The Museum of Everything

museum_of_everything_03Museum_of_everything_01museum_of_everything_02 Me and Lou went to The Museum of Everything the other day up near Primrose Hill (bloody jolly nice area as well you know), which was ace. It's a temporary gallery of sorts for 'Outsider Art', so basically lots of people who were or had been in psychiatric wards and mental asylums drawings, paintings and objets de art accompanied by introductions written by contemporary cultural/artistic types- Ed Ruscha, Jarvis Cocker, etc. As I imagine is the case with alot of outsider art, the context and lives of the artists where as interesting as the work itself. Also it's worth mentioning that alot of the works had a scale of spectacle about them- a dedication of immense amounts of time spent which adds to their effect- be it either immensely detailed drawings (they provided magnifying glasses) or the physical size of the pieces- one triptych was about like 6 or 7 metres tall,- or the number of similar pieces displayed, repetition seemed to play a fair part and coming from my collections point of view I reckon that the cumulative effect was very much a factor in the museum. (There was a nice moment where i heard a guy on the telephone saying 'I'm still at the Museum' which I thought was great, I think the distinction between a art gallery and a museum of curiosities is an important one- for some reason i feel closer to museums than galleries.) It didn't feel like a typical art space either- they museum guided you first up some steps and then through a series of small rooms and corridors- here was one of my favourite collections: Russian military enthusiast Aleksander Lobanov, Aleksander_pavlovitch

but the route then rounded a corner and you were standing at the top of some steps overlooking a massive double height space where the walls were dripping with paintings and drawings- the space was a warehouse like space too and the structure they'd erected to hang things on was brilliant- there were more rooms downstairs and at the end a place to get a cup of tea for a donation- brilliant. The graphics for the show were also spot on- the whole space thing was excellent and at the moment it's only on until the end of December so get down there.