Alternative Museum Tours Russia for Talent

Alternative Museum Tours Russia for Talent

Published: August 29, 2012 (Issue # 1724)


FOR SPT

The itinerant Museum of Everything showcases work by artists without formal training, including disabled people.

The Museum of Everything, which toured St. Petersburg earlier this month selecting and exhibiting local artists at an impromptu exhibit space on New Holland island, moved to the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow’s Gorky Park on Saturday.

At the heart of the Museum of Everything is the concept of a museum of creativity, as opposed to a fine art museum. The museum does not have a permanent venue; instead, exhibits are held in a diverse variety of locations.

The project tours the world extensively, and is constantly on the lookout for new talent, seeking contributions from people without a professional training in art. A number of the artists whose works are exhibited by the museum come from marginalized groups of society.

In July and August, the Museum of Everything toured St. Petersburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg, where museum founder and director James Brett joined art experts to select works by local artists to be exhibited in those cities for the duration of the museum’s tour there.

In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times, Brett said he had been overwhelmed by the Russian tour. He found the local art distinctly Russian, revealing the country’s Orthodox connection, its social conflicts and its landscapes.

“Only about 5 to 10 percent of the works may have appeared in a different country,” he said.

The idea for the Russian tour was born out of a conversation with Darya Zhukova, founder of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, on a recent visit to London.

“In my mind we were on a train from Moscow to Vladivostok stopping in every village, but I was a little too ambitious, so it took its current shape,” Brett recounts.

“People were coming and bringing their works. From a young student just expressing themselves to an old lady who maybe has a hobby, artists would come and we would look.”

The most thrilling works selected during the Russian project will be included in a grand-scale international tour, and some of them will become part of the museum’s permanent collection in London.

Moscow is to see three displays, the first of which was held from August 23 to 26. The next two are due on Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, and from September 6 to 9. When the search for artists is complete, the Museum of Everything will announce the dates of the final show, also to be held at Garage.

The collection was founded in London in 2009, following an interesting encounter between James Brett and an elderly man called William Brett living on the Isle of Wight.

FOR SPT

A volunteer poses with creations submitted by local artists at New Holland.

By sheer coincidence, James Brett happened to read an article in a newspaper about an 85-year-old man who had created a museum inside his own home, and whose home was the school the octogenarian himself had attended when he was five. Inside this brick building with a high ceiling was everything from his life that he considered important, from his schoolbooks to old records and plastic bottles. James Brett went to the island and met the man.

“He showed me a fishing net, and asked me what it was. ‘It’s a fishing net,’ I replied,” Brett remembers. “And then he said, ‘but it is to catch rabbits at night.’ His home had become an installation, an artwork. And the local children loved it; and they called it a museum of everything.”

The two Bretts agreed that the younger of them would take the name to London, and that is how James Brett’s Museum of Everything was born.

Unlike any other arts institution, the museum does not have many regulations, and it constantly changes its form, adopting a new one to suit its new mood.

“The museum is a bit like a child, and it is in fact a child — it is only three years old,” said Brett.

The original idea was very simple. There was no institution in the U.K. that showed art by people who are non-professional or self-taught or who, for whatever reason, did not fit into mainstream art history. Brett was interested in just such material, and he happened to know a number of art curators in London, so the concept formed in his mind gradually.

“I was not interested in the museum being a stable idea, so we originally wanted to do a show,” Brett said. “There had been exhibitions of this sort of art in the formal museums, and usually they were not successful because a formally taught art historian would not understand this work, as it exists outside an art historical context. It is not a fine art.”

Russia’s solution to a similar dilemma was the creation of so-called naive art museums, yet the concept’s critics have compared the creation of a naive museum to that of a ghetto.

“Its name suggests that the artist who creates the work is somehow primitive, which is a bigoted idea,” said Brett. “The person who is least able to communicate can somehow express themselves fantastically, yet their means of communications may not include words.”

Giving Brett’s artists a correct name is a sensitive issue. Calling these exhibits a display of “outsider” art would not be without some ground for a professional critic, yet for the curators and the artists alike, it is nevertheless a rather tactless term.

Brett adheres to the philosophy that everyone is disabled in the sense that every human being has a different degree of ability. In other words, the disability concept could effectively work the other way around, with the word ability serving as a starting point for assessing someone’s capacities or resources.

“Because we have a narrow view of ability, we do not have a very narrow view of disability, and as a result these people are marginalized very quickly,” Brett said. “It is a mistake because actually, within the area that I am looking at, it can be very fruitful for them. People with autism can be astonishing if given the right job or profession. They can cope and perform extremely well, but they need to be given more time.”

FOR SPT

One of the artists who presented his work at the Museum of Everything during its visit to St. Petersburg this month.

The work of amateur artists is often regarded with prejudice, and it is this unjust attitude that the Museum of Everything strives to overcome. Professional training is not synonymous with talent, and the absence of an arts diploma may indicate a lack of certain training but has nothing to do with a lack of creativity.

Although Brett sets no goal of making his artists commercially successful, the museum does help them to get international recognition. In 2011 the museum presented a show by Judith Scott, a solo artist with Down Syndrome, who never spoke, had never heard, and did not even know she was making art. The curators took 60 of her works and exhibited them in an old building next to the Selfridges department store in London. The display occupied almost 1,000 square meters of space. Her works were shown on TV and became one of the most discussed art events of the season, and now they are part of another traveling show in Madrid that is later traveling to the New Museum in New York and then going to London.

“If you were to meet Judith Scott, were she alive, you would feel sorry for her because she had a severe disability,” Brett said. “But if you do not know any of that, and if you look at her work, you are amazed.”

The works exhibited by the Museum of Everything have mostly been created by artists who represent so-called socially vulnerable groups, and are the result of a creative process. And it is from this perspective that the curators would like them to be judged. The attitude that the museum requests from its audiences is not always easy to master, even for professional art critics.

When Brett put together a show of international artists with learning disabilities in Selfridges in London last fall, he talked to an art critic from a leading London daily newspaper.

“The reviewer is a smart guy, a prominent art critic, but when he visited the display he said: ‘This is not a museum, this is not art, this is painful,’” Brett recalls. “He was totally wrong. The art that we exhibited was not full of pain. It was done by people who were extremely happy to be making these works. So if even an educated man came with this bigotry, with this predetermined misunderstanding, I can see why society marginalizes these people.”

For the show in Selfridges, the curators used every single window of the store, and in each window they showed work by a different artist. The curators did not announce anywhere that the artists were disabled. Inside the store were 400 works by different artists, and the only way people could discover that they had a disability was from a film that showed them working in their studios.

“With the eyes of contemporary art we can understand different forms of beauty; we do not need a completely clearly organized pattern,” Brett said.

“It is true that people with some forms of, say, schizophrenia, are dangerous to themselves and other people, and they need to be protected, but it does not mean that you just push everybody into the sea,” Brett said. “I know from my experience that if you give art to somebody with a learning disability or a mental health issue, it will help. It is cheap and easy, and there will always be somebody nice who wants to do it. Trust me, there are so many really nice people out there.”

Those who missed the selection process in St. Petersburg but feel that their work could make a valuable contribution to the Museum of Everything can send photographs of their artwork to: ru@musevery.ru or cd@musevery.com.

Staff cannot guarantee to reply to all applicants, but James Brett makes sure that he personally looks at all art that is sent to the museum for consideration. Because of the extremely high volume, there may be a waiting period of up to one month before a file is viewed and assessed.

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