The soft sandstone sides of the Shutes Lane Hollow Way have become a home for rural graffiti, much of which follows familiar formulae but the exceptions are intriguing. Interestingly there’s virtually no sex or politics to be seen. Names and initials are present in great numbers as are images of eyes (evil and all-seeing) and hearts, most of which are simple incisions. Many have been scratched in haste while some display an interest in more finished letter forms with serifs and downstrokes. A few have taken the time to record aphorisms and more enigmatic text elements. The images of human heads fall broadly into three categories - simple incisions, basic formal modelling and complex modelling with spatial recession. Examples of non-human heads are usually non-specific while reflecting the visual clichés of the horror genre. I have been told I missed the single example of an unambiguously female head but many are gender non-specific. Homer Simpson makes two appearances alongside Stewie from Family Guy but nobody else can easily be recognised. More than a few share the characteristics of Outsider Art and communicate a genuine sense of human despair with conviction on a sliding scale from expressions of mild despondency to an existential scream of desperation drawn from the inorganic depths. There are expressionless eyes that appear to stare back at us as if they’ve been witnesses to unimaginable terrors and mouths that exhale the odour of brimstone. Then there are those that promise more than they can deliver - hours of hard labour carving out an emblem of terror and ending up with something faintly comic. Happiest of all are the unambitious mark makers whose scratchy efforts have a light charm. Finally - a salute to the five-legged elephant.
One of many unusual exhibits in the Museum Dr. Guislain in Gent is a clothes rail full of vinyl raincoats, mostly in black or brown with a few in yellow, red, green and white. Underneath is a display of random clutter that gradually becomes discernible as an unfinished project of vehicle models assembled from waste materials. The coats are part of a lifetime’s collection, assembled by Willem Van Genk (1927-2005), a curious and reclusive artist who lived and worked in a small apartment in Den Haag for over 30 years. A visit to the Museum Dr. Guislain was described in this 2012 blogpost. The story goes that when Willem was a schoolboy during the last war, the Gestapo forced their way into the family home in search of his father who was active in the Resistance movement. This experience during which the Gestapo conducted themselves with all the sensitivity for which they were famous would haunt him for the rest of his life. Totalitarianism would often break the surface in his work. His exceptional talent for drawing was recognised in his youth and as an adult he would obsessively pursue his passion for making incredibly complex drawings, paintings and installations whilst leading a solitary existence, avoiding human contact as far as possible.
Many of Willem’s subjects were transport-themed cityscapes from across the globe. The travelling largely took place in his imagination assisted by a compendious library of reference books and magazines. He had a touching faith in the power of Soviet Communism to transform life for the better which explains why Eastern Bloc locations turn up so often in his work. A blizzard of ultra-fine, precisely drawn pen lines define his subjects, always alert to technical details, while plunging perspectives attract the eye. There’s a preference for expansive cityscapes observed from an elevated position. Architectural complexity, military parades, urban signage and popular culture all drew his attention. Many finished works are assemblages of smaller panels or vignettes, frequently cut and pasted from other projects – decorative borders enclose the panels, sometimes with medallion shapes inserted at points of intersection. Colour is usually applied in the form of washes and enhances the ominous atmosphere of impending doom. Somehow the darkest events of 20th. century Europe often filter their way into his paintings, intentionally or otherwise.
Willem’s passion for transport included airships and planes, trains above and below ground, military vehicles and traffic of all types but especially trams and trolleybuses. It was the tram and trolleybus that he chose to translate into three dimensions in the form of wondrous improvised models that resembled apocalypse survivors in their scorched and battered state. Bashed together from fragments of food and drink packaging, aerosols, bottles and cans, cartons and containers before being savagely beaten. There’s a repeated fascination with networks of rails, tracks and overhead power distribution that surge through his imagery, crackling with visual static. In a painting of Amsterdam Centraal station, trains seem to explode out of the station with such force that they threaten to achieve escape velocity. On city streets, trams and trolleybuses burst out of the picture plane, their forms distorted by electromotive force, with passengers in the grip of ecstatic frenzy.
There’s an interesting debate around Van Genk’s status as an Outsider Artist. Some say that because he had a dealer for many years and regularly exhibited and sold his work that this description no longer applies. Willem would have agreed – in his own estimation he was an important artist. He compared himself with Rauschenberg and complained about the relatively modest sums that his work commanded. To me, the more important question may be whether Roger Cardinal’s term has outlived its usefulness if it needs to be so narrowly circumscribed. The comparison with Rauschenberg is not without merit – they certainly shared a fascination with conveying the pace and exhilaration of modern life via multiple imagery.
