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Peculiar people doing art

Over the past couple of months, since I received a copy of the book "Insider Art," about artistic achievement in British prisons, I’ve been struck many times by the contrast between the values of two career systems: prisoners in prison and artists in the art world. If you’re a prison artist, you probably know the issues that engage the art world. You will not be an "innocent"; you will have been exposed to mainstream art, both the historical kind and the trendy kind, through art-education classes, the prison library, TV, and the Internet. However, these issues will not make up the center of your ambition. They will not define you or the way you present yourself. And they won’t define your art or what’s intense about it. Rather, what has happened to you, what you have done, and the peculiarity, compared with the rest of society, of your everyday existence will be the urgent focus of attention — your own, in making the art, and your audience’s, in appreciating it.

At the moment a lot of art is valued for the special subjectivity that the artist who made it is supposed to have and that the artwork is supposed to somehow magically embody. In reality, however racked certain officially sanctioned artists might affect to be, their output is not based on anguish or in fact on any kind of inner experience, joyful or whatever. Instead, these are rhetorical flourishes on the side of a building that has absolutely conventional foundations. Art world art must match art world expectations. For the special-personality artist, these expectations are that the work will be a pop version (easily readable without benefit of art education) of personal politics, with internal structures that come from a post-late-1960s Minimal/Conceptual academy. By "academy" I mean a set of conventions that is obeyed without question. If the artist does something different, a place might be found for him, as it is for Grayson Perry, the English potter who won the Turner Prize in 2003 and who freaks people out or delights them by being a transvestite. But that place will never be on the Louise Bourgeois level.

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As it happens, Perry wrote a very moving foreword for "Insider Art." He talks about the lack of self-control that gets people into prison and is sensitive and penetrating about the need to develop control to get anywhere with art, but he also recognizes the place of the unpredictable in work that has any originality. The writing style of Matthew Meadows, the book’s author, is different from Perry’s in that Meadows is not self-revealing. His sympathy and humanity come through but primarily he is concerned with making sense out of the complicated information he is dealing with. The book amounts to a rich sociology of prison art, and Meadows is informative about every level on which the players operate: their self-image and aims, both often touchingly uncertain, and the relationship they have to the intricate structures of the institutions they’re in. Their accounts to Meadows are extremely various, and he is great at instantly nailing what makes a comic strip created in prison by a graffiti artist, say, different from an incredibly detailed illustrative fantasy of the sinking of the "Titanic," which has obsessed another prisoner for years. The practical reality of prison art is full of stuff you might not have guessed. It’s interesting, for example, that art is done much more in prison cells than in prison education classes. And when that’s not the case, it tends to be because materials can be acquired more easily from the class than through the post, not because of a positive interest in education. Meadows himself is a prison art educator (as well as a successful artist). He writes about a strange, cruel, exotic-seeming world that is also sometimes a place of rare hope.

Disgusting or good?

When I was a teenager, I was in a couple of juvenile detention homes, and I learned the power of art to distract enemies. I impressed the skinheads with felt-pen and Rapidograph drawings that caused them to forget that they’d wanted to beat me up when I first walked in. So I’m always interested in any meeting of art and prison. There are cases of wrongful imprisonment, and there are exceptions to the rule, such as political prisoners, but prison by definition is for those who have stepped beyond the moral boundaries. When art comes into the picture, this morality becomes slippery. There’s something disgusting about the idea of someone collecting art by prisoners, wanting to stare at the evidence of ruined lives. But then it might be to help people who have fallen, for whom art is redemption, so there’s something elevating about the idea after all. There’s definitely something beyond the pale about the recently established market in the U.S. for serial-killer art and death-row art, known as murderabilia, which is frequently sold directly to collectors from the prison cell. On the other hand, there’s something disgusting too about the scenario now operating in the U.K. whereby sleazy journalists are able to make a career out of exposing prison artists. If an artist is outed as a pedophile, any public art institution showing his work will instantly withdraw it. But nothing like the same journalistic energy is expended on exposing murderer-artists.

The first bit of art in "Insider Art" that touched me is actually the illustration accompanying the first extended account in the book by a prisoner. Terence Lambert, a lifer convicted in 1999 at the age of 14, paints a scene of prisoners at work in the servery. Lambert breaks down the picture for Meadows, gradually opening up its levels of meaning, a rich story of the emotional states that the incarcerated get into — gleeful, gloating, cruel, or clamped down — played out in a context of unsatisfying, gruesome food for people whose hunger on a spiritual level is profound.

The pictures I found most striking, most sophisticated visually were by Sebastian Wilbur. He belongs to a particular category of prison artists: the psychiatric patient in a secure hospital, a classic outsider artist — outside, that is, the professional power structure of the art world. As with all the artists in the book, we’re not told what crime Wilbur committed, and we also don’t know what his psychiatric condition is supposed to be. His works are sexual and cubist, done with felt pens and ballpoint, and show a real understanding of the properties that are necessary to knit an image together effectively. The insistent, aggressive sexuality of his symbolism is depressing. But the space and its quality of constant surprise are great, reminiscent of the sweet cleverness of the U.S. painter Stuart Davis. Wilbur started drawing as part of therapy and then developed his work under supervision in art classes. Meadows writes that the first impression of Wilbur’s work is of isolation, and this is right; it is a function of his intricate graphic cubism, in which positive and negative appear to flip back and forth. He also has an excellent sense of design, placing and harmonizing different color intensities so that many separate figurative incidents appear to be contained in an overall pictorial unity. When the objects in his carved-up space are limbs ending in cartoon bloody stumps and ejaculating penises or other sexual parts apparently assembled from different bodies, the effect is a sort of buzzing, unpleasant excitement. Bizarre, weird, surreal stuff that in other contexts might appear merely the clichéd output of an unhinged mind is transformed, through a vision that is careful, abstract, and musical, into something deeper. I felt I was getting a sense of the mind’s layers that is universal and optimistic rather than banally personal and grim.

Philosopher needs to get out more

Prison art and mad art can seem interchangeable from the perspective of the official art world. In a way they are a release from it. Not from high standards that are difficult to match but from posturing that is impossible to take seriously — it is refreshing to encounter art that is authentic and naive, uncorrupted. Corruption implies morality, and the great appeal of this book is that it is confidently aesthetic rather than moral. I was reminded of its humble but at the same time sophisticated tone on a train journey the other day. I was returning from a weekend conference at which a lot of art world people had been giving talks, laying out their stands, trying to get attention, pretending to be philosophers. One of them actually was a philosopher, and he was now on this journey with me. He said one of his supervisor’s basic tenets was that Jacques-Louis David’s "The Death of Marat" is unsuccessful because its purpose is to encourage admiration of a bad man. I said it’s bizarre to be so literal about what a painting "encourages." The "Death of Marat" might be said to encourage a love of incredibly powerful visual relationships, between complex shapes and emptiness, for example, which might lead to a love of making sophisticated discriminations between success and failure. After all, many paintings don’t succeed in getting the relationships as well as David got them in this one. And distinguishing between success and failure must be part of ethics in addition to aesthetics — for example, being able to interpret the features of a situation so that you can tell if it’s false or true, dangerous or safe, as in judging if someone’s lying to you or not. The supervisor’s blindness and clumsiness was so shocking I found myself dazed and having to stumble for the right expression, the right counterargument to a mad error.

"Matthew Collings Diary: Insider Art" originally appeared in the February 2011 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2011 Table of Contents.