BARBARA DENYER

, 2020 Mosaic Tile Ben Wilson,

A BEN WILSON RETROSPECTIVE: CORRESPONDENCES

Hoxton Gallery, London 22 – 30 September, 2021

Curated by Chiara Famengo, Ben Wilson’s first retrospective show, presented by the Hoxton Gallery in East London’s Shoreditch, celebrates the life work of the artist who is familiar to many as “The Chewing Gum Man”. Famengo met Wilson whilst reading anthropologist Tim Ingold’s book, Correspondences, which contains a series of essays and conversations that express Ingold’s acute sensitivity to his surroundings. Famengo recognised a similarity with Wilson’s views of his own community and environment and how his art responded to it. This show is the outcome of that chance meeting and the title was chosen to reflect both men’s outlook on life.

Selections from each of Wilson’s creative periods stand proud against the stark white gallery walls. Photographs of his huge sculptures from the 1980s, which he left in woods for unsuspecting ramblers to chance upon, are displayed next to assemblages that he made from discarded objects including broken furniture. Works from debris that once littered the streets, such as the painted cigarette butts and chewing gum pictures on bricks, have a compelling quality and are complemented by the more traditional techniques of the paintings on mosaic tiles and canvases nearby.

Most striking is the montage of Wilson’s thousands of street chewing gum pictures, an ongoing series which began in 2004 and for which the artist, lying on the ground in all weathers, paints on the discarded blobs of gum that blight London’s pavements. By working on litter, Wilson circumvents graffiti laws and in the process transforms the uncouth into something meaningful. The work is born from the requests of strangers wanting to see their personal stories depicted and shared. The photographs provide important documentation of the ever-changing social landscape, taken against the backdrop of the different seasons, and will exist long after the chewing gum pictures themselves have succumbed to the wear and tear of city life.

The white cube of a gallery space offers the visitor the chance to examine each

Ben Wilson, Minibeast, 2019

facet of Wilson’s oeuvre, but it is on the nearby streets that the exhibition really packs a punch. From Arnold Circus to the top of Rimmington Street, a trail of chewing gum pictures and tiny mosaic tiles await discovery by eagle-eyed passers-by. These joyful treasures, fixed in the crevices of the urban landscape, are small rebellious victories that reclaim their environment from suffocating corporate blandness and the bombardment of garish adverts. It is a trail of tales expressed through art by an artist who lives to make a difference to his community.

VIVIENNE ROBERTS

AGATHA WOJCIECHOWSKY: SPIRITS AMONG US

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York September 8 – October 23, 2021

On entering Andrew Edlin Gallery for “Agatha Wojciechowsky: Spirits Among Us” , you saw a small dresser just to the left illuminated by an antique lamp, a framed photograph of a woman with an arresting gaze catching your eye. Alongside was another photo – this one of a morning glory flower, a representation of one of her spirit guides who revealed that the dead were not gone but all around us, all you had to do to see them was to allow an unseen hand to take over yours. Once Agatha Wojciechowsky let the spirits in, she drew and painted the endless faces that were unveiled, creating clouds of them in rapid lines of pencil or landscapes where visages were obscured below vivid fields of colour.

The recreation of a place where she conducted séances through these personal artefacts set the tone for the first exhibition of her art in New York since 1972. While the vibrant works on paper on the gallery’s white walls allowed a close examination of the incredible details, the faces emerging from rich layers of watercolour and pastel, the context of her deep involvement with Spiritualism as a respected medium was emphasised by curator Aurélie Bernard Wortsman as essential for understanding why and how she created.

Wojciechowsky was born in 1896 in Germany, and moved to the USA in 1923 with no intention of being an artist. She had experienced visions since childhood, but suddenly her hands would not stay still. A medium urged her to try automatic drawing and – with a pencil strapped to her hand with a rubber band – she waited, and the visages manifested through her on to the paper. She described looking out her window at a bare wall and witnessing “thousands of faces and heads. Nothing but faces. Nothing but heads.”

Like other spiritualist artists, she did not claim the art as her own but a collaboration with another realm. Years after her death in 1986, there is now a reconsideration of artists who had these powerful artistic practices yet were mostly ignored by art institutions, and recently there have been retrospectives on Georgiana Houghton and Agnes Pelton who similarly used their work to try to access meaning beyond the physical world. (Wojciechowsky is featured in the touring “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art”.) There are elements of abstraction in Wojciechowsky’s work, and in her lifetime she was sometimes considered a Surrealist. Recognising the spiritual influence in her work is crucial to not just viewing her art but also to recalling that there are many artists like her, some still waiting to be remembered, who approached art from a desire to visualise the intangible.

