RAW NEWS

FOUNTAIN HOUSE GALLERY

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

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

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

Walla, Tischtuch

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

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

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

THE BEER CAN HOUSE

A beer-loving Houston man used his empties to create a local landmark of beauty and renown

PETE GERSHON

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

When 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

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’.”

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

Nick 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 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