April 15 to June 10, 2016
18 East 79 Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, (212) 734-6300

In Acquavella Galleries’ panoramic view of Jean Dubuffet’s mindscape we are in familiar territory, immersed in sand, oil emulsion, butterfly wings, tobacco leaves, tar and gold. Dubuffet used terms like “Anticultural” and “Art Brut” to characterize his vision, in homage to an underground world where the “sap is richer” and where art is dedicated to madness. Dubuffet believed children, the uneducated and the naive are able to immediately “hit the bull’s-eye” and arrive at something visionary in their art making.The detritus and random objects of urban streets represented a diminishing horizon, for him, between high and low art.  Aquavella’s knock-out exhibition of judiciously selected works from the 1940s through the early 1960s illuminates the philosophical roots of his pictorial language.

Dubuffet’s vision blossomed in the wake of the Second World War, times of despair, daring and survival. He was keenly aware of the changed philosophic climate had occurred after the Great War with its polarization between the classical tradition and what the Nazis would call “Degenerate Art.” With the advent of WWII the realization of the innate brutality and barbarism in the human psyche affirmed aspects of Freudian thought. Though Dubuffet spoke against the Western tradition with its penchant for classical harmony, order and rationalism, paradoxically he was well versed in European culture.

The Second World War brought out in him a fierce stance against the acquiescence of the French during the German occupation. Having been a puppeteer and mask maker, he later created paintings of gestural configurations of human frailty and vulnerability in a series of portraits. The protagonists of these paintings openly expose the raw emotions of the post-war period. These portraits are non-portraits in disdain of mimesis and verisimilitude. To him, they were “cooked and preserved in memory.”

Joë Bousquet in Bed (1947), a portrait of the elusive poet disabled in World War One, has the writer almost embalmed in black sheets scribbled with white cuneiform-like script. Dubuffet melds figure and ground into a singular unity, roping his protagonists within a shallow space. He eschews Western perspectival space, possibly as a remembrance of his journey to the Algerian Sahara in the late 1940s. It was a revelation for him to observe non-Western societies that are linked and inseparable from the earth.

In Will to Power 1946, he parodies the Nazi appropriation of the Nietzschean superman as a glob of flesh, hair, a dangling genital and teeth which could be a counterpart to the later de Kooning “Women” series [1952-53]. Dubuffet’s paintings Corps de Dame, Esplanade de Peau and Beautiful Woman with Heavy Breasts, (both 1950), portray flattened pieces of protoplasm, scratched and etched with markings for their orifices and dangling cylinders for arms. They are laid out for inspection as a source of the early beginnings of life immersed in the oil and gravel of the ground. In 1954, in a similar mode to his women, Dubuffet depicted cows splayed in a grassy field. He said that he felt no hierarchies between humans, cows, earth, wind, and water, all of them belonging to the living universe. His world-view was a dismissal of all “Greekeries,” he stated.

In Façades d’immeubles, (1946), his personages begin to exit from their Parisian domiciles like small animals out of a cave. This painting links the end of the war with an “hommage” to the burial of his literary mentor, Max Jacob, who died in the internment camp of Drancy. The landscapes with and without personages of the later ‘40s and early ‘50s clearly reflect his North African odyssey and his observation of the way forms in the desert come in and out of focus as they merge with the surrounding space. In Our Old Land, (1951), a segment of earth tangled with crevices and vegetation takes a dominant position and becomes the prime protagonist, whereas in The Gallant Pursuit, (1953), two small creatures enact an amorous dialogue dwarfed by the enclosing land. The influence of Paul Klee is evident in these images, especially in the way Dubuffet integrates visual signs of the human , animal and vegetable spheres.

Dubuffet took a strong countercultural position by withdrawing from the ”call to order” and the return to old values of France during the two world war years. He was by no means a naïf or unrelated to the European cultural tradition though he championed the irrational, the instinctual and the “anticultural.” He had the French love of “matière” and was a consummate craftsman who mastered the art of preservation for his new materials. He had a vast knowledge of art history including the newly discovered cave paintings, ancient Egyptian and Sumerian art, Picasso and particularly Klee as well as his contemporaries Soutine, Bacon and Fautrier. His countercultural friends belonged to literary circles and Dubuffet had an interest in languages, having learned Arabic for his North African journey. He was also a musician and later became involved with Jazz.

His cerebral nature, however, affirmed the visceral reality of organic matter, and instinctual life. He thus intertwined a universe of ideas and physical substances. He considered his personages and “earthscapes” a fictive world of the mind. Consumer culture was not part of his pictorial vocabulary. Dubuffet came to maturity in a time torn asunder by two world wars and a growing knowledge of the non-Western world that gave him a different understanding than ours of comedy, tragedy and the ironic.

