PDF file - University of South Australia

Margin to Centre: Visionary Art
5 July - 5 August 2011
SASA GALLERY
Anthony Mannix, n.d., Untitled, watercolour on paper, 30 x 40 cm
Margin to Centre: Visionary Art
Curators
Paul Hoban, Head, Painting Studio,
Art, Architecture & Design, University of South Australia (UniSA)
Prof Colin Rhodes, Head of School,
Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
Artists
Vittorio Ban, Howard Finster, Iris Frame, Anne Marie Grgich,
Bronco Johnson, Albert Louden, Anthony Mannix, R.A. Miller,
Frank Phelan, Jungle Phillips, José dos Santos, Gérard Sendrey,
Mary T. Smith, James Son Ford Thomas and James T. Thomas.
Editor
Dr Mary Knights, Director, SASA Gallery, UniSA
Catalogue Design
Keith Giles, Curator/Manager, SASA Gallery, UniSA
1
Howard Finster, 1990, Self-portrait aged 25, acrylic & felt pen on plywood, 25 x 10 x 5 cm
2
Contents
5
Introduction
6
Who’s Afraid of Outsider Art?
Colin Rhodes
18
Margin to Centre: Visionary Art
Paul Hoban
25 Acknowledgements
Front cover: José dos Santos, n.d. Figures (detail)
wood paint, clothing, dimensions variable
Back cover: Jungle Phillips, 1996, Timed Tides XXVI, (detail)
acrylic on canvas, 180 x 60 cm
3
José dos Santos, n.d., Figures, (details), wood, paint and found clothing, dimensions variable
4
Introduction
Margin to Centre: Visionary Art is an exhibition of work by
artists who are self-taught and have developed their practices
outside of mainstream art schools and galleries. Many of the
artists have been marginalisation from society because of
eccentricity, poverty or illness, or through institutionalisation in
prisons and psychiatric hosptials. Although grouped together
as ‘Outsider Art’ the work is idiosyncratic reflecting, not a style
or a movement, but a range of very disparate visions. In this
exhibition the curators Paul Hoban, Studio Head, Painting,
AAD, UniSA, and Prof Colin Rhodes, Head, SCA, Sydney
University, have repositioned this intense and exuberant body
of work by artists at the fringes of the art world back into the
centre.
The SASA Gallery has received immense support and
assistance from many people in the development of this
exhibition and the associated events and catalogue. Special
thanks to the curators Paul Hoban and Colin Rhodes and the
artists Vittorio Ban, Howard Finster, Iris Frame, Anne Marie
Grgich, Bronco Johnson, Albert Louden, Anthony Mannix,
R.A. Miller, Frank Phelan, Jungle Phillips, José dos Santos,
Gérard Sendrey, Mary T. Smith, James Son Ford Thomas
and James T. Thomas. Also special thanks to the performers
Anthony Mannix and members of The Loop Orchestra and
Rudely Interrupted.
To bring this project to fruition the curators, artists and
performers have been assisted by many friends, family
members, carers, arts professionals and organisations including
Arts SA, the Helpmann Academy, the Greenaway Art Gallery,
the Richard Llewellyn Arts & Disability Trust, the Muscular
Dystrophy Association of South Australia, and the Disability
Information and Resource Centre.
Margin to Centre: Visionary Art has been developed as a partnership between the SASA Gallery and Painting Studio, AAD,
UniSA; and the Sydney College of the Arts, and STOARC,
University of Sydney. The SASA Gallery supports a program
of exhibitions focusing on innovation, experimentation and
performance.
With the assistance of the Division of Education, Art and Social
Sciences and the Division Research Performance Fund, the
SASA Gallery is being developed as a leading contemporary
art space publishing and exhibiting high-quality research based
work, and as an active site of teaching and learning. The SASA
Gallery showcases South Australian artists, designers, writers
and curators associated with Art, Architecture & Design, UniSA
in a national and international context.
Dr Mary Knights
Director, SASA Gallery
5
Who’s Afraid of Outsider Art?
