The quality of these two images is not great. I’m not sure what was happening, but I visited the exhibition at about the time I was starting to feel unwell last year, so maybe this went with the territory – as possibly does the subject.
Callan Park Gallery held a show titled Snakes last November, and I enjoyed several lovely examples of this mysterious animal by Jose dos Santos. The snake woman on the left was rich and more overtly sexual than the image makes out – complete with painted red vagina (which seems to have become muted in this photograph).
I’m thinking that the approach to dos Santos’ snakes should be as Hillman’s approach to snakes in dreams, i.e. phenomenological rather than analytical. In this nice quote from Hillman’s Inter-Views (1983):
“…a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it…The task of analysis is to keep the snake there…”
Such an approach keeps the snakes of dos Santos (as it does the dream) alive, able to affect the consumer afresh on each encounter; chaotic, disturbing, as is his nest of vipers below.
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Callan Park Gallery,
James Hillman,
Jose dos Santos,
Outsiders
I am now the proud owner of number 892/2000 in the first edition of Susan King’s comic book, which I bought at her recent exhibition at the Callan Park Gallery. Here’s a snippet from the book, brimming with energy and much strangeness.
According to the comic:
Susan stopped talking around the age of 4. But she drew and drew and drew and drew and drew – expressive, rich, imaginative and complex drawings. In the mid 1980s, Susan stopped drawing. Then towards the end of 2008 as new people were starting to discover Susan’s work, she started to draw again. It’s late 2009. Susan has an exhibition happening imminently, a documentary is being made about her, wonderful people from the art world are studying her drawings… and Susan continues to draw.
There’s lots more of her work at Susan’s web site, and here are a couple of favourites of mine from the show (the one “happening imminently”):
Below is an image from her web site that I couldn’t help thinking fits closely with another of Susan as a child, drawing in the sand at Waihi, New Zealand. Maybe it’s my New Zealand connection, but I feel an emotional pull from these images; she’s managed to keep alive a fresh, child’s view and a child’s creative use of the natural resources around her. And I guess for me that’s the kick I get from Outsiders – their ability to remind me of things I’ve pushed out of my awareness, in my construction of a “normal” adult psyche.
Susan’s also on Facebook – I searched for “Susan Te Kahurangi King”.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Susan King
Ok, this one’s not obviously about Bali, yet in another way it is. This is a work by Paul Sedgwick (2006) that I saw at the recent exhibition of works from the Peter Fay collection at the Callan Park Gallery. I photographed it then, but wasn’t initially moved. Yet this strange canvas has been working on me over the ensuing weeks (and even while in Bali) and I now love its language and its delicacy.
That got me wondering about how good Outsider art works – how it operates, as though on a different plane from much mainstream art, breathing from deeper levels of the psyche. And the painting fits well for me with my recent Bali experience – Bali and this work hold something related; another, fresh way of inhabiting the world.
Before I went to Bali I spoke to Peter Fay about this work, and he gave me some of the background. Paul works out of an arts workshop in Hamilton New Zealand. He compiles lists of street names, of mountains, of local landmarks. (This one has entries from the Auckland phone book.)
I like Peter’s take on the work: to him it’s “the dying of a breath of wind” (the way the letters fade). There’s much delicacy here, in the text and in the underlying abstraction of colour (which the photo doesn’t quite do justice to). An art piece that’s prepared to die away, to breathe in quite a different way. I like that.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Paul Sedgwick
More work from the Peter Fay collection, at Callan Park Gallery in August – here’s Reece Tong (born 1968) with two energetic paintings.
Reece Tong
Bird Seed
Reece Tong
National Park Trees
I love the way the graphic elements in these works float in a void field – whorls (possibly in the sense of these being fingerprints of the artist) of psychic energy and veracity, “selflets” of presence and consciousness, unfiltered by the more usual oppressions of thinking.
Reece works through the Vincents Art Workshop in Wellington New Zealand.
Tagged as:
Art,
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Reece Tong
I visited Callan Park Gallery today to see works from the Peter Fay collection. Peter has a wonderful collection of outsider art, and this was just a small selection. Here’s a little work from the show that caught my eye, by an artist I know almost nothing about (except that I hear he lives in Melbourne). 
Christian Den Besten
Strike
Painted Matchsticks on board, 30 x 40 cm (approx )
I found this a touching work, conveying a strong sense of inner space. And to cap it off, it reminded me of little “sculptures” I used to make as a kid, from matchsticks. One of the pleasures in making these works was buying boxes of matches in bulk and lighting “clumps” of about 20 sticks at a time, to get the blackened burnt tips I especially liked.
I loved the flare of a bunch of match sticks going up, that colourful, energetic Strike I see in Den Besten’s work.
Tagged as:
Art,
Callan Park Gallery,
Christian Den Besten,
Outsiders
I visited the Rosemarie Koczy exhibition at Callan Park Gallery last Saturday and was moved by her works on paper – 21 in all, in her Holocaust memorial I am Weaving You a Shroud.
Rosemarie Koczy (1939-2007)
Uzbekistan Book and Genevieve Roulin’s Operation, 2000
Ink on paper, both 27 x 35 cm
The blog My Heart – Jewish Memories has a nice post on her, and links to NY Times and other reviews.
What was also moving for me was the collection of her writings and scrapbooks in the intimate back gallery at Callan Park. In the cutting below the artist has captioned a photo taken much closer to our own time, and chilling in its reverberations with her own horrendous experiences.
Finally, here’s the entire text of Rosemarie’s description of I am Weaving You a Shroud. (Click on the image on the left for the readable version.)
It’s a strong artist’s statement – and another one of her works on paper, standing out as strongly as the others.
