Almost six years ago, artist Joe Cook appeared on kdoutsiderart for the first time. In this artist showcase, Joe shares his new body of work. Joe says:
This new body of work is a direct continuation of my previous illustration work. My brief was to create a diverse range of characters in a far away land, living a life of heroic adventure and intrigue. I took direct influence from Henry Matisse, amongst others. The shapes and colours he created in his cut-out era feel exotic and foreign to me and I tried to employ those curves and free flowing lines where I could. Similarly, where there is action in my drawings there is also naivety and an unapologetic (David Shrigley-like?) quality to the movement. I scoured photos from the internet and national geographic back editions for real life examples of everyday folk lost in their endeavours in far tropical lands. Ultimately I tried to be honest in what I saw and how I adapted that to paper. The drawings are primarily pencil and ink and don’t always follow the tried and tested rules on how illustrations should look, feel and move.
Joe Cook, BoyJoe Cook, EleleleJoe Cook, EyezJoe Cook, Candle ManJoe Cook, The StoneJoe Cook, Captainas FishermanasJoe Cook, Black Coat Eating
Welcome to the second installment of ‘In Focus,’ a series of blog posts that see a question and answer session taking place between me and PhD student Marion Scherr. This post focuses on the implications of the term ‘outsider art’ for the artists it describes, and considerations when exhibiting works of outsider art.
Joanna Simpson, Good Luck Gum Nut Folk
Marion Scherr (MS): You know many artists yourself and seem to have talked quite a bit with them about the term. Could you give a brief overview of the different opinions and viewpoints artists have about the term? What are the pros and cons people mention when speaking to you about the term ‘Outsider Art’?
Kate Davey (KD): I’ve generally found that artists don’t feel as strongly about the term as academics and curators do, which I find interesting. I’ve had mixed responses, from people who are really pleased to have a found a term (that comes with its own artistic community) that they feel an affinity with. Others have expressed feelings about it being quite limiting, particularly in terms of what kind of shows they can enter or exhibit in, and how they are viewed as an artist.
Interestingly, a couple of years ago I did a blog post focusing on artists’ responses to the term. From this, you can see that a fair few of the artists note that in the term outsider art they have found a ‘movement’ that they feel they themselves and their work can belong in – and belong in successfully. I think there’s something about artists who might see themselves as ‘outsider artists’ finding a community of other artists who view themselves and their work in this way. I find this is quite different to the mainstream art world which can be quite saturated with competition. Certainly I’ve found much more comradery amongst outsider artists, which is always really good to see.
I think I might have mentioned this in a previous answer, but I think that artists who see themselves as ‘outsider’ artists are able to access more support with their professional development and their artistic career through organisations specifically set up to support and promote artists doing this kind of work, which is so important.
Julia Clark, Owl
MS: Do you think the way in which a work of art is perceived changes, if the audience is told it has been produced by an ‘Outsider’? What is the feedback of gallery/museum visitors like in this regard in your experience?
KD: In my experience, there have been mixed reviews, but generally people are very open to experiencing new kinds of art, and particularly art that might be different to the work they normally view. It’s not to everyone’s taste, and I think this is sometimes where a bit of context can be really useful. I have had a couple of experiences in the past where exhibition-goers have maybe asked ‘what’s wrong with’ one of the artists whose work is on display, but I generally take this as an interest or curiosity in the work and the person who made it – and this is when I’ll talk about outsider art and what it means today.
I think in recent years the market and for and opinion of outsider art has come on leaps and bounds – certainly in the U.K. where we’ve had big exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and the Hayward Gallery. The main thing, I think, is to display work by ‘outsider artists’ just as you would the work of a ‘mainstream’ artist, so the public see it as valid art and are able to appreciate it for its aesthetic qualities.
I’ve had a few really positive experiences where people weren’t expecting to come across ‘outsider’ art at a gallery or museum, but they have gone away feeling like the work was the most powerful work they saw during their visit.
I think as taste makers, curators and galleries have a role to play here. As long as they are showing ‘outsider’ work (and showing it well) then art audiences (and the more general public) will come to see this work as valid – and, most importantly, as art.
MS: In one of your blog posts you mention that the show ‘Jazz Up Your Lizard’ has changed your mind about curating ‘Outsider Art’. Rather than presenting it in a ‘white cube’ you speak about turning this approach round and “shaping the place to fit the work” and/or finding a space, that works well with particular artworks. What are your opinions on this issue now? What do you normally look out for and what elements do you consider, when you think about the place and setting of a show?
KD: The Jazz Up Your Lizard show was a real turning point for me. As I’ve written about before, I was adamant that outsider art be shown the same way as its ‘mainstream’ parallel. However, this show was a bit different, as I was working very closely with the artist throughout – an artist I have known and admired for a long time. There were also some practical issues involved – the exhibition space had been painted black, and the curator I was working with on the show really liked the colour (and so did I!). The exhibiting artist’s work is very bright, but macabre in content. I think the black just really brought out the colours, as well as the darker side of the works – that on first inspection can sometimes seem fairly jolly.
