nightmares features what Johnston called the ‘evil eye’ and ‘flying eye’, which he started drawing in high school. In The Devil and Daniel Johnston, he says, “The evil eye sees everything that’s there, seeing even more than what’s there. It sees evil even when it’s not there.” Perhaps, brought up in a religious family, he felt – or was told – that the devil was responsible for a lot of his behaviour, that in reality was provoked by his mental illness. In the drawing, the evil eye says, “Hello Daniel. You’re nervous, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” And, lying in bed, he thinks, “They would kill me if I didn’t wake up in time.” Ducks, like the one in Strange But True (1997) are also a reoccurring theme in Johnston’s work. He referred to the birds as members of an army in a battle against Satan. Like Henry Darger, he was obsessed with the struggle between good and evil. While Darger had the Vivian Girls to fight that battle, Johnston had his ducks. In his 1998 drawing Ha, Ha, Ha, three of them, wearing superhero uniforms, stand together fearlessly laughing in the face of evil. Another frequent motif for the artist was ghosts, in particular Casper, the Friendly Ghost. In > page 49 several drawings – including his 1985

Hulk Will Smash, 2000

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PETER’S GARDEN A mountainside in eastern Spain is studded with hundreds of vibrant sculptures that reflect their maker’s profound relationship with the land

JO FARB HERNÁNDEZ

left: Head with a Dream, stones, paint, ceramic and terracotta tiles, over a structure of steel rods and wire-mesh (an infrastructure the artist used for many of his works) opposite: a figure of painted concrete decorated with broken tiles and topped with a terracotta jug

all photos: © Jo Farb Hernández

eter Buch was born in Frankfurt in September, 1938, as the Nazis consolidated their power over Germany. Soon, his leftist family, once relatively well-off, lost their wealth and social standing. Young Buch started school in the grim post-war years, but he was not a gifted student and quit by the age of 14 to work as a gardener. However, he was always interested in art and, a few years later, he enrolled in an art academy in Stuttgart to study painting. It did not go well, however; one teacher, demanding strict attention and self-restraint from his students, threw Buch out of the classroom due to his perceived lack of discipline, while a second insisted that the young artist should concentrate on acquiring technical skills rather than thinking creatively. By 21, Buch had had enough of art rules, and abandoned formal education for good. Heading for Paris to become a “famous artist” – a goal that he has long since abandoned – he took a variety of menial jobs that neither provided economic security nor served as an outlet for his creativity. He

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moved in with a girlfriend, worked as a house painter, did some travelling, and by the mid-1960s had fallen in love with the Spanish island of Formentera. The couple moved there in 1970. During this period, Buch painted for pleasure. He also built and carved the frames for his art, perhaps a precursor to an interest in sculpture. After a 1982 visit to California, which he later said inspired him to conjoin his life and art, he began experimenting with concrete, making sculptures of animals and figures. However, the response to this work was disappointing and he recalls selling just one piece during his time on the island. By 1985, once again single, Buch travelled to the mainland planning to buy property – land speculation on the islands had caused property prices to rise steeply, and those without large inheritances or steady incomes were being squeezed out. In the picturesque mountain village of Pobla de Benifassà, in the eastern sierras of Valencia’s Castelló province, he bought and then extensively renovated a house. He affixed

The figure (above) and two creatures (below, left and right) are examples of the whimsical, fantasy characters that populate Buch’s Garden

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The diverse scales and heights of the buildings and sculptures lead the visitor’s eye on a fascinating journey