Colin Rhodes
‘A song bawled out by a girl scrubbing the stairs knocks me over
much more than an erudite cantata. To each his own. I like the
little. I also like the embryonic, the ill-fashioned, the imperfect,
the mixed. I prefer raw diamonds, in their gangue. And with all
their defects’.1 Jean Dubuffet (1945)
When I was very small I used to get told off for staring at
people. The truth is I was staring at everything. I still do. It’s just
not so obvious now. By the time we’re not very old, most of us,
though, look away more than we actually look. We stop pointing. We stop asking questions. Avoidance becomes a function
of etiquette, of socialization. Previously insatiable curiosity is
tempered and the sense of wonder is domesticated. Naïveté
gives way to knowing. The same goes for attending to art. On
the whole, we come into the gallery armed with our received
opinions and learned cultural baggage. Too often exhibition
visitors spend more time huddled around explanatory wall texts
and peering at labels adjacent to displayed works than they do
with the art itself. They are looking, of course, for context; for
guidance on how to look. And they are looking for reassurance
that the artists who created the work have a right to be shown in
such spaces ... especially when the art is difficult.
The art we’re concerned with here is, in its most important
ways, no different to any other. Drawings by Gérard Sendrey
and Albert Louden, sculpture by José dos Santos, paintings by
6
Jungle Phillips and Iris Frame, and prints by Kenneth
Rasmussen and Anthony Mannix, for example, clearly belong
to the family of visual art. Yet their work, and that of the others
included here, has been fenced off, redefined, and contained in
discourses of collecting and criticism that presume its essential
difference to ‘mainstream’, or what Arthur Danto calls ‘artworld’
art.2 In the USA the term ‘self-taught’ has long been in use as an
umbrella descriptor. In Europe in the 1940s, the French artist
Jean Dubuffet even invented a new category that he called Art
brut, which set the trend for a flurry of naming attempts and
internal debates that at times have threatened to obscure the
art itself. One of the terms that has stuck in spite of being, or
because it is, contentious, is ‘Outsider Art’.
Much Outsider Art reveals experience that is often radically
different to that of the broader audience for the work – and
especially for artworld sophisticates who form its most vocal
audience. Aesthetics helps to muddy the waters here, because
it is often the strange or singular look of works like those of
Dos Santos or Mannix that attracts our attention in the first
place. And it is not just the unusual ways in which artists deal
with form, but often also their unexpected use of materials and
idiosyncratic construction that draws the eye. It is also, almost
inevitably, the evidence that a singularly visionary perception is
at work. In sociological terms people are marginalized through
difference. And in cultures which are fundamentally materialist
and privilege rationality, ‘special insight’ and even naïveté, after a
certain age, are not only questionable, but essentially
threatening qualities. To take an obvious example: in the
western nations today voice hearing is described by the
Mary T. Smith, 1989, Collector (detail), enamel paint on masonite board, 80 x 62 cm
7
Gérard Sendrey, 2009, drawings (details), ink on paper, dimensions variable
8
dominant culture as hallucinatory and the individual voice
hearer deemed to be ill. The voices are said to be internally
generated, rather than metaphysical or supernatural in origin.
Visionary, or otherwise revelatory perception is viewed with
ridicule or suspicion. Yet this was not always so, and there are
contemporary cultures and sub-cultures in which ‘visionary’
perception is viewed as real, revelatory, and a gift.3
There are artists – like Mannix, Louden, Grgich, Phillips and
Wenzel – who seemingly have access to ‘other’ places,
enjoying or enduring the experience of realities that are
markedly different to the one that’s commonly acknowledged
by social consensus. And because the consensus is held
together as much by what is excluded as included, such people
can find themselves ostracised by what I’ll call the ‘visionary’
nature of their perception. However, anyone interested in the
possibility of descriptions of consciousness as more than just a
by-product of mechanistic processes will be open to the
possibility of seeing types of vision that are not merely
practical as both legitimate and potentially insightful. Rather
than categorizing, we should attend to the particularities of an
artist’s vision. Imagination means different things to different
people at different times. And for academically trained artists
like Henry Fuseli, Caspar David Friedrich, or William Blake, for
example, it was the cosmic function through which individuals might get to the very essence of things. According to Blake:
‘This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity … There
Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every
Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature
[the human eye]’ (‘A Vision of the Last Judgment’, 1810). This
fundamentally visionary worldview should make viewers attend
to Blake’s representations as more than ‘tweakings’ of the world
we all live in, and investigate their metaphysical dimension. The
same is true of all of the work included in this exhibition.