ALLISON C MEIER

Agatha Wojciechowsky, Untitled, 1974

BOSILJ: TALES FROM PARALLEL UNIVERSES

Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York June 3 – September 8, 2021

The dreamlike scenes in the paintings by Ilija Bosilj Bašičević – where winged beings soar alongside rocket ships, and birds with fantastic foliage perch on the heads of twofaced figures – are so evocative of a fully formed universe that it is surprising to learn that he came to art late in life. Born in 1895 in Šid in what is now Serbia, he spent most of his years as a hardworking farmer before he turned that tireless energy to painting. It was then that he took on the pseudonym “Bosilj” and mined the vibrant imagery of myth, Biblical stories, nature and folklore.

“Bosilj: Tales From Parallel Universes” was the first exhibition to be presented by Cavin-Morris in the gallery’s new space. The compact show surrounded viewers with art

CREATIVITY AND ART: NEUROSCIENTIFIC AND PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES

by Andreas Steck and Barbara Steck EPFL Press, 2021 ISBN: 978-2-88915-423-4

Andreas Steck is a Swiss professor of neurology, and his co-author and partner, Barbara Steck, a psychoanalyst and lecturer in child and adolescent psychiatry, yet this book is that rare thing – a scientifically grounded study that does not seek to explain art. It might be situated in a lineage deriving from Hans Prinzhorn – who combined art history and psychiatry and become a psychotherapist – but even more relevant is Andreas Steck’s father, Hans Steck, professor of psychiatry at the University of Lausanne, who played a major role in discovering the work of Aloïse Corbaz at the psychiatric hospital in Cery. It was Hans Steck who encouraged his supervisee, Jacqueline Porret-Forel, to devote her medical thesis to Corbaz’s work and, as a result, Andreas Steck was exposed to art brut early on.

In the book, neuroscience and the psychoanalysis are included sensitively as part of a complex panorama of brain processes, life histories and emotional worlds. The volume’s 20 chapters range from “Hierarchies of Consciousness” and “The Visual Brain” to “Music”, “Grief” and “Artists’ Expressions of their Childhood Experiences” – but ultimately the discussion focuses on artists’ testimonies about their creative experiences. The sections of particular interest to readers of Raw Vision will be those on “Creativity and Psychopathology”and “Psychopathological Art and Modern Art”. The latter contains lengthy descriptions of Adolf Wölfli and Corbaz, taking off from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s judgment that “The Wölfli case will help us some day to gain new insights about the origins of creativity.”

If any general idea emerges in the book, it concerns the role of loss in galvanising artistic responses. Thus, in Wölfli’s case they note how early in his hospitalisation at Waldau he would cry for hours in a corner thinking about his dead mother, while at times Corbaz was agitated, “seized by states of erotic excitement involving obscene speech, aggressiveness and physical violence”. However, Wölfli became calmer when drawing, composing and writing poems, and Corbaz appeared less anxious when working quickly on her art, “often mixing the colour of her crayon with saliva”.

These portraits sit alongside numerous other vignettes of artists, composers and writers – including Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Claudel and Edvard Munch –struggling to cope with illness, grief or trauma, and responding creatively. On this front, they draw on psychoanalyst Hannah Segal’s insight that, “It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments... it is then that we must recreate our world anew”.

MATT FFYTCHE

BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS

Directed by Jeffrey Wolf Breakaway Films, 2021

Like so many others, filmmaker Jeffrey Wolf first encountered the work of Bill Traylor (1853–1949) in the iconic 1982 exhibition, “Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980”. Since that time Traylor’s work has become increasingly well known and celebrated as a key oeuvre in twentieth-century American art. His imagery stands witness to AfricanAmerican experience through slavery and Jim Crow, in a visual language that is both formally direct and conceptually sophisticated and multilayered. Yet Traylor came to art late, after a lifetime of physically demanding work, mostly on farms in the rural south. He became, for a while, a feature on Monroe Street, the prosperous busy thoroughfare in the traditionally Black neighbourhood of Montgomery, Alabama, where he could be found perched in front of a store drawing assiduously. During his lifetime, his art was neither well known nor widely valued, although a large collection was purchased over the course of a few years by Charles and Blanche Shannon which now constitutes the largest part of Traylor’s surviving output.

In 75 minutes, Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts brilliantly evokes an individual life lived meaningfully, and the times and culture that Traylor and his family inhabited and negotiated. It is a story of the mundane and also the transformative possibilities of creativity. At the film’s core is a notion that Traylor’s art collectively represents a visual history of period and place; at once personal, objective, incisive and witty. Wolf’s task, then, was to help these artworks to reveal their content through the documentary medium without losing sight of their centrality, or that of their creator. Around the ever-present fulcrum of Traylor’s artworks, Wolf therefore sets in motion a carefully chosen comparative collage of historical photographic stills, stock moving image footage and even jazz dance, overlaid with an almost omnipresent soundtrack of jazz, blues and southern folk music. The inevitable talking heads sequences (including Traylor descendants, artists, scholars, and actors speaking the written words of past figures) are refreshingly short on the didactic and mostly richly conversational, so that they rarely jar. Everything spins around and back to Traylor and his art in a way that feels completely real and natural. This is a mustsee film for anyone interested in art and the African-American culture and history since the mid nineteenth century.

COLIN RHODES

photo: Horace Perry