RAWVISION93 SPRING 2017
EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Phyllis Kind, Frank Maresca, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels SENIOR EDITOR Edward M. Gómez FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITORS Natasha Jaeger, Nick Petty ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels ADVERTISING MANAGER Michael Gormley CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com USA 119 West 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023 (Standard envelopes only) ISSN 0955-1182
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RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world
OBITUARY - LAURENT DANCHIN The premature loss of key French writer and critic
LA PINTURITAS Obsessive mural painting in an abandoned Spanish building
OUTSIDER ART: THEN, NOW AND FUTURE Leading dealers at New York’s Outsider Art Fair give their thoughts
JEAN PERDRIZET French artist whose machines communicate with souls of the dead
ART BEHIND BARS The recent discovery of a painted high security cell in Germany
RORY MCCORMACK Sculptural environment on a Brighton beach
KNOWN - UNKNOWN Expressions of sexuality in outsider and folk art
YVONNE FRANCIS MAB Paintings of trauma and survival
WASHING WITH THE GODS Magic soaps of Latin America
RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions and books
GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE A round-up of notable venues around the world
COVER IMAGE: María Ángeles Fernández Cuesta, known as La Pinturitas, at her creation at Arguedas, Spain. photo: Hervé Coutas.
Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) March 2017 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK, and distributed in the USA by Mail Right Inc., 1637 Stelton Road 84, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Periodical Postage Paid at Piscataway, NJ, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address corrections to Raw Vision c/o Mail Right International Inc., 1637 Stelton Road 84, Piscataway, NJ 08854. USA subscription office: 119 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023. (Standard envelopes only). Raw Vision cannot be held responsible for the return of unsolicited material. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Raw Vision.
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD
WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE
UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD
MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS
R AW N E W S
DENMARK, FRANCE
MARIE-ROSE LORTET
ROBILLARD
until Jun 11
Apr 12 – Sep 30
Marie-Rose Lortet, Les Attrape-Monde presents intricate woven textile works by the French selftaught artist. MUSÉE & JARDINS CÉCILE SABOURDY Le Presbytère, rue Chavaud, 87260 Vicq-sur-Breuilh, FRANCE. www.museejardins-sabourdy.fr
Works by self-taught artist André Robillard. LE MUSÉE ART BRUT DE MONTPELLIER 1 rue Beau Séjour 34000 Montpellier, FRANCE atelier-musee.com
Marie-Rose Lortet
This year’s European Outsider Art Association conference and annual general assembly will take place May 17–20 at GAIA Museum in Denmark. This year’s topic is outsider art photography. GAIA MUSEUM Lene Bredahls Gade 10, 8900 Randers C., DENMARK www.gaiamuseum.dk, www.outsiderartassociation.eu
André Robillard
Alexander Lobanov
EOA CONFERENCE May 17–20
BIZ’ART-BIZ’ART
Françoise Sablons
Apr 5–23
REYNAUD
MICHEL NEDJAR AT LILLE MÉTROPOLE
Apr 24 – May 20
until Jun 4
The Force Within – Raymond Reynaud and the Singular Art: Drawings, Paintings, Sculptures features works by Raymond Reynaud, Jaber, Danielle Jacqui, Chomo and others in the field of singular art. EGLISE DES FRÈRES PRÊCHEURS Quai Marx Dormoy, 13200 Arles, FRANCE
Michel Nedjar, Introspective presents Nedjar's varied oeuvre: his mud and rag dolls, sculptures, drawings, paintings and experimental films. LILLE MÉTROPOLE MUSEUM OF MODERN, CONTEMPORARY AND OUTSIDER ART 1 Allée du Musée, 59650 Villeneuve-d'Ascq, FRANCE www.musee-lam.fr
As part of the Itinéraires Singuliers festival, Profondeurs by Biz’Art-Biz’Art features work by Vincent Crochard, Christopher St John, MarieFrançoise Valois and Françoise Sablons. HOTEL DE VOGÜÉ 8 rue de la Chouette, 21000 Dijon, FRANCE www.bizart-bizart.com
CÉRÈS FRANCO
L’Internationale des visionnaires, curated by JeanHubert Martin, will feature art brut, visionary and singular art from the Cérès Franco and Daniel Cordier collections. Artists include Louis Chabaud, Tallal Chaïbia, Corneille, Francisco da Silva, Michel Macreau and Marcel Pouget. LA COOPÉRATIVE-COLLECTION CÉRÈS FRANCO Route d'Alzonne, 11170 Montolieu, FRANCE www.lacooperative-collectionceresfranco.com
Michel Nedjar
Corneille
Raymond Reynaud
Apr 29 – Nov 7
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SWITZERLAND, USA
COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT
LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM
until Apr 30
MUSEUM OF SEX until Sep 18
Collection de l’Art Brut continues to exhibit Henriette Zéphir’s works in pencil, ballpoint pen and India ink. From June 9 through November 26, Anna Zemánková will have a solo exhibition. COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT Av. des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne, SWITZERLAND www.artbrut.ch
MUSÉE VISIONNAIRE
Soul of the South: Selections from the Gitter-Yelen Collection includes works by Roy Ferdinand, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Clementine Hunter, and Howard Finster. LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM, The Old Mint, 400 Esplanade Ave., New Orleans, 70116 www.louisianastate museum.org
Johann Korec
Anna Zemánková
Sister Gertrude Morgan
Henriette Zéphir
until May 28
Known/Unknown: Private Obsession and Hidden Desire in Outsider Art showcases over 100 rarely seen photographs, sculptures and paintings by outsider artists, including Steve Ashby, Morton Bartlett, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Johann Korec, Johann Garber and Royal Robertson. MUSEUM OF SEX, 233 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016 www.museumofsex.com
RÖTHLISBERGER AT LAGERHAUS
AFRICAN AMERICAN SOUTHERN ART
Apr 4 – Jul 9
Jun 3, 2017 – Apr 1, 2018
For the first time, the Rolf Röthlisberger Collection will be presented to the public in an exhibition at the Museum im Lagerhaus. The collection brings together high quality art brut and a broad range of animal subjects. MUSEUM IM LAGERHAUS Davidstrasse 44, CH-9000 St. Gallen, SWITZERLAND www.museumimlagerhaus.ch
In Revelations: Art from the African American South, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco debut their major acquisition from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta of 62 works by contemporary African American artists from the Southern US. Includes work by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mary T. Smith, Mose Tolliver and Purvis Young. DE YOUNG MUSEUM Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118. famsf.org
Mose Tolliver