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Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Rosemarie Koczy
“…It isn’t easy, being an outsider. Once elected, there are appearances to be kept up: the solitary lifestyle, the nutty habits, the freedom from artistic influences. Above all, indifference to earning money. Scrounging for canvas and paint, going without luxuries such as food and socks, are all part of the life of austerity that one’s public demands. In the end, the outsider’s surest way of proving his integrity is to be dead.” – Albert Louden, quoted in Raw Vision magazine.
Whether Louden is an “outsider” or not is a matter of debate, but visiting the Louden show at Callan Park Gallery today I felt I was certainly experiencing an art of internal necessity (to use Herbert Read’s term). I also had a great time talking to Peter Fay, gallery minder for the day and source of interesting insights into Louden and his art.
Peter sees Louden’s figurative couples as disconnected, and there’s a strong sense of this for me as well. Some of these couples seem to engage in a visual crossover – as though forming an “X” mark against the relationship depicted; a mark against its disconnection, its dysfunctional nature? Pure conjecture on my part of course, but there seems no Buberian I-Thou here.
And from this 2000 Observer article on his work: “Louden calls them his ‘internal landscapes’ and says he has no idea where they come from or what they mean. ‘I think they’re odd,’ he says, ‘but not depressing. I’ve destroyed sackfuls of them in the past because they came out vicious or nasty.’”
And these possibly complex and enigmatic relationships and dispositions that Louden depicts reside in flowing, colourful landscapes, often with an attention to horizons and expressive skies, helping the works’ strong dream associations.
I’m left with the sense of psychic dances or dramas unfolding.
Then there’s his abstracts (or are they all abstracts?), in which the characters seem to have become atomised into bubbling fields of psychic energies and “selflets”. They’re complex works – see the detail below from one of these tortuous meanderings.
There’s lots more on this man and his art on the web – and debates as to whether someone’s still an outsider when he’s been (after working for 20 years) suddenly embraced by the establishment (as happened to Louden upon his 1985 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery); and subsequently dropped by that same establishment. But Louden evidently works the same way he always has – making works in quite humble conditions, and leaving them untitled and undated, driven more by internal concerns than those of the market.
Tagged as:
Albert Louden,
Art,
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders
The first show at the new Callan Park Gallery is José dos Santos. SCA has an informative article on this interesting artist who called himself “the greatest sculptor of Portugal”.
Thanks to Peter Fay, local collector and curator, almost all of dos Santos’ surviving work has been relocated to Sydney, and is now held by the University of Sydney. The show at Callan Park is just some of this collection – carefully restored and exhibited in simple, white rooms of which I’m sure dos Santos would have approved. He evidently lived a simple life, being able neither to read nor write (nor sleep, in old age) – in a small-holding in the village of Arega, Portugal (1904 – 1996).
A devout Christian, he was said to have received the stigmata, and the richness of the Roman Catholicism of Portugal comes through in these works. There’s an earthy magical mystery about this faith (one that certainly impressed itself upon me in my travels in Northern Portugal in the 1980s) and in these works there’s sexuality which isn’t really just that – it’s Eros, the generative principle, embodied and earthy and living within the faith. Many of the pieces have both male and female genitals – under the flowing layers of clothing (that actually came from the inhabitants of Arega) designed to avoid embarrassing the local women.
In the store room are lots of other interesting works deemed not yet ready or not appropriate for display [update, 10 Apr 09: Colin Rhodes says in his comment below that this is not the case - thanks Colin], and below are a couple of these – energetic little demons and part human/animals, rocking away out there, emanating from a personal creative world completely isolated from the contemporary trends of European modernism.
(It’s interesting to me that dos Santos wanted to be remembered as a fadista, a singer of the fado, the plaintive, semitic sound of Portugal, rather than as a sculptor.)
As John McDonald said about dos Santos, in his review of last year’s show Without Borders: Outsider Art In An Antipodean Context at the Campbelltown Arts Centre:
Yet for a truly eye-catching exhibitor it is hard to go past Jose Dos Santos, a Portuguese peasant who claimed that God had told him how to release forms hidden in hunks of wood. Whatever God said seems to have been a huge turn-on, because dos Santos’s sculptures are as hyper-sexualised as any African fertility fetish. He was divinely inspired when it came to finding a place for that last piece of timber.
Finally here’s a magnificent hermaphrodite – proudly holding centre stage in the gallery. Her/his breasts are definitely a central subject of interest for the artist – as they are in several others of the works (in fact, clothing is at times cut to reveal and draw attention to breasts). Dos Santos was said to hold women in high regard, in distinct contrast to his view of men.
And here’s a great article by Hugh Adams one of the “discovers” of dos Santos, about the man himself, about outsider art and about art collecting in general.
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Callan Park Gallery,
Jose dos Santos,
Outsiders
Great news! There’s a new gallery, the Callan Park Gallery, at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) – the first Sydney gallery (as far as I know) specialising in outsider and self-taught art. It’s the showcase for SCA’s new Self-Taught and Outsider Art Research Collection (STOARC), led by Colin Rhodes, Dean of SCA and author of several books on outsider art (including Spontaneous Alternatives, a book I love and return to often).
The first show is the rich work of Jose dos Santos (on which I’ll post very soon). Last Saturday was the very first at this new gallery (the dos Santos show opened the previous Thursday), and here’s the entrance to the Gallery, on that day.
This is of course a significant location for outsider art – the Callan Park Mental Hospital was here from 1885 until 1996, when SCA took over the Kirkbride complex (of which this new gallery is a part). The buildings, of locally-quarried sandstone with slate tiled roofs, have been beautifully restored, and Callan Park promises to be an important place for outsiders.
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Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders
