december 2013 - issue 06

Outsider Art, reinventing the world

December 2013 issue 06

Outsider Art, reinventing the world

Glifo Edizioni in Palermo is the new publisher of the Outsider Art Observatory magazine of the University of Palermo. The O.O.A. n.6 (October 2013) has been published on paper and translated in English for the first time!

Scientific director Eva di Stefano Managing director Valentina Di Miceli Scientific committee Domenico Amoroso, Francesca Corrao, Eva di Stefano, Enzo Fiammetta, Marina Giordano, Vincenzo Guarrasi, Teresa Maranzano, Lucienne Peiry Scientific collaboration Roberta Trapani Editor Sarah Di Benedetto Translations
Denis Gailor, Francesca Giusti

Graphic design and layout Luca Lo Coco

Glifo Edizioni di Glifo s.r.l.s. via Beato Angelico 53 90145 Palermo (Italy) www.glifo.com info@glifo.com

Rivista dellOsservatorio Outsider Art six-monthly publication Authorization of the Court of Palermo n. 25 of the 6/10/2010 ISSN 2038-5501

index
Editorial
by Eva di Stefano

12

Memories
A Lagoon Galaxy. Donato Zangrossis House of Pinwheels by Giada Carraro

20

SUBSCRIPTION

Explorations
A Pavement Museum and its Custodian. A Meeting with the Artist Fausto Delle Chiaie by Naida Samon Urban Expressions of the Unconsciousness. Camelot and Gaetano Chiarenza by Pier Paolo Zampieri

O.O.A. MAGAZINE SUPPORTERS

OUTSIDER ART REINVENTING THE WORLD

28 38 52

If you want to support, also financially, our publishing activity you can buy the Outsider Art "supporters" subscription (150 euros): you will receive directly at home the two annual issues of the english O.O.A. magazine (on paper!!!) with our heart-felt thanks.

Francesco Giombarresis Possible Machines by Marco Mezzatesta

Focus
From Nave Art to Art Brut. The Italian Story by Laurent Danchin

66

In-depth studies
Queer Art and Gender Transformations in the Works of Psychiatric Patients by Thomas Rske For a Portrait of the Artist as a Fawn. Autism and Creativity by Marco Carapezza and Valentina Cuccio

78 90
Borderline stories
An Artists Home: Junkerhaus in Lemgo by Jrgen Scheffler Art and Magic in the Visions of Austin Osman Spare by Marco Coppolino Edward James a Dream Weaver by Giulia Ingarao

100 110 122

Reports
The Collection de lArt Brut: Tradition and Innovation. Interview with Sarah Lombardi curated by Teresa Maranzano Preview: a Tribute to the Birdman Gustav Mesmer by Lucienne Peiry An Alternative Guide to the Universe. Reflections of an Artist Visiting the Hayward Gallery by Andrea Cusumano At the 55th Venice Biennial. A Visit to the Encyclopaedic Palace. by Giada Carraro Borderline: an Art Itinerary between Normalcy and Madness by Enrica Bruno The Work Saved: the Moschini House-Museum at Tuscania by Pavel Konen

136 142 148 156 164 172

Informative reports
Contributors

180 182

Photograph credits

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Editorial
by Eva di Stefano

It is not rare to see windmills on windowsills in Venice, and indeed it is rather common. But when you happen to discover a balcony on which dozens of coloured corollas turn in the wind, made of all sorts of materials, in a happy decorative anarchy that arouses amused surprise, you perceive a break with daily banality, the signal of a sudden deviation towards something that resembles a breath of poetry. Poetry of small and humble things, bricolage made of nothing but nevertheless prompting imagination not tamed by the toil of living, where there still resounds the playful echo of the carillon of infancy. The lost Venetian installation by Donato Zangrossi, with which this issue opens, was one of those modest and positive creations that without other pretensions hearten the wayfarer. Just a little testimony of the possible irruption of the marvellous into daily life, of which we of the Observatory of Outsider Art are continually seeking, under the inspiring aegis of Breton, the crocks and presences in the side streets of human creativeness. It is not by chance that Breton, together with Jung and Steiner, is among the divinities presiding over the Venice Biennale, still ongoing at the moment of going to press, and reported on by us in the last part of the journal. It is a Biennale exhibition that shuffles the cards, putting in the same pack professional artists and creative dilettantes, insiders and outsiders, mostly with eventful or fascinatingly irregular biographies, who have set alongside the chaos of the world their own principle of order, an original attempt at classification, a symbolic paradigm, an unusual taxonomy destined to be defeated. They are in studios visited by collectors or out of sight in old disused garages, kept in safes or put aside in rubbish bags it doesnt matter how these works have been conceived and received , yet they all claim depth, light years distant from all conceptual minimalism or from all cynical modernist approximation. I dont know if this Biennale exhibition marks a point of no return in the dominant aesthetic parameters,