Insider – Outsider presents 100 works by 21 outsider and naive artists such as Paul Amar, Aloïse Corbaz, Josef Wittlich and Carlo Zinelli. MUSÉE VISIONNAIRE Predigerplatz 10, 8001 Zurich, SWITZERLAND museevisionnaire.ch
Johann Hauser
Carlo Zinelli
until Jun 11
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USA
HENRY DARGER AT INTUIT
Henry Darger
Apr 12 – Sep 4
Betwixt-and-Between: Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls features major works by Henry Darger that include double-sided, panoramic drawings with watercolour and collage spanning up to eight feet long, Vivian portraits, as well as traced images and resource materials from Intuit’s archives. INTUIT, 756 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60605. www.art.org
JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS CENTER
until Aug 20
through 2017
The American Folk Art Museum is showing solo exhibitions of two major art brut figures. Carlo Zinelli (1916–1974) presents 55 paintings, audio recordings of Zinelli and a film. Eugen Gabritschevsaky: Theater of the Imperceptible features 80 artworks, a film, publications and archival documents. Both shows are the first monographic exhibitions of their work in the US. AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM 2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023. folkartmuseum.org
The Road Less Traveled is a yearlong exploration of art environments. The series of 15 exhibitions presents the work of 17 art environment builders from the Arts Center’s collection, and also incorporates new writing and works of art produced by scholars, curators, musicians, and theorists in response to the environments. Exhibitions include Greetings, Hello and Boo! Mary Nohl from April 30 – August 27; Pasaquoyanism: Eddie Owens Martin until May 7; The World in a Garden: Nek Chand until June 4; An Encounter with Presence: Emery Blagdon and Shannon Stratton until December 3; It's Gotta Be In Ya: Fred Smith until December 31; and The Making of a Dream: Loy Bowlin until January 5, 2019. JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS CENTER 608 New York Ave, Sheboygan, WI 53081. www.jmkac.org
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Nek Chand
Eugen Gabritschevsky
Carlo Zinelli
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM
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LAURENT DANCHIN 1946 - 2017 The world of outsider art mourns the passing of one of its most accomplished advocates
photo: Anet Faurie
ROGER CARDINAL
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aurent Danchin – freelance writer and exhibition curator, polemical critic and French correspondent to Raw Vision has died in Paris after a long illness. He had been a loyal supporter of this magazine since its inception, contributing enthusiastic and well-informed articles and reports that embraced a range across the lively overlappingaterritories of art brut, outsider art, art singulier and naïve art. He was a tireless researcher and curator who loved to befriend individual creators, and the hundred-odd feature articles he issued over three decades established a distinctive circle of French creators actively working in our busy and multiform field: Pierre Avezard, Raymond Isidore, Miguel Amate, Raphaël Lonné, Anselme Boix-Vives. A prolific writer, Danchin bore witness to the successes and the excesses that have marked the marginal art world over the past half-century, praising fulsomely where praise was due, while waging a war against laziness and inaccuracy in the claims and appraisals manifested at international museum blockbuster exhibitions, as well as at ambitious solo
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shows in makeshift galleries. His publishing record is formidable and includes prefaces and introductions composed for art catalogues, along with theoretical musings regarding the themes, techniques and strategies of self-projection that characterise the Outsider world. His illustrated handbook Art brut. L’instinct créateur (1989) represents a mine of information and a shrewd deployment of impressions garnered over time, while his short essays reveal a tireless concern to assess new developments or to document the quarrels and agitations of a long list of philosophers, aesthetes and pioneering collectors. His discerning gaze saw through any sham or shameful manipulation, and installed a constant standard of fairness and imaginative response that shed an even light upon the dozens of marginal artists he loved and defended. His personal favourites were many and ranged from bona fide outsiders like the painters Marcel Storr and Germain Tessier or his hero, the environmentalist Chomo (Roger Chomeaux), to awkward borderline cases such as the disturbed surrealist Antonin Artaud or the founding father of art brut, Jean Dubuffet himself, to whom he devoted an
photo: Jean-Paul Vidal
erudite monograph: Jean Dubuffet, peintre-philosophe (1988) and in 2001 Jean Dubuffet, which was published in both English and French. Ever alert to artistic invention, Danchin organised a section on contemporary Fabric Art (The Inspired Needle) at the international trienniale ‘INSITA’ in Bratislava in 2000, with pieces by Rosa Zarkhikh and Marie-Rose Lortet; he once coaxed a secretive mediumistic artist called Marie-Jeanne Gil into showing her work. He was a leading activist in the campaign to rescue Pierre Avezard’s playful merry-goround when it was threatened with destruction in the late 1990s, rolling up his sleeves and helping reconstruct the work at the Fabuloserie museum. Danchin played a part in the wider effort to preserve those unwitting masterworks that hover at the frontier of ‘high culture’ and challenge the very foundations of creativity by dispensing with authorised themes and imposed standards. In recent years, he and an artist friend, Jean-Luc Giraud, have worked in tandem on a website literary project called Mycélium, a flexible network of ideas and images, now sadly curtailed after an experimental exhibition, Génie
savant, génie brut (2014), that juxtaposed artists of genius in both academic and self-taught spheres. Laurent Danchin was a social animal and loved busy meetings and encounters with newcomers lost in the dark corners of the Lausanne museum. For many years a teacher in a lycée at Nanterre, he was a great humourist and loved to bring anecdotes to a group conversation, often standing his ground before retreating a few shuffling steps, prior to moving quickly forward again to deliver a punchline that released a burst of general laughter. He cultivated many friendships, and while devoted to home life with his wife Francine and his talented violinist daughter, Clara, actually managed to travel widely as a kind of outsider art ambassador. He will be remembered for his loyalty to his friends, his sharp intellect and his ceaseless curiosity. The last time I met Laurent was at the outsider art Fair held in Paris in 2015, after his first operation. He was cock-a-hoop about his discovery of a new path of expression – he had just started his autobiography and the project seemed to fill him with utter joy. He will be sorely missed.