bas-relief and tiled works to the walls and floors and installed sculptures and paintings, altering the property so radically that he challenged his neighbours’ ideas about what a living space could be. Buch also purchased an eight-acre parcel of hilly land outside of town, planning to garden among its scrub forests and abandoned grape and almond fields. However, for the next 19 years, he alternated his time between Formentera and Paris, only visiting Pobla de Benifassà occasionally, until 2007, when he moved there for good. Although aware of the mainstream contemporary art world, Buch pays it little heed, and is not up-to-date with trends and genres. He saw the architecture of Antoni Gaudí during an early visit to Barcelona, but at the time still considered himself a painter so was not inspired to work with similar materials. Instead, he credits his California trip with the redirection of his artistic endeavours, and now freely references not only Gaudí, but Ferdinand Cheval (Le Palais Idéal, France), Raymond Isidore (La Maison Picassiette, France), the gardens of Niki de Saint-Phalle (such as the Giardino del Tarocchi, Italy, and Queen Califa’s Magic Circle, California), and the sixteenth-century Sacred Forest of Bomarzo, Italy. But the rocky landscape of Pobla became his true inspiration, and from 1991 he began to boldly

transform the space with colour, form and texture. Buch finds much of his raw material on site, and uses the distinct properties of the different stones to create a diverse range of both purely aesthetic and aesthetically functional works. Integrating his artistic expression with the land’s topography, he started to create sculptures and buildings using the fantastic, imagistic vocabulary he had developed as a painter. Always improvising, he used simple shovels, picks and trowels to build up walls with rocks, adding earth and stones to set them and smooth out the shapes. He then covered the structures with concrete, ornamenting the surfaces with pieces of broken tiles that he found or that friends brought him. When the first building or two collapsed, he learned to add metal supports and chicken wire within the walls and roofs to improve durability and stability; newer works show no cracks or movement. Now, the artist buys big bundles of ceramic tiles and pallets of concrete blocks and terracotta bricks, as the rapid pace of his work requires much more material than he could find or scrounge. However, when possible, he purchases overstocks or seconds to reduce costs. The sculptor stresses that he never plans anything out: “That would be too boring,” he says. He prefers to work spontaneously, exploring a vague kernel of an

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THE AMATEUR AND THE UNDERGROUND Discredited by the state for anti-Soviet activity, a group of dissenting artists in the 1960s channelled their creative energy into the growth of Russian naïve art JAMES YOUNG and TATYANA SINELNIKOVA

n the decade following Stalin’s death in March 1953, a gradual cultural relaxation occurred in Russia, a brief period of artistic freedom. Of course, this in no way resembled the freedom available to Western artists who were at liberty to explore the personal and political within the psyche of the post-war period. Nonetheless, there seemed to be a softening of the autocratic structures that constrained Russian society, a culture where individual thought and expression had been comprehensively and ruthlessly suppressed. After the 1917 revolution, there was an intense push to create a new art for a new ideal society. The Socialist idea that personal leisure was an opportunity for people’s creativity was explored. It was the period of the avant garde, and this experimentalism extended to self-taught artists. Among the artistic intelligentsia there was great enthusiasm for the vivid and nonWesternised traditions of peasant culture. Many, like Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, believed the new proletarian art should be built on its foundations. In the 1920s and 1930s, the idea of art education by correspondence emerged. Russia is vast and there were not enough artists to produce propaganda art for the decoration of public spaces. At the Russian State House of Folk Art, correspondence courses in painting and graphics were devised. At first, no-one thought painting could be taught by correspondence but the initiative was a success. All sorts of people – workers, housewives, prisoners, from all over the country – received training. However, by 1934 – when the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution ‘On the restructuring of literary and artistic organisations’ – Socialist Realism became the only permissible ideological approach. Amateur artists were expected to conform to the subject matter and technique of professional artists who obeyed strict codes laid down by committee. Amateurism was not a means of self-expression as might be understood in the West, but part of an apparatus to create a new kind of human being, one whose consciousness had been ignited by communist ideals. Amateur art was strictly