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Julie Webb and her two Boston terriers welcomed me at the entrance to the gallery. Just outside of Dallas, this 10,000 square foot cabinet of curiosities. which she founded in 1987 with her husband, Bruce (like her, an artist) greets you with a cast iron storefront, painted in red, yellow and blue. It is a magnet for collectors of Outsider art, including the likes of David Byrne and St. Vincent. The entrance is peppered with potted plants and the open doors give way to a visual treasure trove of vintage neon signs, fraternal banners, paintings, sculptures and folk objects.

The Webbs had just returned from the 2015 Outsider Art Fair in NY, so I had the benefit of watching Julie unpack some drawings that they had shown at the Fair.

She pulled out eight drawings by Reverend L.T. Thomas and spread them across the table for me to study. The Reverend used colored pencil and some ballpoint pen on spiral paper, ledger paper and scrap paper. His drawn figures are fashionably dressed in suit jackets that look like military dress coats with a dash of western flare – outlined in vivid colors with matching hats and shoes. In all the drawings, the faces have pursed lips, as if striking a pose. Each drawing bears the same title: “Clyde Barrow, Pretty Boy Floyd or Frederick Douglass.” With the exception of a rare Bonnie Parker drawing, these three men were the only characters in Rev. L.T. Thomas’s drawings. I mentioned to Julie that the figures look remarkably similar. Julie agreed: “they resemble the Reverend himself.” I could see how the oratory skill and righteous leadership of the fearless abolitionist Frederick Douglass would resonate with an African-American Baptist preacher like Thomas. But what about Pretty Boy Floyd and Clyde Barrow? One answer is a personal connection: Reverend Thomas claimed to have known Clyde Barrow. Reverend Thomas was born in Calvert, Texas in 1904, so he was in his twenties when Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde were all wreaking havoc during The Great Depression. Many people thought the outlaws represented the little guy, the poor folk versus the banks. Those stories were more fiction than fact, but one thing is certain: the outlaws were concerned with style. This style is evident in the Reverend’s drawings and in the care he took with his own dress even into his nineties. Julie describes the Reverend as a joy of a person, always stylish and smiling. When the Reverend was asked about his subject matter, he responded: “My mind just gives it to me and the old man upstairs gives it to my mind.”

In my conversations with the Webbs, it struck me that their relationship with their artists is often one of friendship before business. Bruce and Julie Webb visited Reverend Thomas in the nursing home for several years until his death in 1995. They purchased his drawings by paying for dental and medical care, and they bought suits and other stylish items for his wardrobe. In 1998, the Webbs donated fifty of his pieces to Collection de l´Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, the premier collection of Outsider Art.

In the gallery’s flat files I stumbled upon the small, whimsical labyrinths of Tom Burleson. Using colored pencil and marker on card stock or labels, Burleson creates interconnected worlds from edge to edge, like James Siena, with the bright palette and biomorphic shapes of Franz Ackermann. Burleson’s structures suggest a Rube Goldberg chain of events with machine-like parts that are playfully aware of a watchful eye. Burleson was born in 1914 in Waxahachie. He had a short career in minor-league baseball before entering the navy. After being honorably discharged for malaria-induced emotional instability, he continued work as a civilian for companies with military contracts, like Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in San Jose, California. At Lockheed, he arranged to be on the night shift, where his obsessive drawing gained momentum. Employed as a shipping inspector, his subject matter was probably influenced by the equipment surrounding him – interlocking machine parts and constructs that seem both playful and entrapping. In his retirement years, his reclusiveness grew more acute: he sent his wife out for art supplies so he wouldn’t have to leave the house. He died in 1997.

