Sunday, March 01, 2015

System and Vision. David Zwirner Gallery

   After viewing the Joyce Pensato show (and please do not ask me what I thought of it) I walked over to one of the many David Zwirner galleries that are popping up all over the place like fleas on a mangy dog and had a nice walking nap through the deliciously dull paintings by Suzan Frecon, and like a certain Alice I found myself falling through a hole to the 2nd gallery where I awoke to find myself in a madhouse.
              This house of the mad is the marvelous and dense group show called "System and Vision" and consists of 100's of pieces by an assortment of wild woolly and cuckoo "artists" who are now generally referred to as outsider artists. I call them self taught wonders. This is a grab your hankie eye opening extravaganza of the odd and odder and this stuff not only woke me up with a bang but also put a big smile on my face.
        Lets see there were 12 artists included with one who was completely anonymous and was known as "Type 42"  because of the polaroid film stock he used to take 100's of closeup portraits of actresses off the t.v. screen  in the 1960's. Also great were the "dirty" drawings by William Crawford whose archive of several hundred of these sexually explicit pencil drawings were found in an abandoned house in Ca. Raunchy was never more wonderful.
              There were also the 40 years worth of Polaroids by Hans Ademeit who documented those deadly cold rays that fell on himself and the environment with his minuscule writing on the white borders of the photos. If these don't make you gasp nothing will. There were also beautiful disturbing  color drawings by Prophet Royal Robertson who combined biblical Prophecies (a favorite among the outsiders) along with science fiction and futurism.
           Also great were the scrapbook pages kept by a dentist Francesco Ponte who lived n San Juan and who in the 1920's documented seances he conducted by pasting strange photographs he took on black paper along with his elegant writing in white ink, and the very sophisticated obsessive and crazy Harald Bender (he was convinced that he carried a female uterus inside of him) who colored thousands of his  photocopied drawings that mixed geometric shapes, color fields and diagrams, into superb works of unsettling and amzaing art that filled 100's of folders. This whole show is unsettling, brilliant and memorable with most of the work borrowed from the collections of the Delmes & Zander Gallery in Germany. I loved this show.















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