The cat that walks alone: there must surely be just such a character in all cultures – whether in folklore and fairytales or in children’s literature. That image of one who is absolutely untameable. Matt Lamb is the artist who walks alone. Accepting or rejecting with equal ease all interpretations of his art, he gleefully takes advantage of any opportunity to elude classificational limits and to disentangle himself from hierarchical tables. There is a price to be paid for everything, however, and the art establishment offers no great rewards to such characters who lie outside the system, characters with ambitions to make art directly, without concern for the rules of the game as set down by that same art establishment. Not to mention his other quite objectively irritating moments. By very definition the true Outsider artist must be, as it were, ‘of another world’, to have problems with socialising, to evade reality by escaping to his own parallel world, his own reality. Lamb is by nature an activist, a man who does not know the word ‘impossible’, one who has learned to turn his ambitions into reality. As if that were not enough, Lamb is not only a man with a defined and active stance, but he has also a defined and active moral and spiritual stance. And he has the ambition to spread his views of the world. He is in essence a preacher, seeking to bring his views to others largely through his own art. His wall paintings in the Peace Chapel of the Parish Church of St Martin in Tünsdorf and the Austin Hope and Light Center in Chicago – of which more later – serve as an excellent example of this. But in the postmodernist era, with its lack of faith in the meta-narrative (which it sees as a form that is per se repressive and totalitarian), such positive action – without any shade of distancing irony, without any overtones of parody – seems to be, at the very least, somewhat strange. So in this sense Lamb, the ‘last of the preachers’ and thus a breacher of the accepted conventions, cannot but be an irritant, certainly to all professional ‘mediators’ and presenters of contemporary art within the mainstream. As the artist himself has said, ‘…I'm an underdog in the art world, and power traditionally does not belong to the underdog.’ Power in this context means being within the system, part of the art establishment. Lamb is interested in a very different kind of power: ‘But I would say painting gives me inner power, an inner peace.’ (1)

Lamb is indeed interesting in himself, for his own personal judgments of the world, the unique nature of his personality, the dramatic turns his life has taken, for his incredible creative output. Nonetheless, ‘walking alone’ as he does, Lamb seems to have some sort of supreme sense which guides him as he picks out his route, with the result that his route is of cardinal importance not only to himself personally but also to the current relationship between two of the most important layers of artistic culture, contemporary art and Outsider Art.

As one attempts to characterise Lamb’s art, therefore, one finds oneself forced to deal with that relationship, which has recently taken on new meaning.

With his own indifference to classifications and hierarchies Lamb may not be interested in such a projection of general laws in the development of art onto his own experience. When faced with questions regarding his relationship to any other artistic phenomena, he likes to answer thus: ‘Anything I may have absorbed …was really from osmosis.’

We shall therefore also see the matter with which we are dealing here – and which, regardless of Lamb’s own feelings on the subject, has direct relation to his own art practice – as one of osmosis. Without looking at this question, it seems to me that no full study of the Lamb phenomenon is impossible.

Throughout the course of the 20 th century avant-garde art has been kind and attentive to that which, thanks to British art critic Roger Cardinal, came to be known as Outsider Art . (2)

Exhibitions in the 21 st century, such as the recent In Another World, held at Kiasma in Helsinki, or Inner Worlds Outside, organised by the La Caixa Foundation , the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, have wrought some changes in the situation. Nowadays ‘outsiders’ – to use the term in its horse-racing meaning – do not take part in separate heats: they set out from the same starting line, on an equal basis with the favourites, and they often come in first. Such at least is the impression created in the wake of these recent exhibitions. What exactly is taking place?

Primitive art, naïve art and the art of marginal elements and sociopaths have always influenced contemporary art. It is an incontrovertible fact, moreover, that some of these artists who by very definition do not belong to the mainstream or even to the art establishment have managed to break through the professional hierarchies and pass beyond the conventionally established clientele for Outsider Art (museum specialists, art fairs, collectors and publications such as Raw Vision) to occupy leading positions in museums of contemporary art. In recent times, however, it seems to me that the very modus of Outsider Art is changing.