I do know that for once, however, it has grafted enthralling vitality onto the asphyxiated and predictable world of contemporary art. Thanks to the presence of the outsiders, who actually are less and less out. The index of this issue is shot through by the awareness that the borderline is becoming more and more flexible and even evanescent, as if its cultural and aesthetic reasons had become less clear than once. But, if this allows profitable enlargement of imagery horizons and unexpected possibilities of protection for works of human talent that were previously depreciated, perhaps their difference too should be protected as a value. At least this is the position of Sarah Lombardi, the new director of the Collection de lArt Brut in Lausanne, also opening up to dialogue with the contemporary art. The artist Andrea Cusumano, visiting the Hayward Gallery, instead wonders about the legitimacy of the distinctions and the impracticability of the current definitions. These are parameters that the artist Fausto delle Chiaie, refractory to every affiliation and interviewed for us by Naida Samon, dissolves through irony and in concrete action, choosing the road and contact with passers-by instead of the self-referential world of galleries. In or out? During the 20th century there has been no lack of artistic incursions into the enclosures of madness, nor contacts and mirroring among aesthetic universes that are culturally and existentially distant from one another: we were also reminded of this, this year, by the exhibition Borderline at MAR in Ravenna, reported on in the journal. By contrast, with a retrospective gaze, our section Border stories, beginning from the end of the 19th century, collects some exemplary stories of creative self-exile: for different reasons Karl Junker, Osman Austin Spare and Edward James represent a radical form of extremism blended with a powerful Zeigeist that it is simplistic to see merely as individual eccentricity. The Observatory of Outsider Art, created as a research laboratory inside the University of Palermo soon to project itself towards the outside world as

a cultural association, explores the Indian reserve of artists not conforming to the norm, by choice or by destiny, and it collects those manifestations of spontaneous creativeness that bring a little salutary anarchy into the world: those windmills of the mind, precisely, to which it has devoted its journal, which has grown in these years and not only in a quantitative sense. If around the term Outsider Art and its direct antecedent Art Brut, for some a ghetto and for others a proud little fortress, among experts there is a growing theoretical debate provoked by the ongoing changes in the art system, organisational and display practice more and more often faces up to problems of method: how can one integrate outsider works in the art system without zeroing their specificity? how can one profitably develop a peer-to-peer dialogue with contemporary art? In the end it is quite an acrobatic matter (it is not by chance that Acrobatics is the title of a pioneer project, curated by Elisa Fulco, that for years has been organising creative encounters between young emerging artists and the creative ones of the Atelier Adriano e Michele set up in a psychiatric institution) an answer to which has been attempted in our journal by the display experiment conducted in Caltagirone by Marco Mezzatesta, who highlighted, through the collaboration of young artists, an unknown aspect of the rich production of the irregular Sicilian artist Francesco Giombarresi. The Observatory continues to investigate in Sicily, regularly coming upon interesting new discoveries: in this issue we present the case of the bed sheets painted in the Messina psychiatric hospital by Gaetano Chiarenza, in which the sociologist Pier Paolo Zampieri reads the shroud of an urban territory deprived of identity. Among the essays on more general themes, the one by Laurent Danchin, a well-known French scholar, provides some essential data for a history of the reception of irregular art starting from the success of the label nave. Pressingly topical are both the article by Thomas Rske, the director of the Prinzhorn Collection in

Heidelberg, who in early twentieth-century psychiatric documentation tracks down some figured dreams of gender transformation, almost an incunabulum of todays queer art, and the stimulating reflection by Marco Carapezza and Valentina Cuccio on the origin of the prodigious islands of ability connected to autism. I also thank for their generous collaboration Lucienne Peiry, Pavel Konecn, Jrgen Scheffler, Teresa Maranzano and Giulia Ingarao. With the support of their evident competence we have realized this kaleidoscope of ours of active resources of the imagination, which also owes very much to the enthusiasm of young independent researchers like Enrica Bruno, Giada Carraro and Marco Coppolino. It is they that give a perspective to these researches. And it is precisely to young people that still want to reinvent the world that we owe the quantum leap of our journal that, having reached the sixth issue, also at last materializes outside the web in a paper version. Thanks to the commitment of the young Palermitan publishing house Glifo Edizioni, which has decided to give breath and continuity to this challenge and to go with us along the side streets of art. Though remaining downloadable free from the Internet, where it came into being, from today it also become possible to purchase the journal to read it more conveniently and enjoy its images to the full, making it why not? a collectors item. We believe, indeed, that in its pages it is still possible to discover the secret of that mysterious key of the fields that for Breton opened up the passage to freedom. Even more so when the message comes from the extreme world of those who have been exiled or betrayed by reality. It is a viaticum that it is worth protecting and handing down.

