While in Graduate School, my downstairs neighbor came up to my apartment one afternoon and knocked softly on my door...I barely heard the tapping, but I went to the door to make sure I hadn't just heard noises...viewing through the peephole I saw a demure woman holding papers in her hand...I opened the door and said, "hello, can I help you?" She said she had heard I was an Artist and wanted me to take a look at her work...it was the most obsessive and controlled work I had ever seen. They were incredibly intricate, tight, with small shapes drawn over and over and over and over...I found out later she had just been released from a mental hospital...
The work of Adolf Wolfli feels like those obsessive drawings of my neighbor, but with a darker bent and with a more sophisticated handling of symbols and form. The thing that separates the art of the insane from the insane artist is an awareness of visual language...His managing of the space goes beyond the uncontrollable, repetitive mark making of the compulsive...they way he constructs the space and shows depth and central figures, his placement of the symbols and their arrangement is pattern like and decorative, yet there is something sinister and off about the imagery and faces...the dark circles under their eyes...not smiling, but not frowning...they are bandits who have stolen Adolf's free will...tormenting him and forcing him to do the unspeakable...his crimes are documented and not pretty...I won't discuss them here, but they are easy enough to find...His art lives on and on and on...
No comments:
Post a Comment