It is no longer willing to accept a paternalistic attitude from its Big Brother – modern and contemporary art – as it did during the days of Jean Dubuffet and his Art Brut. Dubuffet himself (although long before this Kazimir Malevich had recorded such paternalism) gave polite expression to the importance and talent of Outsider artists, whilst noting that they were invisible, i.e. that they were not necessarily a part of the professional art scene: ‘I see great art in them. They were simply not visible behind the backs of Titian, Rubens, behind the Wanderers, behind the Impressionists, and behind us – the Cubists, Futurists and Suprematists.’ (3)

Today Outsider Art has been more profoundly and professionally institutionalised than ever before. It has abandoned many cultural and anthropological myths: where today, for instance, can one find the purely reflexive mind and its opposite, the naïve or natural mind? Yet that very opposition has traditionally formed the basis of a division of art into representational and direct or presentational, within which space the receiving ground for naïve art was set apart. A synthesising approach is set against those logical procedures of formalisation and abstraction that lie at the basis of these oppositions. Jacques Derrida wrote: ‘The limitation between phonetic and non-phonetic writing, however rightful and necessary it is, remains secondary and derivative with regard to what we can call synergy or synesthesia. From this it follows not only that phoneticism has never been omnipotent but also that it always worked on the unspoken signifier.’ (4)

This tendency towards synesthesia (manifested for instance, although using a different descriptive system and within other sciences, in the perinatal matrices of Stanislav Grof) as a means or actualising the unspoken signifier is a manifestation of modern man’s more general need to understand his own ancient history, a need that is not always fully considered in the light of the competence of specific trends of philosophy and science. The need is cyclical and seems to be manifested around the beginning of each century. At the start of this current century it has been sharpened by a new nostalgia for unity and integrity, for that lost existential infrastructure which facilitates the true fulfilment of human life. This need, it seems to me, lies behind the new interest in the Old Testament, Gnostic beliefs and the Kabbalah, an interest widespread not only in professional spheres but also in more naïve, ‘mass’ philosophising.

Moreover, in my opinion, this need provides the more basic preconditions for alterations to the modus of naïve art. There are other ‘insider’ preconditions as regards contemporary art itself. Over the last decade the whole of the contemporary art project seems to have been becoming increasingly inert in nature, in its hermeticism and its concentration on its own linguistic means. Inert in all its hypostases, whether in the institutional sphere or in the realm of philosophical consolidation and in teleological terms. Hence the greater interest in Outsider Art is a result of the exhaustion of the contemporary art project’s conceptual potential and the predictability of that which Derrida described as ‘phonetic writing’.

But today the Outsider artist is no longer prepared to play the role of ‘energy donor’, as he did during the age of the classical avant-garde. The Outsider artist’s perception of himself is no longer what it once was (nor indeed is the attitude to him of curators of the very latest exhibitions). Even when curators are working with historical material, such as the works of Henry Darger, Charles Dellschau or Jesse Howard, they have a sense of ‘the resistance of the material’. When compared with the milestones of contemporary art such as the works of Jake and Dinos Chapman or Jean-Michel Basquiat, such works enter on a competitive relationship. What results is no longer an atmosphere of touching solidarity, with great Art kindly giving a helping hand to Outsider Art, as if to lift it up to its own level and gain in return an injection of new life, the vitalising force of an unmediated view of the world. In contrast, the result is an atmosphere of competition, that energy of rivalry without which no forward movement is ever possible.

To describe today’s interaction between contemporary art and Outsider Art I would choose a metaphor conceived by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam: ‘Like an Attic soldier, in love with my enemy.’

Such a long preamble is necessary before we start looking at the work of Matt Lamb itself, but this is not because it has now become something of a bad tradition to commence any study of a specific artist in any connected with Outsider Art with a terminological and gnoseological commentary, attempting each time to sort out (yet again) the phenomenon of this art’s existence. No indeed. The information already accumulated within the framework of the term seems quite sufficient. The preamble is necessary to record that alteration in the modus of Outsider Art which has taken place over recent years, both in its sense of itself (in memory of former conceptions regarding the naïve and natural kind of consciousness that is supposedly inherent in the Outsider artist, I won’t say in its self-identification and self-reflection) and in attitudes to it.

For the art of Matt Lamb surely grows and evolves on the sharp edge where these alterations are taking place. The very epitome of the Outsider artist – according to a whole series of indicators – Lamb nonetheless gives personal form to new potentials and ambitions which have emerged for this new kind of artistic consciousness over the last decades. He is a ‘frontiersman’ in the good old sense of the word: he protects his lands and seeks to cultivate his own values, all the while consistently (and without advertising the fact) extending the borders of his territory. In this case, the territory of contemporary art.

There is another circumstance which makes it important to articulate this change in the artistic consciousness of Outsider artists and of Lamb in particular, one connected with the system used to describe Outsider Art and thus with those who write about it. (Which is not a reference to the purely literary genres since, as a rule, these are variants on the classical history of the younger, naïve, brother slighting his elders, the pragmatists: the naïve, pure view is always victorious in the end, with all the benefits that that entails.) Traditionally this area has been dominated by different versions of the psychoanalytical and / or structural-anthropological discourse that have to one degree or another appropriated artistic questions. That ‘appetite for the artistic’ (perhaps somewhat naïve and archaic from the point of view of defenders of the purity of contemporary art’s conceptual basis) that has made itself felt in the development of Outsider Art over recent years allows those writing about it to manifest a similar – and it must be said quite forgotten – appetite. As Annie Carlano writes: ‘Connoisseurship may be out of fashion, but it is crucial to the future of Outsider Art. A spectacular range of styles and feelings punctuates these pages, and each image commands attention – it is these qualities that provide a constant thread.’ (5)

So, what is he, this Matt Lamb, with whom I link changes in the Outsider artist’s status and self-perception at the turn of the centuries?

