december 2013 – issue 06

Outsider Art, reinventing the world

ISSN 2038-5501

Scientific directorEva di Stefano

Managing directorValentina Di Miceli

Scientific committeeDomenico Amoroso, Francesca Corrao, Eva di Stefano,

Enzo Fiammetta, Marina Giordano, Vincenzo Guarrasi,

Teresa Maranzano, Lucienne Peiry

Scientific collaborationRoberta Trapani

EditorSarah Di Benedetto

TranslationsAll the articles have been translated by Denis Gailor,

except 'Borderline Stories' section by Francesca Giusti

Graphic design and layoutLuca Lo Coco

december 2013 – issue 06

Outsider Art, reinventing the world

Rivista dell’Osservatorio Outsider Artsix-monthly publicationAuthorization of the Court of Palermo n. 25 of the 6/10/2010ISSN 2038-5501

© Glifo Edizioni di Glifo s.r.l.s.via Beato Angelico 5390145 Palermo (Italy)www.glifo.com – info@glifo.com

Glifo Edizioni in Palermo is the new publisher of the Outsider Art Observatory magazine of

the University of Palermo. The O.O.A. n.6 (October 2013) has been

published on paper in Italian and translated in English for the first time!

index

Memories

A Lagoon Galaxy.Donato Zangrossi’s House of Pinwheels

by Giada Carraro 20

Explorations

A Pavement Museum and its Custodian.A Meeting with the Artist Fausto Delle Chiaie

by Naida Samonà 28Urban Expressions of the Unconsciousness. Camelot and Gaetano Chiarenza

by Pier Paolo Zampieri 38Francesco Giombarresi’s Possible Machines

by Marco Mezzatesta 52

Editorial

by Eva di Stefano 12

OUTSIDER ART REINVENTING THE WORLD

O.O.A. MAGAZINESUPPORTERS

SUBSCRIPTION

If you want to support, also financially, our publishing activity you can buy the Outsider Art "supporters" subscription (150 euros) on our website Glifo.com:

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Borderline Stories

An Artist’s Home: Junkerhaus in Lemgo

by Jürgen Scheffler 100Art and Magic in the Visionsof Austin Osman Spare

by Marco Coppolino 110Edward James a Dream Weaver

by Giulia Ingarao 122

In-depth Studies

Queer Art and Gender Transformationsin the Works of Psychiatric Patients

by Thomas Röske 78For a Portrait of the Artist as a Fawn.Autism and Creativity

by Marco Carapezza and Valentina Cuccio 90

Focus

From Naïve Art to Art Brut. The Italian Story

by Laurent Danchin 66

Informative Reports

Contributors

180Photograph Credits

182

Report

The ‘Collection de l’Art Brut’: Tradition and Innovation. Interview with Sarah Lombardi

curated by Teresa Maranzano 136Preview:a Tribute to the Birdman Gustav Mesmer

by Lucienne Peiry 142An Alternative Guide to the Universe. Reflections of an Artist Visiting the Hayward Gallery

by Andrea Cusumano 148At the 55th Venice Biennial.A Visit to the Encyclopaedic Palace.

by Giada Carraro 156Borderline: an Art Itinerary between Normalcy and Madness

by Enrica Bruno 164The Work Saved: the Moschini House-Museum at Tuscania

by Pavel Konečný 172

by Pier Paolo Zampieri

Art as social electroshock – Story of a mu-ral that brings down old walls revealing an unexpected artistic vocation – A studio in the former mental hospital in Messina and a painter of salvific bed sheets as ‘territorial sensors’ of a disfigured urban context

I was not born in Messina. The first time I

heard of the (former) “Mandalari” psychi-atric hospital was due to the Puppet Thea-tre. I was helping Venerando Gargano, the last puppeteer in the city, to record a cunto (story) in which he went over the centenni-al curriculum of his family and, among the mysteries of the origin, the splendours of the ‘50s, the darkness of the ‘80s, and the struggles in subsequent years, I learned that Rosario, his father, precisely in the pe-riod of greatest indifference of the city to-wards its glorious paladins, did workshops “ai pacci du Mandalari”. Thus went the verse.1

1 “For the mad of Mandalari”. Gargano Family Archive.