With the publication Annamaria Tosini. Gardens and Paper Sculptures, Glifo Edizioni opens the Margivaganti series devoted to outsider creators and their works. The series, curated by Eva di Stefano, highlights extra-ordinary characters that have found, in the most unusual and amazing art forms, an escape from their difficult lives. You can buy the first book of the series, that is published in Italian and English, on the website www.glifo.com

OutsideBox Nella rete degli outsider is a project addressed those people who want to discover the fascinating artistic works by Sicilians outsider creators. By purchasing a package including hotel and restoration in typical places and carefully selected, you can visit the main outsider sites of the island, also taking advantage of specialized guides. The itinerary includes, for example, visits to: Museo a cielo aperto Giovanni Bosco Castellammare del Golfo (TP), Museo delle Trame Mediterranee Gibellina (TP), Castello incantato di Filippo Bentivegna Sciacca (AG)

OutsideBox has been created with the support of SicilWorld Creative Farm

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info@tourismondo.it rachele.fiorelli@gmail.com

Visit the Outsider side of Sicily!

A Lagoon Galaxy. Donato Zangrossis House of Pinwheels

by Giada Carraro

A melancholy Venetian walk on the trail of a festive spontaneous creation that has now disappeared, although it had entered the collective imagination and was mentioned in guidebooks

Campo Castelforte1

is one of the many Venetian areas that now seem to be abandoned to themselves, with those houses with peeling paint, some recently repainted, and that bridge beyond which one can still encounter the craft shop of a shoemaker. It may seem like one of the many places in Venice that it is not worth dwelling on, but it is there that the story of the House of Pinwheels is kept. Until about 1994 the front of the house with its entrance at number 3792 of Corte dei Preti afforded an unprecedented sight: the entire wall was animated by handbuilt pinwheels that swirled at the slightest breath of wind. There are many people who remember them, with a vein of melancholy and bitterness at its disappearance, but few have had the pleasure of knowing the person that did it.

1 It is located behind the church of San Rocco, near the Basilica dei
Frari.

A Pavement Museum and its Custodian. A Meeting with the Artist Fausto Delle Chiaie
by Naida Samon

The witting choice of marginality by a brilliant artist who turned his back on the art system in the name of freedom in the urban space His personal open-air museum in a square in Rome Street objects, amid poetry and irony, recount heavens and hells of contemporary society

Since

you have turned on the light Ill show you the picture. Fausto Delle Chiaie (b. Rome, 1944) counts to 10 and symbolically turns on the spotlight on the biggest work of his open-air museum in Piazza Augusto Imperatore. The picture is a big drawing done on the pavement with white and red chalk, a big silhouette of a boxer knocked out and lying on the pavement up to the wall of the San Rocco church, against which there rests his head drawn on a stone. He cant get up, its a technical knockout hes staying on the ground, says Delle Chiaie in Roman dialect, and so begins my tour, the original version that I have deserved (not everyone gets it) because I turned on the lights, that is to say I made a donation to the advanced museum system (called this way, he explains, laughing, because Im not like the other museums that are in crisis, Im never in crisis). Every day Fausto Delle Chiaie opens in front of the Ara Pacis.

Urban Expressions of the Unconsciousness. Camelot and Gaetano Chiarenza

by Pier Paolo Zampieri

Art as social electroshock Story of a mural that brings down old walls revealing an unexpected artistic vocation A studio in the former mental hospital in Messina and a painter of salvific bed sheets as territorial sensors of a disfigured urban context

I was not

born in Messina. The first time I heard of the (former) Mandalari psychiatric hospital was due to the Puppet Theatre. I was helping Venerando Gargano, the last puppeteer in the city, to record a cunto (story) in which he went over the centennial curriculum of his family and, among the mysteries of the origin, the splendours of the 50s, the darkness of the 80s, and the struggles in subsequent years, I learned that Rosario, his father, precisely in the period of greatest indifference of the city towards its glorious paladins, did workshops ai pacci du Mandalari. Thus went the verse.1