In ‘visionary’ works I don’t think we are ever asked, as viewers,
to mistake the representation for the ‘reality’, for however
realistic the artist’s intent might be, none except perhaps the
most deluded would regard their works as more than
representation; as interpretative, communicating vessels. The
question, then, is partly about what it is that is being
represented. In addition, simply by being self-taught, as are all
the individuals in the exhibition, artists are less likely to reflect
the prevailing ‘mainstream’ conventions their day. Add to this
further hurdles, which might variously include a lack of formal
education, poverty, incarceration in jail or psychiatric hospital,
and trauma, and the marvel is not so much the idiosyncrasy
or eccentricity of style, but the sheer inventiveness that has
been brought into play to communicate so strongly in spite of
everything.
Outsider Art is a field that has grown, usually in fits and starts,
over the last hundred years or so, giving it the appearance
nowadays of a transnational and transhistorical tendency
descriptor, rather than of a movement shaped by self-conscious
practices and philosophies, as in the case of the various ‘isms’
of modern and postmodern art. Its scope has been defined
largely by collectors, dealers, culturally inscribed professional
artists (that is, not outsiders) and, occasionally, psychiatrists, all
of whom were interested in creative production that lay beyond
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even the ‘bohemian’ or ‘underground’ scenes so familiar in late
modernist counterculture. Art historians and critics came late
and only sporadically to the field. Curators likewise. This was
largely a result of the anti-academic and anti-institutional views
of many of Outsider Art’s foundational supporters and current
apologists.
Though it has been around loosely as a concept for almost a
century, the specific term ‘outsider art’ was not used until 1972,
when it was employed as the title of British writer, Roger
Cardinal’s book about ‘art brut’4 – the term invented by the
French painter Jean Dubuffet to describe his collection of
idiosyncratic art in the 1940s. It gained wider usage in the
1980s and ‘90s, largely as a result of increased, if contentious,
usage in the United States among specialist dealers and
collectors wanting to distinguish the work in which they were
interested from traditional ‘folk art’. In Australia, the field
arrived almost readymade as Outsider Art in the 1980s,
through pioneer dealers and collectors like Terence Relph and
Philip Hammial, as well as artists like Mannix.
The term Outsider Art has grown to embrace work produced
by artists springing from a fairly broad range of socio-cultural
and socio-medical groups, ranging from the stereotypical,
institutionalised ‘psychotic’, to mediums, intellectually disabled
people and other non-mainstream individuals. Claims are
commonly made for special and different qualities in the art
itself, though often all that seems to connect the ‘outsiders’ is
a shared unconnectedness to dominant artworlds, or a highly
idiosyncratic relationship with marginal, culturally embedded
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traditions of image and object making.5 As a result, attempts are
regularly made to dismiss the very construction of the
Outsider Art category on the grounds that it further separates
and undermines certain groups already marginalised by
normative codes. Yet, for better or worse, as sign the concept
Outsider Art separates in order to make visible that which
otherwise tends to remain invisible and challenges normalising
tendencies. The American commentator William Swislow
argues that, ‘In the most useful version of the outsider art
concept, the great insight is that art is not a monopoly of
Culture, with a capital C’.6 In this sense, art produced outside
the dominant artworld matrix is generally recognized, but not
dependent on artworld appropriation for legitimization.
Romantic ideas about artists cast them as a classless figures who
inhabit a zone at the margins of society; people who belong
and speak to the dominant culture, but who are still somehow
set apart from it.7 Although not tenable as a literal description
of the artist’s social place, it is a useful metaphor to employ
when thinking about art that is created away from the system
of training, production and consumption that constitutes the
dominant artworld; art that doesn’t know the ‘rules’, so to speak.