Mandalari

Urban Expressionsof the Unconsciousness.Camelotand Gaetano Chiarenza

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of the Camelot Day Centre Language Arts Project, of the North Messina Mental Health Departmental Module, directed and animated by Dr. Matteo Allone.5 For the second time cultural objects rejected by the community, but by no means resigned to oblivion, knocked at the doors of what in the collective imagination is still a place of suppression and exclusion, little matter if it is for health purpos-es. The datum, journalistically appetizing, hides symbolic and territorial values that are by no means secondary. There is always a subtle relationship between cultural artefacts, the territory in which they are produced, and the policies that manage their circulation and hence, in a broad sense, their public existence. But there is a simpler explanation for this coincidence, and it lies in the ‘artistic’ approach that the Camelot centre espoused for so-called ‘therapy’, although it would be more correct to speak of a relationship.

5 Much of the information contained in the article was provided directly by Dr. Allone. I thank him for his helpfulness during the two lengthy interviews to which I submitted him. For more extensive information on the centre see www.asp.messina.it/dsm/camelot/camelot.asp.

If it seems crazy that a culture2 should abandon to itself a powerful cultural/popu-lar object like the Puppet Theatre, and indifferently witness its near-extinction, to me it seemed absolutely incredible to imagine that the last puppeteer left in the city was really to teach in a (former) psychiatric hospital. There was something too strong in that image. A true connotative concentration: Sicily, Messina, Puppets, silence, the mad, dreams, the shout of the last puppeteer, the mental hospital, art, struggle, indifference. From a narrative point of view it was just too good to be true. More a parable than a story. The last wooden paladins overwhelmed by the locomotive of progress, collected and cared for by the children of those who were imprisoned there precisely in the name of the great Enlightenment cogito.3

The second time I heard of the (former) Mandalari psychiatric hospital was when I ended up there. On this occasion too the input came from a puppeteer, though one of ingiuria and not of trade. We were looking for a public space to house the sixty surviving works of Giovanni Cammarata4 and, after a daunting peregrination between offices and public institutions, a teacher from the Ernes-to Basile art school advised us to try “at Camelot”. Seeing our astonished face he added, with the smile of someone who has often seen that expression, “the Mandalari”. And it was at the Lorenzo Mandalari that I saw the works of Gaetano Chiarenza and had the opportunity to observe close up the reality

2 I speak of “culture” and not of community because the risk of extinction that affected the Puppet Theatre involved the whole of Sicily and not only the city of Messina (Pasqualino 1977).

3 For an analysis on the relationship between the emergence of madness as a disease and the rise of Enlightenment thought cf. Foucault (1961).

4 These are sculptural works that were in the house-museum of the Sicilian outsider artist Giovanni Cammarata (di Stefano 2008, Mina 2011, Zampieri 2012), the remains of which, like the façade, can still be seen in Via Maregrosso in Messina.

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Broadening the wide angle lens, the entire Giostra neighbourhood, where Man-dalari stands, is a strange modernist dystopia composed of a stream cemented over, futuristic junctions and a long strip of cheap housing designed without any environmental and social sensitivity (fig. 1). Sealing this urban illiteracy there are also large areas of those that in the everyday lexicon are called ‘shacks’, which together account for the urbanistic/symbolic scars left by the big earth-quake of 1908 and the true place in which to intervene politically to allow the city to have a harmonious development. If one wants to read that territory in psychoanalytic terms, one could say that the vast area of repression, ultimately, is precisely the repressed memory of the great urban trauma suffered by the city of Messina. Its unconscious and, even more, its subsequent urban delirium. If it is difficult to imagine a ‘better’ place for a mental hospital, it is easy to im-agine the enormous symbolic power of the elements present and the hidden or invisible ones. “We have seen the invisible”, Allone says not surprisingly, “seeing the visible is all too easy. The task of art is to give form to the invisible”.