On the one hand he is flesh born of the flesh of Outsider Art. A man who is self-taught; a man who had no interest in art until his middle years. The spark that set light to that interest was not artistic as such (i.e. it was not an impression of some work of art that changed his whole outlook) but of a mundane biographical and in some ways therapeutic nature (hello, Hans Prinzhorn! In 1922 the German psychiatrist and art historian published Bildnerei der Geistenkranken – The Artistry of the Mentally Ill – which played an incomparable role both in developing the century’s avant-garde tendencies such as Dadaism and Surrealism and in the formation of public attitudes to Outsider Art. Since then the psychotic component has traditionally been considered obligatory in all manifestations of this kind of art. Roger Cardinal finds a metaphor for this in his classic study Outsider Art , New York : Praeger, 1972: ‘the psychic elsewhere.’) (6) With his new interest in art, Lamb developed outside the art establishment, initially working, moreover, solely for himself, without any interest as to how his works were perceived by others, particularly by professionals. John Beardsley defined such a means of existence as being ‘… to live and work at some distance from prevailing artistic cultures.’ (7) Indeed Lamb lived at a distance in terms of both his artistic and spiritual life. Clearly, as Lamb himself put it once he had entered on a period of recognition, when he found himself in the situation of having to explain his view of the world, he put all his hopes in the elemental, emotional, non-conceptual and unmediated: ‘It’s not about thinking or planning. It’s about emotion.’ Or ‘I couldn’t have planned it this way if I‘d tried.’ He took up the material that lay at hand. He thought within the bounds of a set typology of an iconographical kind, a method widespread among Outsider artists. (The creators of the exhibition Inner Worlds Outside even sought to summarise these typological lines: ‘Faces and Masks’, ‘The Erotic Body’, ‘The Allure of Language’ and so one.) In short, he was one of those good old Outsider artists who were so attractive in their steadfastness. But then we find ourselves facing certain counter-arguments that give the lie to that image. Arguments that refine and reform more or less every element in that identification. Above all these are to do with the very nature of Lamb himself, with his personal characteristics. This powerful, knocked-about Irish American is a self-made man: before he was ‘converted’, as it were, to art, he had established an extremely successful and diversified business. So we cannot even think of applying to him the description given in The New York Times to another, more typical Outsider artist, Daniel Johnston, ‘Man-Child in the Promised Land’. (8) Lamb could hardly have built up such a business if he’d had a child’s view of the world and he certainly had no problems with social interaction. Moreover, the artist continued to apply his professional skills to his PR and his business relations with collectors and such like.

(This so annoys defenders of the stereotypical image of the naïve artist ‘floating in the clouds’ that in 2003 Lamb’s works were removed from the Outsider Art Fair, something that seems even more funny when we recall that Jean Dubuffet, a man who perhaps did more than any other for the development and institutionalisation of Outsider Art, reassessed his own position to it as an art that is in its very nature ‘non-convertible’. He wrote to his fellow artists enjoying success on the art market: ‘… I am quite happy that your drawings bring you a modest income and applaud your efforts wholeheartedly. It would be highly desirable for the trade in works of art not to exist; but since it does and since it is so widespread, it would be absurd if you did not make some money.’ (9). After all, the Pope is not the only Catholic!)

There are other contradictions, although these lie within the realms of artistic thought. Lamb’s works undoubtedly have elements of an expressive and intuitive type of artistic consciousness: spontaneity, directness, gesture. And yet others: in his grandiose projects such as the action ‘Lamb Umbrellas for Peace’ and in his church wall paintings there are clear and defined artistic strategies, even a certain sense of the conceptual. Another contradiction to the widespread stereotypes lies in that Lamb is very sensitive to the realities of life, able to react immediately to any prompting from the outer world. Yet it is thought, as Annie Carlano writes, ‘that the raw, enigmatic, and even sublime attributes of Outsider Art stem almost exclusively from the mind of the maker, the collective unconscious, or supernatural beings, divorced from the realities of everyday experience.’ (10) In the case of Lamb, everything is the other way round: his main social project, ‘Lamb Umbrellas for Peace’, was inspired by dramatic contemporary events, by the threat of terrorism. And on the level of visualisation he is extremely attentive to the surrounding everyday world: his works contain precisely captured realities, punk hairstyles, extravagant hats, the racing driver’s overalls, characteristic modern poses…

