Placing themselves amongst the myriad of art-events surrounding the Frieze Art Fair, the Museum of Everything opened their doors to the general public on Wednesday last week. While Frieze is certainly all about being ‘in’, the Museum of Everything displays more than 200 works by those most commonly referred to as outsider-artists. Situated just a short ride from the Frieze, it offers a stark contrast with its intimate environment and consciously rough display (and free entrance). It can be hard to find an overarching unity in what exactly these artist were outside of – some of them were social outcasts or mentally ill, while others were just occupied with artforms outside the vernacular of the traditional art world. In any case, “outsider” is a polemicizing and maybe slightly inadequate term that the museum seems keen on avoiding in favor of concentrating on the creative power of these artists. Although it is only recently that artists like Henry Darger have been recognized by the big art institutions, these non-professed artists influence on the 20th century avant-garde and many artists today has been significant. Instead of offering supposedly objective labels of descriptions next to each work, the museum has invited a number of contemporary artists and cultural figures to give a personal account on how the works on display has inspired them. Although I find the placement of these text painfully low at first, I soon realize that it is a smart move in making you actually concentrate on the work instead of letting your eyes instantly glide to some external interpretation.

The building which is a former dairy/recording studio has been renovated in a way that partly respects that a lot of these works were never meant for an institutional display. A lot of the surfaces have been left bare and a there are both creeking corridors where you have to hunch to get past and shed-like dark spaces that invokes some of the privacy that surrounds these works. Although something like Emery Blagdon’s Healing Machines could easily be displayed as single sculptural elements one has to remember that, like a lot of the other works in the show, they had a specific and important purpose for their makers. Blagdon believed that the complex environment of wire sculptures and paintings that he created in his shed in Nebraska would through their electromagnetic resonance protect him from disease and pain. At some point he supposedly claimed that they had stopped working and died shortly after.

Walking through the show one can see that there is a creative necessity and an absence of doubt that does not consider the lack of material or skill as obstacles. There is a lot of frightfully tireless scribbling, collecting, calculating and repeating like Nek Chand’s rock garden or George Widener’s complex calenders of disasters. Every corner has to be filled. Every detail is equal to the sum (or maybe the sum is equal to the detail). There are signs warning us of life’s traps like the hand-painted banners of Rev Jesse Howard or George Liautaud’s short rhyme.  And there are re-created worlds, better worlds, where broken promises are fulfilled over and over like in Henry Darger’s epic ‘Realms of the Unreal‘ or Alexander P Lobanov’s photographic self portraits.

Nek Chand

Georges Liautaud

Alexander P Lobanov

Luckily the museum is open for more than just this hectic week. Although its future seems uncertain I’ve been told that they will keep running Thursday through Sunday until December.