Furthermore, although the idea of the margin denotes an edge, I
want to extend the metaphor by talking about a more vaguely
defined frontier; a kind of fringe structure whose limits are illdefined and which tangle with other world-views. The French
writer Louis Marin introduces the useful concept of the ‘lisière’,
which he describes as ‘the space of a gap, but uncertain of its
limits’; it has on one side a well-defined edge, but ‘on the other
an edge fraying so as to become chaos’8 I don’t want to produce
a model here of a single, monolithic culture bounded by a lisière
containing ‘outsiders’, ‘the folk’, and ‘visionaries’, etc., but rather
one of manifold cultures (sometimes constituted as ‘tribes of
one’) whose zone of interaction is the lisière; a place where the
familiar and the alien merge, where communication across
boundaries becomes possible. Moreover, this zone of
communicability is a neutral place; the ‘No-man’s Land’
between trenches on a World War I battlefield, where enemies
can be together or, at Christmas play soccer. This is the
‘territory’ that viewers are invited to enter in this exhibition.
Metaphorically speaking there are imaginative spaces that one
occupies. Their existence is a sign of one’s personhood.
Depending on where you’re starting from, access even to
representations of these spaces is on a sliding scale from easy to
impossible. Understanding is based on shared experience and
being able to build empathic bridges in cases where that
experience, background, and so on are not shared. As a viewer,
the attempt to feel your way empathically into a work has much
to recommend it. Some people occupy their world-view
centrally, unable or unwilling to engage with other realities.
Except in such cases of profound autism, though, most people
have a more or less elastic relationship with the unfamiliar and
the unknown. They can enter into creative dialogue. Viewers
can, if they are prepared to stare, point, ask artless questions, and
feel their way into these worlds.
Vittorio Ban, 1995, Landscape with boats (detail), oil on masonite board, 110 x 135 cm
Vittorio Ban, 1996, Mona Lisa (detail), oil on masonite board, 114 x 73 cm
11
Anne Marie Grgich (USA, b. 1961) began making
spontaneous art at the age of fifteen, mostly by clandestinely
painting in her family’s books, or making junk constructions.
Essentially self-taught, she first introduced collage into her
work around 1988, but took it to a higher level in 1997
during a period of illness. When she had recovered she began to
produce collage paintings – images of people encountered over
time in the street and in mind journeys that manifest themselves and recombine, according to her mood, in the process
of creation. Recently, she has described her faces and people as
‘manifestations of conglomerated persona, in a way acting out
these characters’. Works share in common a luminescence and
great physicality, resulting from a creative process that typically
combines collage, painting and the use of polymer resins, often
thickly applied and in multiple layers. In this way, the resulting
images appear simultaneously ancient and amazingly fresh and
contemporary.
Albert Louden (United Kingdom, b. 1943) was born in the
English seaside town of Blackpool where his Londoner parents
had gone to escape the Blitz. He had already been making art
for two decades when he was ‘discovered’ by the art dealer
Victor Musgrave in 1981. Louden’s celebrity as an artist lies
primarily in large pastel drawings of people in urban
environments, followed by spare landscapes, usually consisting
of a single geometric dwelling. He has for a long time also been
an abstractionist. Louden’s path has been unswerving through
the ups and downs of anonymity, fame and fortune. He still
lives in the same compact house in East London that he shared
with his mother until her passing.
12
Anthony Mannix (Australia, b. 1953) is a Sydneysider who
has in the last few years found a home and space to create in
the Blue Mountains. He has been making art for twenty-five
years, including writings, drawings, paintings, sculptures, artists’
books and sound recordings for radio. His work centres on
the documentation and investigation of his own experiences
of psychosis and the revelations of the unconscious. At times
visionary, philosophical and documentary, his work brings into
dialogue image and text in order to depict an animated, erotic
unconscious landscape.
Kenneth Rasmussen (Denmark, b. 1971) lives alone in a
sheltered unit. The whole apartment has been transformed in to
a big piece of art; a constantly changing installation. He is a
collector, acquiring anything he thinks is interesting or useful,
from anywhere he finds it – the beach, the forest, the street,
garbage. Sometimes he collects things that he can use in his
knitting, such as plastic bags, which he cuts up, or an object to
create a particular shape. Along with knitting Kenneth’s
favourite material is linocut. His subjects are often people,
which he relates either directly or indirectly to good or bad.
Copulating animals often appear. Cjørkebøncer are everywhere. This little flying creature – one-eyed, Siamese, happy,
angry, three-legged – is Kenneth’s own invention.