Mandalari

1 For the mad of Mandalari. Gargano Family Archive.

by Marco Mez

zatesta

the project Francesco Giombarresis Possible Machines, the winner in 2012 of the first edition of the National Francesca Jacona della Motta Prize,1 I set out to bring back to life, through a study phase, a subsequent artistic experimentation and in a short museum itinerary, the scientific, medical and naturalistic side of the imagination of this Sicilian outsider.2 Fishing out of the abyss projects, tools and thoughts otherwise destined to oblivion3 and grafting them into contemporary works by young professional artists, the aim was also to hypothesise a new mode of museological presentation intersecting and connecting contemporary art and irregular art, art in the system and outside the system. The aim was thus to make it possible, according to modern languages and within a contemporary art museum, Imagined Machines, dreamt of and sometimes built by the Artist/Master/Inventor from Comiso.

With

e The inventions of a multi-faceted peasant artist between scienc ryside count n and poetry His home-workshop in the Sicilia An original experience of discovery and valorisation that interl laces contemporary art and irregular art indicating a new mode of museum presentation

The award, aimed at young artists and researchers in philosophy, was established in 2012 in memory of the artist Francesca Jacona della Motta and is sponsored by the Municipality of Caltagirone. The first edition was won by the author of the article with the project reported on here. On Francesco Giombarresi (Vittoria 1930-Comiso 2007), cf. L. Di Gregorio, Giombarresi e la scienza di astrosit, in Rivista dellOsservatorio Outsider Art, issue 2, March 2011, pp. 36-47; the biography is available on our website, http://outsiderart.unipa.it. The reference point for the project, as well as the final location of the event and place of exhibition of the works, was MACC in Caltagirone, that shortly after the death of Francesco Giombarresi, in 2006, recovered in extremis numerous writings and objects, jealously guarded by the artist, further enriching its pioneering collection of Art Brut, cf. M. Mezzatesta, Il MACC di Caltagirone: una collezione in progress, in Rivista dellOsservatorio Outsider Art, issue 4, March 2012, pp. 220-231.

s i s e r r a s b m i ne o i G ach o c s M e e c l n si b a r F Pos

From Nave Art to Art Brut. The Italian Story

by Laurent Danchin

The fortune of nave art in Italy in the 50s and 70s The late acceptance of the term Art Brut The French scholar indicates dates and protagonists of a controversial story yet to be written

Like

many visitors to the exhibition Banditi dellarte (Halle Saint-Pierre, Paris, 23/3/2012 - 06/01/2013) dedicated to Italian Art Brut, I was deeply impressed by the works of Rosario Lattuca,1 born in Sicily in 1926, who for me was a real discovery. The biography informs us that he was a deaf and dumb cabinetmaker and furniture restorer. He created fantastic animals and even some very strange paintings. It all appears fascinating for the alliance between an amazing dexterity, real formal complexity that is rather rare in Art Brut, and an inspiration, clearly obsessive, out of the ordinary. Well, I read that the work of this author has been assimilated by Dino Menozzi to nave art. We therefore have to reflect on the statute of nave art in Italy.

1 Editors note. For information on Rosario Lattuca (1926-1999) cf.

the article by C. Nizzoli, Sarracenie e fossili estinti. La cultura privata di Rosario Lattuca in issue 5 of our magazine, October 2012, pp. 80-89. For information on Art Bandits exhibition cf. the report by R. Trapani in issue 4, March 2012, pp. 202-211.

Rosario L

attuca

Queer Art and Gender Transformations in the Works of Psychiatric Patients

by Thomas Rske

Transformations

and role play. Works by Ovartaci and other queer art is the title of an exhibition presented in the Prinzhorn Collection of Heidelberg University Hospital, which during the summer of 2013 exhibited drawings, watercolours and photographs done by patients in psychiatric institutions. They express original fantasies on gender identity and sexual libido.1 Chronologically, the first works date from the early twentieth century, a time when doctors were quite helpless in relation to the mentally ill and the sick were mostly kept in hospital until their deaths without the possibility of being subjected to therapy or treatment. Artistic activity was not encouraged. The works, done out of a spontaneous impulse, were not credited with aesthetic value, so they were usually thrown away. The Heidelberg Collection is very important because it preserves a rich heritage of over 6000 works of very different character, done between 1840 and 1930. They were sent from all over Germany to the Heidelberg university psychiatric clinic, especially in the years 1919-1921, in response to an appeal by Hans Prinzhorn, at that time an assistant doctor. Since 1980 many new works have been added. The most recent heritage currently includes more than 12,000 works. In addition, since 2001, the collection has had its own museum in which thematic exhibitions are held.