Merging the theories of Jung (1912) on the unconscious and even more those of Hillman (1979) in a Dostoevskian horizon that sees in beauty the salvation of the world, art, at Camelot, from being a ‘simple’ medium of expression for the unresolved problems of the soul, has become the very principle of transforma-tion of the real. It is having planted this simple idea in the ‘Dantean Inferno’ of a psychiatric hospital that gave birth to the, in some ways exciting, experience of Camelot: using the energies and the archetypal grammar of the unconscious in order to transform ‘reality’. This operation takes on even greater symbolic value when you consider that the ‘real’ was a dilapidated enormous public structure located in a suburban area of the city, cemented without any criteria of good urban sense (see p. 39).6

6 It should be noted that the position of the pre-hill area should instead allow use of the powerful panorama of the Straits of Messina.The real problem is that there is no relationship between the urban grammar used and the environment.

Fig. 1

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the eyes of dolphins, the cracks turn into clouds, the old grey planks become alienating horizontal canvases and waste materials are transformed into paths and gardens.7 As in a move in judo, all limits, malfunctions, the inadequacy of the buildings, become extraordinary resources. Given the context, speaking of paradise is probably excessive, but in a short time there is no longer any trace of that hell in which the first people that felt like prisoners were probably the doctors themselves. Feeling like protagonists of the metamorphosis from horror to beauty is perceived by everyone as a true year zero, even more than the change brought by the Basaglia law which was its irreplaceable cultural-politi-cal background. That image represented a kind of collective call to arms and set in motion unconscious and never expressed energies. Art, seen as a medium, far from the straitjackets of the usual circuits,8 literally became social electroshock that allowed the unleashing of relational dynamics which had become frozen. As in the script of a very bad American movie, the effect produced by a simple picture turned out to be superior to ‘scientific’ treatments and obscure bureau-cratic regulations. Obviously, the key was not a simple image, but collective participation in the creation of an other space mediated by an intrinsically symbolic language. In the language of Foucault the total institution opened up to heterotopia. In that of Jung the ‘whole’ of the psyche found the key with which the ego can reorganize its various dissociated elements in a unified way. From there to contemplating a workshop and extending the scope of the visual arts to theatre, music and later hippotherapy was only a matter of time, and not even the incredible dismantling of that formidable space decided by the bosses of Mandalari arrested the process. Camelot, building on its ‘method’, like the phoenix rapidly rose again in another shed nearby, and since 1997 has been active there. The result of this process was that the famous ‘opening’ to the ter-ritory, which every former psychiatric hospital invokes as a mantra, has become bidirectional. Not only people can go out of it, but thanks to that powerful magnet of beauty, the Camelot Day Centre becomes a place that manages to

7 Curiously Dal Lago (2008) in his cartography about art outside art, sets Outsider art alongside Street Art (and votive art).

8 For an overview of the relationships between art and territory cf. Detheridge (2012).

In this context, the narrative provided by Dr. Matteo Allone, in charge of Camelot, has the implications of fable. There is an opportunity, we wanted to repaint the dining hall, there is a case, an auxiliary says: why not make a big mu-ral painting? And, as soon as the idea is accepted, and the image of the harvest is selected with its powerful symbolism of death and rebirth (figure below), this vision radiates to all members of the staff first, and afterwards to the patients, to radically transform the whole ‘atmosphere’ of the place. That powerful image becomes the place of “social negotiation”, which defrosts the resignation of staff and autistic chronicity in some patients. Expressing an opinion on the colour of the grain, handing over a brush or even picking it up and making a mark on the wall, which will be commented on by others, triggers off a relational dynamic unthinkable until just a few days before. The walls, which were a symbol of clo-sure and separation to the outside, through the power of open art regain that heterotopic dimension which is always the latent pole of every place (Foucault 1966, Augé 1992). Those walls suddenly become the sensitive and manipulable diaphragm placed between patient, physician and administration (and city).