Anne Marie Grgich, 2009, Trista (detail), mixed media on paper, 68 x 118 cm
13
José dos Santos (Portugal, 1904-96) claimed that, ‘The
Portuguese are the greatest sculptors in the world and I am
the greatest sculptor in Portugal.’ But his gravestone has on it a
photograph of him playing a guitar and describes him as fadista
(fado singer). He lived with his wife in the small village of Arega,
in the Leiria region of Portugal. His smallholding was extremely
primitive, and for very many years he was relatively unaware of
the realities of modernity, ‘living in a remote part of a remote
place’. He attended mass regularly and, besides his later
preoccupation with the creation of an idiosyncratic and
powerful sculptural oeuvre, led an apparently unremarkable
life. There was a clear visionary bent, though, to his faith. He
claimed to have received the stigmata and ‘that it was God who
told him what to release from the natural forms of the vine, pear,
olive, and other local woods which were his main raw material.’
His sculpture, then, must be seen as much as divine revelation
as anything else.
Gérard Sendrey (France, b. 1928) is an artist and one-time
civil servant in the Bordeaux and Bègles municipalities. Always
physically and psychologically fragile, he suffered from
compulsive obsessions (in particular after his father’s early and
violent death) that have dogged him all his life. The experience
of psychoanalysis in 1967 both alleviated his psychological
suffering and triggered an irrepressible need to create. For ten
years he painted alone, until in 1979 he held his first
exhibition and founded the ‘Groupe Pluriel’. His goal, he argues,
is to ‘visit the unknown, which is the opposite of knowledge.’
He works obsessively, every day, and in a year, can produce
around 8,000 artworks! In this way, he transmutes, in his
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words, ‘his deep anxieties into a show reflecting the absolute
thirst to live.’ In 1989, a year after he retired, Sendrey and the
Bègles mayor, Noël Mamère opened the Musée de la Création
Franche, which continues to thrive today.
Anny Servais (Belgium, 1952-2009) painted out of herself,
and in translating her own hopes and desires she tapped into
a rich expressive vein that communicates something of the
shared, general condition of contemporary life. Without
resorting to linear narrative or literary symbolism, she packed
her work with a content to which audiences react intuitively as
well as intellectually. Hers are very physical works, which bear
witness to an intense relationship between the artist and the
process of production. Surfaces are built up in paint and collage,
then worked back into and over. It is easy to imagine the literal
closeness of the artist to the surface on which she worked.
Remarkably, the mature body of artistic expression she left behind was the result of only a decade and a half of practice. Anny
Servais began her life as a visual artist only at the age of 42.
Roy Wenzel (The Netherlands, b. 1959) was born in a refugee
camp in the southern town of Heerlen to Indonesian parents.
He suffered from severe eczema from his earliest years and was
hospitalised constantly as a child because of problems
associated with the condition. It was during this period that it
also became apparent that he was autistic. The memory of these
times has remained very strong, as revealed in repeated images
of hospital wards, nurses and, in particular, the constant
recurrence of a self-portrait figure with arms raised behind
its head, hair standing on end, and face screwed into a silent
Anthony Mannix, n.d., Afficianardos, paint & ink on paper
15
Anne Marie Grgich, The Golden Arrow, handmade artist book, mixed media, 45 x 30 x 5 cm
16
scream. Wenzel first began drawing at the age of eleven when
he gained access to materials in hospital. Since that time he has
drawn spontaneously almost every day. In his work Wenzel
provides us with a privileged view of a world into which,
because of his verbal disability, we would otherwise be denied
access.
Notes
1. Dubuffet, ‘Notes for the Well-Read’, M. Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards
an Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p.86.
2. A. Danto, ‘The Artworld and its Outsiders’, Museum of American Folk
Art, Self-taught Artists of the 20th Century: an American anthology,
San Francisco, 1998, pp. 18-27.
3. On this topic see, for example, Ivan Leudar and Philip
Thomas, Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity, London, 2000.
4. Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art, London, 1972. As recently as June this year
Cardinal repeated to a conference audience in Helsinki that the phrase was
not his invention, but that of his publisher, and that his book was about Art
brut, which he has always considered to be a perfectly acceptable term for
Anglophone audiences (compare with Art Nouveau and Art Deco, for
example).
