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Outsiders in Music
22.
June - 28. July 2012
Opening:
Friday, 22.06., 6 – 10pm
Mingering
Mike, Daniel Johnston, Wesley Willis, André Robillard,
Bruno
Schleinstein, Oswald Tschirtner, August Walla, Howard Finster and
others
The
fascination with Outsider Art in music has become increasingly
visible in recent years and punctuates pop history with a long list
of quotes and cross-references. For many musicians Outsider Art and
Art Brut - terms that refer to art by prisoners, loners, the
mentally ill and other marginalized people, made without thought to
imitation or presentation - embodies
the recurring desire for radical authenticity, renegation
and otherness. Bands
are called Art Brut
in an coquetry with Jean Dubuffet's term for the raw aesthetics of
the self-taught beyond academia and dogma coined 1945. Or they name
themselves Vivian
Girls in a
wink-of-an-eye homage to Henry Darger's bittersweet watercolour waifs
from his 15.000-page magnum opus "In the Realms of the Unreal,"
discovered posthumously in 1973. Prinzhorn
Dance School pay
tribute with their band name to a German psychiatrist, who in the
early 20s imploded the boundaries between psychiatry and the arts
with his groundbreaking publication "The Artistry of the
Mentally Ill." Examples range from the names of bands to song
lyrics, from the album cover design to the video clip aesthetics.
The
exhibition "Recordings Rejected" at Galerie Susanne Zander
sets off here in search of further parallels and stumbles across
surprising revelations: renowned Art Brut artists who have always
made music, Outsider musicians who devote themselves to the visual
arts and Outsiders on the verge between music, installation and
conceptual art.
In
this context, the gallery show will feature artworks by two seminal
figures of the American underground music scene: Daniel Johnston and
Wesley Willis (1963 - 2003), the latter for the first time in
Germany. The exhibition will also present the weird and wonderful
album covers from Mingering Mike's imaginary superstar discography,
here in a limited archival print edition. Other featured artists are
Bruno Schleinstein, forever immortalized by Werner Herzog as Kasper
Hauser, and André Robillard with his fascinating arsenal of
home-made rainbow-coloured guns (both were passionate accordion
players), "Reverend" Howard Finster, whose work branded for
years several iconographic Talking
Heads' album covers
and Gugging artist Oswald Tschirtner, to whom the Einstürzende
Neubauten dedicated
their 1983 album "Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T."
Galerie
Susanne Zander will feature Daniel Johnston in a one-man show in the
Fall 2012 / Spring 2013.
"Rejected
Recordings" is curated by Monika Koencke.
The exhibition will be open until midnight on Saturday, 23. June on occasion of the c/o pop.
Galerie Susanne Zander
Antwerpener Str. 1
50670 Cologne