When curating exhibitions in future, I’d really like to take the lessons I learnt from this show on board. Things I would now consider include what it is we want to pull from the work – what is the essence of it? What might people get from it and how can we help this along? I’ll always work closely with the artist, where possible, as they are the best interpreter of the work. When curating, I really like to think about audiences who might not ‘naturally’ consider visiting an art exhibition – or more specifically an outsider art exhibition. Anything that helps them experience this work is absolutely vital. This includes colour, space, accessibility, accompanying text, events etc. So these are now all things I consider in great detail.
Featured Image: Don’t Look Back in Anger by a Koestler Trust entrant
In this extended post, writer Nick Moss reviews Jacques Derrida: Artaud the Moma (Columbia University Press, 2017). Moss critically examines Derrida’s writings about what it means for an artist – and subsequently their work – to exhibit in various institutions.
Jacques Derrida engaged repeatedly with the work of Antonin Artaud throughout his life. His best known essays on Artaud are collected in Writing and Difference (Routledge 2001 2nd ed.) As he states in the text reviewed here (a lecture given at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996 on the occasion of the exhibition of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper), Artaud represented for him “a sort of privileged enemy, a painful enemy that I carry and prefer within myself.” Derrida states that he is bound to Artaud by “a sort of reasoned detestation.” He is resistant to “what might be called, thanks to a certain misunderstanding, the philosophy, politics or ideology of Artaud.” The resistance to Artaud, though, is ultimately a resistance to Michel Foucault/Gilles Deleuze’s romanticisation of Artaud, “everything in this work that, in the name of the proper body or the body without organs, in a name of a re-appropriation of self, is consonant with an ecologico-naturalist protest.” For Derrida the re-appropriation of self is a myth, as is the privileging of some kind of end to alienation, especially if this is to be realised through any form of “schizo-politics.” As he makes explicit in his essay “Cogito and the History of Madness,” madness is always already internal to reason and thus privileging “madness” actually reinforces the divide that Foucault and Deleuze would seek to overcome.
Antonin Artaud, Paule with Ferrets (courtesy of ArtStack)
Nevertheless, in the text given at MOMA, Derrida enters into a strategic alliance with Artaud, in order to save Artaud from the “museographic institutions” which, 100 years after his birth, seek to recuperate his work, to commodify that which was intended as resistance to “technical reproduction,” these works which sought to deliver a coup, a blow struck against “the Christian West, the god who steals my body, the spirit, the holy spirit and the holy family, all the forces-ideological, political, economic-that are one with this thief of bodies.” The “thief of bodies” is that “machination…the social, medical, psychiatric, judicial, ideological machine, the machine of the police, which is to say, … a philosophico-political network that allied itself with more obscure forces so as to reduce this living lightning to a body that was bruised, tortured, rent, drugged, and above all electrocuted by a nameless suffering, an unnameable passion to which no other resource remained than to rename and reinvent language.”
Antonin Artaud, Self-Portrait (courtesy of ArtStack)
The drawings on display at MoMA were the sketches and drawings Artaud made while detained in the psychiatric hospital at Rodez. The works are, Artaud states, “deliberately botched, thrown on the page like some scorn for the forms and the lines, so as to scorn the idea taken up and manage to make it fall.” It is in this ‘fall’ – in the art’s failing – that Artaud’s coup is struck. Yet every blow leaves a trace, a bruise, and so it is here – the works are ‘maladroit,’ they are ‘ill-fashioned,’ scorched by flame, but they survive to be archived and displayed. Artaud intended the drawings to be “not that of a man who does not know how to draw, but that of a man who has abandoned the principle of drawing and who wants to draw at his age, my age, as if he had learned nothing by principle, by law, or by art.” For Artaud the works are intended as weapons, not commodities, but they become commodified in any event. How then to restore, to protect, their existence as “gestures, a verb, a grammar, an arithmetic, a whole Kabbalah…that shits on the other,” to maintain their endurance as “a machine that has breath”? How to preserve the destructive essence (and we should be clear Artaud’s intent was destructive, not merely critical) of Artaud’s project against “the museographic management of its surplus value.” As Derrida puts it: “Will it be possible to do what I am trying to do, to say ‘Merde?’ Will it be possible, either with or without blasphemy, to read and to cite ‘Shit,’ ‘Shit to art,’ to do it then as it must be done, in this great temple that is a great art museum and above all modern, thus in a museum that has the sense of history, the very great museum of one of the greatest metropolises in the new world?”