To return to the collection of coats, Van Genk claimed that the act of wearing them in public gave him protection against the hostile forces he perceived around him and perhaps, in a similar way, his artworks were part of a defensive strategy to cope with the the mass of visual information that threatened to overwhelm him. It’s easy to imagine him, wearing a sinister vinyl coat, staring at an array of flickering monitors displaying montages of live-streaming from the world’s major cities, from Arnhem to Zagreb, from Wuppertal to Minsk and from Moscow to Madrid. With a flick of a switch, as one is deleted another is imported and a new mosaic of urban imagery is formed. In his mind’s eye, he sees circuit diagrams, metro maps and signalling diagrams as he inches forward to a place of total control. These photographs of his work were taken in Gent (Museum Dr. Guislain) and in Lille (Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne).
These are some impressions of a visit to the history of psychiatry collection held in the Museum Dr. Guislain in Gent. We venture into delicate territory here – a place where careless language and lazy thinking can easily give offence. Contemporary attitudes to mental illness seem to be conflicted between pious public expressions of sympathy for the victims of depression and a generalised complaint that the NHS is failing in its responsibilities to them and on the other hand, vociferous complaints that sufferers of schizophrenia are inadequately incarcerated and allowed to roam free to inflict terrible acts of random violence on members of the community. The use of emotive language (dysfunctional, abnormal, insane, delusional, deranged) and pejorative terms (nutjob, headcase, loony, mentalist, psycho) is hard to avoid. The museum is housed in part of one of Europe’s pioneering institutions in the humane treatment of mental illness in civilised surroundings, established in the second half of the 19th. century. Exhibits reflect the desperate measures resorted to by clinicians in their efforts to modify, control or inhibit aberrant human behaviour and shock-therapy treatments involving lengthy immersion in cold water and the administration of high-voltage electricity are thoughtfully displayed.
Alongside this is an art gallery with a selection of Outsider Art in two and three-dimensions created by self-taught, marginal individuals for whom the creative act became an essential survival skill. Colour and composition are deployed in a directly personal way with little regard for pictorial conventions often with sensational results in terms of formal repetition and disharmonious but vibrant colour choices. Reading these paintings as if they were case notes is not for me. I prefer to look and respond to them out of a clinical context as I would any other painting. That’s not to disregard the circumstances in which they were made but simply to avoid over-valuing them.
André Breton, Surrealism’s Holy Father, was an early cheerleader for autodidacts and the art of the insane which for him embodied absolute freedom from convention. In his writing he deplored the “blind and intolerable prejudice which has for so long surrounded works of art produced in asylums”. It was a short step for Breton, with his head full of convulsive beauty and the wonders of delirium, to consider madness as a state of exaltation and a short-cut to creative nirvana. Sadly, in 1927 when the young woman whose dazzling personality had inspired Breton’s book Nadja was committed to hospital suffering from paranoid hallucinations, the great man couldn’t find it in him to visit her. The sublime but inglorious story of Breton and Nadja’s diabolic dance through the streets of Paris is the stuff of great melodrama. A transgressive vortex of divided personalities and erotic obsession flavoured with bad faith, exploitation and betrayal all leading to the publication of a literary landmark. Coming soon to a screen near you.
The complex and dense paintings and constructions of Willem van Genk crackle with electromagnetic energy – a wild and intoxicating blend of grandiose architecture and explosive public transport networks. Supercharged linear grids barely contain the airships, helicopters and jumbo jets that drone overhead. Express trains scream through the sky on lofty viaducts. Trams and trolleybuses fight for road space in overpasses and tunnels, subway trains drill their way below the city streets, illuminated advertising defines the skyline. The photos below show van Genk’s disorderly, extemporary re-imagining of the bus station at Arnhem formed out of discarded packaging and paper refuse. Bruised and battered vehicles are entrapped in hopeless tangles of collapsed overhead wiring and uprooted poles – as if an experiment in matter transference has gone terribly wrong. The restless energy and magnitude of the modern metropolis got right under his skin and compelled him to find a visual equivalent. His achievement was to realise his vision with little more than an incisive line, cross-hatching and colour washes, over painting, cut and paste and collage.
