today i was reading a little tidbit over at artnet about autism and art. evidently “outsider art week” just passed us by, and many galleries were exploiting celebrating the untrained and seemingly unsane among us. many of the usual suspects were pimped

shown (including darling darger whose life got the documentary treatment recently) with much of the usual “visionary” style represented, the off kilter anatomy, the obsessive crowding, the crayon line quality, the bright colors. personally i can’t tell the difference between a trained and untrained artist anymore, at least not evidenced by the work. what that means i won’t hazard to guess.

in any case all this put me in mind of one of my favorite visionary artists, whom i’ve heard little about since 2002 when he was among those mentioning a 100 year old gaudi design for the ground zero site. he is one of the more talented utopian art kooks out there and in that he was diagnosed as slightly autistic in his youth i thought he’d serve as a good late addition to outsider art week…

paul laffoley
“was born into an Irish Catholic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940. He spoke his first word, “Constantinople,” at six months, then remained silent until the age of four (having been diagnosed as slightly autistic), when he began to draw and paint. In his senior year at Brown University, he was given eight electric-shock treatments. He was dismissed from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but managed to apprentice with the sculptor Mirko Baseldella, before going to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. In 1968 he moved into an eighteen- by thirty-foot utility room to found a one-man “think tank” and creative unit called the Boston Visionary Cell. Laffoley supports himself with a job at the Boston Museum of Science, returning to the BVC not only to eat and sleep but to work on multimedia renderings of his visions of alternative futures and complex realities.”

all well and good. but here’s my favorite part:

“During a routine CAT-scan of his head in 1992, a miniature metallic implant, 3/8 of an inch long, was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland. Local M.U.F.O.N. investigators declared it to be an alien nano-technological laboratory. He has come to believe that the “implant” is extraterrestrial in origin and is the main motivation behind his ideas and theories.”

his work is obsessive in the best possible way. simultaneously creating and supporting complex theoretical mythologies. his work intertwines the visual systems of alchemy and science, combining mysticism, an often opaque historical symbology, and crisp, clear, technical diagrams to describe his dense pseudoscience. think chris ware and william blake smoking chemically synthesized opium and reading out loud to one another from back issues of omni magazine.

another comparison i’d be tempted to make is to the work of joe coleman, a similar obsessively detailed, overwhelming amount of information, only minus coleman’s extremely biological bent. the filth, despair, fluids, loss, greasy hair, and mortality which coleman’s work tend to exude from every minute stroke are totally absent from laffoley’s work. his work is more platonic in a sense i’d say, more concerned with human invention, be they mechanical or mythological, than with humanity itself. his titles illustrate this pretty well: the number dream, the orgone motor, geochronmechane: the time machine from the earth, the omega point - the future of evolution, dimensionality - the manifestation of fate, etc.

of course rather than falling into the trap of critical heavy-breathing let me also add that the last two paragraphs are just as likely meaningless and laffoley may just be “plain ol’ crazy” as chris rock would say. but i don’t buy it.

anyhow the joe coleman comparison leads me to another laffoley story. that of his amputated leg. evidently while installing a show at the kent gallery here in new york he was at the top of a ladder when it slid down the wall to the floor. on his way down to meet the floor time went slo-mo. he had a conversation with himself, wherein he decided which body part was more dispensable, given that something was about to break. he decided that as an artist he could not afford to break his arms. he realized he had to land on his feet. he had a conversation with his feet. he said there was an implicit agreement made: “you save me, I’ll save you.” he broke both legs.

one healed well, the other did not. he decided that perhaps demons had invaded the ladder, and now his leg. during one surgery to try to save his leg, paul was wheeled out of surgery as high as a kite on morphine. he insisted there was a demon in his leg, and requested four specialists: a priest, a rabbi, an agnostic and a shrink. He wanted them positioned as follows: “The priest will be on my left, the rabbi on my right, the rational side. The psychiatrist will be at my head, and the agnostic at my feet.” He gave explicit directions: “When the demon comes out of my leg, I want the agnostic to capture it.”

his leg was eventually amputated after which point joe coleman contacted him to ask if he could have it for his museum of human oddities. paul declined wishing is to keep it close to him, like the main character in his favorite underground horror classic, basket case.

what does any of that have to do with art? “everything you fool! don’t you see!? the man is an artist, so everything which happens to him has to do with art!” actually, the story drastically excerpted above is from paranoia magazine and it’s a good one covering other biographical bits of interest. you can check it out for yourself here.

for further reading / viewing on laffoley check out the following:

his work via kent gallery.

a recent interview you can read here dealing with new work and specifically satan, god, and h.p. lovecraft.

meanwhile a documentary on laffoly called laffoley’s odyssey gives you a nice glimpse at the man himself.

a lecture he made in 2001 about buckminster fuller, utopian space, the noosphere, the international symbolist movement, etc… if your interested here it is

here’s some realaudio via disinformation’s infinity factory. haven’t listened.

enjoy. but remember outsider art week is over so once you’re done forget what you’ve seen and get right back to stroking hirst’s taint, nuzzling barney’s ball sack, sniffing koon’s ass, and fondling warhol’s cold corpse.