Post by Admin on May 17, 2021 13:55:11 GMT
This isn’t just art, but a supercharged act of meaning-making
psyche.co/ideas/this-isnt-just-art-but-a-supercharged-act-of-meaning-making
One frigid evening this January, I dropped by the Outsider Art Fair in New York, a stripped-down event in its pandemic iteration, scattered across a few small galleries in the Bowery. At the Andrew Edlin Gallery, I was transfixed by some tiny talismanic drawings by Melvin ‘Milky’ Way, an artist with schizophrenia from South Carolina. Put together with Scotch tape, scraps of paper, marker and ballpoint pen, Way’s recursive considerations addressed a single theme: the precise structural formulae for the mysteries and marvels of human existence, from ‘sweet red cherry juice’ to ‘happiness’. ‘They’re all highly secret, not to be shared,’ explained a masked gallery assistant, adding that these small cards travelled in Way’s coat pocket as ‘weapons of protection’ through his years in New York’s homeless shelters and psychiatric facilities.
Clustered together on the wall, the densely patterned fragments recalled a museum display whose seals and tablets bore messages in a lost language from another time. Some contained a single pattern, such as purple whorls resembling a stained-glass window belonging to an occult temple. Some had insistent neologistic messages flashing alongside the chemical formula: ‘Compel, expulsate, perpetrate’ said one. Previous attempts to press Way on the meaning behind his work, including by the art critic Edward M Gómez, have resulted in disquisitions on the virtues of time travel, Way’s invention of cocaine, his purchase of Alaska, and the time he turned 16 – at the age of 60. Yet the unknowability of this art is part of its appeal. ‘Since [the artists] can’t explain their work, we’re left to discover it on our own,’ Edlin, the gallery owner, told me. ‘Their minds are impenetrable and, once you accept that, it’s liberating to just think of what the art means to you.’
Every year, I seek out ‘impenetrable’ art at the Outsider Art Fair, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and elsewhere. By now, I know what I’m drawn to: art that iteratively sketches out a personal obsession. It’s often heavily symbolic; swimming with a profusion of barely decipherable words, lists and astrological charts, or with hypnotic patterns of repeating concentric lines. In art made by erstwhile residents of psychiatric hospitals, sometimes the leitmotif is a home whose soaring windows and flowering plants speak of inexpressible yearning; sometimes, the drawings conjure a private hauntology, populated with beaked tormentors or looming, blackened wraiths with large, childlike eyes.
It’s not a straightforward, entirely kosher feeling to peer so closely at images that stream straight out of the cauldron of a lifetime of human pain, loneliness and ostracisation. Some of the artists are non-verbal, and their art is the closest form of locution they undertake in their entire life. Many have spent years sequestered in mental health units, or they’ve endured chronic bouts of sickness and indigence before their work posthumously changed hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Looking at this art head-on feels like glimpsing an optical illusion, or experiencing a psychic bait-and-switch. You can get lost in the immediate and surprising visceral pleasures of drawings compactly festooned with mysterious symbols and cursive text; in fantastical worlds rendered in coloured pencil; or the touchingly misshapen animals set in landscapes that are ever so slightly askew. Reading the biography of the artist can then plunge you into an abyss, or leave you both moved and discomfited, unsure how to feel about what you saw. Often, there’s a faintly queasy undertow of déjà venu: a sense of ‘I might have known this place, and, had the wind blown differently, I might have stayed there.’
psyche.co/ideas/this-isnt-just-art-but-a-supercharged-act-of-meaning-making
One frigid evening this January, I dropped by the Outsider Art Fair in New York, a stripped-down event in its pandemic iteration, scattered across a few small galleries in the Bowery. At the Andrew Edlin Gallery, I was transfixed by some tiny talismanic drawings by Melvin ‘Milky’ Way, an artist with schizophrenia from South Carolina. Put together with Scotch tape, scraps of paper, marker and ballpoint pen, Way’s recursive considerations addressed a single theme: the precise structural formulae for the mysteries and marvels of human existence, from ‘sweet red cherry juice’ to ‘happiness’. ‘They’re all highly secret, not to be shared,’ explained a masked gallery assistant, adding that these small cards travelled in Way’s coat pocket as ‘weapons of protection’ through his years in New York’s homeless shelters and psychiatric facilities.
Clustered together on the wall, the densely patterned fragments recalled a museum display whose seals and tablets bore messages in a lost language from another time. Some contained a single pattern, such as purple whorls resembling a stained-glass window belonging to an occult temple. Some had insistent neologistic messages flashing alongside the chemical formula: ‘Compel, expulsate, perpetrate’ said one. Previous attempts to press Way on the meaning behind his work, including by the art critic Edward M Gómez, have resulted in disquisitions on the virtues of time travel, Way’s invention of cocaine, his purchase of Alaska, and the time he turned 16 – at the age of 60. Yet the unknowability of this art is part of its appeal. ‘Since [the artists] can’t explain their work, we’re left to discover it on our own,’ Edlin, the gallery owner, told me. ‘Their minds are impenetrable and, once you accept that, it’s liberating to just think of what the art means to you.’
Every year, I seek out ‘impenetrable’ art at the Outsider Art Fair, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and elsewhere. By now, I know what I’m drawn to: art that iteratively sketches out a personal obsession. It’s often heavily symbolic; swimming with a profusion of barely decipherable words, lists and astrological charts, or with hypnotic patterns of repeating concentric lines. In art made by erstwhile residents of psychiatric hospitals, sometimes the leitmotif is a home whose soaring windows and flowering plants speak of inexpressible yearning; sometimes, the drawings conjure a private hauntology, populated with beaked tormentors or looming, blackened wraiths with large, childlike eyes.
It’s not a straightforward, entirely kosher feeling to peer so closely at images that stream straight out of the cauldron of a lifetime of human pain, loneliness and ostracisation. Some of the artists are non-verbal, and their art is the closest form of locution they undertake in their entire life. Many have spent years sequestered in mental health units, or they’ve endured chronic bouts of sickness and indigence before their work posthumously changed hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Looking at this art head-on feels like glimpsing an optical illusion, or experiencing a psychic bait-and-switch. You can get lost in the immediate and surprising visceral pleasures of drawings compactly festooned with mysterious symbols and cursive text; in fantastical worlds rendered in coloured pencil; or the touchingly misshapen animals set in landscapes that are ever so slightly askew. Reading the biography of the artist can then plunge you into an abyss, or leave you both moved and discomfited, unsure how to feel about what you saw. Often, there’s a faintly queasy undertow of déjà venu: a sense of ‘I might have known this place, and, had the wind blown differently, I might have stayed there.’