Antonin Artaud, Autoportrait (courtesy of ArtStack)
One of Derrida’s oft-deployed strategies of resistance was to introduce an element of slippage, or wordplay, puns, double-meanings, into his own texts, so that the text could never be reduced to a single canonical reading. He does the same here, with his punning on Artaud-momo (“idiot” as he referred to himself”) Artaud-MoMA, and on glyph/glyphe/hieroglyph/electroglyph. The words of the Derrida-text begin to echo the “glossolalic or glossopoetic rebirth of language” sought by Artaud. And we should not forget that in these ‘botched’ works, which Derrida tells us were intended to do no less than “change the eye with the drawing,” produced in the period described by Artaud as “ten years since language left,” that language-as-writing is essential to these works – that words are strewn across their surfaces, inseparable from image. ”And ever since a certain day in October 1939 I have never written without also drawing.” (In this of course, Artaud stands as a precursor to Twombly, and to Basquiat – for all three, word and image can only exist side by side, so that the works become, as Katharina Schmidt has described them, a ‘meta-script.’) In this museum devoted to the commodification of the image, Derrida insists we go back to the words carved, hacked, scrawled, on to the surfaces. To hear the questions Artaud asked: “And who today will say what?” “And what do you yourself say?” – to hear, within the works, “Artaud interrogating a ghost of himself.”
Antonin Artaud, Untitled (courtesy of ArtStack)
Derrida battles with the “agony of an art that nevertheless, at the instant of its death, will perhaps survive its own apocalypse.” He seeks to retrieve Artaud’s project of anti-art, to cry “woe to whoever might consider them as works of art, works of aesthetic simulation of reality.” More than that – he uses the museum as archive against itself, and refuses to have Artaud’s voices silenced, so that the images are all that remain. It is Derrida’s determination to restore “the event as event.” And thus he seeks to allow Artaud’s words to come back, to haunt, but also, the sound of Artaud’s voice – at the beginning and the end of the lecture, from a recording of “To Have Done With the Judgement of God.” The ranting, scatological Artaud, “starving, drunk with rage against America.” The intent is to have the drawings address the viewer again “as if they were conducting a trial.” Such that “never before, when finding myself faced with drawings or paintings…never have I heard so many voices, never have I felt myself called, yelled at, touched, provoked, torn apart by the incisive and lacerating acuteness of a broadside of interjections so justly addressed to their addressee.”
Antonin Artaud, Autoportrait (courtesy of ArtStack)
As to whether the strategies Derrida employs can succeed when Artaud is already entombed in the gallery space of MoMA – “especially MoMA in which Artaud the Momo would have right away identified the malevolent figure of the great expropriator”- we have to ask whether allowing the voice of Artuad-Momo to be heard can ever be enough, when Artaud himself declaims -against accusations of mysticism -that he has “always been body.” Can the body of Artaud-Momo – the anti-artist, the beaten, broken, electrocuted body (body of artist/body of work) stand in the way of “this great march of the symbolic market, from Paris to New York, from capital to capital, metropole to metropole?”
Antonin Artaud, Le Pendue (courtesy of ArtStack)
There is a further point to take up. In the book’s afterword, Kaira M Cabanas, associate professor of global modern and contemporary art history at the University of Florida notes that Jean Dubuffet presided over the Societe des Amis d’Antonin Artaud, and that he rejected Artaud’s work as Art Brut: “I find Antonin Artaud very cultured, not at all Art Brut.” There is much truth in this. Artaud’s rhetorical/scatological manoeuvres were pathologized as a way of neutering the content of his lacerating attacks on Church and State. But Cabanas seeks to take this as a prelude for a discussion about the purpose of outsider art more generally:
“Often the inclusion of outsider art is read as a progressive move within the modern and/or contemporary art institution, and in the early 2010s one witnesses how the art of ‘madness’, ‘outsider’ and ‘self-taught’ became the ‘new’ in the contemporary global circuit….this legitimation…occurs at the expense of what we might learn from the specificity of the work’s contemporaneity vis-a-vis the historicity of the psychiatric institution.”
Antonin Artaud, Les illusions de l’ame (courtesy of ArtStack)
This is, I think, specious. I write as someone who is more than happy to adopt and preserve the perspective of outsider as a vantage point from which to view the contemporary art world. Nevertheless, I think Cabanas’s argument is crassly reductive and presumes a) that ‘outsider’ art has no aesthetic merit beyond its ‘specificity’ as art produced within a particular institutional context, and b) that the works’ ‘original meanings and values’ i.e. their place as works produced within/symptomatic of said institutions is diminished if displayed outside such institutions, so that the critical content of the work can only have effect within the context of its own production.