We come at last to his relationship to contemporary art – the most acute and most disputed issue. In the institutional sense – the sphere of art’s own existence, the use of its structures and institutions – Lamb feels himself to be ‘simply an artist’. He is ready for any comparisons, for encounters with the classics at exhibition (in fact there were two exhibitions with that very name, Lamb Encounters Miró, Lamb Encounters Picasso, while there were plans for a third, Lamb Encounters Chagall). At the same time he was clearly irritated by the removal of his works from the specialised Outsider Art Fair and thus the denial that he belonged to that particular form of art practice… (11) But then we must recall that Lamb states clearly that all possible influences, associations and borrowings were ‘really from osmosis’.

So he is clearly not one who believes in contemporary art’s obligatory contextualisation and self-identification within the bounds of the general trends of the art of today. On the other hand, that phrase ‘from osmosis’ can be seen not only as metaphorical, or rather not only as learned and metaphorical. The Russian philosopher Vladimir Vernadsky and the French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin set out the theory of the noosphere, a special stage in the development of the biosphere in which humanity’s spiritual creation, a certain consolidation of thought, takes on decisive significance. Continuing this learned metaphor we can speak of the consolidation of artistic thought: within the noosphere is a separate layer, the iconosphere, within which ‘float’ certain visual images. These might well, I think, be the images of classical Modernism that indeed express certain archetypes of 20 th-century consciousness. Lamb’s ‘from osmosis’ can thus be given more concrete definition, it can be contextualised. (We won’t dwell on the fact that Lamb is a native of Chicago , where the Art Institute contains the world’s best collection of classical Modernism, while the works of Miró, Picasso and Dubuffet were entering the urban environment – literally, in the form of public art – just as he was commencing his own dealings with art.)

But we shall move away from broad generalisations to the facts and biographical information that make up the canvas of his life.

In 1984, after numerous ‘signals’ of a mystical nature, signals that also had much to do with his very existence (for whatever one says, a hopeless diagnosis, accompanied as it was by an unclear and cloudy anamnesis never fully revealed by the doctors, relates to existence rather than the mundane elements of everyday life), Lamb decided to take a step that radically altered his life. He went into an art supplies store and bought a huge amount of art materials, sufficient for a very long time. This was a step of an existential nature: without yet knowing how, Lamb was fully aware of why – he wished to express himself, to create a world which he would truly feel was his own, personal, individual world. Such a demiurgic moment is quite characteristic; Lamb had no desire to learn ‘correct’ drawing, he had no wish for any representation of a realistic or mimetic kind. He wanted to create – not reflect, copy and so on – his very own world. According to his biographer, in describing his feelings Lamb used a word that has multiple meanings and yet precisely defined his own situation: ‘I am concocting a world based on my own strengths and limitations, and loving every minute of it.’

I shall come back to that word, ‘concoct’.

For now I would like to support my conclusion regarding the existential nature of that visit to the art supplies store with some words from the artist himself: ‘ As a funeral director I saw people through the eyes of the people they left behind. And I noticed there were always the same regrets: why didn’t we take that trip we always dreamed of? Why didn’t we drink that wine we saved for 20 years to drink on a special occasion? Why didn’t I show him more love? A loved one’s death made people bump up against the same questions over and over. Who are we, anyway? Why are we here? What’s it all about?’ Such were the questions that concerned the prosperous funeral director in his severe suit. To put it bluntly, since the time of Leo Tolstoy’s novel TheDeath of Ivan Ilyich contemporary culture has never set questions of life and existence with such directness and simplicity, seeming somehow almost to be afraid of them. One had need of the naïve daring and ambition of the neophyte and outsider, moreover one whose experience in a previous life and profession had brought him into contact with these borderline states of existence, in order to take up such questions without the irony and lowering, parodising procedures so usual in contemporary art. To use one of Lamb’s own reflections, to ‘drink that wine’ that is usually left by art and by the ordinary man for later, for some unknown ‘special occasion’.

Over the course of just three years Lamb passed from being a full-time businessman to being a full-time artist. And I still find it hard not to catch myself asking the naïve and – to be honest – unanswerable question ‘why?’ Everything is clear with the usual passengers in the train of Outsider Art – a brief list of them is provided in all publications devoted to Raw Vision, each of which stresses their mental and social inadequacy. But why him? One who was not only not handicapped in social matters but who was, partly thanks to his profession and his status, a quasi-society man, extremely capable, a public and communicative man?

Why was an Outsider Artist born in him?

