Interesting Ideas Update

Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists, Charles Russell, Prestel, 256 pages, 180 color illustrations, 2011. ISBN: 978-3-7913-4490-4. Hardcover $65.00

Charles Russell’s Groundwaters has the look and feel of a conventional coffee table book, and it can indeed be appreciated simply for its many beautiful plates representing the work of important self-taught artists of the 20th Century.

Start reading the text, however, and another kind of book emerges. Those pictures aren’t there just because they’re striking. Each one is referenced in the text to make or elucidate a point, and Russell has many to make. Their density results in a book that feels longer than its 240 pages, but it also enables Russell, professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Rutgers University, to provide succinct but thoughtful and thorough summaries of major themes and historical moments in self-taught art. Read the rest of this entry »

Accidental Genius, Art from the Anthony Petullo Collection, by Lisa Stone and Jane Kallir, Milwaukee Art Museum/DelMonico Books/Prestel, 240 pages, 250 color illustrations, 2012. ISBN 978-3-7913-5200-8. Hard cover $60

Genius is rare enough that it ought to always seem a bit accidental. Genius matched with artistic talent is an even happier coincidence. Artistic genius displayed by art world outsiders is rarer yet. These artists must figure out how to convert their brilliance into powerful acts of creativity on their own, without the support of formal art education and usually with no help at all from outside themselves. While there is a growing canon of established genius in the field, when their ranks are considered against the far greater number of trained artists, or for that matter potential artists in the general population, these geniuses are few indeed. Read the rest of this entry »

Schaafijs en wilde bussen: Straatkunst in Suriname, by Chandra van Binnendijk , Paul Faber and Tammo Schuringa, KIT Publishers, 160 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2054-8. Dutch, soft cover, 19.50 euros

Kit Pubishers, the same Dutch company behind African Signs, also crossed the ocean to document the decorated buses and snow cone stands of Surname, a former Dutch colony next to Guyana in South America.

Shaved Ice and Wild Buses: Street Art in Suriname, published in conjunction with exhibits in that country and the Netherlands, is an ideal coffee table book if you don’t happen to speak Dutch – you can just look at the photos without guilt.

The book documents a tradition of decorating small urban buses said to go back to the 1970s. Many of these images are more polished than the African signs in the previous books, and their scale is often small –medallions painted above the license plates that look to be just a foot or two square.

The shaved ice carts are much smaller than the buses yet seem more monumentally decorated, perhaps because the paintings tend to cover the entire carts. The style on the carts also seems more varied, in some cases similar to the bus images but in others more personal, with some being outright pornographic.

The explicit scenes aside, most of the paintings on both buses and carts show celebrities ranging from Bob Marley to Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and a bevy of movie stars, both Hollywood and Bollywood varieties. Political figures also turn up, including Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandi. A particularly nice image shows George W. Bush, labeled the Boss, gesturing between two seated, almost angel-like, babes.

For good measure the book supplements the buses and carts with a number of wall paintings and concludes with biographies and photos of a number of artists, again unfortunately all in Dutch.

Click here to view a video of this material and artists producing it.

South African Township Barbershops and Salons, Simon Weller, Mark Batty Publisher, 128 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-1-935613-04-6. Hard cover $27.95

If African Signs, with its minimal text but rich collection of photographs, provides a window to African vernacular culture, South African Township Barbershops & Salons passes through that window to provide something of an inside tour. Simon Weller, a professional photographer, not only document numerous advertising signs but also spent time with the hair cutters and their customers as well as several sign painters. He aims not just to show the art but also the culture in which the art is embedded. That took him across much of South Africa, both cities and countryside, and into place that few whites, let alone tourists, every visit. In one rural district he asked whether anyone had ever photographed the shops and founds only one case, and that was a government official documenting a structure for possible demolition.

Seeing inside the ramshackle structures, many of them converted steel shipping containers, gives a richer sense of the businesses the signs advertise, including details like their reliance on car batteries for their source of electricity. Weller also sketches the history of strife and the current poverty that are as part of the vernacular as any of the painted images. He observed that the poorer the community, the more the barber shops and salons serve as centers for community interaction.

