Saturday 11 May 2013

Book-keeping as Outsider art



The above pictures are from the exhibition Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan (at the Wellcome Institute until the end of June). Here’s Brian Sewell writing on the exhibition (my italics): ‘European Outsiders of 1900 and Japanese of 2000 share certain constants, of which the most notable is the obsessive repetition of the minute to make a work of larger, and even gigantic, scale. Everything begins with, as it were, a seed, but the seed does not germinate, flower and fruit, it only produces another seed, and another, and another.’

And here are some photos of pages in the ledger (I don’t do spreadsheets) in which I attempt to keep track of CB editions:



Outsider art is produced, Sewell notes, ‘by anyone who is, at one extreme, intelligent but mildly unhinged, and at the other, either entirely lacking an IQ or raving mad’.

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