THE BEER CAN HOUSE

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 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

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

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 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

opposite: covers and inside pages of Osservatorio; inset: Di Stefano in 2020, photo: Fabio Mantegna below: traditional Sicilian puppets at the Antonio Pasqualino International Puppet Museum, co-publisher, photo: Chiara Vaglica

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 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