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supervised. Titles of works by correspondence course graduates might include: A Working Group is Studying the Stalin Constitution; Young Lenin Listens to his Mother’s Piano; Comrade Stalin among Collective Farmers. After Stalin’s death, his successor Nikita Khruschev famously denounced the personality cult surrounding the dictator. Fissures seemed to be appearing in the cultural deep freeze. The “Thaw” had begun. By 1960, the correspondence courses for amateurs had become part of a new independent organisation: The People’s Free University of the Arts by Correspondence (ZNUI). In 1962, a group of avant-garde artists, believing the time to be right, put on an exhibition of contemporary painting exploring subject matter outside of the prevailing Soviet orthodoxy. When Khruschev saw “The New Reality” exhibition, he was appalled. He said to the artists: “Are you pederasts? ... What is hung here belongs in urinals ... It’s amoral ... Dog shit ... Art should ennoble the individual ... This is simply anti-Soviet.” Calling them “parasites”, he declared, “We are declaring war on you.” (Encounter magazine, London, April 1963). After such devastating criticism, the “New Reality” artists could not promote their work. A criminal law was passed against “parasitism”. They resorted to exhibiting in secret, perhaps for one afternoon in an apartment, and then disappearing. An underground movement had begun. In order to maintain some pretence of adherence to Soviet precepts, a few of the artists became teachers at ZNUI. And so a strange union of the underground and the amateur, the forbidden and the marginalised, gave birth to Russian naïve art. These art teachers did not want to tame the selftaught – on the contrary, they wanted to protect the amateurs’ individual vision. They believed that in every person there is a natural artist and that it was their job to help the students realise their capabilities. Education, in their opinion, could not be a systematic, step-by-step academic progression because intuitive, authentic creative integrity must not be dismembered. The teachers abandoned traditional exercises such as drawing geometric volumes and plaster

left: Ivan Egorovich Selivanov, Lion, 1957, watercolour, pencil and whitewash on paper, 13 x 16 in. / 34 x 41 cm, courtesy: Moscow Museum of Modern Art below, left: Pavel Petrovich Leonov, At the Factory, 1970s, oil on cardboard, 28 x 40.5 in. / 72 x 103 cm, courtesy: Moscow Museum of Modern Art below: Vasily Tikhonovich Romanenkov, The Birth of the World, 2004, pencil and felt-tip pen on cardboard, 18 x 30 in. / 46 x 76 cm, courtesy: Collection Bogemskaia – Turchin

cast anatomy. They believed that mechanical copying achieved nothing, deprived the subject of its soul and negatively affected the artists’ subsequent work. They told students to compose still-lifes from their everyday environment – mugs, spoons, pots, cereals – items that would later become the main subject matter of many of the non-conformist artists who founded Sots Art

(often called Soviet Pop Art). The underground teachers were proud of their method, however it was not widely adopted as it contradicted the entire system of Soviet education which was based on the principle of adherence to a single programme. Although many ZNUI students made unexceptional work, some – frequently social outsiders – possessed a

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THE GOLDEN BOUGH OF BOGOSAV ŽIVKOVIĆ On a remote piece of wooded land in Serbia is a magical garden filled with figures carved from wood and stone NINA KRSTIĆ

Živković in his atelier in Leskovac in 2003, photo: Mario del Curto

opposite: Untitled, 1961–1962, wood, 35.5 x 97 x 25.5 in. / 90 x 246 x 65 cm, photo: Arnaud Conne, courtesy: Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

hewing and shaping anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures. The birth of these forms in wood, and also stone, was a consequence of the artist’s own inner world and an unconscious desire to preserve his identity and his life experiences. They are a unique record of a parallel reality. Živković was born in the village of Leskovac in a wooded region of central Serbia on March 3, 1920. As

he ancient Slavs considered wood to be a deity, and made carved figures of the gods hoping to appease them. While carving, they took care to defer to the natural form of the wood, its knots, cavities and branches, out of respect for nature as the progenitor. Bogosav Živković worked in the same way, his chisel following the configuration of the wood, thus releasing,

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“Trees are ... his crystal ball, his vision-giving mirror, his reading glasses. He can see the world only in terms of trees... ”

above and opposite: Živković’s stone sculptures were made using sandstone taken from the surrounding area, photos: N Krstić

a young man, he worked in leathercraft, learning to use a variety of tools. However, in 1945, poor health led to him giving up leatherwork, moving to Belgrade and, later, taking a job as a doorman. It was not until 1957 that he made his first sculpture: "I dreamed of a serpent running through a meadow, leaving a wet trail behind, then catching up and constricting an unknown man in a cloak and with a monk's hat on his head." (1) It was almost as if the dream serpent had handed his chisel back to him. By day, the artist freed himself from the dark images and spectres of his dreams by carving them out in wood