It strikes me that the opposite is true – that the exhibition of works produced outside the cycle of art-world luxury commodity production, which contain the ‘auratic’ to which Walter Benjamin refers as an auratic ‘trace’ of an originary trauma, might more likely impact on their audience as the lightning-strikes Artaud aimed towards, if shown outside their institutional context. When we encounter, for instance, Luc Tuyman’s Gas Chamber painting, do we dismiss all save the aesthetic, or does the political not there intrude on and shadow the aesthetic?
Antonin Artaud, La Bouillabaisse de formes dans la tour de Babel (courtesy of ArtStack)
Artaud referred to “the innumerable necrophages that fill churches, police stations, army barracks, prisons, hospitals, university faculties.” We might note one of the many reasons for such complaint would be the determination of some academics to determine for themselves “who today will say what.”
By Nick Moss
For more information on Jacques Derrida: Artaud the Moma, please click here.
Over the past six months or so, I have been contributing to a project by PhD student Marion Scherr. Marion initially got in touch because she is currently completing her PhD thesis at the University of Oldenburg, Germany (School of Linguistics and Cultural Studies), focusing on the personal experiences, opinions and thoughts of artists who have been labelled or choose to label themselves as ‘Outsider Artists.’ She is comparing and contrasting the artists’ personal experiences with representations in academic and media discourses in the UK.
Since summer 2017, Marion and I have been in a game of email ping pong, sending emails to and fro about the nature of outsider art, what it means for curators and academics, and ultimately, what it means for the artists themselves. After speaking to Marion, I thought it would be interesting to relay some of the conversations we’ve been having. The series has four installments, of which I will post one per month for the next four months. Both Marion and I would love to hear your comments on any of the questions or answers, so please do leave them below. Keep reading for the first question!
Mitsi B, Always
Marion Scherr (MS): When and in what context did you come across the term ‘Outsider Art’ for the first time, and how have your opinions on the term changed since then?
Kate Davey (KD): I first came across the term outsider art in 2008 when I was studying for my undergraduate degree in Art History. It was introduced to us during a module on psychoanalysis and art, which predominantly focused on sublimation and perversion in art. I remember seeing images of work by Richard Dadd during the lecture, and it was the first time a piece of work has ever truly made me feel something. It was then that I decided I would focus my attention on this interesting (and to me at that point, completely unknown) area of work. I visited the Bethlem Museum archives to see Dadd’s work in the flesh, which was a fantastic experience.
I focused my BA Hons dissertation on outsider art and then went on to do an MA in Art History and Museum Curating, this time focusing more specifically on curating exhibitions of outsider art. At this stage, I was somewhat accepting of the term – it described an area of work that I needed to describe in my essays and using that term made it easier. I did a lot of reading around the subject, both for and outside of my studies, and I was looking for an outlet to share my thoughts and discoveries – which is when I started this blog.
It was a combination of this research and starting work for a couple of organisations that supported marginalised artists that encouraged me to start questioning the term. Until that point, it had been a given, and particularly as an undergraduate student, it’s difficult to question these things. My blog became somewhere where I could air my thoughts freely, sometimes heading off on tangents, but always feeling better once I’d written it down.
I started to become dubious of the term, wondering why – unlike other movements in art history – this term described the person creating the work rather than the work itself. I wrote many posts about how the ultimate aim is the complete elimination of the term ‘outsider art’ and the unconditional welcoming of ‘outsider artists’ into the mainstream canon. My views have changed many times over the years, and at one point I welcomed the term again, wanting artists who might be grouped under that term to ‘take it back’, in a similar way to what happened during the disability arts movement. Over the years I have also had the opportunity to speak to many people about the issue, including many artists, and have found that definitions and ideas about the term are varied and diverse.
A couple of years ago I decided to do a call out on the blog for artists to submit their visual response to the term outsider art, and to give an alternative term that they might prefer to use. This was very enlightening – most of the artists did still want a term, whether that was ‘outsider art’ or not, and many of them were in fact happy with the term. I have done a lot of research on taxonomy and categorisation, and humans innately like to group things together. I think for this reason, there does need to be a term, but there is still a long way to go in unpicking what it really means, and ultimately (and most importantly), unpicking what it means for the artists it describes. Does it condemn them to work in the ghettos of the art world, never really being a true part of the art historical canon? Does ridding ourselves of the term also mean we will rid ourselves of all of the wonderful organisations who are supporting artists who face barriers to the mainstream art world?
As you can see, I am still not at a final decision, and I don’t know if I ever will be – and in some ways, I hope to never not be. This is a topic that continues to fascinate me, and I will keep exploring it.
Manuel Lanca Bonifacio
MS: You have been involved in putting together exhibitions yourself – how do you personally define the term? And how would you explain it to a visitor who isn’t familiar with the term at all?