There can be, of course, no full analysis of the whole complex of reasons. Yet I would very much like to make several points. Lamb himself has noted repeatedly that he is, thanks to his upbringing at home and his profession, a reserved man, ‘buttoned up’, the very epitome of all set rules of behaviour, of the necessary norms and rituals.

Yes, indeed, this was a successful, highly professional, highly organised businessman, a self-made man, a fund-raiser and charitable supporter, in a word a man worthy, thanks to his business career, of a biography in the genre of the lives of American tycoons, those men who took fate into their own hands. But he was a man of formalities. One who might, perhaps, be favourable, as Dubuffet wrote, towards ‘customary art or cultural clichés’. Not just a common man but a quasi-common man, the highest form of his manifestation. The cliché (social, behavioural, cultural) raised to a very high degree. Yet Dubuffet, creator of Art Brut, came to hate the common man. Yes, at first he loved him, as he created him in his own imagination, considering that only in the common man, in the banality of his everyday existence, could one find energy and even poetry. Then he described the common man as an illusion and rejected him for being bound hand and foot by rules and habits, including habits of perception, by his ‘visual apprenticeship’. The source of Art Brut, its true creator, could only be an unusual man, even if that unusualness was expressed in some handicap or damage in the physical, mental or social sense. Decades passed before Dubuffet rejected this ingenuous and rather isolationist concept, arriving at an understanding that the most important thing for an Outsider Artist was and is ‘resistance to and rebellion against conditioning’. (12) And then it all becomes clear as to ‘why Matt Lamb’.

He has something to resist and to rebel against. Recall that quasi-common man, the behavioural cliché taken to the highest degree? Plus the visual apprenticeship usual in his circles. Russian poet and Nobel Prize-winner Boris Pasternak wrote some lines that are most applicable to the ‘Lamb case’: ‘with whom then did his battles pass? With him himself. With him himself.’

Am I perhaps laying it on too thick in describing the funeral director? Was he really so very buttoned up, was he really ‘a man in a case’, to use Chekhov’s phrase? I am describing, perhaps, rather the behavioural and functional model. (What was going on inside can be understood only by turning to his art.) I am sure – and the biographer records several of Lamb’s observations, made by a man of that profession, coming into daily contact with the very borderline of human existence – that he understood the unique nature of his experience on a human level. When we get down to it, his profession brought with it a huge tradition of the study of mankind: the gravedigger in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the characters in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One are but two instances of personificators of the theme. Figures in the funeral business (to take the more modern and politically correct formula) are entrusted with some of the most important reflections on the world and all within it, on everything around us now and in the future, even if they somewhat reduce the weight and meaning of the message with their joking, ironic intonations.

To sum up: of course Lamb was moved, in his transition to the status of Outsider artist, by the energy of resistance and mastery. Fully in keeping with the concept of Outsider Art set out by Dubuffet. But there is also here the positive energy of the messenger, the herald: an awful lot of things would seem to have accumulated inside that ‘buttoned up’ body…

I would like to risk putting forward another suggestion with regard to Lamb’s transition to a new state. That he preserved elements of the childish consciousness. It was these that helped him in the battle ‘with him himself’ (to recall Pasternak’s formula). With him himself – knowing the rules of the game and the behavioural norms required for success in life, if you want to belong to the establishment, if you want to be ‘grown up’. Elements of childish consciousness are usually associated with bright, ‘undimmed’ reactions and emotions, with ‘freshness of feelings’, i.e. with that emotional ingenuousness which is so valued in art of the modern age, rejecting the canon and the explicitly defined aesthetic ideal (I will not deal here with the postmodernist paradigm, where ingenuousness of expression is demeaned through special procedures for parody or reduction).

The category of ‘childishness’ presupposes another unifying quality, a certain unconventionality, a natural rejection of the rules (sometimes through lack of knowledge, sometimes as a sign of protest). Of the rules of ‘educated’, conscious art and of the rules of behaviour in art.

Indeed, a certain directness and ingenuousness of reaction and some kind of ‘anti-conventionality’ are elements of childish thought that also unite representatives of Outsider Art of all kinds: both people with problems in social adaptation, right down to the mentally disturbed, and, as in the case of Lamb, people who are socialised and successful in the highest degree. But there is another aspect which seems, as far as I know, to fall outside the sphere of those who have developed the concept of Outsider Art. This is the attitude of the subjects of artistic communication in Outsider Art (the artists and auditorium for this kind of art) to the created artistic world. Outstanding Russian philosopher and philologist Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the terms ‘artistic external necessity’ and ‘artistic internal necessity’ (13), the latter being analogous to the ‘inner immersion’ put forward in the 1930s by Claude Levi-Strauss. The first presumes a certain distance from the depicted (or written, created by literary means) world – the distance of reflection and thought, of interpretation and assessment, i.e. a view of this world from somewhat apart. Internal necessity lacks any presumption of such a view from apart: the created world is perceived by the subjects of artistic communication as an independent self-controlled reality with which they identify themselves and in which (and through which), subordinating themselves to its magical influence, they start to live. The closest analogy would be the mythological thought of archaic cultures, what Levi-Strauss called ‘pre-writing’ cultures.

