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From: JJ
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 08 March 2001
This is an exhibition of a British religious nutcase's drawings, in the conventional style of his time, of heaven, hell, and other biblical motifs and his illustrated boring poems. I would compare it to the recentish Whitechapel show about art and the insane. Its appeal is simple and short-lived. It is based on the premise that it is always pleasurable to see art which looks outside of its time, either by reason of it's style seeming anachronistic, for example the art of the insane resembling contemporary "bad painting", or it's subject matter being unusual, for example a person eating an ice-cream in a medieval illuminated manuscript. However this pleasure is based mainly on the viewer's ignorance of the history of art and the world, and their resulting expectations that the past was radically different from the present in every way. Regular exhibition and museum goers will know how frequent these pleasures of the "unexpected" are, and that the thrill quickly fades. The regular soon comes to sadly expect such nonsurprises, and in the end the seasoned looker is merely bored by idiosyncrasy.
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