A chance to visit a different world

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Rosalind Ormiston finds artists exploring the universe at London’s Hayward Gallery

‘Imagine that you could live in a different world. What would you want it to be like?’ asks Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward. He suggests that we might change how we measure time, or alter our cities, or the finality of death. With that in mind, for the exhibition ‘An Alternative Guide to the Universe’ he has chosen 22 artists’ works that explore their ideas of alternative ways to live, alternative ways to measure what is important and what is not.

 ‘An Alternative Guide to the Universe’ (Hayward, until 26 August, 2013), fills its gallery spaces with a different kind of art, the work of prophetic re-imaginers of the universe with different views of how we could live and where we might live. Inventors and visionary ‘architects’, unorthodox physicists and self-taught artists, display their visualizations of the universe, collectively known as ‘Outsider Art’. The illustrated catalogue includes around 30 essays, sectioned into ‘invented selves’, ‘time and space’, ‘cities and buildings’; and ‘codes and technologies’ plus ‘fringe physics’. The essays give insight into why the artists chose their particular path for visualizing their alternative worlds, through painting, photography, drawing and sculpture.

In the first gallery a wall of colour hits the visual senses with works by George Widener (b.1962, Cincinnati, Ohio) and Alfred Jensen (1903–81; b.Guatemala City). Widener, a former cold war spy, is now an internationally successful artist. Calendars and numbers are an essential part of his working day, given his impulse to convert every number he sees into a calendar or a chart based on historical events. At the age of 18, Widener worked in intelligence with US military cryptographers and code breakers. Since he was diagnosed with Asperger’s, he has felt more comfortable working as an artist, using numbers and dates and historical timelines to make sense of his world, creating large-scale works on paper since the 1990s. The exhibition includes Magic Square 12-21-12 (Conspiracy)(2012), Games 23 (2011) andMegalopolis 2053 (2010).

Alfred Jensen, a student of Hans Hoffman (1880–1966) and friend of Mark Rothko (1903–70), the American abstract expressionist painters, discovered a link between the Maya number system and Goethe’s colour theory. His interest in Pythagoras increased his awareness of numeric systems, particularly ancient Greek, Chinese, Mayan and Egyptian ones, which he invested in his work. On display All the Beautiful Systems (1979) is like a giant patchwork quilt of numbers, and Twelve Events in a Beautiful System (1979), with its handwritten text and numeral classification, fills a whole wall of the gallery. It is his journey through time and space, ‘an epic saga’, as Jensen’s essayist William C. Agee discusses in the book.

There is such a wealth of exceptional originality throughout the show that it is hard to pinpoint just one or two exhibitors. Richard Greaves (b. Montreal 1952), creates deliberately asymmetrical buildings. The exhibition includes monumental photographs of his shacks on his own land in Canada, all created from disused barns and shelters. Sixty drawings by Marcel Storr (1911–76, b.Paris), were discovered in 1971, when the artist’s wife showed them to friends. Storr created a fantastical world of architecture, cities and churches, gothic towers, Babylonian temples, all imaginary. Lee Goldie (1908–94, b.Chicago), living homeless in Chicago, told people that she was an ‘Impressionist’ painter but in the exhibition one sees Goldie as the object of her art, depicted through several hundred photographs she took of herself in photo booths, which she called ‘publick cameras’.

Paul Laffoley (b.1940, Cambridge, MA), is described by essayist Michael Bracewell as an ‘artist, architect, polymath, and ideologue’. Laffoley, through diagrammatic art, illustrates his perception of time and space. Bracewell links his concepts to the mediaeval, in alchemy and magic, mind physics and visionary architecture.  The technical brilliance of his drawings, art as thought more than representation, is just one part of the extraordinary ‘otherworld’ universe he paints. Laffoley’s creation draws the spectator in; the book explores Laffoley’s interpretations.

Not to be missed are the robots of Wu Kulu (b.1962 Tongzhou, Beijing), a farmer and self-taught robotics engineer. His display includes a rickshaw robot Remote Controlled Cart (2013); the work of Rammelzzee (b.1960, New York), especially The Equation, the Letter Racers (c.1988), an exciting space-wars style skateboards sculpture suspended from a gallery ceiling. A favourite for me is the enigmatic Healing Machine (1955–80), built by Emery Blagdon while living alone on his 160-acre farm in Nebraska, Canada, and known to his neighbours as a kindly, strange, long-haired recluse. These are a few of the artists in the exhibition, all discussed comprehensively in the book; each deserves attention through the extraordinary works that the Hayward has chosen to display, it is an alternative guide to the universe with some inspirational leaders.