A third artist whose work captivated me at Webb Gallery stands in contradistinction to the previous two in terms of career trajectory. In contrast to Thomas and Burleson – who never self-identified as artists, did most of their work in the later years of their lives and achieved recognition posthumously – Esther Pearl Watson is a mid- career artist who has exhibited widely across the U.S. and internationally. She has published two graphic novels and teaches at the Art Center College of Design in California. Her acrylic paintings on wood immediately pull you into a narrative world: the imagery involves natural landscape, children, vehicles, façades, and a flying saucer, the latter usually appearing in foil or glitter. The small text written with paint on the top left or right tells the location or a small statement of context, for example: “Waiting until Payday” with the artist’s name and date painted underneath. The brushwork is childlike, but the humor is sophisticated. And there is clearly something odd happening in these scenes. Asking Julie about the subject matter, I learned that Esther’s work pulls from childhood journal entries: her father built flying saucers in their backyard obsessively. His goal was to sell the saucer to NASA or to Ross Perot. I was enthralled with this contemporary version of Noah’s ark and I wondered out loud to Julie about the ridicule Esther and her younger siblings may have suffered from the neighbors. “No, the other children were envious… she had a space ship in her yard!” And Julie should know, because she grew up near the Watson family. I asked Julie how she discovered Watson’s paintings. She was a fan of Esther’s hand-drawn comics on the back page of Bust Magazine for many years. In the late ‘90s, Julie and Bruce received a package from Esther and her husband Mark: it was “full of stickers, postcards, multiple cool zines, and the sweetest handwritten fan note to us about the gallery.” In 2005, Julie received an invitation to Esther’s painting exhibition in Los Angeles – and it was only at that moment that Julie realized the painter and the comic artist were the same Esther Pearl Watson. Immediately, Julie called Esther and included her in a group exhibition at the Webb Gallery in 2005. Since then, Esther has had several shows with the gallery. Additionally, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas just installed a large painting by Watson for their new atrium where it will remain on view until May 2016.

My visit to Webb Gallery was enchanting. The Webbs have a hunger for the overlooked artifact; they recognize the gem that languishes outside of fashion. Because music came up thematically throughout my conversation with Bruce and Julie, I couldn’t help but think of their role as producers. Like Rick Rubin bringing Johnny Cash to a whole new generation of music lovers, Bruce and Julie Webb bring the secret, the buried and the overlooked into the light and into our lives.

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Sunday November 15, 2015 at 7:15 PM, Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas
Wednesday November 18 at 5:15 PM, IFC Center

David Shapiro’s “Missing People,” which won Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival earlier this fall, shadows art gallery director Martina Batan in her twin missions better to grasp the past lives of two people now gone. One is Roy Ferdinand, an African-American man in pre-Katrina New Orleans – crime capital of America at the time of his death – who, at the urging and funding of a local art dealer, chronicled the culture of destruction around him. Martina has collected around 200 of his sometimes lurid drawings, keeping small pictures of them on hand to show to other people. The second missing person is her younger brother, Jeffery Batan, who in 1978 was violently killed, aged 14. His body was found in a yard near the family home in Queens, but murderer and motive remain unsolved.

The film opens with her description of this event, accompanied by news footage. Restless since that day, then a freshman at School of Visual Arts, Martina, now in mid-life, believes that something like closure is due, a resolution that will bring her some measure of rest. The accumulation of Ferdinand’s artwork, untutored illustration essentially, is an ongoing stopgap offering provisional or stand-in meanings, as if the depictions of murder and social decay by this artist, who often lived on the streets, could fill in her brother’s untold story. Martina visits Ferdinand’s sisters, Fay and Michele, in New Orleans, to learn more about him, which becomes a process of familial bonding.

Home in New York, Martina engages a private investigator to pursue the still-open case of her brother’s murder and surface what he can. This, too, is a form of progress, but its disclosures, ever more unexpected, throw her into new narratives that answer sets of questions she’d never know to ask. The speed and intrigue of the film move in a golden ratio, where a slow arch gathers momentum as it centers in on itself. Several points in the story could be a feasible ending, but as it continues, its psychological depth intensifies and keeps turning.

The documentary is about meaning-making as much as it is about Martina, in the film’s search for connection with her – finding her within a fog of her growing emotional vacancy – as she ties together what she can of her memories, her fears, and recent revelations about her brother’s life. Our contact with her is threaded through her contact with herself. Meaning is in moments suspended for the sake of continuation; continuation is sometimes halted for finding moments of reflexive meaning.

The film runs back and forth between clips of Martina’s present life and footage from decades past, the unfolding of who Roy Ferdinand was alongside the piecemeal construction of Jeffery’s life and death. This fluid structure is consistent in the way it keeps the viewer involved, on every level, as seemingly disparate elements of people’s lives, their interiors and exteriors, come in and out of view. Most remarkable is the balance the filmmaker maintains in documenting Martina’s ongoing struggles and snapping points. Ultimately, Shapiro respects the craft of non-fiction cinema as much as he does Martina Batan.