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– more specifically in beech and then in walnut, as the area in which he lived was especially rich in these trees. At the opening of his first solo exhibition at the Graphics Art Gallery in Belgrade, in 1960, Živković met Oto BihaljiMerin, himself an artist, as well as a writer and art critic. Two years later, Bihalji-Merin published Dreams and Traumas in Wood (1962), the first monograph on Živković’s work, classifying it as naïve art. Considering the sculptor’s phantasmagoria, the power of his vision, and the suggestiveness that radiates from his work – all created in a kind of artistic isolation in his garden

– the label certainly seems to fit. On many occasions, Jean Dubuffet and Michel Thévoz wrote about the sculptures of Živković and, in the book L’Art Brut (1995), they classified the artist’s oeuvre as art brut. In the chapter “Material as an Initiation of Form”, Dubuffet pointed to Živković’s special relationship with his material: “Trees are ... his crystal ball, his vision-giving mirror, his reading glasses. He can see the world only in terms of trees.” (2) In the 1960s, back in Leskovac, Živković began to carve sculptures in situ on the land around his family home. It was the start of his unique garden, his own world of ideas,

that he would call his “Golden Bough” – just as the Roman poet Virgil and British anthropologist and writer James George Frazer each had a “Golden Bough”. Bihalji-Merin’s writings referred to Živković’s work as “magical”, and the sculptor’s creation at his family home became widely known as “The Magical Garden”. Today, the site is a kind of permanent exhibition of his work. The monumental stone sculptures are scattered all around, overgrown with twisting ivy. A small outhouse – his winter atelier – accommodates smaller wood carvings, while outside stand more huge stone columns. The outer walls of the

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BRITISH FOLKLORE: A LIVING ENTITY

Artist Ben Edge documents the rituals of the ancient folk traditions of Britain through a series of paintings

hile modern life evolves constantly, seemingly at an ever-increasing pace, many ancient British folk traditions and rituals persevere. The British people, like those of many nations, are fascinated by their country’s folklore, proudly and tenaciously passing it down through the generations – sometimes even reintroducing traditions that died out years previously. Stories, myths, legends and folktales get retold and re-depicted. Customary lore, actions reflecting folk beliefs, traditions and rituals – connected to religion, historical events, nature and the seasons, birth, marriage and other milestones – are carried out time and again. Folklore is often evident in outsider art, with countless creators finding inspiration in the legends and traditions, and so passing them on through their work: Sam Doyle’s corrugated metal paintings depicting the history and culture of St Helena’s Gullah community; Lonnie Holley’s portrayal of African traditions and Egyptian mythology; Pushpa Kumari’s renderings of Hindu epics inspired by the wall paintings of her home region in India; Reginald English’s bright tin sculptures of the folk spirits of Jamaica; Ilija Bosilj’s scenes from Serbian folktales

painted in traditional peasant style; the list goes on. “Folklore doesn’t come from the top, it doesn’t come from the palaces or the stately homes. It comes from the peasants that used ritual practice, superstition, storytelling and creativity as a way of taking back control of their lives and destinies from the oppressive regimes of the ruling classes,” says British artist Ben Edge. Edge himself is trained as an artist but finds much of his inspiration in outsider art, in particular British folklore. In a quest to document the unusual rituals and traditions still found around the British Isles, he started “Frontline Folklore”, a project in which he created a series of 20 paintings and a documentary film. An exhibition of his work, alongside folk objects from the Museum of British Folklore, was shown at London’s Crypt Gallery in 2021. ”What struck me straight away was that as the local stories were told and retold, they were growing, changing and evolving – much like a living, breathing entity, just like the customs themselves,” Edge says. “Folklore ... encapsulates the voices, personality and the ephemeral remnants of everybody that has ever told it, retold it and lived it and breathed it.”