KD: I think over the years I have become much more flexible about who might be considered an outsider artist, and generally (for my blog) I will leave it open to the artist to decide if that’s something they would like to be associated with. In terms of the exhibitions I have curated, I have tried to convey that the artists I consider to fall under this category create because they have to, not to sell the work, not to gain any fame from the work etc. My hope is to inform the public that anyone can be an artist – anyone can create, and anyone should feel like they are able to create. It’s always a bit of a win if someone comes along to the exhibition feeling inspired to go home and make or create something themselves.
I do also give people information on the history of the term – objectively – so that the public are able to come to their own conclusions about what might be considered outsider art (and it generally helps people to see where the work has come from and the context that this sort of work sits in more widely).
If I were describing the term to someone who didn’t know about it, I would give them Roger Cardinal’s definition as a starting point, but would hope to convey to them that I consider it to be a term that encompasses people who haven’t necessarily taken the ‘traditional’ route to become an artist. It’s about unfettered creativity and a need to produce something – which is actually what innately makes us all human. I find I know people who don’t consider themselves ‘art’ people, but once they see a work of ‘outsider art’ they find they can relate to it more easily than a piece that has developed out of an art school or the art historical canon.
So I guess to sum up, I haven’t got an ‘elevator pitch’ for what I think outsider art is now, but I’m very open to (and thoroughly enjoy!) discussions with a wide range of people about this area of work. I think it’s an open conversation and everyone who is working in this area – curators, researchers, directors, and artists – should aim to engage with people about the subject. It’s such a fluid thing, and it’s a ‘type’ of art that has been so fluid and depends so heavily on people, that it doesn’t feel right to have a strict paragraph of text to define it.
From 4th – 6th May 2018, Outside In is hosting the European Outsider Art Association (EOA) conference at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. This year’s conference focuses on ‘the Artist’s Voice,’ celebrating the work of excluded and non-traditional artists and sharing best practice in the field through a series of presentations, key note speeches, and workshops delivered by artists and practitioners.
Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings, Mental Illness and Me, 1997 – 2008, Day 579 Cathedral of the Mind. Image Andrew Whittuck, 2009
The keynote speech to open the conference will be delivered by multi-disciplinary British artist Bobby Baker, and panel discussions during the conference will focus on ‘supporting the artist’s voice’ and ‘exhibiting the artist’s voice.’ Presenters at the conference include the Living Museum (the Netherlands), Out By Art (Sweden), Venture Arts (UK), Joy of Sound (UK) and Look Kloser (UK). Panellists will include Garvald Artists (Scotland), Headway East London (UK), Arts Project Australia (Australia), Blue Circus (Finland), Creahm/MadMusee (Belgium), and Creative Minds (UK). In addition to all of this, there are dedicated slots for artist presentations that will be happening throughout the conference.
There will also be an opportunity to find out more about the work of Outside In through presentations from director Marc Steene, and by taking part in creative workshops and tours led by Outside In artists. The conference will run alongside a new exhibition of work by renowned outsider artist Scottie Wilson at Pallant House Gallery, which in turn will be accompanied by a special commissioned work by an Outside In artist in response to Wilson’s practice.
In the run up to the conference (2nd and 3rd May), you can join a VIP programme of activities that will include trips to Bethlem Museum of the Mind, ActionSpace, an opening of an Outside In exhibition at Long and Ryle Gallery, an outsider environment in Brighton, and a tour of a renowned collection of modern British and outsider art.
For more information and a full programme of events, please click here.
I can only apologise for the lack of posts in recent weeks – I hit the ground running at the start of 2018, and haven’t managed to stop just yet. However, I wanted to write a quick post for you as a couple of days ago, I was doing my usual crawl through the internet for the latest news on outsider art: upcoming exhibitions, auctions, in depth articles on individual artists, when I noticed the recurrence of a new word alluding to artists creating outside of the cultural mainstream. The word was ‘autodidact’, which literally means ‘a self-taught person.’
Interior (1944) by Horace Pippin (c) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
The first occurrence of the word appeared when I was reading an article on the new ‘Outliers and American Vanguard Art’ exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The exhibition, the article notes, aims to “reconsider the ubiquitous but limited ‘Outsider’ designation as an umbrella term for autodidact artists.” Also interesting is the title of the exhibition itself – more specifically, the use of the term ‘Vanguard’ which means ‘a group of people leading the way in new developments or ideas.’ Both terms are new (to me, anyway), when it comes to describing the work of those traditionally known as outsider artists.
Aloïse Corbaz, image from “Brevario Grimani (circa 1943), 19 pages, bound, in a notebook, colored pencil and pencil on paper, 9 5/8 x 13 inches, collection abcd/Bruno Decharme (photo courtesy of Collection abcd)
The second occurrence of the term (that I came across within the space of about half an hour!) was in an Hyperallergic article about the American Folk Art Museum’s new show, ‘Vestiges and Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic.’ In this article, author Edward Gomez notes that the exhibition, “organized by Valerie Rousseau, AFAM’s curator of self-taught art and at brut… calls attention to the integration of text and image in works made by a diverse group of autodidacts.”
