The
Pallant House Gallery's 'Dubuffet: Transitions' (as
covered last time) was a mere part of this three-in-one
“season of exhibitions,” also including 'Outside In'
- a group show of contemporary outsider art and 'Pat
Douthwaite: The Uncompromising Image.' (None of which are
still on now, needless to say.)
”Unpredictable,
Impulsive and Spontaneous”
Riddle
me this, show curator, can you really put the outside in? Can
outsider art actually fit in a gallery? It's a question you could
even ask literally, when so many of the most memorable examples have
been immersive environments, such as Ferdinand Cheval's Palais Ideal or Simon Rodia's Watts Tower. (According to Wikipedia, never slow to
coin a term, these are “visionary
environments.”)
Or,
on another tack, can you generalise about it enough to meaningfully
create an exhibition around it? It sounds a task like herding cats.
Dubuffet himself said “there is no more an art of the mad than
there is for those with bad knees.” But worse, if the point of it
is to be outside, if that's where you go in search
of the uncategorisable, why then try to neatly box it?
All
the “from the” and the “ins” which lace the phraseology here,
they can start to raise hackles. In the gallery magazine (no. 28,
Oct' 12- Feb '13) Marc Steene eloquently extols outsider art's
virtues and suggests it was the pressures of the art market which
drove him to a breakdown. But here we are not just in a conventional
gallery show but one that's even a competition! (What
was it Dubuffet said about art “where the
worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not
interfere”?)
Nevertheless,
if we don't want to see outsider art as a genre it can be a
convenient umbrella term. Don't look for a coherent movement, with
agendas and manifestos, but tendencies and (perhaps just as
importantly) contradictions. Art movements are pretty much that
anyway, when seen up close. The show finds three broad headings for
it's artists, so let's take them in turn.
We
start with 'Intuition', and one of the first
pieces we come across is Jacob Rock's 'Spiky Dog'
(above) assembled from “what I found by the roadside.” Rock has described him as “a primitive dog... like
the part of me that functions on it's own outside of any control –
unpredictable, erratic, impulsive and spontaneous.” Another of his
works (not in this show) is tellingly titled 'Letting
Fearsome Things Fly.'
It's
easy to get carried away before such an imaginative work and imagine
the outsider artist as some uber-bohemian, his bridges to conformity
long since burnt, with him left free to plant his elbows on the table
and paint just what he wants. Yet the phrase that sticks is “like
the part of me.” The way it's built from
non-organic material, in a kind of animism, suggests some kind of
totem. Someone who was so free a spirit, would
they need to create an artwork to channel that? Artists don't tend to
make what's there already.
Nevertheless,
Rock does perhaps epitomise one pole of outsider art. Many of the
other pieces here are diagrammatic, almost cartographic, featuring
cut-away elements and a heavy use of text. They seem not wild and
exuberant but obsessive. Take for example Ronald Henry's 'The
United Kingdom from the White House' (below).
Henry
reproduces the world on a micro-scale, as if making a power object in
the hope that will control it, the map-maker seeking to rearrange the
territory by delineating it. Art here is a way to organise the world
in your mind. It's the way children tend to draw, and perhaps for a
similar reason. Conversely, Rock took things from the world and
rearranged them. His art aims not to make sense of the world but
impose his will – to build a mechanical dog which will ride
roughshod across it.
Obsession
(Madness in the Method)
In
a huge contrast from the bright and often jolly colours of the first
room, we next come to the often heavy pen and ink work that hangs
from the walls of 'Introspection.' Kate Bradbury's
'Where Has All the Birdsong Gone?' delineates a
great line of birds in obsessive detail, with not half an inch of
open space. (The image above is but a section of the long parade.)
What initially appear as squiggly hatching on the brickwork turns out
to be individual handwritten words, as if you could keep drilling
down and just come across more and more content, past the point a more balanced brain would quit.
The
shock effect of outsider art is sometimes held as being it's
amateurishness, like cultured gallery-goers sensitising their
palletes then suddenly being threatened with a blunt implement. But
check out that pen on Bradbury – it could scarcely be any sharper,
this is a highly accomplished work. There is clearly something else
afoot...
