Rozhovor s Henkom Van Es o jeho blogu OUTSIDER ENVIROMENTS zameranom na neobvyklé umelecké prejavy ľudí neškolených vo výtvarnom umení. Je o výtvarných aktivitách rôznych podivínov, nadšencov, bláznov, outsiderov z celého sveta.
Rozhovor som robil prostredníctvom mailu, je v angličtine.
1. To begin with, please introduce
little bit yourself and tell something more about your blog activities. When
did you start and what were the reasons? Are you in contact with similar
bloggers focused to outsider art/art-brut/naive-art etc.?
First I would like to say, that I am quite happy indeed you invited me
to talk about my weblog, because one of the reasons I started it is my
conviction that art environments should become better known.
And then a little bit about myself.
I was born in Amsterdam, studied political science and worked at the
town hall of Amsterdam in the fields of public health and social care. When I
became retired I had no idea that I would become so active in collecting and
disseminating information about this special field of art. But so it did happen
indeed and I must say, I am very satisfied with it.
It all started when on a
holiday in France in the late 1990’s I visited Picassiette’s mosaic decorated
house in Chartres and got so impressed that I began to search the internet for
comparable sites. At that time the internet had no social media, so I stored my
findings in a paper notebook.
In 2006 and 2007 the first Spanish and
French blogs about outsider art were published and In the course of 2008 I
thought I could just as well join these and share the information about art
environments I meanwhile had collected in a weblog. So on November 11, 2008 the
weblog Outsider Environments Europe was
published for the first time.
With regard to my contacts with other
people who are engaged in publishing about outsider art/art environments, I
would like to refer to Raija Kallioinen and Minna Haveri from Finland, as well
as Pavel Konečný from the Czech Republic who together with me form the
editorial board of the Facebook page Outsider
Art Environments Europe, a site that reports about developments in the
field of art environments. I also have good contacts with Sophie Lepetit from
France, who is very active in writing about outsider art and art environments
on her weblog Les grigris de Sophie (from
2006 on), like I also have good relations with Jo Farb Hernandez, editor of the
U.S website SPACES (from 2012 on), a site to which I contribute texts.
And then I would like to mention my internet friend Alexander Emelyanov
from Russia, who created a rather special art environment in and around his
house in Samara and who helps me in tracing art environments in the European
part of the Russian Federation.
2. Where did you find all of those amazing
artworks which you published on your blog?
When I started researching art environments in the late
1990's the internet had no social media, just websites. I traced a US website named Jane’s addictions (not operational anymore) where to my
surprise I found a list of some twenty of thirty art environments in France,
all described very briefly. But I had the names of the artists and began to
Google these. I also traced newspapers from the region where these art environments
were located. In this way I got the info about the creations which I penned in
my notebook.
I also read a french bulletin entitled Zon’art (1999-2008), which was published on the internet and had a
variety of articles about art brut, folk art, art “hors- normes” and art
environments.
When in 2008 I began my weblog, other french weblogs about
outsider art/art environments and medio like Facebook had started. These became
good sources to trace information about art environments and get into contact
with other lovers of outsider art/art environments.
3. How did you first
get in touch with outsider art?
That was after I had visited the house of Picassiette in
the late 1990’s. In the years before I was acquainted with modern art by
visiting the Municipal Museum in Amsterdam and I also knew about naive,
self-taught artists and people with disabilities making visual art, but it was
only when I started to explore developments in France that I came across a
range of concepts such as art brut, art singulier, art hors normes and their
Anglo-Saxon equivalent "outsider art"
4. Are you a
collector, or active artist, or both?
No, I am not collecting or creating outsider art myself.
5. Can you recommend
some museum/gallery/space with good outsider-art collection?
For me the most interesting museum that in its collection
combines interest in outsider art and in art environments is the French private
museum La Fabuloserie in Dicey, France. In addition to the extensive collection of
art "hors normes", there are a number of items from once existing art
environments, including the showpiece Pierre Avezard’s Merry-go-round.