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LA PINTURITAS OF ARGUEDAS Painting as a source of life HERVÉ COUTON
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ince discovering La Pinturitas and her murals in 2009, I have returned every year to the little Spanish village of Arguedas, to film and photograph the evolution of her extraordinary work. Day in and day out, the innate creative talent María Ángeles Fernández Cuesta, also known as La Pinturitas, obsessively works on her colourful paintings, which decorate the walls of a derelict restaurant in Arguedas, Navarre, northern Spain. These walls will ultimately face either destruction or transformation; her canvas
S
is ephemeral. Disregarded and mocked by many of her neighbours, the non-conformist La Pinturitas claims that she started to paint on the walls of this building in 2000 to portray those who marginalised and ridiculed her. She is married to Miguel Galarret, with whom she has four children. While they share a profound connection that has supported them in overcoming a range of hardships, married life has been tough. However, since 2000, painting has brought an
above: an exterior wall, 2012, with a special dedication for Raw Vision following the report on her work by Laurent Danchin in Raw News, RV69
All photographs by Hervé Couton
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Text translated by Hannah Memmott (and Jo Farb Hernández)
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OUTSIDER ART: THEN, NOW, TOMORROW The 25th Outsider Art Fair, which took place in New York in January, was a milestone in the outsider art field. Its success offers an occasion to look back on the evolution of this unique sector within the broader international art world. Raw Vision spoke with some leading dealers who have been involved with the fair for many years. How do they see the main developments in the outsider art field and the market that has grown up in support of it? And how do they predict where it may be headed?
photo: Ted Degener
Compiled and edited by EDWARD M. GÓMEZ
ANDREW EDLIN
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Andrew Edlin opened his eponymous New York gallery in 2001. He also heads Wide Open Arts, a company that has produced the Outsider Art Fair since 2013.
he biggest changes in the field over the last 25 years revolve around its exponentially greater recognition by the art world and general public. This is due to a gradual evolution in the understanding of outsider art, from [formerly regarding it in] a folk art context to [nowadays regarding it in] a contemporary art context. Outsider material is no longer relegated only to specialised collections and museums. The most visible and respected institutions are exhibiting and collecting this art, and major auction houses are taking it seriously, too. The Internet and social media have played a vital role in disseminating information about outsider art. Our fairs have generated a higher volume of news about the field than any other entities, and we work very hard at sharing these articles with an international audience. The press has also become 20
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more interested in the work and better informed about it. We’re also seeing a new and energetic generation of scholars in the field, which is becoming more international in its scope and worldview. Categorical boundaries will continue to weaken. There are many interesting artists who, while formally trained, are creating work that is not based on arthistorical precedents or trends. Their work might be considered closer to outsider art, [bringing to mind] the term “neuve invention”, which Dubuffet coined to refer to art [forms] that he admired and collected, but which didn’t quite adhere to the more stringent qualifications [he had established that would allow them] to be considered “art brut”. The goal continues to be that art [should be] evaluated along a spectrum of being interesting or uninteresting, rather than as “outsider” or “insider” art.
AARNE ANTON Aarne Anton’s American Primitive Gallery opened in New York in 1981 and has taken part in the fair since it began in 1993.
photo: Ted Degener
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eflecting on this field’s evolution over the past 25 years, I think back to my walks through each year’s Outsider Art Fair and the diversity of the works different dealers have presented there. Many artists whose works have been shown at the fair have passed away. Some of their works have become iconic. Most exciting to see are the new discoveries each year. This field continues to become broader in scope as it embraces artists from more and more nations around the world, and as new connections [between dealers, collectors, artists and others] continue to be made. Another trend I’ve noticed is that of increased attention to this field on the part of artists, dealers, writers and critics in the larger, mainstream art world. For me, the fact that, after 25 years, we still cannot agree on a single term to use to name this kind of art is a good sign; it means that it is still giving off sparks. Looking ahead, I expect more museums will catch up with what is happening at the grassroots level and mount more exhibitions and pursue more scholarship in this field. Twenty-five years is a short time. In fact, this field may still be in its infancy.