5. This is pertinent in relation to other non-hegemonic forms, such as
European ‘folk art’ or traditional Aboriginal art, which are centrally inserted
in recognisable cultural traditions. For this reason, they have tended to be
regarded as separate from outsider art, though instances of non-normative
practices arising out of these environments may well be assimilated.
6. William Swislow, ‘Catching All, Capturing Little’, Interesting Ideas, www.
interestingideas.com/out/testim.htm, accessed 4 January 2011.
7. Colin Wilson’s 1956 study of authors and characters in literature who
adopted critical bohemian or countercultural positions was entitled The
Outsider.
8. L. Marin, ‘The frontiers of Utopia’, K. Kumar & S. Bann, eds., Utopias and
the Millennium, London, 1993, p.10.
José dos Santos, Staffs (detail), wood, dolls heads;
mixed media, 120 x 10 x 10 cm
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Margin to Centre: Visionary Art
Paul Hoban
This exhibition assembles great artworks from international
collections – some being seen in Australia for the first time. It
is also an opportunity to contextualise some national and local
artists within this international, ‘visionary’ framework. My
essay outlines our preferred terms for describing these artworks
by drawing attention to several thematics, contained in each,
which bring the idea of ‘visionary’ art into focus. Of the artists
themselves, it is important to say that all could be classified
as self-taught and outsiders. These artists have produced
distinctively original work on their own terms – regardless of
the usual expectations of aesthetic or art historical reference
points. In this short meditation, I focus on a few of the local
and international artists with whom I am most familiar, Jungle
Phillips, Iris Frame, Vittorio Ban, ‘Son Ford’ Thomas and Mary
T. Smith.
Jungle Phillips (Australia, b. 1956) is local to Adelaide. Jungle’s
house is a spectacular landmark on a busy suburban road.
Inside, all available space seems to be filled with paintings,
hung ‘salon’ style from floor to ceiling. Paintings and sculptural
installations also adorn the exterior –walls, yard and fences –
tempting passers-by to stop and engage with Jungle’s world.
Jungle is irrepressible, incredibly prolific and possesses a
wonderful sense of colour and composition – and it’s purely
intuitive. The work is formally inventive and as far as I can see,
is not influenced by any other artist or style. Jungle is unique
– as his business card states: ‘Australia’s most original creative
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artist’. The paintings typically depict Jungle’s own narratives
and characters, sometimes incorporating his own take on
Australiana, for example, his Ned Kelly series. The productions
are compulsive and relentless. Jungle has his demons – he
has had a hard life, but the work transcends all adversity with
optimism and joy.1
Vittorio Ban (Yugoslavia,1935-2002) was born in Tzara,
migrating to Australia with his mother as a post war refugee.
As a young man he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and
spent many years in institutional confinement at Glenside
Mental Hospital in Adelaide and subsequently in community
residential care in Port Adelaide. Vittorio was obsessed with
his European heritage, creating portraits, still life paintings,
landscapes and cityscapes – while making these traditional
genres other-worldly, alien and strange. Vittorio’s images were
mostly derived from childhood memories and imagination.
Only his portraits of film stars sourced images from popular
culture. He never worked directly from a printed image –
subjects would have to be committed to memory before the
painting process began. His favourite theme was the female
portrait – his ‘Madonnas’ (Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren,
Marilyn Monroe, etc.). The Mona Lisa paintings were his most
consistent works, always repeated with slight variations. On one
occasion I showed him a reproduction of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Vittorio silently and seriously considered the image for several
minutes, before declaring, “The nose is too big.”
Iris Frame (Australia, 1915-2003). Mrs. Iris Frame was born
and lived all her life in rural South Australia. It’s not clear when
Iris began writing stories and making art. However, some
Anne Marie Grgich, 2003, Rooster Book, hand-made book, mixed media,
19
Iris Frame, n.d., paintings (details), sizes variable
20
of the earliest surviving paintings are traceable to the 1950’s.
