My Personal Journey through Post-punk, Art, Music and Radio
5.Outsider Art
I describe Outsider Art (or Art Brut in French) as art work done by untrained, self-taught, visionary people who often live outside society almost as hermits and devoid of cultural influences. They include people who have spent time in psychiatric institutions or living a solitary existence of their own choosing. The art work they create is the result of a desire to express something inside them and is very natural and raw and utilises whatever materials they can obtain, discarded objects from rubbish tips or garage sales (including wire, broken ceramic plates, machine parts or scrap metal), paper (newspaper, plain paper, exercise books and art paper), colour pencils and paints. Despite the seeming naivety of much of this work it has an incredible rawness and visionary quality. To me, this is REAL ART. It is not contrived or done for a market or for monetary gain. The term Art Brut was devised by the French modern artist Jean Dubuffet who collected about 5000 such pieces of art mainly from Swiss Psychiatric Hospitals from 1948.He donated his whole collection to the council of the city of Laussagne in Switzerland in 1972. A museum was subsequently established in 1976 to house the work, it is called the Collection de l'art Brut in that city and has kept growing since its establishment and is the focal point of Art Brut throughout the world. The English term Outsider Art was devised by the English author and teacher Roger Cardinal in his book "Outsider Art" published in England in 1974. Outsider Art includes painting, drawing, sculpture and includes the creation of fantastic gardens and outsider environments filled with sculptures including houses and buildings constructed from discarded materials as described above. In all instances the artist is completely untrained.
From the time when I was first introduced to this art in the early Eighties, I have totally immersed myself in it, met many of the artists and done radio programmes about it with interviews. I had always thought of this as being a European phenomenon. Much to my surprise and complete delight, friends of mine and I discovered that in 1987 there was an exhibition of outsider Art in Sydney organised by the Australian Collection of outsider Art. This consisted of Philip Hammial (poet, painter and sculptor) and Anthony Mannix (Art Brut maker, writer and poet) the latter of whom has become a close friend of since that time and we often talk about many issues, he has been a great inspiration and support to me. I was invited to join the Australian collection of outsider art by Phil and Anthony in 1990. The first exhibition which I attended was at a gallery in Sydney called the Kelly Street Collective in Ultimo. My experience upon entering this gallery describes the essence and meaningfulness of Outsider Art. When I entered the gallery the first large room was full of art of young new artists, it was so banal, contrived, deviatory (Dada, surrealism etc), flat and one-dimensional. Walking into the adjoining small room was like walking into another world, this was the world of Outsider Art. The work was soulful, original, vital, completely devoid of influences, natural and very raw. The work literally bounced off the walls. Philip Hammial and Anthony had organised the show it was to be the second of 16 shows which they would organise in subsequent years.