JOHN OLLMAN John Ollman heads Fleisher/Ollman in Philadelphia. The gallery has been an Outsider Art Fair mainstay since its inception.
photo courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman
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he most significant changes concerning artists who are essentially self-taught have come with regard to their acceptance within the bigger picture of the global art world. The artificial boundary of “otherness” [that has long applied to such artists] is far less important today than it was ten years ago and it is greatly different than it was 25 years ago. When you can see, as you can now, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, a William Edmondson sculpture next to a Glenn Ligon painting, without any qualifying explanation [for the presence of the Edmondson work], then you know things have changed! Hopefully we will arrive at a point at which we will discuss all art as art, and all artists as artists. Meanwhile, as long as we treat some of them as “others”, discussion will continue to be problematic.
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BEYOND THE IMAGINABLE The designs and inventions of a visionary polymath ALLA CHERNETSKA
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ean Perdrizet was born to schoolteacher parents in 1907 in Villers-la-Faye, near Dijon, eastern France. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in1931, then worked as a wartime field engineer from 1934–37. He later worked sporadically for Électricité de France, but in 1949 he stopped working completely because of mental health problems. Aged 48 and unmarried, he moved in with his parents in Digne-les-Bains, southeast France, where he worked in earnest on various inventions and designs for machines that he had been creating since the early 1930s. Perdrizet sent some of his designs to the National Center of Scientific Research in France, various faculties of science, NASA and the Vatican, as well as to
the Swedish Academy in the hopes of being awarded a Nobel prize for his innovations. Some scientists of his time, such as the Catalan mathematician José Argémi and the French neurophysiologist Jacques Paillard, were intrigued enough by his inventions to correspond with him. His projects were all based on science, but they went far beyond the field of scientific research. He devoted his life to designing machines to communicate with the “souls” of deceased, immaterial beings and aliens. Towards the end of his life, he began to invent a new form of communication: “T language”. This, he believed, needed to become a new universal language. Perdrizet believed that the world was full of
All works are mimeograph, ballpoint pen, and marker or coloured pencil on paper left: Untitled (Tables en images de multiplication et d'addition), 1967, 22.4 x 29.3 ins. / 57 x 74.5 cm, private collection, Paris
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immaterial beings that existed in the waves. He said, “matter is a needle wave on a continent parallel to ours”, so mankind needed the machines to communicate with these invisible beings. He shared his theories with different scientists, and some of them supported him, like a radio engineer who told him, “The dead are trying to build machines to communicate with us”. For historical context, if we consider the research of great scientists of the beginning of the twentieth century, Perdrizet’s ideas were not so insane. Nicolai
Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi, who both experimented with radio, reported anomalous sounds and voices coming from their radio receivers. Even though Edison mocked Tesla’s ideas, he corresponded with “spirit photographers” and announced that he was working on a “spirit phone” or “necrophone” to communicate with the dead. The plans never materialised, and many people now think that he was joking with the press of the day. However, a chapter that was removed from the English-language copies of his posthumous Diary and Sundry Observations (1948) was published in the
above: Untitled (Machines á calculator), 1940, 11.4 x 32.3 ins. / 28.9 x 82 cm, collection Treger St Silvestre, Portugal right: Untitled (Espéranto sideral), c. 1963, 23.6 x 29.5 ins. / 60 x 75 cm, Collection particulière, Paris
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Interior of Cell no.117, photo: Andreas Spengler, 2013
ART BEHIND BARS A sensational discovery in a German cell ANDREAS SPENGLER and THOMAS RÖSKE
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here are still sensational discoveries being made in the field of Outsider Art. One of them is the Klingebiel Cell in Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. The hallway leads through barred gates to cell number 117, a dark dungeon that is two and a half metres wide by four metres long (about eight by 13 feet). Until 2013, the sun shone from the south through a high, barred window (today it is darkened for conservational purposes). The viewer goes through phases of astonishment and irritation. All the walls are densely painted up to a height of three metres. The connoisseur is reminded of the Sixtina in the Haus der Künstler (House of the Artists) in Gugging, Germany. Indeed, August Walla’s (1936–2001) murals are in many ways similar. The prison-like Verwahrungshaus (safe-keeping house), a high-security hospital founded in 1906, was used until 2016 to detain mentally ill offenders. Here, 34
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one of the darkest chapters of psychiatric history was enacted. Most of the 72 patients who were interned here in 1940 were deported and gassed as part of the Nazi euthanasia operation, T4. Gustav Sievers (1865–1941) painted here, too, and Paul Goesch (1885–1940) created a mural in a neighbouring building in 1922. Both of these artists, who are represented in the Prinzhorn Collection, were murdered. The occupant of cell 117, Julius Klingebiel (1904–1965), created here between 1951 and 1961, constructing a complex artistic interior. He also created numerous works on paper, of which 18 are extant. Klingebiel came from Hanover. He was a mechanic with the German army and a member of the SA (Sturmabteilung, meaning “Assault Division” but also known as the Nazi Storm Troopers). If, and how strongly, he identified with the Nazi ideology is not
Julius Klingebile, wearing a convict uniform, in his cell, c. 1955, photo: Asklepios Fachklinikum Göttingen overleaf: left wall of cell 117, 13 ft 1 in. x 10 ft 2 ins. / 400 x 310 cm, photo and graphics: Hans Starosta, 2013 (subsequent built-ins are retouched, and replaced by historic photo segments, in cooperation with the authors)
recognisable in his work or biography: he married in 1935; in 1939 he suffered from delusions, reacted violently, and, according to the law at the time, was interned with a diagnosis of schizophrenia in a mental institution. There was no criminal trial. As a “dangerous madman”, he was sent to Wunstorf mental institution. Here, in 1940, he was compulsorily sterilised according to the Nazi’s genetic-health laws, and so became a victim of Nazi psychiatry. He was also registered for the T4 operation. He was transferred, due to rebelliousness, to the Verwahrungshaus in Göttingen. The transports to the gas chambers were rolling at the time, but Klingebiel’s name never appeared on the transport lists. Under the directorship of Gottfried Ewald, who spoke out against the Nazi operation in 1940, he was spared in now-unknown circumstances. He also survived the war years, but in the post-war period he remained incarcerated and in 1951 was transferred to cell 117 of the Verwahrungshaus. His internment was never approved by a judicial proceeding. Formally, this approval was legally required after 1951. His wife had legally divorced him in the year 1941, and contact with his family had
