What outsiders can teach us about creativity

Liz Else, associate editor

Naked Family, 1997, by Sakiko Kono (Image: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters)

When it comes to art and science, there are many ways to be an outsider. There are the fully trained but disaffected, there are the licensed jesters who play at dissent, and then there are those expelled from the academy for bad behaviour.

But perhaps more interesting are two other outsider groups: the self-taught who generally work outside established channels or institutions but who may exhibit or write papers challenging the mainstream; and the wholly untrained, who work only for themselves and do not seek an audience.

Two London exhibitions are set to deal with these latter groups. Upcoming in a few weeks is The Alternative Guide to the Universe at the Hayward Gallery, which will feature a mix of everyone from fringe physicists to the inventors of new languages, and from artists who map cities of the future to others who design imaginary technologies. Its organisers describe it as ?bracingly eccentric? and as a kind of a parallel universe where ?ingenuity and inventiveness trump common sense and received wisdom?.

But right now and until the end of June is Souzou: Outsider art from Japan, at the Wellcome Collection - one of the most amazing, moving and shocking shows you could hope to see.

Souzou brings together 300 works by 46 artists, all of whom live in or attend social welfare institutions across Japan?s main island of Honshu - and all of whom have neurodevelopmental disorders (some involving very poor communication skills) or mental illnesses.

The show is organised into six overlapping sections: Language, Making, Representation, Relationships, Culture and Possibility. These labels underscore both the artists? marginalisation and their triumph over their ?disabilities?.

Aside from the sections, there is little in the way of hand-holding: Wellcome wants its visitors to experience the art with as little mediation as possible, and maybe ask themselves difficult questions. What is the nature of art - especially when it flows so copiously from people considered by society to be damaged? Is it really art at all - or just therapy? Does their ?art? tell us anything new about the complex cognitive processes of creativity?

There are no easy answers. The show is organised with the Het Dolhuys, the museum of psychiatry in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and the Social Welfare Organisation Aiseikai, based in Tokyo, Japan, so we are already in a world of multiple meanings.

For example, souzou, the show?s title, has no translation in English but has a dual meaning in Japanese: "creation" or "imagination", with both alluding to a force by which new ideas are born and take shape in the world.

The subtitle, however - "outsider art" - can connect us to the art brut ideas of 20th-century artist Jean Dubuffet, who was interested in art produced by people in the old asylums, or to other Western notions of naive, untutored art by ?normal? people, sometimes only discovered after their death.

In Japan, the kind of institutions where the Souzou artists live and work are all about training people to improve their chances of finding employment and a place in society. They owe much to artist Kazuo Yagi, who insisted on his students? right to self-expression, arguing that they should be allowed to produce non-functional objects of their choosing whenever they pleased, without being trained or directed to do so.

Eventually this policy of non-intervention in the creative process became a model for other social welfare institutions throughout Japan. Until recently, work created in the institutions was rarely displayed.

Surprisingly, then, some of the work at the Wellcome Collection could easily sit in mainstream exhibitions. Take Marie Suzuki?s very accomplished pen drawings, which deal, darkly, with sex, gender and procreation. Any of the shockingly titled pieces (Unwanted Release, Don?t Move Without Asking, It?s All Your Fault) could give Tracey Emin a run for her money.

What are we to make of this sophistication? How did she gain such mastery? We learn little of Suzuki beyond the stark caption, "Marie Suzuki. Born 1979. Lives and works in Nagano Prefecture."

Then there is the even younger artist Shoichi Koga, whose work Londoners may already have seen advertising the show. With just papier m?ch?-like techniques, he has created amazing, globally appealing fantasy people and animals.

And Norimitsu Kokubo?s wall-long citiscapes with their 360-degree panoramas are imaginary but very real places, with amazingly detailed technical and cultural references (maglev trains, for instance) that show how open the artist is to the world.

There is great vitality and diversity in Souzou, ranging from wonderful embroideries and textiles (such as Takahiro Shimoda?s Fried Chicken Pyjamas) to spiky sea urchins and a whole miniature army of action figures created out of wire twist ties by Shota Katsube.

There is also great tragedy and poignancy: it would take a heart of stone not to be moved by Sakiko Kono?s near-life-size fabric dolls, which represent friends and carers in the facility where she has lived for 55 years, and whose size is determined by how kind they were to her.

For those who want more a structured approach, Wellcome will be running an event with psychiatrist David O?Flynn in June to explore the idea of art as therapy and other themes. Or you could just go along and have a think about the nature of art and creativity - and ponder why you probably couldn?t produce anything half as good.

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Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2ac5abd2/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cculturelab0C20A130C0A40Coutsider0Ejapan0Eart0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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