The mural painting having been finished (in 1992) and the effects generated being seen, the entire centre is affected by this method and there is no longer a single object that is not radically transformed. The holes in the walls become

4746explorat ions

ing at a textbook case: diagnosed as suffering from severe and disorganized schizophrenia and a patient for many years, he had never been in contact with art, before that famous year zero. Infected by this new spirit, he immediately reveals a remarkable aptitude first for drawing, and then for sculpture, and finally painting. The solemn figures imprinted on those symbolic paintings are transpositions of ‘normal’ people encountered by Chiarenza in town and perceived as ancient warriors or primitive men. In addition to these archetypal joints perhaps of struggle, which however “had not lived long”,10 there stand out the figures with a religious and mythological background. The huge bed sheet/canvas of Nep-tune flanked by strange sirens (Scylla and Cha-rybdis?) with two legs in which the sexes recall wounds is almost an ideological manifesto (fig. 3).

10 Much of the information on Chiarenza was provided by the artist Stello Quartarone. I thank him for his helpfulness and for the materials provided.

attract many cultural initiatives and productions, financial support (the Bonino Pulejo Foundation, the Province of Messina), and at least two powerful artistic ideas rejected by the city but well rooted in the urban unconscious: the Puppets of the Gargano family and the works of Giovanni Cammarata.9

This is the context in which there are set the works of Gaetano Chiarenza (Messina, 1943-2011). Without that atmosphere I do not believe Gaetano Chiarenza could ever have transformed the sheets of his bed into a powerful painting of Christ with more compassionate than imploring eyes (fig. 2). Chiarenza’s works appear as imposing figures immersed in a strong chromatic world, without compromises. He is practically an unwitting ‘Fauvist’. The use of hospital linen as large canvases adds a very strong symbolic element to his prolific artistic production. With Gaetano Chiarenza we are once again look-

9 Cammarata’s works did not go to Camelot because in those days of negotiation, thanks to a mention by Sergio Todesco, a former superintendent of the Messina Cultural Heritage, Bianca Cordovani, an art teacher at the Dante Alighieri school, together with other colleagues expressed the desire to acquire the works temporarily for educational purposes. Since September 2013 Cammarata has been studied in an art school in his city.

Fig. 2 Fig. 3

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There is the artist’s geographical location in a mythological key, there are clearly visible sexual organs stripped of all eroticism, and the feeling of greeting with which the three figures seem to welcome us fits in perfectly with the position of the panel placed right at the entrance to Camelot. It is impossible not to see an analogy with the monumental fountain of Neptune by Montorsoli, located right at the entrance to the (for-mer) port heart of Messina. Also remarkable is Chiarenza’s sculptural production, which, albeit slightly, genealogically precedes his painting work. The obsessive use of corners and straight lines in the first human figures drawn on paper (figure to the side) lead the artist Stello Quartarone to orient him to-wards sculpture, a perfect place

to express this geometrical attitude or obsession. Without the subsequent ‘chromatic distraction’ of the paintings, Chiarenza’s sculptures are imposing for a certain solemnity. There are busts and full figures that are solemn, enigmatic, totemic. Apparently pre-Columbian sculpture on tuff created many problems of ‘responsibility’ for the directors of Camelot, since putting a hammer in the hand of a patient of a (former) psychiatric hospital was not something in line with the protocols of the time. A rare case among Camelot patients, Chiarenza’s produc-tion was continual and very prolific. He worked every day and, mainly due to the sale of many works, acquired some awareness of his art. Despite a certain evolution of the sign, which also incorporates softer elements, he never aban-doned the imprinting of the first drawings.