A freakish pathway from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, with the guidance of the director of the Prinzhorn Collection, through some exemplary representations of changing sexual identities

Transformation und Rollenspiel. Werke von Ovartaci und andere queere Kunst, curated by Ingrid von Beyme and Thomas Rske, Sammlung Prinzhorn, Heidelberg (24/4 - 04/08/2013).

For a Portrait of the Artist as a Fawn. Autism and Creativity

by Marco Carapezza and Valentina Cuccio

What is the relationship between cognitive impairment and the extraordinary ability to carve details possessed by designers such as Stephen Wiltshire and Gilles Trehin? Can study of autism and its islands of ability help to understand the mechanisms of human creativity?

Marginality

is always at the centre of human societies. The madman, the saint, the hermit, the shaman are at one and the same time marginal and central figures. The margin of the paper is what defines and identifies it as such. So marginality characterizes human societies, if only because it defines what is not marginal. But, even after this premise, can we speak of marginality in the arts? Is there a marginal art, or are there simply artists who live on the margins of social life (in any possible meaning)? Perhaps we should try to rethink artistic geography outside the concept of margin, i.e. using different conceptual models from those of Euclidean geometry; for example, in topology use is made of figures which have no margins, like the Moebius ribbon, a figure that can be entirely gone along (which is what Eschers ants do) without ever leaving the margins of the figure. Besides, in the art world, the boundary between what is marginal and what is not, at least from Van Gogh on, is a shifting boundary, whose motion tends to acceleration. This is true in general both for artistic creation, and for forms of collecting. How many acclaimed contemporary art installations simulate the relationship between order and chaos and the existential collecting of Mr. Barnes? wondered Eva di Stefano, citing an eccentric accumulator discovered by Damien Hirst.1

E. di Stefano, Irregolari. Art Brut e Outsider Art in Sicilia, Kals, Palermo 2008, p. 27.

An Artists Home: Junkerhaus in Lemgo

At the close of the nineteenth century, the ornamental bulimia of a reclusive artist recasts the eclectic historicism that forged him, thus prefiguring Expressionism A total work of art, whimsical cathedral of misanthropy, Karl Junkers unsettling masterpiece has now become the main tourist attraction of the small German town of Lemgo

Located

by Jrgen Scheffler

in the Hanseatic town of Lemgo, Junkerhaus is the only German example cited amid the repertoire of Visionary Environments listed in the Outsider Art Sourcebook.1 The house, which is completely covered with an intricate, decorative array of wooden intaglios, was once the home/studio of the artist Karl Junker (1850-1912) and has for some time constituted one of Lemgos main tourist attractions. Yet as early as the end of the nineteenth century, the artist had opened the doors of his home to visitors, treating it as a private museum. Following his death, the house was deemed as a mere curiosity for quite a number of years. It has only been safeguarded as a work of art and monument for about the last thirty years. Karl Junker followed the example of other artists who, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, set up their homes and studios as artists home. Upon conceiving the spatial arrangement of his residence, he indissolubly linked architecture, sculpture, and painting. As a result, Junkerhaus may be correlated with the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Moreover, Junker left us a vast artistic legacy, comprising paintings, drawings, sculptures, furniture, and architectural models. In the last few years, Junkerhaus has been the object of extensive restoration and preservation work. In 2004, a new annex to the museum was inaugurated which is connected to the Junkerhaus via a glass passageway. This additional building includes the museums foyer and an exhibition room. The display of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and small models in a space adjacent to the Junkerhaus provides an opportunity to compare the richness of the artists visionary world to his architecture.

J. Maizels, Outsider Art Sourcebook, Raw Vision, Watford 2009, p. 195.

Art and Magic in the Visions of Austin Osman Spare

by Marco Coppolino

The experience of an artist/magician an outsider due to his esoteric interests amid the legacy of symbolism, retroactive evolutionism, occultism, and shamanic practices.

That

Mario Praz, in one of his exquisitely learned notes in The Romantic Agony (1930), should have hastily defined Spare as a satanic occultist and his drawings as curious symbolic illustrations,1 little matters to those who, having taken up certain studies spurred by a taste for the dark and the decadent, and having thus come upon this masterful work, cant but fail to appreciate the skill of its author in shedding light on extreme, fascinating personalities, even if with the aim of attesting their artistic mediocrity (the poems of Aleister Crowley) or signaling, with academic dismissiveness, little more than their existence (Spares drawings). On the other hand, Prazs neoclassic sensibilities and aesthetic conservatism could not have conceded anything more to his refined, yet canonizing voyeurs gaze. It little matters, as I was saying, because his essay nonetheless constitutes a fatal invitation to embark on a journey, thus undertaking another, differently equipped, exploration.

