The Museum of Everything

What Disney animation, Kabuki performance art and styrofoam trays have in common.

The world of contemporary art, for all its global reach, is relatively small. A select group of collectors, critics, and curators define an equally select group of artists as “in,” and those same names repeatedly fill exhibitions and installations from Amsterdam to Venice. Not for nothing is the string of major art festivals called a circuit.

What’s left out, on the other hand, is a vast range of work that for the first time has a dedicated space in the UK. Just open this month, the Museum of Everything in northwest London calls itself a place “for artists and creators living outside our modern society.” And indeed, most of the names shown at the Museum will be unfamiliar to the art-world denizens currently in Regent Park for the annual Frieze Art Fair. (To our knowledge, this is the first such museum in Europe; however, the American Visionary Art Museum and other museums of so-called folk art have significant institutional legacies.)

Located in a former dairy factory in Primrose Hill, the Museum of Everything displays work typically called intuitive or outsider art. No one genre defines the collection, and “mixed media” is the descriptor that accompanies much of the work. What the artists do have in common, however, is that they are all self-taught and create work with singular and distinctive vision.

Sister Gertrude Morgan, 'God's Greatest Hits,' 1978

Sister Gertrude Morgan was a self-proclaimed missionary, poet, and musician whose self-portraits on paper, styrofoam trays, and window shades often depict her as a bride of Christ. A more widely known name, Henry Darger worked as a custodian in Chicago for more than fifty years while also creating elaborate drawings and paintings based on a fully formed fantasy world and narrative.

Henry Darger

One artist whose work we discovered thanks to the Museum is Kunizo Matsumoto. The Japanese-born Matsumoto fills notebook upon notebook with stories of the things he loves, among them Disney animations and Bunraku and Kabuki performance art. The densely covered pages seem to speak in shibboleths, scripts whose real meaning remain mysterious to all but the artist himself.

Kunizo Matsumoto

James Brett, the Museum of Everything’s founder, is a filmmaker who has collected these visionary works for years. In addition to his own selections, the Museum’s inaugural exhibition was curated by some very “inside” artists and cultural figures. David Byrne, critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, and artist Marcel Dzama are among the big names involved, ironically drawing the fringe inside the typically closed contemporary-art circuit.

Brett’s collection comprises artists’ complex inner worlds, replete with characters, codes, and customs we may not understand. We can, however, enjoy them, and be grateful that places such as the Museum of Everything have discovered this art and given it a place to call home.

Use the Museum’s list of artists as a jumping-off point from which to explore their worlds.

Kirstin Butler has a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter. For more of her thoughts, check out her videoblog.

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Art, Science, Food: Kevin Van Aelst

The sweet side of the Periodic Table, or what kitty litter has to do with your DNA.

Jackson Pollock’s near-fractal paintings notwithstanding, science and art have always had a tortured Cold War of a relationship. But photographer Kevin Van Aelst is on a mission to change this — his series of food photography presents scientific and mathematical concepts through creative images of donuts, crackers, gummy bears and other such wildly unscientific snackables.

Cantor Set

Chromosomes

The images aim to examine the distance between the ‘big picture’ and the ‘little things’ in life — the banalities of our daily lives, and the sublime notions of identity and existence.

Cellular Mitosis

The Golden Mean

We’re also quite taken with his fingerprint series — a visceral reminder of how the physical environments we construct reflect the intimate realities of our personas.

Right Index Finger

Right Middle Finger

While the depictions of information — such as an EKG, fingerprint, map or anatomical model — are unconventional, the truth and accuracy to the illustrations are just as valid as more traditional depictions. This work is about creating order where we expect to find randomness, and also hints that the minutiae all around us is capable of communicating much larger ideas.

Left Pinky Finger

Right Ring Finger

via SEED Magazine

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Smells Like Modern Art: Six Scents Series Two

What cognitive psychology has to do with experimental film and the smell of roses.

At their most compelling, the creative arts go deeper than the aesthetic brilliance of a beautiful painting or the auditory indulgence of a superb sonata. They explore the boundaries of our perception and the intersection of our senses, our emotions and our intellect. And we don’t normally think of fragrance or the olfactory world as a typical playground of such ambitious art. But experimental project Six Scents is working hard to challenge this assumption.

Six Scents explores the relationship between artist and nature through a collection of fragrances, stories, films, art and photography.

Every year, Six Scents invites six prominent artists to create a series of fragrances for six of the world’s greatest parfumers, with the goal of raising awareness for a chosen charity.

Series Two, this year’s edition, includes three experimental short films, each capturing the stories behind all six fragrances on multiple and very different levels.

Flashback by Marco Brambilla explores the notion of memory through a conceptual collage, creating a kinetic video canvas out of iconographic images in a play on human emotion and cognitive psychology.

Subliminal by Justin Edward John Smith and Alessandro Tinelli captures the emotion and character each fragrance embodies, and how these characters interact with their unique environments.

Contact by Azuma Makoto reflects on the creation of scents and the beauty of the moment through a slow, surreal journey into the materials — roses, dirt, leather, wood, soil, bone — used in making each fragrance.

This year, the effort benefits Pro Natura — an international nonprofit aiming to conserve biodiversity and mitigate climate change by combating poverty, an underlying social and economic trigger for these issues.

Explore Six Scents and immerse yourself in this eerie world of sensory cross-pollination and postmodern creativity.

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