ended in 1940. In permanent detention without a future, he was further deprived of his rights. His longtime, chronic (and, at that time, hardly treatable) psychic problems led to excitable states, when he became angry, cried tormentedly and felt himself threatened, impaired and influenced by radiation. He also occupied himself with expansive systems. He imagined himself to be an inventor and a sportsman. He often seemed sad and withdrawn. Finally, in 1961 he was treated with new medication and became calmer and more orderly. But he stopped painting and in 1963 was transferred to another ward. He died in 1965. In everyday life, his carers experienced another Klingebiel. Contemporaries describe him as headstrong, assertive, quick-witted and imaginative. Around 1951, he began sketchily drawing on the white walls of the cell with a stone and pieces of coal, but he was forced to wash off the “smearing” immediately. When the doctors realised that drawing calmed him, and that he produced strange original pictures, they soon gave him paints and brushes. The psychiatrist Hemmo Müller-Suur who was very interested in patient’s art came round from time to time. Through RAW VISION 93
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RORY MCCORMACK’S FLINT GROTTO Self-built environment on an English beach KATE DAVEY
below: Design from an Etruscan crater, 5th century BC
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o the east of Brighton’s Palace Pier, Brighton’s last beach fisherman Rory McCormack has created his own flint grotto out of materials from within a quarter-mile radius of the site. McCormack, a drystone waller before his fishing days, started the endeavour two years ago as the weather became increasingly unpredictable, particularly during the winter months. With time on his hands, McCormack started by making a low stone wall; originally intended as a flat
All photos by Kevin Meredith, unless otherwise stated
below: A procession of flint figures. Photo by Yvonne Luna
surface to chop his catches on. The low wall marked the first time he had used flint as a building material, and he began experimenting with what could be created from and within a seemingly bleak landscape. His huge – predominantly figurative – sculptures are inspired by characters from history, from the ancient to the classical; for example, the horizontal recreation of a bronze-age burial site, or his smaller depiction of Venus that welcomes visitors through the entrance of the site. The pieces he uses for inspiration are, in his
below: Outside view from behind the flint grotto
below: Greek lettering in beach-weathered brick and flint. Part of a Christian motif
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KNOWN/UNKNOWN Expressions of sexuality in outsider and folk art COLIN RHODES
“K
nown/Unknown: Private Obsession and Hidden Desire in Outsider Art” at the Museum of Sex, New York, presents a diverse group of powerful works of outsider art. It includes work by more than 15 artists, spanning a century or more. They are linked by their treatment of themes of desire and the erotic. Outsider art arises in unexpected places, distant and distinct from official art worlds. It takes up a kind of renegade position in relation to other art and to the dominant culture. It is singular in its subject matter and even material construction. It reveals experiences that are often radically different, strange and idiosyncratic. Outsider art is found the world over. It inhabits unlikely places including secure psychiatric hospitals, the parlours of spiritualism, and the compounds of personal religions. It is also found in remote and regional places, and sometimes even in the lonely, impersonal jungles of teeming cities. Overt sexuality and eroticism are, perhaps surprisingly,
unusual subjects in outsider art. But when they do appear they are emphatic and unconstrained. Eroticism is usually thought of as a prelude to the sexual act. It can just as easily be part of a reorientation and transformation of sexuality. This is often driven by singular obsessions that blot out all considerations of conventional sensibilities. The art in “Known/Unknown” in different ways inhabits territories emphatically outside of ordinary experience. The everyday world has been dissolved, reformed and transformed. Images and objects bring to our eyes tantalising, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes even terrifying insight into other psychological terrains. I will consider the themes explored in “Known/Unknown” through examination of some of the featured artists. Artworks by many now-classic outsider artists, such as the Austrian Johann Garber (b. 1947), have emerged from psychiatric hospitals. He continues to produce work at the Gugging hospital, near Vienna,
where he was first admitted at age 19. He was here encouraged to give free range to his expressions. And pictorial obsessions with sex and sexuality developed into a sustained art practice. Naked men and women cavort throughout both his pastoral and city scenes. While we might expect this is in images of Paradise, it is rather more incongruous in the urban hubbub. As often as not, though, nakedness in his cities is an indoor affair. Garber gives his erotic drawings the generic name, “Sexi-Blatt” (Sexy Sheet/Paper). The shallow, almost claustrophobic spaces of these densely worked images speak to the horror vacui (fear of empty space) that was long commonly regarded by psychiatry as symptomatic of certain types of mental illness. Garber’s roommate at Gugging was Johann Korec (1937–2008), whose work also reflected erotic subjects. In the 1960s he began collecting photographs from newspapers and magazines. He soon began using the images to make his own compositions by tracing and combining them. Each figure was given a name. Women were almost always identified as his own girlfriends, whether the relationship was real or imagined. Haas Maria Korec is a version of the simple image of the desired other. Her availability to the viewer outside the picture is signalled by the rising sun and her awakening. First Gap Romana is a rather more crudely pornographic fantasy, depicting a couple at a party. The woman is naked and faces front. She holds a glass between both hands, thereby rendering her passive. The man is fully clothed and has his back to us, though he casually clutches her vulva with his left hand in full sight of the viewer. Also in Europe but roaming a city was Miroslav Tichý (1926–2011), a master of the stolen image. He worked compulsively and obsessively. He fashioned handmade cameras from cardboard and recycled materials. These he used to take clandestine images of women and girls around his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic. The camera was, for Tichý, a liberating device. He captured images that are natural and unposed both by shooting secretly or using an element of surprise. The technical imperfections of his prints added to a sense of resistance to a rule-bound society. His subject was the female form. In all his work there is an element of erotic desire that merges with an intuitive feel for great composition. He further played with the images in the darkroom and afterwards. Crudely made cardboard frames decorated with ballpoint pen were often added. This emphasised the physicality of each print as well as its status as captured thing. Once complete, the photographic