opposite: Hunting the Earl of Rone, 2020, 35.5 x 39.5 in. / 90 x 100 cm This tradition is said to commemorate the execution of an Irish aristocrat, the Earl of Tyrone, who rose up against Queen Elizabeth I. The real Earl actually escaped the Queen’s soldiers but, every year in the spring, the legend of his capture and execution are played out on the streets and beach of Combe Martin in Devon. below: The Burryman, 2018, 27.5 x 31.5 in. / 70 x 80 cm On the second Friday in August, in South Queensferry, Scotland, the Burryman hikes for seven miles covered from head to toe in sticky, scratchy burdock seeds. He stops at houses and pubs where, to ease his burden, he is served drams of whisky through a straw. He rewards each donor with a “burr” seed to bring good luck for the year.

below: The Autumn Equinox, 2018, 32.5 x 43 in. / 82.5 x 110 cm Each year on London’s Primrose Hill, the Druid Order performs a ritual to mark the Autumn Equinox, when the sun crosses the plane of the earth’s equator, making night and day equal in length. Poet William Blake, a founding member of the Order, once wrote: “I have conversed with the spiritual sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill.”

all work shown: oil on canvas, unless otherwise stated

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R AW C L A S S I C S

BILL TRAYLOR Untitled (Legs Construction with Blue Man) JEFFREY WOLF finds autobiographical elements within this intriguing piece

ill Traylor (1853–1949) was born into an enslaved family on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama, and went on to endure the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow laws, and the Great Migration. While living homeless on the city streets of segregated black Montgomery, Traylor made over 1000 works of art – between 1939 and 1942 – depicting his memories from his life on the plantation, as well as scenes of a radically changing urban culture. He mostly used discarded pieces of paperboard as his canvas, choosing an oddly shaped one for Untitled (Legs Construction with Blue Man). Through research, there are only limited facts of Traylor’s life that can be detailed. In his art, he often placed his figures on platforms, which have been likened to the structure of the cotton press and other agricultural equipment that he would have encountered during his farming and plantation days. In this artwork, the structure on which the main figure leans, crouches, teeters is more unusual. With feet that appear to be cobblers’ anvils – the instruments used to repair soles and heels – it seems to harken back to the artist’s days in the shoe factory where he worked on first arriving in Montgomery. There are very few pieces of Traylor’s work that are as complexly autobiographical as this one appears to

be. Prominently featured, the bearded figure is most likely Traylor himself, created in the blue poster paint that he often favoured. He commands the centre of the picture with great, show-stopping power, holding a contorted pose and smoking a pipe. The smaller figure below brandishes an axe and seems to be pointing and taking aim in an aggressive manner. At whom or what is unclear. A perched owl is staring straight out at the viewer. Could the bird be narrating the story? Different cultures ascribe various symbolic meanings to these mysterious night creatures. While they are often considered to be a metaphor for death, they also appear in mystical forms as messengers of wisdom, truth, and the insight to understanding a situation. Finally, a rabid dog to the right of the artwork appears to be jumping up trying to attack the bearded man, but fails to sink his bared teeth into his victim. The geometrics of the man’s odd positioning imply the challenge and control of keeping one's balance in an ever-changing, complex world and of facing all the unknown events that lay ahead. For an older, black man living in Montgomery, in the first half of the twentieth century, keeping upright was a daunting task, which Bill Traylor managed to achieve into his nineties.

Jeffrey Wolf is a writer and filmmaker. Among his documentaries are Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts and James Castle: Portrait of an Artist.

