Colin Rhodes, UK - MEET THE COLLECTOR Series Part Twenty Two

To tell you the truth, I cannot remember when I first met the next collector in person, but we definitely spoke over email several times before that. It’s great that we now have Professor Colin Rhodes in England, although he has accepted a creative teaching job in China so we will lose him for parts of the year to that! Read on to find out more from this fascinating man.

Colin Rhodes working with Osigi in Japan, February 2020

1. When did your interest in the field of outsider/folk art begin?
It really began when I was an art student at Goldsmiths, London. I found the catalogue for the 1979 Outsiders exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in the library. I was really into Expressionism at the time and some of the images in these books were seriously expressive. Like any good art student, I didn’t really read any of the text, just really got off on the images. My interest proper began in the mid-1990s, as I was completing my book, “Primitivism and Modern Art”.

2. When did you become a collector of this art?  How many pieces do you think are in your collection now? And do you exhibit any of it on the walls of your home or elsewhere?
I never thought of myself as a collector, but at some point, I had to accept that I probably am. I started to accumulate outsider and self-taught art at the end of the 1990s. Much of what I own was either given to me by artists and collectors in lieu of payment, or as a gift, for writing about work for exhibition catalogues, etc. Sometimes, it was given in exchange for a piece of my own artwork. I have bought quite a few things over the years, though, such as a little Purvis Young, some Scottie Wilson pieces, a couple of Madge Gills, and lots of work by the Australian artists Jungle Phillips and Anthony Mannix.

I’m not sure how many pieces I have altogether. Maybe about three hundred or so.

I usually have quite a few pieces on the walls of my home, but we’re in the middle of renovations at the moment, so there’s not much out just: a nice little Mose T, a couple of wonderful Gregory Warmack (aka Mr Imagination) pieces, some Scottie ceramics, a drawing by Emilie Henry, and a couple of other things. In 2008 I did show what at the time was just about everything I owned, at the Orange Regional Gallery, in Australia, under the title “European and American Outsider Art”.

During my time in Sydney I also ran little a little gallery devoted to self-taught and outsider art, the Callan Park Gallery. As well as staging a string of great exhibitions of Australian and international art between 2009 and 2016, I was able to put together a reasonably impressive collection, almost entirely through donations. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a permanent home for the collection in Australia, but its intact survival was ensured by gifting it to the Museum of Everything.

Scottie Wilson, Royal Worcester Tea Set

3. Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’ve been drawing longer than I can remember. Drawing defines me. That said, I arrived in London from the North of England at the age of 18 to study for a science degree. That lasted a year, before I escaped into art, first at Goldsmiths, then studying art history at the University of Essex. I’ve pretty much worked in art schools for most of my adult life. 

4. What is it that draws your eye away from contemporary art to outsider/folk art? Or do you collect both?
I'm not averse to contemporary art. Having worked in art schools, I’ve been around contemporary art for thirty years and helped in the training of contemporary artists! I can’t afford to buy it, though. In any case, if I did have a lot of money, I’d be more likely to spend it on 20th-century expressionist and post-expressionist art – people like E. L. Kirchner, George Grosz, Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock. I also love sculpture from Africa and New Guinea, as well as Australian Aboriginal art, and have a few nice examples of those.

5. What style of work, if any, is of particular interest to you within this field? (for example, is it embroidery, drawing, sculpture, and so on)
I’m drawn in particular to the two-dimensional image, which I suppose reflects what’s dominant in my own practice. I’m as happy with the precision of Damian Michaels and Nick Blinko’s visionary mark-making as with the expressivism of Anne Marie Grgich, Rosemarie Kôzcÿ or Ody Saban. I do have a soft spot for ceramics, though. The work of the late Australian ceramicist, Kevin Meagher, for example, is brilliant and deserves to be much better known.

Mose T

6. Would you say you had a favourite artist or piece of work within your collection? And why?
A tough question. I love it all, otherwise I wouldn’t have it. In many ways, though, the most precious work to me is that which was given by an artist purely as a token of friendship.

