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Review Oct 22 2009 « | »
The Museum of Everything A look at outsider art champion The Museum of Everything, which launched with the opening of last week's Frieze......

Sonia Zhuravlyova

The Museum of Everything, tucked away in London's Primrose Hill, is a bit of misnomer, albeit a highly intriguing one. The museum doesn't display everything, of course, not even a bit of everything, but what it does show, and for the first time exclusively, is outsider art. Road workers, nuns and asylum inmates are the artists and their creations sit firmly outside the boundaries of official culture. Some 200 works have been selected by 'recognised' artists, such as Ed Ruscha and Jarvis Cocker, who tell us via typewritten message boards, what they mean to them.

Some of the works are by those living in psychiatric hospitals, who were encouraged to express themselves through art. The suspended felt statues of American Judith Scott, who had Down's syndrome and was also deaf and mute are absolutely peculiar, and somewhat unsettling, but are also wonderful - they are the outpourings of emotions and thoughts which probably had few other outlets. They resemble nothing in particular, perhaps a giant mushroom here or a running dog there, but they radiate a strong voice frustrated by disability.

One of my absolute favourites, who has cropped up over the years at various exhibitions, is Josef Karl Rädler, who painted painstakingly delicate watercolour birds and men. His family committed him to a Viennese asylum in 1983 for his unpredictable mood swings, which were evidently much subdued by his contact with paint and brush.

Not all artworks come from a dark or troubled place. Some exhibited artists are those who worked when they could, snatching hours in between day and night jobs. Nek Chand was a road worker in Chandigarh, north India. By day, he would collect shards of plates, bowls, bottle tops and other debris, only to incorporate them into his secret life-size sculptures of people and animals. These simple statues look like they have risen from the earth, using the city's debris as their skin. Although his body of work has now been recognised as one of India's treasures, Chand came from humble beginnings and his statues retain simplicity and unfussiness and are obviously a labour of love.

There are a lot of peculiar things here, of course, which are hard to look at and to digest. But most of the artists, who have not been confined by market pressures, patrons' wishes or the lure of mass production, are neither primitive nor unrefined and deserve recognition. It's good that it's not come too late for at least some of them.

The Museum of Everything will remain open all day every day throughout October. From November onwards we will be open from lunchtime to dinnertime, Thursday to Sunday. For more information see their website.

Josie Breese

The Museum of Everything was hard to miss last weekend. An energetic and attention-grabbing publicity campaign was pursued, particularly targeting Frieze-goers. An informative nun dressed head-to-toe in a white habit at the fair's entrance distributed flyers, directions, shuttle rides to the Museum and indicated a path of arrows through the park for those that preferred to walk. The quirky flyer hinted at the imagination of the show while maintaining the ambiguous allure of The Museum of Everything's canny marketing.

These clever tactics drew curious viewers out of Frieze, where they were rewarded with a liberating antithesis to the fair. Organised by James Brett with a number of enterprising and enthusiastic individuals, The Museum of Everything presents an unique collection of outsider art and unsung artists.

The curatorial thread prioritises eccentric creativity and imaginative expression. So it follows that the exhibiting artists are a motley crew. Their biographies present an eclectic line-up, ranging from a Prussian governess inspired by an imaginary affair with Kaiser Wilhelm II, a Haitian house painter and voodoo priest alighted upon by André Breton for his work with chicken feathers, furniture enamel and his own fingers, to an obsessive Dutch artist who constrained himself in leather coats to protect himself from his own urges.

Media and approach varies from room to room in the winding network of converted recording studios in the Museum. Naïve and folk art reappears throughout with bold forms and clashing colours, alongside Christian revelatory images from the Deep South, slogans and text. A mildly disturbing and thought provoking current accompanies these effusive scenes.

A gloomily lit internal room is solely devoted to long frieze-like scenes. These transporting watercolours and pencil drawings of young girls seamlessly merge innocence with a lurking uncertainty or menace. Scale, place and gravity are forgotten in Darger's surreal world. Similarly challenging are examples from Morton Bartlett's family of dolls, which he started making in secret from 1936. A young girl freezes in a pose with a hip thrust forward and eyes cast down, awkward in its prematurity.

Well-established collaborators including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jarvis Cocker and Grayson Perry have been selected to contribute comments on their favourite works. The unusual dynamic between exhibiting artists and commentators is in especially engaging in the subjectivity of written responses. Pretentious blurb and academic waffle is largely foregone for frank musings and brief essays.

The Museum of Everything raises compelling questions of validation. These coincide with unavoidable implications for contemporary art and its exhibition, heightened by the symbolic presence of Frieze just down the road. The Museum poses an intriguing contrast, addressing the conditions of artistic obscurity and celebrity on its own terms.

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