The artists Weller interviews demonstrate as much variance in their stories as in the styles on view in their work. An artist known as Smoky, active in Soweto, told Weller he had wanted to be an artist since he was five and studied art in college. He paints what he considers fine art but also does commercial signs for income. He works fast, taking from 45 minutes to 2 hours to complete a commercial work.

Chris Masekela, from a rural area outside Pretoria, is self-taught and reports being “inspired by an art gallery that I used to see when I came to town and became interested in white man’s art.”

“I like black man’s art but I like white artists because they show real life and draw towns and people, for instance showing guys playing dice. Black art only shows traditional things like a black woman carrying a calabash on her heard, going to fetch water from the river.”

Masekela’s portraits have a definite edge to them and for whatever reason seem to show less of the American influence (often hiphop in nature) that characterizes much of this work and is widely acknowledged by the artists and their customers.

Weller found another artist who produces versions of his shop signs for sale. Durban painter Espoir Kennedy – actually a refugee from Burundi — said he sells hair signs in a gallery for $95 while charging $40 for actual shop banners.

Click here to see a selection of photos from the book.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

African Signs, by Rob Floor, Gert van Zanten andPaul Faber, KIT Publishers, 208 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2080-7. Soft cover $45

Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the,

African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured in an Intuit show in 1994 and have become what might be the most widely collected hand-made trade signs since those of 18th and 19th Century American came into vogue. These signs are popular enough that many of the examples that end up for sale abroad are apparently made specifically for export.

African Signs is a broad survey of Africa’s commercially inflected vernacular art. It collects hand-painted signs, mostly photographed in situ, across a number of categories, including food, clothing, health, electronics and the ubiquitous hair. Among other things, the book shows off a scale of work that can’t be grasped from the individual signs collected in the U.S. That scale includes many mural-size images, but also remarkable photo that shows more than a dozen individual signs displayed outside a pharmacy in Togo. And these being health signs, the explicit representation of ailments – some obvious and some obscure but many just gross — is easily as disturbing as the kitschy violence seen in the low-budget movie posters featured in the Extreme Canvas book and the Chicago Cultural Center show.

There is certainly a kitsch element contributing to the appeal of some of these signs, but only some. The degree of talent evident in them also varies, reflecting apparently low barriers to entry for the signs’ producers. As the introduction notes, the continent is generally too poor to produce the art school graduates who might otherwise populate a commercial art industry. But the need for commercial art in the continent’s thriving local markets has produced a demand for creativity that is ripe to be filled in interesting and creative ways.

Paul Faber, the museum curator who wrote the book’s introduction, tracked down one of these artists, who goes by the interesting name of “Middle Art.” Faber notes that Middle Art is one “of the hundreds of professional painters in Africa who don’t see themselves as ‘artists’ in the romantic sense … but as craftsman who make a living with paint and brushes. This modesty can also be found in the name ‘Middle Art.’ … He doesn’t consider himself very bad but also not very good, just Middle Art.”

However accurate Middle Art’s judgment of his own ability may, the talent displayed in this book is impressive if unpredictable. Some artists can’t manage much more than caricature, other produce nuanced portraits. Some show flights of imagination, others lavish loving attention on the most mundane (or sometimes bizarre) subjects.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, essay by Pamela Kort. Michael Werner Gallery, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-8850-1381-1. Paperback $55

Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern images of unexcelled symbolic intensity marked him as one of the most creative German artists of the mid-20th Century, but also an artist whose weirdly eroticized work was unlikely to be found on gallery walls in his own time. He was also hugely eccentric, putting in time as both a charlatan occultist and a mental patient, according to Pamela Kort’s essay in the recently published catalog for the exhibit From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist at Michael Werner Gallery in New York.

His serious production of art began with no training and minimal preparation, resulting in an effusion of highly idiosyncratic pictures. Combined with his mental health history it could sound like a typical art brut biography, but the story does not necessarily conform to the usual script. Kort argues that his time in mental institutions should not be taken at face value. He was troubled, certainly, and eccentric, but not necessarily insane.