So, Lamb’s artistic world is characterised by this kind of internal necessity. He lives within it and lives through it. Recalling that word he used, he ‘concocts’ his own world, based on himself, for himself and for those who believe in him (in Lamb as an individual and as an artist).

To concoct, to mix and knead one’s own world – this has something of the demiurge in it. Indeed, Modernism based itself on this idea (I will not linger on this point, but in the type of his world outlook and his approach to creating new worlds Lamb is of course part of the general Modernist paradigm). But Modernism too, in its seeking to create worlds according to the individual rules of each artist and not according to templates (whether aesthetic standards and ideals or stylistic conventions), has in its turn very deep roots, both archaic and magical. (In this lies a paradox, for Modernism is the most individualistic type of artistic thought, and yet the words of Claude Levi-Strauss can be aptly applied to the Modernist artist: ‘In seeking to be original, the artist comforts himself with an illusion, perhaps a productive one, but the privilege with which he endows himself is absolutely unreal. When he supposes that he is spontaneously expressing himself, creating an original work, he is in fact responding to other creators, whether in the past or present, existing or potential. Whether he knows this or not, no one ever treads the path of creation alone.’ (14)) So in Lamb’s case too, the magical had its place, even if only on the level of process, that is to say in the process of the creation of artistic images. This process is mythologised, ritualised.

Lamb recalled how, from his very first works in paint, he was ignorant of all kinds of rules governing working with the materials: that paint in fact consists of pigment and medium, that the medium could be oil or water-based, that oil and acrylic paints do not mix, and all sorts of things besides… It would seem, however, that even then he saw the very act of mixing paintings, something that he came to understand in the process of working, as something more than a purely technical question. That word ‘concocting’ that he used to describe his then state was used consciously. It contains something that is above all archaic, a symbolic subtext: this concocting, this hand-mixing, this hand-molding, this ‘cooking’ is associated with creation. (This is a version of that chain of creation in so-called primitive societies – claypot-throwing-world creation – noted by many scholars, including Levi-Strauss. And the art of Modernism also turns willingly to this ancient metaphor of art as creation of the world. Paul Klee wrote that the painting is above all an act of genesis and only then an expression of some particular style. Jackson Pollock even turned the likening of the act of art to the act of creation into his subject, mixing earth, sand and rubble in with his paints.)

Other connotations lie within the flow of time, the chronotope. Creation takes place within a certain temporal regime. Lamb made the process of creating his own world into his subject. First through overcoming his lack of skill, or rather through his own technology of creation, an individual technology that is independent of the usual rules of the ordinary artist’s craft. Then, a few years later, Lamb mythologised the material and the technique: he soaked his canvases in waters (which precise waters – those that lap the shores of Ireland or the Florida Keys – being important to the artist), and then, with the aim of creating a kind of underlayer of colour, he kept it submerged in paint, before letting it dry slowly over a long period. The result is ‘a canvas with a past’, with a past that is organic, ‘pre-writing’. Then the artist applied his own image: the canvas is painted and repainted. In the light of this archaic, perhaps biblical metaphorical approach, the container with paint in which he submerged the canvas can be likened to a font. Lamb’s mythologisation and ritualisation of the process of creation is of course purely his own, individual, and yet it echoes some aspects of the art practice of the great names in Abstract Expressionism. Pollock, for instance, sought to paint in the way the American Indians wrote in the sand or their medicine men sprayed images in blood. His drip paintings had not only a technical aspect but a symbolic meaning. Admittedly Pollock and other artists of abstraction’s ‘second coming’ drifted towards the construction of a metaphysical system, the topography of the spiritual. Lamb, it seems, had other interests.

Even so, the analogy is clear. What is the reason for such echoes? Perhaps it lies in the nature of the iconosphere mentioned above, surrounding the world and thus, of course, the artist: the images of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism were literally in the air at the time. There were also important tactical questions: Lamb was not seeking for naturalistic or realistic representations (nor did he have the skills needed for them); he sought not to reflect and depict, to copy or reproduce other mimetic actions; rather he thirsted to create his own world, to mold it as if for the very first time.