7. Is there an exhibition in this field of art that you have felt has been particularly important? And why?
The most important show for my entry into the field was the Hayward Gallery Prinzorn show. Although the three most important things for me in the early stages of my serious interest were: the short-lived, but amazing Stadshof Museum in Zwolle, The Netherlands, with Ans van Berkum as Director, the Henry Boxer Gallery; and the pages of Raw Vision. As an art historian I’d be tempted to elect an exhibition that I never saw as perhaps one of the more significant in the field; the 1982 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, “Black Folk Art in America” was not just important, but a paradigm shifter.

8. Are there any people within this field that you feel have been particularly important to pave the way for where the field is at now?
Again, a tough question, since there are a lot and it would be far too easy to leave people out. I’ll therefore stick only to a couple of examples, and to people who have passed on: Jean Dubuffet, Roger Cardinal, Herbert W. Hemphill and Phyllis Kind.

9. Where would you say you buy most of your work from: a studio, art fairs, exhibitions, auctions, or direct from artists?
Occasionally from studios and art fairs, or direct from dealers. But mostly, as I’ve said, my collection is a result of gifts and art swaps.

Kevin Meagher sculpture

10. In the year 2000 you wrote a book titled ‘Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives’ – can you tell us about how this came about and what you wanted to achieve with this book?
It came about over a lunchtime conversation with my dear friend and editor, the late Nikos Stangos. He wanted to know what I was thinking of writing after Primitivism and Modern Art. I enthused once again about the book on Kircher I’ve wanted to publish since around 1990 and which had resulted in my introduction to Nikos in the first place. He listened solicitously and then asked if I was interested in writing one on outsider art. I put Kirchner to one side once more and embarked on a different adventure. I wanted to write a short critical history of the field, as I saw it at the time, as well as introducing and exploring some of the problematics. As it turned out, it was the first book about the field, I think, to address work by artists with severe intellectual and learning disabilities with the same seriousness as others. It was originally going to be titled simply “Outsider Art”, but Roger Cardinal, who was by the time it was being edited, my friend, asked if I might be agreeable to finding a subtitle to differentiate my book from his. I was happy to oblige.

11. A conflicted term at present, but can you tell us about your opinion of the term outsider art, how you feel about it and if there are any other words that you think we should be using instead?
Ah! Term warfare. I like “Art Brut”, which would have been the title of Cardinal’s book if his publisher hadn’t got cold feet. He always said that it could have been anglicised easily enough, like Art Nouveau, Art Deco, etc. I don’t mind “outsider art”, though. It is, after all, a term that is known and used globally (even if in France it is regarded as an Anglo Saxon view of the world). The edges of its inclusions are inevitably fuzzy, and interestingly it is one of those terms that people have often contested or rejected even as they situate art and artists within its definitions. Part of the issue, I think, is that while the term was coined in the spirit of finding an English language equivalent for art brut, its qualifying noun much too easily suggests a sociological meaning that places the identity of the creator of the art, rather than the art itself at centre stage. As a result, its history as a term has been at once contested and open to seemingly endless interpretive expansion. I certainly don’t agree with those who say, just call it art, as though that fixes everything. Art is contextualised, defined and redefined according to the company it keeps. Significantly, that means that any particular artist or work might be located in more than one category simultaneously – Dan Miller’s work, for example, which I love, sits comfortably in my view in a Contemporary or Outsider Art space.

Scottie Wilson hand-painted plate

12. Last year you wrote the book ‘The World According to Roger Ballen to coincide with his show at Halle Saint Pierre, Paris. Can you tell us more about this project?
I have worked with Roger Ballen on a few things now and when the opportunity came up to write a full-length book on his work, I jumped at it. Ballen is a great photographer whose work deals with the deeper regions of the psyche. In recent years he has also been producing art installations, which include within them examples of outsider art and his own, raw drawings. At Halle St Pierre he has produced a series of interlinking tableaux, whose themes are reflected in a carefully chosen group of his photographs. The project speaks to art brut and outsider art without being either a reflection of, or comment on, the field.  

13.  What’s next for you?
I’m just completing an essay on the work of Nick Blinko and waiting to be able to travel to China to begin teaching fine art at a university in Hunan.