Back to the Garden

John Haber
in New York City

Cecilia Vicuña and Nellie Mae Rowe

Anna Zemánková and Veronika Pausova

Cecilia Vicuña spent much of her adult life in exile. She was twenty-five in 1973, when a military coup brought Augusto Pinochet to power and seventeen years of his brutal regime. Even so, she has found a home at the Guggenheim—so much so that she renames its bays along the museum ramp for her paintings. Who can resist the promise of Bays of Language, Truth, and Lies?

Vicuña knows lies when she sees them, and an artist is hardly above lying as a creative act. As she puts it in a title, the only truth is Ver Dad, to give sight. Still, she has got to get herself back to the garden. She even sees in the museum's spiral a sense of organic growth and a foretaste of her art. No wonder that so much of her painting has the labored innocence of folk art. This may not be outsider art, but it is still the art of a political outsider.

Nellie Mae Rowe called her largest and most spectacular work Playhouse, but had she found a place to play, or was she putting on a show? Surely both, but the show was not for everyone, and she was not just playing around. Those driving by, on the remote outskirts of Atlanta, might have expected a yard sale, but not this. Rags and empty bottles filled the shelves of the plain two-room house, Rowe's house. Toys, plastic fruit, and Christmas decorations hung from the trees. Her equally strange and better known works on paper might have sprung to life, in retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum.

What, then, makes an artist an outsider, even in a gallery, a museum, or an art fair? Anna Zemánková has all the right credits. Self-taught and, to this day, known to few outside the Czech Republic, she nonetheless has a reputation as a woman in Art Brut. If Jean Dubuffet championed the term to call attention to the excluded, she and a handful of others are a reminder that a largely male movement had its exclusions, too. What, though, if her influence extends not only to outsiders, but to a woman well aware of art's rigors and its past? Thirty-five years after her death, Zemánková exhibits together with Veronika Pausova as "Electrical Flower."

The bay of Eden

Cecilia Vicuña left Chile first for London and then for Bogotá, where she painted herself in 1978, naked, like Eve before the fall. She looks awkward but confident enough, with two copies of herself right behind her, like back-up singers. It must have been an act she knew well. Still, this Eden is short of vegetation beyond a very few trees with no obvious forbidden fruit. It has a flaming red background in place of ground or sky and, in the near distance, a black panther. Is the panther a threat, like the fabled serpent, or will it succumb to her long-haired temptations in place of Adam? Is it a cousin of the Black Panthers, raising its voice in protest like theirs and her own?

A modest retrospective has plenty of space for other voices, not even counting a show in a tower gallery of collecting abstraction. She just has a habit of hearing them inside her head. For all the break in her budding career with the coup, they began speaking before that. A painting from 1971 is her Autobiografía, starting at age eight with a hula hoop. Portraits from the next year depict Karl Marx, but also Chilean poets and activists, Janis Joplin, and Joe Cocker—plus many more on a folding screen. Lenin and Fidel Castro dance with Pinochet.

Vicuña's flat backgrounds and wild cast may resemble cartoons or folk art, but then art for her should be accessible, and an art of the people should respect indigenous peoples as well. It should also respect nature, and another self-portrait has her embracing the wild animal with whom she shares a name. Sure enough, one of the show's few works since her formative decade sets the Frank Lloyd Wright structure alongside a conch shell and what might be a wild mushroom, as Three Spirals. In a work made just for the show, spiraling cords in black, white, and red descend from the ceiling of the two-story High Gallery, sensitive to the great indoor's prevailing winds. They also incorporate more shells, horsehair, and bones.

Vicuña has a way of conflating threats, from exploitation or climate change, much as she conflates the spirals. One image, it turns out, refers to a toxic mining operation in Chile, begun but not finished under Pinochet. Her soft sculpture refers to a molecule whose electron spins generate an internal current, the local custom of Quipu knots, and extermination. Science in art should not become a metaphor for whatever you want it to mean. Then, too, for all the threats, she is resolutely upbeat. "Solidarity forever" becomes Sol y Dar y Dad, "to give and give sun."

Still, she has her bays of joy and sorrows, of broken potentials, and of lies. Now based in New York, she is also fighting back. She has the two lower floors of the Guggenheim for her quiet acts, like Etal Adnan and Jennie C. Jones before her, on the way to the museum's collection of Wassily Kandinsky. But the curators, Pablo León de la Barra and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, also give her the top story for a competing narrative, in language paintings, from an artist better known as a poet. She calls them Palabrarmas, or word weapons: these are fighting words.

Where her other paintings look like outsider art, from a political if not artistic outsider, here the simplification is closer to the mainstream, in Pop Art. Their words and colors jump right out of them, as the gift of an open palm, ammunition for guns, or the passion of bright red lips. Vicuña is still the eternal optimist, taking pleasure on video in children at play just when she herself was in exile. Still, it allows her a sense of home and a reason to return. In a more recent video, she lays the threads of her art on her native shores. Her slow movements are melancholy and driven, but also free.