Next comes the Lille
Art Museum, also in France, that in its department about outsider art also
present creations in the field of art brut and in the field of art
environments.
Other interesting museums and collections, focussing upon
art brut or outsider art as such, can be found in Lausanne (Collection d’Art Brut), Paris (Halle St Pierre), Heidelberg (Prinhorn Collection) and Amsterdam (Outsider Art Museum)
6. Can you recommend
some outsider artists who are special for you and tell why? Any forgotten
talents, hidden workshops, stray artworks?
In this respect I would first refer to Polina Rayko, an outsider artist from Ukraine,
to whom I already dedicated a review in a very early phase of my weblog. Apart
from these sweet memories in the context of my weblog, I am struck by the way
in which she overcame the problems she had encountered in her life by
touchingly painting all the walls of her house in Oleshky, near Kherson.
Another creator of an art environment who
is special to me is Alexander Emelyanov, from Samara, Russia, an outsider artist who
not only created a special, contemporary art environment, but who also helped
me discover other creators of art environments in Russia.
7. Is there
some specific gallery specialised on Outsider art /art-brut in Central/East
Europe? I read that there is gallery BAB (brut art gallery) in Budapest. Have
you ever been there?
Art galleries in general focus on self-contained
creations in the field of visual art, such as paintings and sculptures.
Creations in the field of art environments as such cannot be transported and so
these do not belong to their business, apart from maybe a single work
originating from a (for example no longer existing) site. So I am not very well
acquainted with the world of outsider art galleries.
However I know that the ABCD collection in Paris
since 2004 has a dependency in Prague, named abcd Prague. (ABCD stands for art
brut, connaissance & diffusion - art brut, knowledge & diffusion).
And indeed in Budapest there is the Budapest
Art Brut Gallery. I have never been there, but I
checked their website ( https://artbrut.hu/) and they have news about
a recent exposition, so they are active.
In Serbia, a number of art brut artists have
united in the Art Brut Serbia group,
which as far as I know cooperates with respect to sales and exhibitions with Gallery Aquarius in Kosovo, a gallery
that has grown into a cultural center.
8. If we
compare following terms: Outsider art:Art-Brut: Naive-art - what are the
differences, what are the similarities?
Naive art is a term that originated in the 19th century (especially in France)
and was used to designate painters without art education. Their way of
expressing was mostly realistic, but somewhat childish and often without any
use of perspective. These artists were also in some way related to the cultural
life in society.
This last factor does not apply to the art brut artists in the strict
description as introduced by Dubuffet after the Second World War to denote
those artists who were not related to
cultural life in society, such as psychiatric patients, but who
nevertheless expressed themselves creatively.
Over the years in France the term art brut has been used in a much broader
sense to indicate artists without academic training and a highly personal,
subjective way of expressing. In France variations on the designation art brut appear when terms are used such
as art singulier (singular art) and art hors normes (art out of the
ordinary) with subtle differences between these terms.
The term outsider
art in 1972 was introduced (in a book by British professor Roger Cardinal)
as the english equivalent for art brut
as used in France in the broad sense. The term has been widely used in England,
the USA and other english speaking countries. Currently in the USA it is
becoming replaced by the term non-mainstream
art.
In the title of my weblog I use the term outsider to denote someone without an
art education.
9. When you had to choose the 5 most interesting artists,
which would be the most interesting according to you?
In the field of art
environments I would include in the top five:
- Joseph Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924), Palais Idéal (France)
10. Can you
recommended some interesting publications, books about this kind of art?
A well illustrated book about both outsider art
and art environments is John Maizel, Raw Creation. Outsider Art and Beyond. London,
1996 -240 p.
Then there is Raw
Vision, an illustrated quarterly magazine that reports about developments
both in outsider art and art environments. This magazine also publishes the Outsider Art Sourcebook (latest edition
2016), kind of a guide to the world of outsider art.
In my blog I have a page with an annotated overview of the in my
opinion most interesting publications about art environments in Europe.
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Pictures/photos are taken from the Outisder Enviroments blog.
Thank you so much for your time and answers.
Mišo