object seems to have lost its usefulness and agency for Tichý. He discarded them in piles of thousands strewn on the floor of his home. Tichý's work only came to public attention late in life. But in 2009 he announced that he had made no agreement with anyone to propagate his work. This leaves viewers with a complicated encounter in which they are cast doubly as voyeur. First in relation to the stolen female image, and second to the artist’s private objects. Eroticism in Marilena Pelosi’s (b.1957) work is bound up with ritual suffering and bodily penetration that can be both sexual and literally wounding. She was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At around age 20 she was forced to flee her home country when her father attempted to marry her to a Macumba (voodoo) priest. Pelosi is self-taught and began drawing in earnest at age 16 while recovering from a serious illness. Her imagery is unremittingly sexual and appears to deal directly with often violent
right: life-size display mannequin by unidentified maker, c. 1940s, wood and polychrome,Just Folk Collection, California previous page: two untitled paintings by Ike Morgan, both 2014, acrylic on pasteboard, 22 x 28 ins. / 56 x 71 cm, Webb Gallery, Texas Photo: Lissa Rivera, The Museum of Sex
ALL IN THE MIND Although a trained artist, the trauma suffered by Yvonne Mabs Francis resulted in unique works BARBARA HERBIN
Y
vonne Mabs Francis was born in 1945 in Oxford, of Welsh descent. Her father worked as a picture framer and restorer. Her own career as an artist began aged 15, when she attended a new school and was taught by Keith Arnett, a conceptual artist. He showed her pictures of his harsh, white boxes and told her this was the way forward as “all the marks on a canvas had been made.” Despite this, she describes him as “the greatest teacher of painting and drawing I ever met. He made the useless draw and the hopeless paint. He lit up the whole school by displaying art works in every available space. From seeing this I never lost my interest or belief in painting, even when the virus of conceptual art took hold.” Mabs Francis pursued her desire to paint at Brighton School of Art and then at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where she felt “very comfortable and at home.” Sir William Coldstream headed the Slade and, despite the recommendations of the report bearing his name, she recalled, “it was so noticeably different at his own college. We were, above all else, painters; no other requirements were thrust upon us.” On leaving the Slade in 1968, she lectured on contemporary art at Wolverhampton College of Art for a year, but at the end of that year her beloved father died. The trauma and shock of his death changed Mabs Francis’ life for ever. She reacted by becoming hyperactive, with continual obsessive thoughts and virtually no sleep for three weeks. The thoughts wouldn’t go away, but she felt no sorrow and was unable to cry. Among the thoughts was a delusion that her brains had grown out of her head, like antlers, depicted in the painting Liar. After a few weeks her thoughts stopped completely, which “felt like death, a terrifying experience.” Mabs Francis then slept for three days. Afterwards, she became psychotic, experienced hallucinations, and was voluntarily admitted to the Warneford Mental Hospital in Oxford for three months. The treatment consisted of numerous drugs, deep-sleep treatment and electroconvulsive therapy. Mabs Francis received little help in understanding her condition from the doctors who treated her: “A wall of silence developed between me and the doctors. It was bewildering. I remember
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being analysed and told I was immature. How could anyone tell in the state I was in?” Wanting to go home, she ran across the hospital lawn in her nightdress, believing she could fly if she could get enough acceleration. When Mabs Francis was discharged, she asked the hospital doctor why he had never tried talking to her and explaining her condition. He replied that she was not able to be talked to. Mabs Francis described psychosis like being behind a wall. “Everything is logical behind that wall. You can take things in but your logic is not the logic practised the other side of the wall. One day, one of the Sisters, seeing my distress, said, ‘However you feel now, it will pass’, and I tossed my head back and all the pieces of my skull, which I believed was floating in my brain, fell to one side, and I felt, for one moment, good and defiant. If only that sort of comment could be given more often.” Her psychosis may have been triggered by lack of sleep. Dreaming appears to be a vital function, and if deprived of sleep, the mind begins to create dreamlike images while awake, producing psychotic illusions that are far more disturbing than dreams. Over the years, Mabs Francis has talked to others who have suffered from psychosis; in all cases their sleep patterns had been hugely disrupted before the onset of their hallucinations. By the time she left the Warneford, her hallucinations had ceased completely. Her symptoms never returned. Her mental illness has been a highly disturbing, traumatic episode, but not a life long condition. Still in a fragile mental condition, on her discharge Mabs Francis returned to London. Finding painting a strain, she began to sew and set up her own successful clothes business, MABS. It was only in the 1980s that she returned to painting. She began painting still life with abstract elements, and fabric designs. By the late 1990s, she wanted more depth to her work. “I needed something dear to my heart, something I knew and
opposite: The Impossibility of Being in the Brain of Someone Living, oil on canvas, 2003, 8 ft x 5 ft 6 ins. / 2.44 x 1.68 m
WASHING WITH THE GODS Magic soaps of South America and Mexico JAMES GREEN
Suerte Rรกpida, for quick luck
S
aints and sinners, gods and demons, drunkards, intellectuals, lovers and gamblers. These are just some of the many characters and creatures that appear on the packages of magic soap: a range of soaps that can be bought from esoteric stalls in cramped and dusty corners of the markets of Mexico and South America. These soaps, although quite easy
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to purchase, are largely overlooked, and are virtually unknown in Europe. The artwork used to communicate the powers that each soap will unleash is novel and inspiring. That said, the artists who design the packages go uncredited, making it difficult to find out who they are, and where the inspiration for their package designs originated.