Astral Body and Ghost, 1947

1 M. Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (Milan:

Rizzoli, 2009) p. 281.

Edward James A Dream Weaver

Breaking canons always had the same appeal for me as pulling crackers, in fact makes quite a momentary Christmas just for me! Los Angeles, 6 June 19491

by Giulia Ingarao

Letter by E. J. to Esteban Frances from the hospital

conventions has always been a fundamental constant in the life of Edward James (1907-1984). But who was James? He was one of the most extraordinary conjurors of fantasies of the twentieth century; a passionate dreamer of Surrealism whose creative power was only posthumously recognized, and partially at that. Since his earliest youth, James had pursued the dream of becoming an artist and, for about half of his lifetime, he was able to do so through others, taking a passionate interest in, and supporting those creative individuals with whom he could identify, and who were best able to transmute his fantastical whimsies into a pictorial image, object, or item of interior dcor. It was only after his death, in 1984, that he began to be known as an unsung architect of beauty.2

Unhinging

Too rich to be taken seriously as an artist by his surrealist friends, a British millionaire finds a creative haven in the rainforest of Northern Mexico the experiences of a glamorous outsider and his unrecognized masterpiece

1 The Edward James Archive at West Dean in Chichester (England) managed

by the Edward James Foundation, which also runs a school of fine arts and restoration and was founded by James himself in 1964.

Edward James, Un documental, Edward James: Fabricante de sueos, directed by Avery Danziger (1995; Mexico: TOP Drawer Productions), Film.

curated by Teresa Maranzano

The Collection de lArt Brut: Tradition and Innovation. Interview with Sarah Lombardi
With its very rich collections, the Museum in Lausanne remains the main reference point for Art Brut lovers The new director outlines her museum philosophy, programmes and modalities of dialogue, more and more topical, with the contemporary art system

In

March of this year, the City of Lausanne appointed the art historian Sarah Lombardi director of the Collection de lArt Brut, a function that she had been performing ad interim for a year. Already at work at the museum since 2004 as a research assistant, and since 2007 as a conservator, Sarah Lombardi is the author of numerous articles on Art Brut published in catalogues and specialist journals. We met her to ask what the strong points of her mandate will be, considering respect for tradition and a desire to innovate. And to find out what will change with respect to the previous line of Michel Thvoz, the historic director of the collection from its opening in 1976 until 2001, of Genevieve Roulin, who backed him up as Deputy Director, and later of Lucienne Peiry, who directed the museum from 2001 to 2011, and today holds the position of Director of Research and International Relations.

Daniel Johnston, Hulk Feel Lonely Inside, limited edition poster, 2009

Preview: a Tribute to the Birdman Gustav Mesmer

by Lucienne Peiry

Men are outside nature They look amazed at birds large and small, Like them they glide light in air currents. Can man ever not be envious From a letter written in 1937 by Gustav Mesmer

Gustav Mesmer will be a protagonist of an exhibition curated by Lucienne Peiry for the Collection de lArt Brut in Lausanne in 2014 The dreams of freedom and poetic flying machines of a man who lived for forty years in a mental hospital and escaped Nazi eugenics due to his capacity for manual labour

of Art Brut, Gustav Mesmer (1903-1994) invented bizarre and incongruous flying machines, which he himself made and experimented with in solitude. Most of these are built around a bicycle, to which the inventor adds one or two pairs of wings made with the help of flexible branches, used tarpaulins and old umbrellas. Mesmer also conceived of extravagant shoes with springs to wear to bounce and jump up towards the sky. These utopian devices were all made with recycled materials, such as wood, metal and fabric, which he procured looking in refuse, in landfills or at farms in the area.

An Icarus

An Alternative Guide to the Universe. Reflections of an Artist Visiting the Hayward Gallery
Going round among the creators of parallel universes, exhibited in London last summer, some fundamental questions arise: who is the artist today? which is the field of art? what is the meaning of the cultural construction that we call outsider art?
by Andrea Cusumano

History

teaches us that the greatest cultural innovations are almost always expressed as a result of the encounter with the Other. The Other emerging from the past, as in the case of the Renaissance, or manifesting itself through misinterpretation of the past, as in Neoclassicism, the Other that came from the New World or another world that came from exploration beyond the sensitive confines, when Galileo pointed his telescope at the stars and his microscope in slides; in more recent times the Other was found in anthropological explorations, which influenced German expressionism, just as certain developments of cubism were inspired by African art, Artaudian theatre had Balinese inspiration and the formal revolution of Meyerhold was clearly inspired by Kabuki. Peter Brook and Richard Schechner owe much to the art of sung dance of Kerala, Kathakali and Koodiyattam in particular but the examples in this direction would certainly be endless.