For most of her artistic life Iris created in relative cultural
and geographic isolation. She painted straight from the tube,
without any colour mixing, directly onto Masonite boards
and occasional flat sheets of tin. Her paintings typically carried
text. She invented and reinvented ‘bush’ narratives, making
her paintings to illustrate them. The paintings often elaborate
fragments of Australian folk tales in an eccentric but lyrical,
primitive style referring to the landscape, local places and news
or events from her roots in Penola and the Murraylands. At her
exhibition opening in the late 1990s, Iris delighted the audience
with a performance in which she drew with both hands
simultaneously! It seemed to me that this ambidextrous action
was a contradiction of the notion of the natural/unnatural
hand. At the time the performance was read as humorous,
but in retrospect, a decentring of the normal expectation of a
singular authoritative focus now seems a complex and curiously
subversive gesture.2
James (Son Ford) Thomas (USA, 1926-1996). In 1982, I saw
clay sculptures by James (Son Ford) Thomas at the Southern
Black Folk Art (SBFA) exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum,
NY. Eight years after this inspirational show, I undertook
a pilgrimage to Southern USA to find, and meet some of
those artists, including Son Thomas. He lived in a humble,
two-roomed weatherboard house on the outskirts of Leland,
Mississippi. Son Thomas was better known in those parts as a
bluesman than as a visual artist, having performed with the likes
of Sonny Boy Williamson and Albert King at the Greenwood
Blues festival. He told me that as a boy he had seen Robert
Johnson play. Son Ford’s clay skulls were unfired (he called
it ‘Mississippi mud’), unpainted, and had real teeth. When I
inquired where these came from he said, “I used to be a gravedigger.” He liked to shock, but embedded in this mischief was
also an anti-aesthetic deliberately undermining conventional
sensibility. Explaining his penchant for producing skulls he
would offer this, “Skulls don’t have to be beautiful - the uglier
the better”. It seems to me that on one level this statement is
self deprecating, and on another it works as a subtle cultural
critique of a classical aesthetic value.
Mary T. Smith (USA, 1904-1995). During this crisscrossing
adventure into the heart of southern US folk art, I stumbled
across the extraordinary work of visionary artist Mary T.
Smith. Mary T. lived just off the famous Highway 61 on the
outskirts of Hazelhurst - an agricultural village in Mississippi
cotton country.3 Mary T. was a contemporary of the legendary
bluesman Robert Johnson (1911-1938) – also born in
Hazelhurst. She started painting late in life. Her paintings were
often self-portraits or of family, friends, visitors, and her beloved
dogs. Originally, the paintings ornamented the ramshackle
fence – a constantly changing garden gallery – comprising
pseudo script, semi-legible slogans, and incredible child-like
imagery. Radical, figurative distortion blended with gestural
mark-making. Big, bold brush strokes, and wild colours. I’d
ever seen anything quite like it. Mary T’s work continues to
challenge conventional ideas about skill and representation
while transmitting complex cultural references to voodoo,
African heritage and syncretized Christian iconography.
However she was not self-consciously making these references.
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Aware of their enculturation and aesthetic values, some
so-called mainstream artists affirm traditional or predetermined
values. Some, in the spirit of avant-garde practices, choose to
self-consciously challenge the validity of certain presumptions.
It’s a tough call from within to see invisible wavelengths, much
less to articulate them without the benefit of contrast from
outside. The artist Brion Gysin once observed that “anyone
who manages to step out from his (sic) own culture into
another can stand there looking back at his own under another
light.”4 However, it is very difficult for mainstream art to achieve
this stance without distance from itself. That’s why the work
presented here is called ‘visionary’ art. Visionary, because
these artists manage to achieve something new – shaking our
expectations with exuberant, effortless otherness. The effect
is to provoke reassessment of fundamental presumptions –
skill, history, context, motivation, communication, originality
– in the viewer. Even the relationship between the artist and
audience is challengeable, when the work is produced with
indifference to artistic, cultural or institutional values. Maybe
that’s liberation.
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Notes
1. See Colin Rhodes, ‘From the House of Spirits,’ Jungle Phillips, Richard
Llewellyn Trust/ArtsSA Catalogue, Adelaide, Eagle Press, 2010.
2. Paul Greenaway (OAM) personal correspondence to Paul Hoban,
June 21 2011 re: Mrs. Frame’s painting techniques. Biographical information
supplied by Daniel Thomas (AM). Iris Frame Performance and Exhibition,
Greenaway Art Gallery, circa 1997-8.