Tumba Trabajo, for protection against evil
Tierra de Muerto, to keep negativity away
Afrodita, for finding the love of a woman
Santa Muerte, for luck with money
Amansa, to tame him
Don Dinero, for luck with money, for men
JesĂşs Malverde, the folklore hero bandit
I collected the packages displayed here between 2015 and 2016 during trips to Quito [Ecuador], Santiago and Easter Island [Chile], and MĂŠrida, Oaxaca, Guadalajara and Mexico City [Mexico], while researching contemporary magic and masks. In an old shop in Quito, I spotted a clear plastic bag in a corner behind the counter. Inside were colourful boxes that
Gregorio, or Saint Gregory
smelled of soap. Closer observation found them to be Jabon Esoterico: magic soaps that could grant fast money (Don Dinero) or bring about true love (PegaPega). The dusty boxes were sold with a warning from the old lady in the shop about their power, and what could happen if they were used at the same time. From then on, hunting down magic soaps became part of RAW VISION 93
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Michel Nedjar, Untitled, c. 1985-1987. Paper mache, plaster and dye
EXHIBITIONS
MICHEL NEDJAR, INTROSPECTIVE Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art (LaM), 1 Allée du Musée, 59650 Villeneuve-d'Ascq, France until June 4 2017 The retrospective dedicated to the work of Michel Nedjar (b. 1947) considers 45 years of his creation, from 1960 to 2016. Arranged chronologically, “Introspective” demonstrated the major themes of 60
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Nedjar’s art: his childhood, his travels, Eros and Thanatos, magic, and various encounters that have been central to his life. It included 350 works: dolls, sculptures, drawings, paintings and experimental films. At the entrance, one encountered a small and dramatic painting made in 1962–63. A prisoner stands behind barbed wire, his dark and emaciated silhouette emerging from a blood-red background. The young Nedjar created this work shortly after watching Alain Resnais’ 1956
documentary on the Shoah, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog). Not far from this painting was an odd, two-headed doll. “I was a little boy who was afraid and who knew that this thing [this doll] will help him to cope, help him to get on with his life. My dolls have saved my life”, wrote Nedjar. In his work, Nedjar uses dolls that have been broken or damaged, dressing them in clothes that have already been worn and, preferably, are dirty and trampled.
R AW R E V I E W S
Jean-Pierre Naudau
Gérard Lattier
Raymond Reynaud
EXHIBITIONS
UNDERBRUT: Art Marginal Contemporain? Friche la Belle-de-Mai, 3rd floor, Le Tour-Panorama, Marseille until April 16 2017 Organised by French publisher Le Dernier Cri, “Underbrut” was held in La Belle de Mai, a district of Marseille that was once a working-class tobacco factory and is now an industrial wasteland. It brought together art brut, outsider art, contemporary art and underground graphic creation. At the exhibition’s entrance, earthy film posters printed on Ghanaian flour sacks hung beside poetic drawings by the Hungarian street artist, Stark Atilla (b. 1979). On the adjacent wall hung an attractive fresco, created by a group of Finnish artists, that recalls the universe of Emir Kusturica’s films. Strong colour themes 62
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underpinned the first room: a yellow background for underground microeditions, olive green for outsider art creations from Pascal Saumade’s La Pop Galerie, and purple for the singulier artists from southern France. “Art doesn’t go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is”, wrote Jean Dubuffet. This quote could have been placed at the entrance of the exhibition, as a subtitle. There was another watchword in the section on southern France’s artists singuliers: “We should flee working methods. The painter should move towards mysterious phenomena, towards spontaneous strokes, towards dreams”, wrote Raymond Reynaud (1920–2007). This former house painter, a devoted admirer of Gaston
Chaissac, made strange mandalas and sculptures that incorporated objects found by the roadside or on garbage dumps. “What I dislike the most is consumer society”, Reynaud enjoyed saying. Visitors could admire two of his masterpieces: magnificent polyptychs, inspired by the works of Marcel Pagnol (Jean de Florette) and Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quichotte). They coexisted with Gérard Lattier’s (b. 1937) bleak, erotic paintings and Jean-Pierre Nadau’s (b. 1963) fantastical architectures and surreal creatures. The exhibition, enlivened by several documentary films, closed with a room of recent works by Filipino artist Manuel Ocampo (b. 1965), created during his art residency in Marseille – an “Amen” to this hymn to life, which was spiced with humour and self-mockery. Eric Tariant
Raymond Isidore, La Maison Picassiette