In Lamb’s artistic practice the mythologisation and ritualisation of the very process of creation, like the introduction of his own temporal regime or chronotope that is very different to the way time flows in the everyday world, plays a very important role. To my mind, these things serve as channels that unite the real world and the artificial, artistic world. For Lamb, this transition is of central importance. As an artist, he expresses himself in a situation of internal necessity with regard to the world he himself creates (of which I have written above). At the same time he has no skills of realistic representation, or more simply put, no mimetic skills. Yet we are all brought up to observe certain rules of contemplation: the eye is taught to recognize pictorial spaces filled with and organised by objects (although I leave aside the rules of classical perspective, it being sufficient here to refer to that quality of being filled with certain recognisable things). In such cases the transition from our usual space, the everyday space that surrounds us, to the traditional painterly space is simplified. We enter it as if we were entering a room. In fact, the depiction of space in this way ‘enters’ our consciousness quite easily. But what do we do if that ‘entrance’ is closed, if there are none of those routes usual to our eyes, none of that comforting recognisability to the images we see? We have to reprogramme all those cultural (linked with the practice of perceiving ‘correct’ or ‘usual’ art), perceptive, intellectual and psycho-motor assumptions that come into play as part of that process of comprehension and mastery. Rilke described such metamorphoses of situation as taking place ‘behind nature’s back’: this is not gradual recognition but a totally different means of navigation. Lamb, intuitively aware of this, offered us his own channels (routes) of piercing and entrance into this world he had created. Of translation or transference into this world, a world of the energies that consume him, the images of his subconscious. These channels were the ritualisation and mythologisation of the very process of creating the image and the artist’s own attitude to the ritual of time flow, his very own chronotope.

First, however, came more transitional works. It was not by chance that Lamb commenced his art career with still lifes of flowers. In his pre-artistic life as a funeral director he knew everything there was to know about flowers: their form and smell, their symbolic and ritualistic connotations. I think this is why he chose to paint flower still lifes – with their readability and lack of anything unexpected in terms of what is depicted – as a means of carrying us into a different dimension, into his own, created world. Lamb’s bouquets, untiringly created during these first years as an artist, were his own experimental proving ground in which he developed all possible channels of transference and transition.

Some of these represent a borderline state of consciousness, between reality and mirage, dream, what the philosopher Rudolf Arnheim called ‘sensory fading’. Others canvases, however, represent an arrival ‘on the other side’, in that realisation of a created, individual world. These are works in which the energies that consume the artist are transported along the canals of mythologisation and the chronotope of which I spoke. They are transformed into powerful forces of colour- and form-creation. Flowers and vases are brought forth by these forces: they manifest themselves like clumps and lumps of material from the atmosphere, an atmosphere that contains accumulated life-building powers. (Many of these works, regardless of their subject or the objects contained within them, are so-named: Power. The word is of key importance in Lamb’s work, just as the concept of risk is central to the art of Action Painting.)

I see no point of speaking with regard to these paintings of their stylistic concept and all that it is composed of; little will be learned from any thoughts on the evolution of Abstract Expressionism (to which, through their purely stylistic expressions, these works are closest). Here perception clearly has the hand over conception. These canvases are very specific, not in the recognisability of their visual impulses but on the level of the movement of those energies in time and space and the way they are visualised. No metaphysics here: you simply feel the warmth radiating from them with your skin, the palm of your hand.

There is a need to stress the unusual nature of Lamb’s understanding of abstraction as both a pattern of thought and as a means of visualization. To me, this understanding is far from the classical genesis of abstract thought as the construction of a metaphysical system that it was for Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky set out a rigid order of reductions, getting rid of the outer shell of forms and working with their essence. He divided his works into ‘impressions’, ‘improvisations’ and ‘compositions’, depending on how far they were from the impulse and stimulus of nature. At the last stage, that of ‘composition’, the artist had arrived at pure abstraction. No such thing is to be observed in the work of Lamb. His abstraction is one of perception, an almost tactile, physically felt environment, a material from which his world is built. This environment, this universe, is not, moreover, chaotic. We might use the words of Georges Bataille, so often quoted with regard to abstract art: ‘… to assert that the universe does not resemble anything at all and is merely formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.’ (15) This environment is more like something cosmogonic or geological (lava) and thus it has potential structure and is subject to form-creation.