My little house

The lucky few to have caught a glimpse of Playhouse and chanced to stop could hardly have known whether to come in. No one at all can enter in Brooklyn, which holds a teeming recreation on a smaller scale, like a museum period room run wild, and a barer, still smaller model, like a dollhouse. The project in fact began as dollhouse, and its dolls make unlikely hosts to this day. Born in 1900, Nellie Mae Rowe had her handmade dolls as a child along with quilts and wood sculpture, as her very first works of art, and they grew only more raggedy over time. They sit wherever she or they like, smiling, sulking, or leery. She called them her children, and it was a large family.

So was hers, although she was otherwise childless. Her mother had ten children, and Rowe herself had no time for art. She worked on the family farm in Fayetteville, Georgia, then as a homemaker and domestic laborer, roles that appear again and again in her work, sometimes in collage with a photography of herself. In crayon and pencil, a woman attends to wash day and to dinner. She is literally stirring the pot. A mother sits with her son, but never holding him in her arms.

On the death of her first husband, friends and neighbors brought her still more dolls and castoffs as comforts, but they could hardly have known what they had unleashed. Still, her life as an artist took hold only after she became a widow once again, at age sixty, and continued until her death in 1982. As the show's title has it, she had become "Really Free." Still, she was not denying her past as a Southern black woman or her mother's. She was just transforming them into all that she had loved and known. The folk artist was creating her own private folklore.

Still, she meant to offer a welcome. She says so in a drawing, along with the reassurance that My house is Clean Enought. If that sounds apologetic, consider the full text: My house is Clean Enought to Be healty and it dirty Enought to Be happy. (It also has good enough spelling and capitalization.) Wall text looks out for the dark side, in women as sorcerers, but her first loyalty was to home and play.

Oh, and what play. A black child towers over a rooftop, and others, too, defy gravity, like Russians for Marc Chagall. They also mix with birds, goats, and blue and purple dogs, and it gets hard to tell the species apart. The awkward actors and bright colors may stand alone or fill a sheet. Rowe's exuberance recalls the obsessive compulsive nature of much outsider art, but it does not bog down in detail. It has its spiritual side at that, although you may take small mercies in a god who "will make away far you."

Chagall also had, at least initially, a commitment to revolution, and the show's subtitle speaks of Rowe's "radical art" as well. Not every outsider artist had enough of an inside track to sign a museum protest from the Guerilla Girls. The chief curator, Katherine Jentleson of the High Museum in Atlanta, specializes in self-taught art, while Catherine Morris and Daria Strand of the Brooklyn Museum work with its Sackler Center for Feminist Art—so there is no question where their priorities lie. So what if wall text looks to feminists that Rowe never read? In the end, as in two other drawings, My Little House Is Not So Bad, and it is What It Is. Call it modesty or self-discovery.

Forearms and flowers

So what counts as outsider art? The question arose at least twenty years ago, when the likely inventor of drip painting, Janet Sobel, exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair. Now it is inextricable from the assault on other exclusions in art—of tapestry, craft, and women. And it comes up more and more, because so does outsider art. Once the province of a few dedicated curators, dealers, and collectors, it appears seemingly everywhere. Anna Zemánková herself was anything but the madwoman in the attic.

Her work has all the hallmarks of folk art, including a harsh line and obsessive detail. She turned from landscape to wild thistles and flowers, spinning out like butterfly wings, that existed only in her imagination. The show's very title aligns her with Art Brut and what Jean Dubuffet sought so much—its promise of a savage realism. Yet it was a sophisticated realism, from an artist with a background in biology. She may not have had an education in art, but she did have one in dentistry. It allowed her to support a family while painting on the side until her death in 1986.

Who needs another duly credentialed Yale MFA anyway? How about a trained artist without a Yale degree, but also from Prague? Born the year after Zemánková's death, Veronika Pausova could be the older artist's reincarnation, for those who believe in such things. She could, that is, if her art did not go its own way. She merges free-form abstraction and a woman's body, to ask just which best defines a woman's identity. And then both keep slipping away.

Pausova has her own outsider status, between the relatively marginal status of Czech art and her move to Toronto. Color fields appear as barriers, whether partitions, curtains, or paint itself. They are broken only by circles and, more often, hands. Her hands may lie across seeming wood or grasp a tart yellow from behind. Where their owner stands is impossible to say. They seem brutally disconnected from anyone.

Still, they make their own connections. Forearms cross while trailing off into descending threads. So do women's tops, so that the shallow space becomes a closet with a shortage of clothes. Every so often, too, Pausova makes use of the shallow space for a trompe l'oeil realism. Busier depicts not so busy bees with black wings and bodies in two of her favorite colors, red and green. Color for Zemánková comes as surprise as well.

For both artists, the subject might be stillness itself. Zemánková's images look simpler than Pausova's. Still, they share a scratchy, hesitant, fragmentary realism that is hard to forget. (So does another gallery artist, Anna K.E..) The gallery identifies some as underwater plants. The electricity lies in their forced restraint—and the intrigue in what outsider art leaves out.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Cecilia Vicuña ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 5, 2022, Anna Zemánková and Veronika Pausova ran at Simone Subal through June 18. Nellie Mae Rowe ran at The Brooklyn Museum through January 1, 2023.