The
effect comes not so much from the dark and grotesque imagery itself,
but more the obsessiveness with which it's conveyed. It can make such
pieces disturbing on quite a root level. If such a work has any
connection to the cartographic works of earlier, it's as maps which
impose their meaning while withholding their key - an order contrary
to our own which rears as inexplicable to us, the place where the
nightmares come out.
Dubuffet
may accuse me of having bad knees, but this does seem a recurrent
style in outsider art. My memories of the 'Beyond Reason' exhibition of asylum art, shown at the Hayward back in '97,
are of works ceaselessly crossing between the two poles represented
by Bradbury and Henry – as if aspirations and fears were constantly
overwriting one another on a single piece of paper.
Though
in the case of the Prinzhorn artists they merely drew with what they
had to hand, there may be something in the medium of pen-and-ink
which lends itself to this style – it's scratchiness so at odds
with the aesthetic indulgence of a fat, colourful brush stroke. If
so, an interesting contrast to Bradbury might be Jasna Nikolic's
'Concerning Intrusive Thoughts and Delusions' (below). The vivid colours vie creatively against the overlaid
images; and while the dominant central figure holds together what
would otherwise be a sprawling composition, his face is inscrutably
impassive.
Reduction
of Big to Small
The
final room, 'Insight,' focuses on those whose art
is produced by a “significant life issue.” Of course this runs
the risk of indulging the therapy-culture notion that suffering
produces art like some mechanistic impression made in the psyche, and
that “letting it out” is somehow enough to solve social problems.
Mental health problems may well often be caused by social factors.
That doesn't make them some kind of escape from, or solution to them.
With
some of these life stories so bleak, at times it feels harsh to
evaluate the works as an art critic. Yet nevertheless it has to be
said 'outsiderness' does not necessarily exclude cliché, and some
pieces are shrillishly polemical.
Insight
is however on abundant display in perhaps my favourite work of all,
Tess Springall's assemblage 'Memories of Being
Sectioned' (two views below) a model of a psychiatric
institution she was sent to. With guards made from keys and inmates
fuses, it's savage wit both epitomises and critiques the assumptions
of the earlier cartographic works. It's rigidity and reductiveness
defy us to accept it's message, almost compel us to claim that it's
picture cannot be complete, that such institutions
are not as soulless and mechanistic as suggested here. It's
effectiveness comes not any hectoring cries but from it's bold
flatness.
(Springall's
own experiences may not have been as negative as the work might
suggest. She
speaks thankfully of art therapy classes which helped put
her on the mend, which inevitably enough “I am sad to say no longer
exists in this area, due to lack of funding.” Still, at least the
bankers got their bonuses.)
'Pat
Douthwaite: The Uncompromising Image'
Of
the room devoted to Scottish artist Pat Douthwaite, one wall is
devoted to iconic and often grotesque animal images. There's little
or none of the backgrounds or environments normally used to
contextualise them, the branches or tufts of grass. The facing wall
is populated by people, but there's little to actually tell them
apart. Check out for example the cold-eyed fish head on 'Mary
Queen of Scots' (1974, above). Douthwaite's bold but loose
outlines look almost more framing than Dubuffet's, despite his being
formally employed as frames. They snake louchly around the edge of
the paper.
You're
never quite sure how seriously you should be taking these works, but
fear to write them off as cartoons. There's black humour and savagery
in some volatile mixture. In 'Homage to Brian Jones'
(1969, below, a personal favourite) he's dandified, yet
simultaneously callow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. You're not even sure
it's a portrait from before or after his death.
How
to explain Douthwaite's lack of acclaim? The answer seems to be...
wait for it... that she was something of an outsider. Guy People, in
a feature on her in the gallery magazine (as above), suggests that it
wasn't only her images that were uncompromising. Like her subject
Mary she could be quite contrary, selling works only to demand them
back again and generally making the
cantankerous Edward Burra seem a greasy-palmed careerist.
If so, and her personality was the only bar to her popularity,
hopefully there'll now be no bar to more posthumous shows such as
this.
More
works by some of these artists (and others of their ilk) are on the Outside In website.
Coming
soon! How about more out-of-date art exhibitions? Of course
this blog may well constitute a piece of outsider art in itself...
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