Indeed, Schroder-Sonnenstern was hardly an isolate who labored in obscurity. Early in his artistic career he participated in a local art discussion group. More importantly, his work was recognized and promoted by such luminaries such as Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton and Hans Bellmer and exhibited in surrealistic shows. But Schroder-Sonnenstern’s art did not fit into the aesthetic conversation that dominated the post-war German art world, and he remained virtually unknown in his own country, according to Kort.

Kort devotes much attention to the artist’s medical history, but mostly to make thae case (a bit ironically) that his mental health should not be over-emphasized. Her view is that a focus on his purported schizophrenia only serves to marginalize his work, in his own time and ours, and that in any case may have reflected the man’s disrepute more than a real diagnosis.

If she spends a bit too much time assessing his mental state, in the process she provides plenty of interesting biographical details about a man whose life was in fact very interesting, art aside. In the years after World War I he was active as a mystic, clairvoyant and quack healer, although Kort does not think he had much belief in those callings. But this is a case where even the most fascinating biography pales in the context of the art itself.

His typically pulchritudinous figures appear in a variety more or less threatening scenes, with violence suggested or explicit but almost always understated. The titles are as cryptic as the symbols in the work – “The Moralistic Moon Dualism,” “Zynus Theory – whether Demon of Desiccation and Withering” and “The People’s Joyful Miraculous Shirt, or the Moralistic Scarecrow.”

Kort takes her best shot at interpreting the mind-bending symbolism, but it’s not easy. The complexity of her explanations, however admirable the effort, simply can’t keep pace with the art she is attempting to interpret.

The one thing that can be said clearly about this enigmatic artist is that his status as a true outsider is unshakable. Not because of anything about this personality or work but for the simple reason that he was twice refused membership in the Bildender Künstler Berlin, the Berlin Association of Visual Artists.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Henry Darger, by Klaus Biesenbach, with contributions by Brooke Davis Anderson and Michael Bonesteel. Prestel USA, 304 pages, 250 color illustrations, 2009. ISBN 978-3-7913-4210-8. Hard cover $85

This is the finest edition yet of Henry Darger’s artwork, with an extensive and beautiful selection of plates that includes a number of extra-wide foldout pages. It includes some of the goriest, most disturbing Darger images yet published but also pictures that demonstrate a totally different richness of imagination, such as his over-the-top facility with flowers.

Too bad the book begins bogged down in pointless argumentation about how to classify Darger as an artist. Read the rest of this entry »

Mary Nohl Inside & Outside: Biography of the Artist, by Barbara Manger and Janine Smith. University of Wisconsin Press, 134 pages, 165 color images, 145 b/w or sepia images, 2009. ISBN 978-0-6152-5118-9. Soft Cover $29.95.

See my Mary Nohl photos, circa 1990

The first time I saw Mary Nohl’s masterpiece of a home and yard I only knew I was being taken to “The Witch’s House.”

That was its name for a generation of neighborhood kids, including the two who were showing me the one big curiosity in Fox Point, Wisconsin.

The reason for the visit was Nohl’s eccentricity, which made her yard a target for vandals as well as a local landmark. But it didn’t take long to see that the art was far more important than the oddity. I had visited a couple of art environments at that time, including Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden near Summerville, Georgia, and Nohl’s place was clearly one of those. It may have seemed more domestic than heroic, tucked away next to Lake Michigan in its comfortable corner of suburban Milwaukee, but it constituted a clear statement of her personal vision.
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It’s been some time since I’ve stumbled across anything as nice as these fashion drawings in an antique store, mostly because I don’t spend much time in them any more.

Martin Ramirez: The Last Works, by Brooke Davis Anderson, Richard Rodriguez and Wayne Thiebaud. Pomegranate, 160 pages, 136 illustrations, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7649-4695-0

The ratio of text to photos in this second major volume dedicated to Martin Ramirez is low, and that comes as a relief to someone who feels compelled to read books front to back, even when not reviewing them.

The catalog published last year in conjunction with Ramirez’s epochal one-man at the American Folk Art Museum had many virtues. Contributions by Anderson and by Victor and Kristin Espinosa supplied essential (and in the Espinosas’ case ground-breaking) background and perspective. But several of the more than half-dozen essays felt like heft more than light.

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