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All Chiarenza’s canvases come into being drawn on bed sheets and are later painted, but always within the dimension of horizontality.11 The metamorphosis into paintings only occurs when the work is finished. Despite never having done a solo exhibition, he participated in more than one group exhibition, and his art did not escape the notice of the Messina critic Lucio Barbera, who, involved in a reflection on the entire Camelot production, emphasized the dimension of the “extreme loneliness” of those “flat shapes glued on the background, individuals in a colour bath, destinies immersed in the broth of life”.12 If it is really difficult, as in all outsider artists, to separate the works from the existential condition that generated them, it is perhaps very interesting to add an insider perspective to this reading, inserting them radically in their territorial context, seen in its broadest sense (Magnaghi 2000). Not infrequently, in this perspective, these artefacts open up to the condition of “acute territorial sen-sors” (and social ones), to use the words of Bianca Tosatti (Mina 2011). If, in this view, it is almost ridiculous to use the rigid straitjacket of the ‘scientific’ instrument of cause-and-effect, certainly at a symbolic and analogic level one can have some very interesting indications. The famous Watts Towers by Sam Rodia seen as a monumental instance in a suburb of Los Angeles in constant reconstruction (Dal Lago 2008), the social scream of continuity and symbolic landscape of Giovanni Cammarata (di Stefano 2008, Zampieri 2012) or the intrinsic fragility of the big crib by Andreoli (Mina, 2011), located in the Cinque Terre, which acts almost as a warning to that delicate ecosystem, all go in this direction of social listening to the territory even before ‘simple’ reading. The recent debate in the city on the actual location of the tomb of Antonello da Messina following the recent findings at the church of Santa Maria del Gesù Superiore, located right in the Giostra neighbourhood, no more than eighty me-tres from Camelot, seems to go in a similar direction. It is not important to look

11 For an acute analysis of the different register of meaning between the “sign” placed, and read, on the vertical axis and on the horizontal axis cf. Benjamin (2012). Ultimately, the German philosopher argues that the longitudinal section is primarily a function of representation while the transversal one “is symbolic: it contains the signs”, p. 94.

12 Critical note by L. Barbera in Tra Noi, a volume published thanks to the Regional Province of Messina after the exhibition with the same title.

for amazing causal links between the two phenomena, one of which, moreover, is doubtful, but inviting a mad urban policy of a rational and functionalist kind to intervene only after listening to the enormous complexity of its territory, with its large latent resources and archetypal stratifications, and relate to them, truly seems to be the minimum. The soul of the city, like that of people, often lies precisely in what cannot be seen

Bibliographic noteAugé M. (1992), Non-Lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité; Italian translation (1993), Nonluoghi. Introduzione ad una Antropologia della surmodernità, Milan, Elèuthera.Benjamin W. (2012), Aura e choc, Turin, Einaudi.Dal Lago A., Giordano S. (2008), Fuori cornice, Turin, Einaudi.di Stefano E. (2008), Irregolari. Art brut e Outsider Art in Sicilia, Palermo, Kalós.Detheridge A. (2012), Scultori della speranza, Turin, Einaudi.Dubuffet J. (1986), Asphyxiante culture; Italian translation (2006), Asfissiante cultura, Milan, Abscondita srl.Foucault M. (1972), Histoire de la folie à l’age classique; Italian translation (2000), Storia della follia,Milan, Rizzoli. Foucault M. (1966), Les Mots et les choses; Italian translation (1998), Le parole e le cose, Milan, Rizzoli.Hillman J. (1979), The Dream and the Underword, Italian translation (1984), Il Sogno e il mondo Infero, Milan, Ed. di Comunità. Magnaghi A. (2000), Il progetto locale, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri.Mina G. (2011), Costruttori di Babele, Milan, Elèuthera.Natoli L.F. (2009), Arte contemporanea a Messina (1980-1997), Messina, Intilla Editore.Jung C. (1912), Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido; Italian translation (1965), La libido: Simboli e trasfor-mazioni, Turin, Boringhieri.Pasqualino A. [1977], (2008), L’opera dei Pupi, Palermo, Sellerio.Various Authors (1995), Linguaggio Arte, Edizioni Arci, Messina.Zampieri P.P. (2012), La questione Cammarata, l’Outsider art e l’antropologia urbana. Un caso di “mente locale”. In “Rivista dell’Osservatorio Outsider Art”, issue 4, March 2012.

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