At the 55th Venice Biennale. A Visit to the Encyclopaedic Palace.

Towards new aesthetic parameters? The most highly awaited international exhibition in the world of contemporary art shuffles the cards of history, celebrating self-taught and clandestine artists alongside professional artists and the best-known mainstream names

One

of the dominant ideas of this exhibition is that it is necessary to bring the work of art back alongside other figurative expressions, both to free it from the imprisonment of its presumed autonomy and to give it back the strength required to be the interpreter of a vision of the world. With these words the young curator Massimiliano Gioni explains his apparently provocative decision to turn the International Exhibition of the Biennale of Art into an occasion for challenging the confines between professionals and dilettantes, insiders and outsiders. This combination of heterogeneous materials Gioni continues is not a gratuitously polemic choice but an attempt to get out of an impasse: contemporary art cannot be relegated to a closed territory. [] In order once again to become a hermeneutic tool essential to analysis and interpretation of our visual culture, art has to get off the pedestal and draw close to other existential adventures. This movement of de-sublimation doesnt sacrifice or reduce the incantatory power of images, but indeed charges them with new energy.

by Giada Carraro

Left: The Encyclopaedic Palace by Marino Auriti

Borderline: an art itinerary between normalcy and madness

by Enrica Bruno

A visit to the exhibition that this year in Ravenna, placing side by side insider and outsider artists, pointed out the possibility of another history of twentieth-century visual culture

do a child walking on a little wall, a marble rolling on a plane, an acrobat in unstable balance on a wire, and a man walking on a borderline have in common? Anxiety to climb over, to fall, to trespass into two different territories. Thus a patient affected by what psychiatry calls borderline personality disorder oscillates between normalcy and madness. But what does being borderline mean? It means travelling on an edge, being at the limit. On that imaginary line that delimits reality, in that strange space found between things. That which putting in contact separates, or, who knows, separating puts in contact people, things, cultures, identities, spaces different from one another. Border space or border as space? It is only a matter of perspective, as Piero Zanini points out to us in his essay on the idea of border (Milan 1997). This is also the question without univocal answers that ran through the rooms of an exhibition in the prestigious venue of MAR in Ravenna (17/2-16/6/2013) already beginning from the title: Borderline, precisely.

What

The Work Saved: the Moschini House-Museum at Tuscania

by Pavel Konen

Never doubt that a small group of tenacious and reflexive people will succeed in changing the world. The fact is that nothing but this has led till now to change. Margaret Mead

The positive outcome of the story told in the preceding issue of our journal The post mortem discovery of the sculptural work of Pietro Moschini was followed by spontaneous mobilization and the immediate creation of a small museum

The

works of non-professional artists, classified with the specific definition of Art Brut, often come into being spontaneously without evident artistic ambitions on the part of their creators; their authentic values as well as the amazing creative qualities at times are not even recognized, thus disappearing from the world for good without anyone noticing, documenting or preserving them for future generations. As if their meaning consisted precisely in temporariness, in the dissolution of a marginal existence closely tied tightly to the social insignificance of the artist, who often is not even appreciated by the surrounding environment, and is not understood and supported in his or her intentions. Indeed, on the contrary, the results of his or her original creation over a long period of years are mocked at times, treated as banal and very often also deliberately destroyed. In this way we irreparably lose documents of original manifestations of spontaneous creativeness, freed of the ties of the cultural models of academic art.