The most notable thing about the use of the term – following my reading of the articles and after a quick Google search – seems to be the predominantly positive slant the term gives to art work that is so often seen as ‘lesser’ or ‘not the norm.’ There is a whole Wikipedia page of celebrated famous autodidacts, including but not limited to authors Terry Pratchett and Ernest Hemingway, artists Frida Kahlo and Jean Michel Basquiat, and musicians David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain.
I didn’t, however, see any renowned ‘outsider’ artists on the list. There still seems to be some sort of invisible barrier that separates these big stars of the arts and ‘outsider’ artists – despite there often being similarities in their backgrounds and circumstances. For example, although Basquiat’s background and style of work could undoubtedly be classed as ‘outsider’ (he ran away from home at 15, dropped out of school), he seems to have broken into the mainstream art world without too much trouble. In fact, he was the focus of a very popular exhibition at the Barbican that closed this month.
So, my question (as ever), is what creates this gulf between artists who gain fame and fortune through their work, and those whose legacies are confined to the barracks of ‘outsider’ art? What makes someone eligible to be included in Wikipedia’s ‘autodidact’ list? Do they have to be a certain kind of self-taught? I’d be interested to know your thoughts, so feel free to leave any comments below.
In this post, writer Nick Moss reviews the Koestler Trust’s latest poetry pamphlet, Koestler Voices: New Poetry from Prisons. The collection was published to coincide with the Koestler Trust’s latest national exhibition, ‘Inside,’ which appeared at the Southbank Centre until 15th November 2017. The Koestler Trust is an arts charity that supports prisoners, ex-prisoners and detainees to express themselves creatively.
“I should declare an interest at the start, insofar as I have 2 poems in the book. However, all the other works are new to me and I have no personal knowledge of any of the authors.
This volume was prompted by the reaction of exhibition visitors to the poetry curated by Benjamin Zephaniah in the 2016 Koestler Trust exhibition. The essence of the poems is captured by Benjamin Zephaniah in his introduction, where he comments that “These poems are absurd and strange, they are light and heavy, they are intense, intellectual and playful. They are honest.”
In a recent Guardian article on the Teach First and Unlock projects to introduce graduate prison officers (The Guardian 9 November 2017) one of the graduates interviewed reported his first time on a wing: “I’ve never come into contact with people like this before.” I think it’s important therefore to recognise how important it is to have these poems described by Zephaniah as “intellectual”. We, the ‘people like them’ who fill the jails, are capable of critical thought and reflection. If ‘intellectual’ simply connotes a level of prestige acquired through academic qualification then it has no essential meaning. If it applies to anyone engaged in a critical analysis (in this case of the institutions which contain us) then prisoners such as the writers here are more deserving of the label than the blinkered, knee jerk civil servants who draw up Ministry of Justice policies.
The book is divided into 4 sections – Inside, Outside, Portraits/Pictures, Letters/ Confessions – and this review can only attempt to give a snapshot of each section.
The poetry covering Inside moves from despairing to defiant. One writer focuses on the song of a nightingale he hears at Dartmoor Prison, another gives us a picture of ‘the weans runnin riot/ mair interested in sweets’ in the visiting hall. ‘Networked Gym-Fit Recidivist’ captures the ‘nonchalant callousness’ of ‘a prison officer bellowing’ and is scathing about the standards of prison healthcare and the point of it all, concluding, ‘It’s just a scam, the wrapper’s off.’ Many of the poems in Inside are about looking out; the view of outside from the cell window. Outside can be a strange place. I remember standing in the yard at Belmarsh looking at the block of flats in Plumstead I’d lived in 10 years ago. Outside is where time hasn’t ground to a halt. Outside is the ‘sweet remembered earth’ that Bob writes of in Lockdown. From outside Leslie tells us ‘sunshine shone/through the window casting/ a shadow of bars / unto his appeal papers.’
The Outside section opens with the brilliant ‘Killie Bus Tales’- written in Scottish dialect – ‘drinkin cans a Super n Frosty Jacks (ah wish ah hudnae sat as close tae the back.)’ There are several poems that experiment with Scottish dialect. They are written with a confidence and dry wit that suggests the authors have been enjoying Irvine Welsh and James Kelman along the way. We also get to see the impact of jail time on the families left behind. Graham’s heart-breaking ‘Empty Chair’ is a cool, carefree ode to summer madness, until we reach the end:
empty chair, warmth of sun
cold beer, the clink of ice in mum’s spiced rum
barbeque smoke mixing with skunk
tapping of feet to Fool’s Gold Funk
children laugh splashing without a care
daisies and bluebells in their hair
but no one mentions that empty chair.