Untitled (Legs Construction with Blue Man), c. 1940–42, opaque watercolour, pencil and charcoal on paperboard, 13 × 10.5 in. / 33 × 26.5 cm, © 1994, Bill Traylor Family Trust, (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

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JOSEPH E YOAKUM: WHAT I SAW AT MOMA The Museum of Modern Art, New York November 21, 2021 – March 19, 2022 In November 1972, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a solo show of drawings by the self-taught, 81-year-old artist Joseph Elmer Yoakum, just a month before he died. It wasn’t his first exhibition in New York, as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had featured his work previously in a group show. Now one of the most celebrated US outsider artists, Yoakum returned to MoMA earlier this year with “What I Saw”, a travelling solo show of 100 drawings that opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in summer 2021 and closes at Houston’s Menil Collection in August 2022. Born in 1891 of African, European and alleged Cherokee ancestry, Yoakum grew up in Missouri. He travelled widely, served in France in WWI and worked as a station porter and salesman back in the US. He only began drawing in 1962, motivated by a dream, he claimed. He hung his landscapes, inspired by his travels, on a clothesline in the shop window of his storefront flat in Chicago. Seeing the work, a college professor was impressed and set up Yoakum’s first show, in a church basement in 1967, so introducing him to the emerging Chicago Imagist artists. In a local newspaper story, Yoakum said,“The drawings are unfolded to me, a spiritual enfoldment. After I draw them, I have a spiritual remembrance and I know what is pictured.” This spiritual enfoldment is evident in the poetic drawings on view in “What I Saw”. Strikingly displayed, the show is divided into clusters of similar subjects: Yoakum often used carbon paper to make duplicates

EXHIBITIONS

that he finished in different ways, and worked thematically, depicting mountains, trees, rivers, waterfalls, oddly with no beginnings or ends. The earliest (undated) drawings are in pencil or ballpoint pen, without colour. For the detailed landscapes from his most productive period in the mid-sixties, he rubbed pastels and coloured pencils with balls of toilet tissue to get a watercolour effect. And, while his forests and mountains have a simple, surreal, imagined look to them, his later works (including some still in sketchbooks) are more abstract. Back Where I Were Born 2/20-1888 AD – depicting a cabin in a rural landscape – shows his use of varnish (which has caused some of his work to darken over time). A Rock in the Baltic Sea near Stockholm Sweden E. Europe – depicting the sun rising over a mystical mountainwater setting – exposes the eternal optimism of his work. Ella Fitzgerald Moovie Star, a rare portrait that he traced from a Breck shampoo advert in a magazine, tells us that his sources included more than travel brochures, atlases and encyclopedias. Meanwhile, a pair of flying saucer drawings disclose Yoakum’s belief in alternative realities, which he was most likely depicting in all of his artworks. Bar a large, pastel-coloured seascape, the drawings on show come from the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA and the collections of artists Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Christina Ramberg and Philip Hanson, as well as art historian Whitney Halstead. This latter group had been members of the Chicago arts community that befriended, were inspired by and supported the visionary artist until his death on Christmas Day in 1972. PAUL LASTER

ÉCRITS D’ART BRUT

Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Manto da Apresentação (inside), n.d.

Museum Tinguely, Basel October 10, 2021 – January 23, 2022 “Écrits d’Art Brut”, at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, focussed on the little-known genre of art brut writings – creations which are often just as inventive as the drawings, paintings and sculptures of the same artistic genre. Swiss artist Jean Tinguely was fond of the Italian art brut creator Giovanni Battista Podestà (1995–1976) – it was the admiration of a sculptor for another sculptor, one who was even freer and more subversive than himself. In this fascinating exhibition, curated by ex-director of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Lucienne Peiry, the museum presented a selection of Podestà's flamboyant works, all containing sermons, imprecations, admonitions and other moral advice on signs, in letters of varying sizes. Surrounding these exuberant ex-votos, were the "written paintings" of twelve other self-taught artists. Although collected by Jean Dubuffet and other enthusiasts since, the writings of art brut remain relatively known. They are however the product of the same conditions of creation, psychic resources and expressive desire as those used for other works by

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Yoakum, A Rock in the Baltic Sea near Stockholm Sweden E. Europe, n.d.

