DANIEL JOHNSTON

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EXHIBITIONS

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 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

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

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

ÉCRITS D’ART BRUT

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

EXHIBITIONS

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JAMES CASTLE

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

Giovanni Battista Podestà, Il Dio Oro, c. 1970

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Untitled, n.d.

MULTITUDES

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

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

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