Reclaimed Memory at Rogue Buddha through July 27th and
Dots and Loops at Midway Contemporary Art through August 2nd
Outsider art, a concept derived from Jean Dubuffet’s 1948 coinage Art Brut, is the work of artists who live in extreme mental states. Dubuffet thought these states of consciousness placed the artists beyond the reach of official culture. The term emerged in the middle of the last century, (although some of the most famous outsider work comes from before that time). The Art Brut movement was a response to anxiety about the assimilation of Dada by the art establishment, a desperate search for an outside or margin. Today the term "outsider art" is often applied to the work of self-taught and naïve artists. Dots and Loops, at Midway Contemporary Art through August 2nd, is an outsider artist show in the sense of Art Brut’s dedication to outsiders. At another show at northeast’s Rogue Buddha Gallery, Yuri Arajs – who has done much to promote the cause of the other outsider art in Minneapolis – has an exhibition of new work, his farewell to the Minneapolis art world.
Arajs’ Clever Show
There is a fundamental trick to Arajs’ Reclaimed Memory. The works – comprised of found photographs that are cropped, treated, and re-framed into evocative scrapbook pages – lure us in with junk-shop mystery, then invite us to experience our own assumptions as discovery. In short, Arajs evokes nostalgia.
Lately, Arajs’ work has circled around organized systems: numberings, language, and repetition. The old photographs at the center of these latest works have such a strong odor of nostalgia that they overpower the rest of Arajs’ familiar motifs. The artist’s modifications become mere clues to the lost worlds of the photographs. It makes for an interesting treasure hunt for the scrapbook sleuth, but as bricoleur, Arajs does little to challenge the viewers’ longing for authority as detective/inventors of the past. To unseat us might contribute dissonance to the music at the center of this exhibition, and what sets Rogue Buddha Gallery apart this month is its ability to transport us into a lyrical mindset. You can almost smell the old books, snow, attic dust, teak and cedar.
Interact Center Artists at Midway Contemporary Art
Midway Contemporary Art is currently dedicating its galleries to disabled artists from Minnesota’s Interact Center. The show, Dots and Loops, would attract curiosity even if it weren’t so intellectually engaging and artistically evocative. Just as Arajs’ current exhibition may coax the unwary into indulging mythologies of the past, these artists often point to our own uneasy relationship to the totems of the present – media saturated icons that have become so prevalent as to structure the unconscious idiomatically. Part of the wonder of such a show is that it invites expansive and open-ended interpretation of the work. With that in mind, I will highlight a few of the fifteen artists on display to suggest some of the works’ capacity for meaning without closing off interpretation.
Take for instance the work of Matthew Zimdars. His drawings derive from the weather maps that have saturated our collective minds. The lurid colors in his Severe Weather series suggest the state of constant emergency that permeates the Bush decade. And yet, abstracted from their functionality, the maps radiate warmth, attaining the totemic quality of religious portraits. The maps are whisperings from an angel, or documents of divine wrath, but even wrath is consideration, and if nothing else, we rely on the interactive weather map to place the viewer reliably at its center.
Zimdars’ work suggests the magical quality of the ordinary world – fantasy geographies of the ordinary that scroll by with menace and importance. Zimdars infuses the banal with magical significance. Meanwhile, in the same gallery, Peder Hagen’s work describes a fantasy kingdom with the unflinching eyes of a census taker. His striking portraits and maps from the mythical land of Cressia thoroughly embroider a dream of a utopian culture. His fantasy is unerringly detailed, supported with maps and ledgers until the totality of his dream – its reality – is unmistakable.
When viewing outsider art, it’s easy to indulge the idea that the art is more sincere, more real and less adulterated. The nihilism of a PBR-swilling art college grad seems like lifestyle art, more so when compared to the cockeyed satire in the work of a painter such as Paul Jagolino. Jagolino’s minuet-in-the-round with the ladies of popular culture strikes a chord at once hopeful and insouciant, expressing an ambivalent relationship to the flickering images of supermodels and film stars. In each portrait, the celebrity sitter is painted coarsely, and each one confesses her love for the painter, a love that is, in its way, reciprocated by the portrait itself.
Among the most intriguing artists here is Donovan Durham. His work ranges widely – from unusually populated, flattened scenes such as Scenes of Spooks, painted in acrylic, to fascinating line drawings, including a series of portraits of a class of ’64. The former, with their bright childish color schemes, flat perspective and fanciful subject matter, might lead the viewer to the dismiss Durham himself as a case of arrested development, a man with the ideas and concerns of a child.
But his pencil drawings invite a subversive reading. The portraits seem almost like transliterations from yearbook pages, but the headshots are distorted with a fisheye focus on the lips and nose. The sitters are transformed into half human African-Americans, their noses stretched until they are like armored carapaces across the front of their faces. They might appear like racist caricatures, (Durham himself is black), yet Durham’s portraits are also infused with an unmistakable dignity and honor. Another portrait, with the words "Happy Birthday" written across the top, may refer to the sitter, a curly haired woman, or it may refer to an inscription above her head which reads "The War." The work has stayed in my mind as much as any other I’ve seen this month.
If it seems naïve to praise the work
of an outsider artist show in the same terms as that of more conventionally abled artists, momentarily push aside your expectations of art and disability, and recall that disability refers to that narrow set of skills required for work and its related communications in modern society. It has little to do with the various acts of condensation and expression through which an individual’s vision becomes visible through a work of art. The current show at Midway Contemporary Art is a gift of perceptual grace. Brave and lovely, its views through irregular lenses have that power so rare in modern art to transport the viewer to an alternate present. The show should not be missed.
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