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October 24, 2014 to March 29, 2015
200 Eastern Parkway (at Washington)
Brooklyn, 718 638 5000

Visitors to “Judith Scott: Bound & Unbound,” currently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, are confronted early with one of the artist’s first masterpieces, Untitled (1988), a substantial, architectural sculpture that has been hung on the wall, as in relief. Twined and tied around several bundles of sticks is a vivid array of materials: woolen yarns, fabric strips and plastic tape in a dazzling range of colors, along with green gardening wire of different gauges. The thicker wire loops and swirls around the heart of the structure, while smaller, shaggy-headed knots of the thinner-gauged wire peek out from various crevices like diaphanous sea anemones. At nearly five feet tall, it is one of the larger works on view, and also one of the few to hang on the wall rather than rest supine on a platform. Whether this deliberate curatorial decision would have been met with approval or not by Scott (who died in 2005 at the age of 61) is anyone’s guess. Not only did she never speak a word about her work, she gave no titles to any of her more than 200 sculptures and left no instructions about her intent for their display. In fact, once Scott finished a sculpture, she seemed to have little interest in ever revisiting it. These thorny details, among others, must be grappled with when staging an exhibition of her complex and endlessly fascinating work.

“One of the biggest challenges to presenting the work of an artist whose voice was sharply circumscribed by her life experience is to avoid adding layers of interpretation that can calcify into a narrative fable,” writes Catherine Morris, a co-curator of the present exhibition in the thoughtful catalogue that accompanies the show. Nonetheless, it’s nearly impossible to discuss Scott’s work without a modicum of information about her biography. She and her twin sister Joyce were born in Cincinnati, in 1943. While Joyce was intellectually typical, Judith was born with Down Syndrome. Her parents institutionalized her by age seven, and she remained so for the next 35 years, until Joyce secured guardianship of her twin, and brought Judith to live with her family in northern California. It was around this time that Judith was finally diagnosed as being profoundly deaf, a condition that was likely caused by an acute bout of scarlet fever she’d suffered in early childhood, but which had somehow gone undetected for decades. Deafness also then accounted for Scott’s muteness. For most of her life, she’d been almost entirely cut off from the world.

In 1987, Joyce Scott enrolled her sister at the Creative Growth Art Center, a place of radical experiment for artists with developmental disabilities. Rather than using art as therapy, Creative Growth is structured as a communal art studio, where participants are given freedom to work at their own pace with whatever materials suited their interests, and with minimal instruction. Instead, they work alongside typical, working contemporary artists who provide guidance or practical assistance only as needed. It was there, about a year after her initial enrollment, that Scott discovered textile arts, and completed her first wrapped work, and thereafter she worked steadily and regularly, five days a week for the next 18 years, right up until her death (her final work, from 2005, remained unfinished and is included here).

Scott became adept at her distinctive technique of ardent binding as her work matured. She always began with a found object that acted as the anchor of the sculpture—a crutch, a baseball bat, and a tabletop fan all found their way into her work, for example—and most frequently Scott wrapped it so abundantly that the original form is rendered unrecognizable. Occasionally, as in Untitled (1993), she attached small accessories, such as beads or stones to the exterior, but more often these small tokens found their way inside the work, and the exact contents of each sculpture is usually unknown, imbuing them with a totemic quality.

She also had a sophisticated sense of color and formal control. Another work, also Untitled (1993) finds an unknown object (or objects) completely encased in woolen yarn in a surprising color combination of lavender and burnt sienna. The shape Scott has rendered is womblike, with a pregnant belly of orange-brown yarn tapering, at two ends, into slender and elegant lavender protrusions. The work is so unexpected, so gentle, and so pleasing that one must resist the urge to bend down and caress it. And in Untitled (2003) Scott incorporated a long, gauzy, white ribbon and green mesh into a piscine object swathed in rich cerulean and aquamarine yarn. The highlights of candy-apple red yarn sporadically interwoven into this marine combination pack a visual punch, and one can’t help but think of strange fish, moving through mysterious waters at the ocean floor.

Gerardo Mosquera was speaking about the problems of ethnocentrism when he coined “The Marco Polo Syndrome” in 1992 and, in an essay of the same name, wrote, “What is monstrous about this syndrome is that it perceives whatever is different as the carrier of life-threatening viruses rather than nutritional elements… It has brought a lot of death to culture.” To cast a wider net, the argument also makes a similar point for artists who are different physically or mentally, or who make their work far outside the confines of an established art scene. “Art Brut” and “Outsider Art” are terms that feel increasingly and painfully outmoded, yet somehow seem to persist in contemporary discussions. Morris and Matthew Higgs, the show’s co-curator, have made an assiduous effort in the exhibition to note Scott’s developmental disabilities without resorting to interpreting her work solely through its lens, the wall text in the show is blessedly spare, imparting essential facts but refusing to dwell on them. Instead, the focus is where it should be: on an artist whose laborious and unique process resulted in an output that demands protracted consideration, but which in turn yields both mystery and discovery. “Bound and Unbound” dignifies Scott’s work, and finally invites the artist into the art-historical conversation, not as a marginalized “other,” but as a peer.

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