Some of the poems are playful, like Jacinda’s ‘Animal School’, where ‘Wonger drank from the toilets/ And everyone was late,’ and Jonathan’s ‘I Built a Rocket Ship.’ Others have a real fury; ‘See Nothing, hear nothing, speak nothing’s’ tale of ‘smart uniforms and shiny boots/ dragged and kicked and took me away/where no one will hear and no one will see/ and now, I am nothing.’
Portraits and Pictures is perhaps the most powerful section, with the poets digging deep to capture aspects of their friends and families, building narratives of lives where people come and go, stand, fall, fail and stand up again. ‘The Piano Player,’ with ‘hooch fuelled/ male voices/full of angry/jobless depression,’ Guiltfoot Ron: ‘He’s got an angry knee/ and an eyeful of fear,’ Dys-Leg-Sarah who sees ‘Words squirming like wriggly squiggly worms on a page.’ These are wonderful poems, capturing the essence of vulnerable, raw lives in just a few lines.
Letters/ Confessions contains work which is heart-breaking, and work which is disturbing (in its proper sense of disrupting ordinary perception, shaking the reader’s view of things.) These are poems of loss, ‘Tortured/By Wondering how you are’; ‘…eager to forgive/ In the midst of our own little dust storm.’ Poems also of defiance: ‘You rained your fists on me/ endless thumps you hoped would break me/They are now my bricks.’ One of the strongest and strangest poems is Leon’s ‘Understand Me,’- ‘Understand me arresting the terrorisms of the night/over breakfast I’ll let them loose in the kitchen.’ Leon’s poem has the down-at -heel surrealism of Adrian Henri, but, most importantly, when it says ‘Understand Me,’ it does so on its own terms. ‘Understand me locking the door at midnight/throwing the key away. Later I will climb in/through a window.’ This poem could stand for the book as a whole; prisoners saying ‘Understand me – but understand me as I am, not as some caricature of a prisoner you have as an idee fixe.’
Koestler Voices shows prisoners thinking hard about who they are and where they are. As prisoners and ex-prisoners, we have no choice but to do so. Perhaps this volume will stand as proof that we might also be worth listening to.
This artist showcase comes from Gary Kleiner. Hugely influenced by his artist mother, Gary’s uses his own pain to create uniquely expressive work. Read on for more about Gary’s work and his life as an artist. If you’d like to get in touch about an artist showcase, please email kdoutsiderart@yahoo.com.
Got to go, nice eyes
When did your interest in art/creating begin?
It began in childhood because my mom is an artist – she is 79 years’ old. In elementary school I realized I was proud of art work I did. I grew up following mom to the galleries in New York – her saying of the minimalist artists that my art was better! I helped set up her art studios in New York. I followed her comic strips and kid books. Van Gogh is my favourite – the story makes the artist. I also like Keith Harring, Basquiat, Bacon, Picasso, Dali, Kahlo etc.
A graffiti study
What is your starting point for each piece?
Very interesting question. First I’m empathic and highly intuitive. Originally I just drew for enjoyment. I created a method of drawing in a mental hospital. It consists of listening to emotional music, closing my eyes with paper in front of me. I take my pencil, I think about what I want to draw – I feel the presence of the paper and go. I draw about 20 different lines and open my eyes. If I need more lines I close my eyes again. Now I open them. I have developed this ability to see pictures in my random lines which is one of my techniques. I do this in Starbucks in the States – they must think I’m crazy.
I ask myself what I see on the paper with lines and connect the lines to form faces and things while thinking of my idea. My pencil drawing is now done, hopefully touching upon my unconscious. It doesn’t always capture my exact idea, but maybe I captured another thing that was bothering me.
My ideal world
Who/what influences your work?
My life, pain, my fathers death four years ago, my divorce four years ago, unemployment, mental illness diagnosis, other artists. My mother taught me to think of vomit when doing my work. It means more than thinking outside of the box; I make the box. I have taught myself to intentionally use pain and other difficult emotions to make my art good. It’s interesting that all my pain has led me to something I love. I think this is my calling.
What do you hope the viewer gets from your work?
I hope the viewer gets an understanding of what my work is about. This is funny, I was going to hang this pic for a show and mom sees it. She says you’re not going to hang this? She said it looks like it was done by a psychopath. I hung it anyway knowing it is a good piece. I will adjust my works, but I’m not painting fluffy bunnies. I would like the viewer to see the pain and sadness in the artist.
Get your ass off me
What do you think about the term outsider art? Is there a term you think works better?
I don’t mind the title. You really do feel like an outsider approaching a gallery with your work. I’m trying to get inside the art world by asking the mainstream galleries questions like ‘You didn’t like my work because?’ ‘Can you tell me exactly what you are looking for?’ I spoke to this secretary, she seemed taken aback: ‘Um um, I don’t know we just have to like it,’ and hung up. I’m trying to bring legitimacy to outsider art. Outsider art should just be called art.