LES BÂTISSEURS DE L’IMAGINAIRE Prévost, Claude & Clovis, Editions Klincksieck, Paris 2016. 422 pages; 780 illns ISBN: 978 2 252 04034 8 Here is a remarkable book, coauthored by Claude Prévost and her husband Clovis Prévost, both filmmakers, scholarly writers and curators. The couple’s reputation rests on their close study of the postman Ferdinand Cheval, whose Ideal Palace in rural France is the outstanding example of a three-dimensional construction in the ‘Outsider’ vein. The Prévosts’ meticulous account of Cheval dates back to 1981, and revised versions later appeared in 1994 and 2015. Their intricate presentation is particularly revered for its abundance of historical material, including the charming old photographs, converted into postcards, that Cheval used as gentle publicity for his growing clientele. 66
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Initiated in around 1990, the Prévosts’ wider project now materialises as another weighty tome, Les Bâtisseurs de l’imaginaire [The Constructors of the Imaginary]. Its aim is to celebrate a group of fourteen master-builders or habitantspaysagistes (‘live-in landscapists’, to use Bernard Lassus’s term). Cheval is one of this select group.These selfreliant constructors of towers, fountains or secret sanctuaries devoted years of toil with wood and cement to summon up a vision both down-to-earth and extraordinary. Thus the Prévosts consider Robert Tatin, a self-possessed recluse who adorned a sacred water-garden site with bizarre portals and weird totemic figures; and the Abbé Fouré, who attacked the rugged shoreline near Saint-Malo with hammer and chisel to install a sculpted narrative about local pirate wars. Other creators share the theme of artmaking as a journey toward self-fulfilment. Inspired by
Michelangelo, Irial Vets painted his own set of religious scenes, grouped within a disaffected chapel. Robert Vasseur and Raymond Isidore are kindred spirits who decorated home and garden with splintered pots and plates, producing what look like giant jigsaw puzzles, painstakingly completed. Despite its splendid photographs, the book is a little clumsy in its handling of matters textual, for Clovis Prévost has pursued a somewhat erratic editorial policy in mixing his own commentaries with statements by his team of builders. This makes it hard sometimes to follow who is speaking. Clovis copies out pages of anonymous comments from Robert Vasseur’s Visitors’ Book; the anonymous quotations prove to be numerous, but also banal and repetitive. The chapter on the Abbé Fouré is a lengthy article composed in 1905 by a forgotten journalist, while that on Monsieur G. exploits passages
GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS AUSTRIA
B R I TA I N
CANADA
FRANCE
GALERIE GUGGING Am Campus 2 - A3400 Maria Gugging t: +43(0)2243 87087 381/f: 382 gallery@gugging.org www.gugging.org tschirtner & hauser ...with line and colour
PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY 9 North Pallant, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1TJ t: +44 (0)1243 774557 info@pallant.org.uk, www.pallant.org.uk
LA GALERIE DES NANAS 85 Daniel-Johnson CP669, Danville QC, J0A 1A0 www.galeriedesnanas.ca www.facebook.com/GaleriedesNanas Hors-les-normes, outsider & insubordinate
HALLE SAINT PIERRE 2 Rue Ronsard, 75018 Paris t: +33 1 42 58 72 89 www.hallesaintpierre.org
FRANCE
GERMANY
SWITZERLAND
SWITZERLAND
MUSéE DE LA CREATION FRANCHE 58 Av du Maréchal-de-Lattre-de-Tassigny, 33130 Begles t: +33 5 56 85 81 73 www.musee-creationfranche.com 8000 artworks that refuse academic schema
PRINZHORN COLLECTION Voss strasse 2, Heidelberg 69115 t: +49 (0)6221 564492 prinzhorn@uni-heidelberg.de http://prinzhorn.ukl-hd.de
MUSéE VISIONNAIRE ZÜRICH Predigerplatz 10, 8001 Zürich t: +41 (0)44 251 66 57 info@museevisionnaire.ch www.museevisionnaire.ch
MUSEUM IM LAGERHAUS Davidstrasse 44, 9000, St. Gallen www.museumimlagerhaus.ch t: +41 (0)71 223 58 57 The Rolf Röthlisberger Collection, April 4 – July 9
CALIFORNIA
CALIFORNIA
ILLINOIS
LOUISIANA
INSIDE OUT PRODUCTIONS AT LA GOAL www.Etsy.com/shop/lagoal 4911 Overland Ave., Culver City, CA 90230 310.838.5274 | www.InsideOutProductions.com Artists with developmental disabilities
JUST FOLK www.justfolk.com 805 969 7118 American folk and outsider art
INTUIT: THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART, 756 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622 t: 312 243 9088 intuit@art.org www.art.org Home of the Henry Darger Room Collection
ANTON HAARDT GALLERY 2858 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70115 t: 504 8919080 anton3@earthlink.net www.antonart.com Tolliver, Finster, Sudduth, Gibson
KENTUCK ART CENTER Founded by Shelby Gilley, the gallery specialises in the work of iconic Southern folk artists, including Clementine Hunter, David Butler, Mary T Smith, Howard Finster and Raymond Coins. With an ever expanding collection of unique Outsider and Folk art, Gilley’s continues to be a premier destination for collectors worldwide.
Kentuck Art Center Gallery Shop: where the art and forty-six-year tradition of the Kentuck Festival of the Arts live year-round.
Gilley's Gallery 8750 Florida Boulevard Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70815 225-922-9225 outsider@eatel.net www.gilleysgallery.com
Kentuck Art Center 503 Main Avenue Northport, AL 35476 205-758-1257 kentuck.org
Artists in the shop: Charlie Lucas, Cher Shaffer, Michael Banks, Rubye Williams, Butch Anthony, Theresa Disney, Eric Legge, Della Wells, Brian Dowdall, Sam Ezell
Charlie Lucas
Clementine Hunter
GILLEY’S GALLERY