Yoakum, Mt Grazian in Maritime Alps near Emonaco Tunnel France and Italy by Tunnel, 1958

R AW R E V I E W S

EXHIBITIONS

R AW R E V I E W S

David Zwirner Gallery, New York January 13 – February 12, 2022 Among the drawings and assemblages in the muted palette that James Castle created from soot and spit, this show at David Zwirner in New York included a vibrant display of handmade boxes. Crafted from packaging for food, soap and other household items, they recalled the domestic settings at the centre of Castle’s life and practice. He even made the architecture of his family home in Boise, Idaho, part of his creative work by using these boxes to store art in the floors, walls and rafters. Organised by the James Castle Collection and Archive, the exhibition presented over 60 pieces, offering an overview of the diverse ways in which the artist depicted the world around him using the ordinary materials that filled it. Presenting his art – with its rough edges, like the salvaged cardboard employed as canvas or the twine binding his folded birds – in a white walls gallery meant that the original domestic context was lost. It did however allow viewers to appreciate glimpses into the thousands of drawings, figures and books he created. Born deaf in 1899, Castle’s sole formal education was a handful of years at a state school for the deaf and blind. From a young age, he adopted art as his primary medium for communication. Little of his early work survived as his family moved across Idaho, however his earlier homes would appear in his later art. The details in his drawings frequently came from his childhood memories, lingering on a wallpaper pattern or a quilt on a bed often with the addition of a fantastic quality through tree-like totems or angular figures. He also shaped similar figures, as well as everyday objects and animals, from bits of cardboard, shoelaces and other cast-off materials that he carefully saved until he found a purpose for each one. A few works in the exhibition demonstrated Castle’s experimentation with colour. Rather than add it to his drawings with simple paint or pastel, he did something entirely new by mixing laundry bluing – a cleaning product – with crayon and watercolour for pared-down depictions of houses and landscapes, the layers of the different materials resulting in a tactile texture. One drawing, likely representing the shed he used as a studio in his Boise home, showed an exhibition that Castle staged himself, with his constructions and drawings arranged on the wall and shelves. We will never get to see Castle’s work exactly as he intended it – a purpose he never shared in words – but each opportunity to look closely reveals something more about how he lived with his art. ALLISON MEIER

creators on the margins of society. Their themes are diverse, ranging from love letters to poems, prayers to sexual messages, diaries to official complaints, utopian narratives to the recreation of the world. If they have an addressee, it is rarely. The works are written in a hurry – or else at the slow pace of a copyist monk – on sheets of paper, notebooks, embroidered fabrics, banners and walls. The writings often intermingle with drawings, so much so that words and forms seem to spring from each other. They remind us of the graphic nature of writing and of the scriptural dimension of drawing. They rise above the usual dichotomy of word and image. The exhibition allowed the viewer to grasp the thousands of details within the compositions. It facilitated the understanding of the texts through transcripts and translations, while photos and documentary films provided yet more clarity. In this way, what a pleasure it was to discover the works of Adolf Wölfli, Heinrich Anton Müller, Laure Pigeon, Armand Schulthess, Carlo Zinelli, Arthur Bispo do Rosário and Fernando Zannetti. A French-language book by Lucienne Peiry, Écrits d'Art Brut. Graphomanes Extravagants (Paris, Le Seuil, 2020), accompanied the exhibition. LUC DEBRAINE

Untitled (Figure, red stripe dress), n.d.

JAMES CASTLE

Giovanni Battista Podestà, Il Dio Oro, c. 1970

EXHIBITIONS / BOOK

MULTITUDES

modern times, even though hand-painted pictures were already passé. The section is rounded out by a selection of Henry Darger’s scrapbook collages and source materials; paintings of imaginary flowers and buildings, a UFO drawing, a photo of a topless Marie and concrete, clay and chicken-bone sculpture by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein; and Pasaquoyan outfits and earlier costume sketches by Eddie Owens Martin, aka St EOM. In A Cast of Characters, Annie Hooper’s amazing assembly of biblical characters sculpted from driftwood, concrete, paint and shells are grouped with Mary Paulina Corbett’s illustrated adventures of The Catville Kids, teenage romance stories with masked men and femme fatales that were discovered in an estate sale, and Johnny Velardi’s semi-abstract monsters made from varnished kitchen scraps. Likewise, the anonymous, early twentiethcentury Pointing Hands Quilt, a recent acquisition, is a standout piece in the Systems section. Lastly, a highlight in Repetitions is William Edmondson’s recently discovered carved-limestone sculpture of nearly identical biblical sisters Martha and Mary. And nearby is John Scholl’s standing Sunburst sculpture, an intricately carved-wood, patterned piece that greets visitors as they enter the galleries and symbolically shines a light on the achievements of the gifted artists in the show. PAUL LASTER

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Untitled, n.d.