A self artistic study in keeping boundaries
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m currently working on a drawing of a bald man (me) covered with tattoos holding a gun – with my ex’s face on the gun. The fun is pointing at a balloon shaped like a heart with a cross in the middle. Tattoos represent all my thoughts, the gun represents my wife’s desire to keep my kids from loving me. I’m also working on another picture of me covered in tattoos with my kids physically attached to me. This is my desire – to have my kids close to me. I replay people and themes in different ways attempting to compose a nice picture. Lately I have been focusing on the importance of composition.
Where do you see your way taking you in the future?
I would like my art to continue to be seen in galleries around the world. I want to teach others the use of creativity to help them with their problems.
This artist showcase introduces the work of Darrell Black. Black was originally inspired by space and science, but his creative journey has taken him on a path of simplification and ‘stripping back.’ Keep reading for a Q&A with Black about his work and his life as an artist, as well as a selection of images of his work.
The Promised Land
When did your interest in art/crating begin?
My interest in Art began early in childhood, growing up my parents had a miniature sculpture of artist Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ and abstract paintings by various artists on the wall. At the time I never took any real interest in it, but what I loved was space and anything to do with science. I created as a child, spacecraft including futuristic worlds and cities using any and all household items I could find: utensils, clothes pins and tools. Anything I could find to feed my fantasy this was my first introduction into art without realizing it but my main focus was always science.
Moonlit Metropolis
What is your starting point for each piece?
When I decide to start on a work of art my mind is clear, free of all worry and thought. I start on a canvas from every direction and within the throes of creation, I am a mere spectator. My advice: let your hands do what they do in the creating process, you the artist are only a spectator. The job of the artist is to clean up the mess left behind by creation, fine tuning the image by adding color, defining lines that make up the painting; fixing things up.
The Sacrifice
Who or what influences your work?
The influence on my artwork comes from traditional and non traditional sources. I take inspiration from everyone and everything incorporating the person or object’s mental or physical state in my creations. For example, learning about the personality of Picasso, researching all the tragedy and agony he caused to friends and family; the personal problems of artists like Rothko, Pollock and Basquiat; the struggles of Winston Churchill to defeat the Nazis and win the war against tyranny; the scientists of the Manhattan project beginning from scratch to create the atom bomb; Dr. Frankenstein’s determination to create a monster – all of this struggle, hardship and commitment to succeed against all odds gives me the incentive as an artist to create new and innovative work.
A Really Bad Trip
What do you hope the viewer gets from your work?
The hope is to confront the viewer with a question, and for each person to come up with the same or a different answer. That for me as the artist is very interesting, since there is no right or wrong answer, just a different perspective or another way of seeing the world.
Formulation of Human
What do you think of the term outsider art? Is there a term you think works better?
Personally speaking I think the term ‘Outsider Art’ is a bit outdated and in some way self-defeating. I think the word creates a secondary class of artists whose creativity is seen by others in the art world as being more infantile than substantive, denying many worthy self-taught artists their rightful place in the pantheon of art along side well-known and established artists. I think the term self-taught artists or creatives works best.
The Path to Sanctity
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m presently working on large canvases in a multitude of languages. They express the problems and hopes of many people in certain parts of the world using mere color and writing in an attempt to show our basic similarities, helping to create mutual respect between cultures, and merging all spoken word into one universal language of understanding and acceptance for everyone.
The State of Europe
Where do you see your work taking you in the future?
My artwork has always been a journey of self-discovery. My images began with simple patterns and colors, resulting in more complex and recognizable objects and figures, but after learning so much about many artists and their approach to art, I realized that stripping away from a work of art – simplifying creation to its vary basic elements – might be the key to great works of art.
From 19 – 22 October 2017, eclectic work by talented, unknown and untrained artists descended on Paris from all over the globe for the latest instalment of the Paris Outsider Art Fair. I was lucky enough to be able to hop on the Eurostar and head over to Paris for a couple of days to check out this year’s offering. In between squeezing as much of Paris into one day as might be physically possible (breakfast in Montmartre, the Montmartre Museum, the Tuileries, the Louvre – just the building, Notre Dame Cathedral), I managed to enjoy the opening night, or vernissage, as well as a quick second (much quieter) visit on the Friday evening.
This year, as in others, the variety of work on display at the Fair was truly astounding; work by figural outsider artists (Henry Darger, Willem van Genk), to artists who are completely unknown – but equally as talented. There were familiar faces from fairs past – the Cavin-Morris Gallery, Creative Growth Art Center, and the Andrew Edlin Gallery, as well as some fresh faces. I thought the best way to share my experience of this year’s Fair with you is through the photographs I took.
KDOA 