Subject: Shamanic Art in the Village Voice
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http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0318/saltz.php


Primal Time

by Jerry Saltz


It is said that through some sort of mystic cabalistic jujitsu, when all 666
names of God are spoken, the world will end. Over the millennia, artists,
writers, philosophers, and musicians have revealed some of these names.
Certainly, the mighty Swiss "outsider artist" Adolf Wšlfli enunciated a
handful of them in his fulminating, mandala-like illuminations, drawings,
and collages-105 of which are on view in the American Folk Art Museum's
enthralling survey, "St. Adolf-Giant-Creation: The Art of Adolf Wšlfli."
These powerhouses of energy are as magical as they are aesthetic.
Two-dimensional passageways for metaphysical travel, they are visual magic
carpets capable of transporting viewers to varied psychic dimensions. The
best of them are ecstatic shamanic devices. Perhaps sensing this, surrealist
potentate AndrŽ Breton grouped Wšlfli with Picasso and Gurdjieff as among
the era's most inspirational figures, pronouncing him "one of the three or
four most important artists of the 20th century." As with most things
Breton, the claims are overblown. But not by much. And springing Wšlfli from
the outsider ghetto was prescient.
Still, no doubt about it, Wšlfli was deranged. Born in 1864 in Bern, he was
abandoned by his alcoholic father at five. Three years later, his mother
died and Adolf became a hireling. In 1882, in a heartbreaking incident that
"haunted him for the rest of his life" (according to Elka Spoerri, the late,
great Wšlfli scholar who co-curated this show), 18-year-old Adolf fell in
love with a farm girl whose parents forbade her ever to see him for "social
reasons." In his autobiography, he lamented, "I became downcast, even
melancholy, and was at my wit's end. That same evening I rolled in the snow
and wept for the happiness so cruelly snatched from me . . . my heart had
suffered too much." Then he unraveled.

In 1890, Wšlfli was convicted of attempting to molest a seven-year-old girl
and sentenced to two years in prison. Five years later, he was arrested
before he could molest a three-year-old girl, and was sent to an asylum in
Bern, where, diagnosed as a schizophrenic, he spent the remainder of his
life, dying there in 1930. The decisive moment in Wšlfli's artistic life
occurred in 1899, when, after four years of "extreme agitation," he started
drawing.

He never stopped. By the time he died, he had produced a massively
fantastical body of work consisting of 25,000 pages of richly illustrated
text, 1,620 graphite and colored-pencil drawings (many of himself and his
lost love), and 1,640 collages. All were preserved by his extraordinary
doctor and biographer, Walter Morgenthaler. Stacked in a pile, this Blakean,
biblical ur-work towers 10 feet high.

Wšlfli's masterpiece is divided into five books. Every page is carefully
numbered; drawings are folded, tipped in, and can be as large as
four-by-four feet. The narrative brims with cataclysm, pandemonium, and
redemption (not unlike Henry Darger's "Vivian Girls" epic). The first book
is titled From the Cradle to the Grave, and is Wšlfli's imaginary, grandiose
autobiography. Many of his basic forms and motifs are already in place:
masked faces, bells, birds, buildings, snakes, snails, and musical notation;
curlicues, cross-hatching, dots, and spirals. In the next volume, Geographic
and Algebraic Books, he takes off into the realm of myth, recounting his
travels through the universe, and his own transmutation into what he dubbed
the St. Adolf-Giant-Creation. In this book, Wšlfli calculates his vast
accumulating wealth in cascading columns of numbers. He then celebrates his
almighty status in drawings, songs, polkas, and marches in the next three
books, including the 16-part, 8,404-page Funeral March.

Wšlfli is often compared to Darger. But Wšlfli is a more dogged and abstract
artist than Darger. He's more primal, less pictorial, less winsome. Early
on, Morgenthaler noted the horror vacui, or fear of open space, in Wšlfli's
work. Indeed, there are no panoramas or large-scale figures in his art.
There's also almost no space, light, or graspable narrative-only undulating,
churning surfaces, which are often so jam-packed they can be difficult to
look at. Everything is stylized, divided, and small; images oscillate and
seem unstable. Yet in many of these drawings, everything whirls together in
a rapturous, madly lyrical visual fever dream.

Wšlfli has long been a favorite of the art world. Starting in 1921, he's had
museum retrospectives in Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, and
the U.S., and is often referred to as "one of the greatest outsider
artists." If forced to judge him by this designation, I'd place Wšlfli
behind only Martin Ramirez and Bill Traylor, and just ahead of Darger. But
it's time to get rid of this term, along with whatever labels we use to keep
certain artists in their place. Regardless of his mental condition, Wšlfli's
art is universal. By now, almost everyone would agree that the work of Agnes
Martin or Donald Judd is no more "inside" than Wšlfli's or Darger's. In
fact, painting grids or making boxes for a lifetime is as out-there as
drawing the cosmos.