The outsider as egomaniac
John McEwen
'Outsiders' (Hayward till 8 April) is officially described as an exhibition of art `without precedent or tradition'. Dubuffet was the first person to collect this kind of work seriously and he coined a famous phrase to describle it, Art Brut. For him this was art 'springing from pure invention and in no way based, as cultural art constantly is, on chameleon or parrot-like processes'. Today he has opened a museum in its honour at Lausanne. It is not a sociological gesture; he believes, for instance, that one of the artists you can see at the Hayward, Adolf Wolfli, is among the greatest of all time. Victor Musgrave, who was the principal organiser of the exhibition, concurs in his catalogue preface and goes even further. He has a no less high regard for the work of several other of the artists in the show.
It is best to take this as a pinch of 'outsider' criticism. 'In the work of these great originators', Musgrave concludes, 'the dehumanising process which invests so much contemporary art with its aridity is conspicuously lacking. Lacking, too are the grants in aid and the doubtful backing of Official attention' — though not any more, as he ruefully admits. All in all, therefore, it sounds like a show that should interest the Other outsiders, the vast majority of the Population who leave 'modern' art exhibitions well alone. If it does I doubt if it will Make many converts. The over-riding impression is of egomania, a mad, often genuinely mad, insistence on genius in the face of all proof to the contrary. Just as drunks, whoever they may once have been, all behave the same, so the visions of egomania all tend to look the same — presumably because they derive from a cornMon need.
The work is usually obsessionally detailed, and it is when this detail is exaggerated to a point where it engulfs the invariable banality if the idea it expresses, that You get the saving grace of abnormality. Undoubtedly this is most spectacularly demonstrated by the famous edifices of the Facteur Cheval, Clarence Schmidt and Simon Rodia, though photographs, as at the Hayward, tend to magnify their true size: the same disregard of time, the same coralreeflike genesis distinguish all three, years and continents apart though they are; and in the exhibition it is the similarly fanciful three-dimensional objects, the Heath Robinson contraptions and toys, that stand out, even if they all do look a bit the same. Despite the drunken boast of our own greatest exponent, the late Scottie Wilson, that he was of the stuff of 'Moses, Willie Blake and Robbie Burns', the most lasting impression of outsider art, mad art or what ever else you call it, is of boring repetition.
Leslie Waddington continues his happily conceived idea of showing the old as well as the new work of his artists, with an exhib ition of Patrick Heron's paintings, 1950-55 and 1970-77 (Waddington 2 till 3 March).
These days Heron's doughty championing of abstract, and particularly American abstracts, art as a critic in the Fifties, assumes a historic, even heroic aura, but it cannot excuse the limitations of his own paintings. The present exhibition is small and has nothing from his best and most innovatory late Fifties period, but it is nevertheless disappointing. It looks like the work of a critic, someone who knows too much for the good of his own intuition. Theoretically he is all for art of pure form, but his true sensibility is demonstrably figurative and in this work the two never coalesce.
Figurative details mar his early exercises in the manner of Braque (with a shot of Matisse and a pinch of Hitchens), and a love for the shapes of the harbours of his Cornish homeland and the patterns of sea encroaching on sand underlie the forms of his later abstracts, blinding him to their banality as design. Theory too can be the only explanation for his stubborn persistence with these paintings, in which the texture is as pleasing as myriad plugs of chewing-gum, the colour unmixed and clashed to produce the same buzz of optical effects, the design a jigsaw of 'organic' shapes worthy of a carpet in the lobby of the 'Crossroads' motel. In his quest for self-expression he has mistaken a motif for a style.
Nicholas Pope's latest exhibition of wooden sculpture (Anthony Stokes till 3 March) consolidates his reputation as the most assured sculptor of his generation in England. Logs of various kinds of wood are piled and stacked into increasingly impacted and sculpted shapes. Although individually they incorporate three or many more bits of wood, they are pleasingly cut and shaped as a unity.
Trevor Sutton, Jeff Hellyer, June Green and Colin Nicholas share an exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture at Annely Juda (till 3 March). The work might reasonably qualify as a new school of Marginalism, so insistently does it ring minute changes on minimal themes. It is encouragingly polished and professional but short on character. Gary Wragg (Acme till 9 March) has a similar problem with Abstract Expressionism. He throws various aspects of it together with a base of early Jackson Pollock in the hope that something new will emerge, but it does not. His paintings are large and frenzied, which gives them a certain shock value in England, but in the wider context of the Cobra Group in Europe twenty years ago or similar reactions in New York before and after that time, even their method looks dated. His admirable energy and optimism are being wasted in cosy old London.
That nice area opposite the frontentrance of the British Museum where the spirit of old Bloomsbury continues to flourish has been further enriched by the opening of the ARts Bibliographia bookshop and the Barry Barker Gallery at 37 Great Russell Street. Suitably enough the Gallery kicks off with an elegant mixture of literature and art in the best traditions of Surrealism by John Murphy (till 9 March). His verbal but fresh visual images are reflections on paradox and have a pleasing poetry at times, though this tends to diminish the more visually it is expressed.
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