3. For biographical notes on the artist Mary T. Smith, see William Arnett
‘Her Name is Someone’, Raw Vision 31, Summer 2000, pp. 24-31.
4. Brion Gysin, Here To Go: Planet R-101, London, Quartet Books, 1982,
p. 272. Gysin was speaking as a North American expatriate, after being
resident in Morocco for more than twenty years.
Albert Louden, drawings (details), pastel & charcoal on paper, each 65 x 50 cm
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James Son Ford Thomas, 1998, Skull, unfired clay, aluminium foil, human teeth, 18 x 14 x 17 cm
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Acknowledgements
The SASA Gallery supports a program of exhibitions focusing on
innovation, experimentation and performance. With the support of the
Division of Education, Art and Social Sciences and the Division Research
Performance Fund, the SASA Gallery is being developed as a leading
contemporary art space and as an active site of teaching and learning. The
SASA Gallery showcases South Australian artists, designers, architects,
writers and curators associated with the School of Art, Architecture and
Design, University of South Australia in a national and international context.
The Director, SASA Gallery, would like to acknowledge the contribution
to the development of the 2011 exhibition program by the SASA Gallery
Programming Committee and AAD Events and Exhibition Committee;
Professor Kay Lawrence; Professor Mads Gaardboe, Head, AAD;
Prof Margaret Peters, Dean: Research and Research Education, DIVEASS;
and Professor Pal Ahluwalia, Pro-Vice Chancellor, DIVEASS, UniSA.
Thanks to Tony and Connie Perrini for the on-going support of the SASA
Gallery program by Perrini Estate.
Thanks to the curators, artists and performers for their generous
participation in this exhibition, catalogue and associated events - and thanks
also to their friends, families, carers and supporters who assisted in making
this happen. Special thanks to Arts SA, the Helpmann Academy, the Richard
Llewellyn Arts & Disability Trust, the University of Sydney, the Muscular
Dystrophy Association of South Australia and the Disability Information
and Resource Centre. Without the support of these organisations this
project would not have happened. The Director and curators would like to
thank Peter Fay without which it would have been impossible to bring the
work of Dos Santos to Australia; Phil Hammial for his continuous
support; Creahm, Belgium for their dedication to the late Anny Servais;
Andrew Bunney, Paul Greenaway and Kirsty Hammet for generously
lending work from their collections; staff at the University of South Australia
and Sydney University for their tireless work towards this exhibition
especially: Keith Giles, Peter Harris, Amanda Muscat, Nerida Olson and
Julian Tremayne.
Proudly supported by
the Richard Llewellyn
Arts & Disabilility Trust
Curators: Paul Hoban and Colin Rhodes
Artists: Vittorio Ban, Howard Finister, Iris Frame, Anne Marie Grgich,
Bronco Johnson, Albert Louden, Anthony Mannix, R.A. Miller,
Frank Phelan, Jungle Phillips, José dos Santos, Gérard Sendrey,
Mary T. Smith, James Son Ford Thomas and James T. Thomas.
Performers: Anthony Mannix and The Loop Orchestra; and Rudely
Interrupted.
External Scholar: Professor Colin Rhodes, Head, Sydney College of the Arts,
University of Sydney
Editor: Dr Mary Knights
Catalogue design: Keith Giles
Catalogue project management: Dr Mary Knights and Keith Giles
SASA Gallery staff:
Dr Mary Knights, Director, SASA Gallery, AAD, UniSA
Keith Giles, Gallery Curator/Manager, AAD, UniSA
Julian Tremayne, Installation Consultant, AAD, UniSA
Peter Harris, Technical Officer, Kaurna Building, AAD, UniSA
Chris Boha, Dr Sue Kneebone, and Tom Squires, Research/Education
Officers
Sundari Carmody and Madeline Reece, Research/Education Interns
SASA Gallery
Kaurna Building, City West Campus, UniSA
Cnr Fenn Place & Hindley Street, Adelaide
Published by the SASA Gallery
University of South Australia
GPO Box 2471, Adelaide SA 5001
July 2011
ISBN 978-0-9871008-2-5 Printed by Finsbury Green
© curators, artists and SASA Gallery
SASA
GALLERY
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