Contributors
Enrica Bruno, a young art historian, studies the borderline artistic phenomena; she lives in Palermo and collaborates with Outsider Art Observatory. Marco Carapezza teaches Philosophy of the speech at the University of Palermo, has published studies on Frege and Wittgenstein, and is particularly concerned with the linguistic-cognitive side of social practices. Giada Carraro, an art historian, has focused her research on Imaginary Architectures in Veneto collaborating with the Costruttori di Babele Association; she lives near Venice. Marco Coppolino studies Visual Arts at the University of Bologna; he focuses his research on the relationship between esoteric culture, art and cinema. Valentina Cuccio, a postdoc at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, deals with embodied theories of human cognition; she lives in Palermo. Andrea Cusumano, artist, lives in London where he teaches at the Goldsmiths College; his poetics based on painting also includes theater, performance, installations, music. Laurent Danchin, art writer and critic, lives in Paris; scholar of Dubuffet and author of important publications, he is among the leading International specialists of Brut and Outsider Art. Eva di Stefano teaches Phenomenology of Contemporary Art at the University of Palermo, where she has founded and directs the Outsider Art Observatory and its magazine. Pavel Konen, former superintendent of the monuments in Olomouc (Czech Republic), where he also directed the municipal theater, he has been collecting Outsider Art works since the 1970s. He has also curated exhibitions and publications devoted to Eastern Europe authors. Giulia Ingarao, art historian and curator, an expert on Surrealism and Mexican art, teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo. Sarah Lombardi has been the director of the museum of Collection de

lArt Brut in Lausanne since March 2013. She has been scientific collaborator of the same museum since 2004 and conservator since 2007. Teresa Maranzano, art historian and curator specialised in Art Brut, lives in Geneva where she coordinates projects, such as Mirarts, for the enhancement of creative workshops attended by people with mental handicap. Marco Mezzatesta, a young art historian and independent researcher in the field of Art Brut and Outsider Art with particular reference to Sicilian authors, lives and works in Bergamo. Lucienne Peiry is the director of research and international relations of the Collection de lArt Brut in Lausanne, of which she was the director from 2001 to 2011; among her publications the fundamental Art Brut (Flammarion, Paris 1997, 2006). Thomas Rske, the current president of EOA (European Outsider Art Association), art historian and scholar of psychological aspects and creations in psychiatric contests, has been the director of the Prinzhorn Museum at the University of Heidelberg since 2002. Naida Samon, art historian, studies and works in Palermo and Rome in

the field of museum education and cultural journalism. Jrgen Scheffler is the director of the civic museums of Lemgo (Germany), to one of them, the Junkerhaus, he has devoted several publications. Pier Paolo Zampieri teaches Urban Sociology at the University of Messina; he deals with imagination and marginality with an interdisciplinary approach.

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Photograph Credits
The numbers refer to the pages of the magazine

from 103 to 109: Courtesy Museum Junkerhaus, Lemgo (Germany). Photo Gerhard Milting from 111 to 121: Courtesy Fulgur Esoterica Editions, Londra 124: Courtesy Edward James Museum, Xilitla, Messico from 129 to 134: Photo Giulia Ingarao, Palermo 136: Collection de lArt Brut, Lausanne; Daniel Johnston, courtesy Arts Factory [galerie nomade] 138: Archive of the Collection de lArt Brut, Lausanne; Mario Del Curto, 2013 139: Collection de lArt Brut, Lausanne. Photo Harris Diamant 140, 141: Collection de lArt Brut, Lausanne 144, 146: Gustav Mesmer Stiftung, Buttenhausen (Germany) 147: Gustav Mesmer Stiftung, Buttenhausen (Germany). Photo Stefan Hartmaier from 148 to 155: Courtesy Hayward Gallery, London from 156 to 163: Courtesy Venice Biennale 164, 165: Luca Lo Coco from 166 to 170: Courtesy MAR, Ravenna from 174 to 178: Photo Pavel Konen, Olomouc

22, 24: Photo Alberto Pugliese, Venice 26: Photo Giada Carraro, Venice from 30 to 37: Photo Naida Samon, Rome 41, 42: Photo Valeria Gavagni, Messina 44, 46, 47 above, 49: Photo Stello Quartarone, Messina 47 below, 48: Photo Valeria Gavagni, Messina from 52 to 54: MACC Archive (Museo Civico di Arte Contemporanea), Caltagirone 57: Giombarresi Family Collection, Comiso from 58 to 65: Archive and collection of MACC (Museo Civico di Arte Contemporanea), Caltagirone 66: House-Museum Rosario Lattuca, Boretto (Reggio Emilia) 68: Museum Charlotte Zander, Bnningheim 71: Croatian Museum of Nave Art, Zagabria 72: Observatory Outsider Art Archive, Palermo 73: Museum Haus Cajeth, Heidelberg 74: Costruttori di Babele Archive. Photo Gabriele Mina, Savona 77: Carlo Zinelli Foundation, San Giovanni Lupatoto (Verona). Courtesy MAR, Ravenna 78: Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg 80, 81: Museum Ovartaci, Aarhus (Danimarca) from 83 to 87: Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg 88: Ono Ludwig, Berlin from 90 to 99: Luca Lo Coco

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