Mary Paulina Corbett, The Catville Kids drawing, 1942–1951

American Folk Art Museum, New York January 21 – September 5, 2022 Celebrating 60 years since its founding in 1961, the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) has mounted “MULTITUDES”, a spectacular show, held in – what might be considered by most museums – a relatively small space. Presenting about 400 of the estimated 8,000 artefacts from its comprehensive collection of folk art and artworks by self-taught artists, AFAM curators Valérie Rousseau and Emelie Gevalt have held up a metaphoric mirror to reflect six decades of scholarly collecting. This exceedingly engaging exhibition is organised into five sections by themes and, within those themes, by various examples of an artist’s work or numerous versions of vernacular art forms. Viewers are taken through inter-connected galleries, past display platforms, down an image-lined hallway and up to the rafters to catch a glimpse of the show’s unfolding treasures. In the Memory Keepers section, eighteenth and nineteenthcentury miniature portraits are clustered in a case under a reverse painted family tree on glass with applied ambrotype photos from the 1850s. A recently acquired collection of twentieth-century handtinted vernacular photographs, in the section entitled A Collection of Collections, brings portraiture and tinted photography into more

R AW R E V I E W S

LE JARDIN DE LA MÉMOIRE by Lucienne Peiry Edns Allia, 2021 ISBN: 979-10-304-1543-8 At the age of 50, Swiss civil servant Armand Schulthess withdrew from society and began to create, on a plot he had bought in rough terrain near Locarno, an extraordinary “garden of knowledge” that, inevitably, was still unfinished at the time of his death 20 years later in 1972. In fact, as Lucienne Peiry tells us in her little book Le Jardin de la Mémoire – which, with its 30 photographs, is itself a kind of souvenir – he had been preparing for this retreat for some time, accumulating pictures and facts in some 60 homemade books. With his material needs pared down to the bare minimum, Schulthess embarked on an impossible and paradoxical project, systematically festooning the tree branches around him with “facts” handwritten on flattened tins. These ranged across the entire spectrum of human knowledge: “Axioms or scientific theories, poetic flights, philosophical queries, aphorisms and thoughts, short narratives and brief biographies, juxtaposed without any hierarchy, mutually fertilising each other and all inscribing themselves at the same level in the sum of earthly, subterranean and cosmic knowledge.” (p. 22) Seen from our current situation in an overwhelming plethora of digital information, Schulthess’s laborious and precarious translation of data into tangible facts acquires a considerable degree of pathos and perversity. Effectively, knowledge is hung out at the mercy of the elements; likewise, the many invitations – to the hypothetical visitor to watch films, make recordings or have their horoscope read (there was even a special boudoir for some inconceivable partner)

– which sit uneasily with a disconnected phone and his evident avoidance of any actual social contact. In prototypical outsider fashion, there is a fascinating contradiction between the accumulation of material from the public domain and its secretive elaboration for the benefit of an imaginary audience. Peiry’s book is a poignant miniature tribute to Schulthess’s endless project. As she says, “With its open-air development, this vast installation undergoes relentless corrosion, deterioration and destruction. ... Impelled by the desire to extend his great work, he privileges the creation of new metal pieces, drawn by technical and scientific discoveries, especially the most recent.” (p. 43) So the shadow of destruction hung over the whole project: finally, after his accidental death, his heirs quickly moved in to destroy its remains, and only a few pieces were rescued by the small number of people from the art world who knew of it. DAVID MACLAGAN RAW VISION 110

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