Naturally the ‘state’ of this environment is of a material nature. The artist gives us some idea of that nature by using the expressive potential of his material and his technique: runs of paint across the canvas buckled by the salty sea waters, textural effects and the very way the colour is applied. Here there is conscious use of the specific features of paint and texture’s expressive qualities, notably a grainy, ‘cellular’ feel to form, the interpenetration of the paint layers and those that lie beneath, the unusual transitions from pure and untouched to areas subject to the pressure of outside forces (in the literal sense – mechanical pressure, ‘stamping’ on the paint surface). All this creates an almost tactile sense of the material in making, of Shakespeare’s bubbles of the earth (Macbeth). This sort of abstraction was not merely a stage in Lamb’s work, something he passed through; he returns to it again and again. Moreover, he uses the devices of abstraction to resolve those questions that eternally concern him: questions of energy and power. Indeed, those devices allow him to give visual form to all kinds of states of energy, right down to the energy of explosion! Some groups of works developed the idea of directed, ‘focussed’ streams of energy that have a fixed position in space. Energy materialises in the form of some kind of directed ray, something cosmogonic (in terms of astronomy, what we might call a dark dusty sleeve or the tail of a comet, or such like), and has several dimensions, right down to the archaic-mythological, totemic dimension (Brotherhood of Man). Then came works that gave other outer form to the energies flowing within the cosmos. These appear as assemblies of stars, now like stormy mists, now bright clouds of gas and dust. Here the ‘cosmic’ might prove to be ‘earthly’, of the landscape, and return once more to its natural state. In The Four Seasons Lamb turned to figurative art and, as far as possible, representation. But the paints, the colours, clearly retain the energy of lava, such that what we see would appear to represent not real motifs but the energy of creation! What is important here is the sense of the world’s unity, that it is filled with some all-encompassing, unbroken energy of communication. It is this view of the world that facilitates navigation between the physical and metaphysical, between the cosmos without and the cosmos within.

Lamb articulates the subject of exploration and extraction of sources of energy as found objects. They might be cosmic energies ‘caught’ and reflected in the work, or metaphysical energies, the energetic impulses of pre-creation preserved so far unused. Most importantly they act ‘within the picture’ as within an organism. To characterise these works I would use the term ‘colour-material’. For these energies are all to do with colour as a physical material. They force the colour surface to vibrate, giving birth to almost psychedelic effects, meditative, ‘broadening the consciousness’. Under their centripetal influence the clumps of colour-material twist into oval or elliptical forms with a hidden, ‘presumed’ funnel or spout that can ‘draw in’ the viewer’s attention.

We must recall, however, that which we called the energetic impulses of pre-creation. Lamb’s abstraction clearly also contains certain matrices, traces of the pre-history of consciousness, that have been transported to ‘the other side’, into the independent existence of the artistic world (remember the archaic rituals linked, in Lamb’s works, with the very making of the work; even his canvas has its very own history: treated with sea water, soaked in colour, it is the very essence of a metaphor for the natural processes unfolding within the regime of geological time.) Abstraction is pregnant with elements of organisation and representation, or at least with the potential for representation or narrative. (Lamb constructs such monumental works as Gandhi. There is no narrative here as such: the line of Gandhi’s fate with its dynamics of chance and preordainment, managed by some higher will, is interwoven in the movement of colour forms, apparently spontaneous but in fact provided with the logic of the influence exerted by cosmic forces.) This environment experiences processes of formation; images of a depictive type crystallise within it. Their birth is perhaps linked with a clash between the red hot (the ‘ferment’ for Lamb’s abstraction most frequently appears, as I have said, in the form of red-hot lava) and the cold (the subject of water and damp is set by the very ritual of soaking the canvas in ocean waters and then ‘hardening’ it in the colour mix.)

Lamb’s world thus ‘freezes’ and becomes still, it becomes not only an arena for the action of cosmogonic forces but a place that is lived in, inhabited. This is of course an inner world, extremely intense, in which charges of energy are perpetually breaking through the visual imagery. Note the character who is perpetually found inhabiting Lamb’s world, the girl with plaits literally radiating streams of energy. Another element, the burning tree, the associations here being numerous, from the burning bush of the Bible to aspects of mass culture such as Stephen King’s Firestarter. But in the context of Lamb’s world, it represents the manifestation of power in non-stop regime.

By the end of the 1980s Lamb was creating his own profoundly personal world according to the rules of his own poetics. No longer was this an all-consuming lava-environment, nor made up of separate ‘subjects’ and ‘scenes’, but a universum inhabited by quite specific characters. Lamb’s iconography is consistent: biblical figures (of which more later) and his own Lambian peoples. Peoples because they are not homogenous. Amongst them there are finished characters, which might even be seen as archetypical in the way they are defined and repeated. There are also beings of some uncertain, unfinished kind or tribe, not yet completely modelled, as if they were still in the process of taking final physical shape. Such, for instance, are the beings that appeared from the end of the 1980s, with anthropomorphic heads sitting on bodies that recall all kinds of arthropodae. Other beings seem like direct references to the world of micro-organisms, as if seen through the lens of a microscope. Yes, even those absolutely vital inhabitants of Lamb’s world, the animals and birds, are of course quite fantastical, even if they have not quite lost their ‘genetic link’ with reality. The incredible vitality of this animalist component in Lamb’s world (the ability of his animals and birds and even of his strange mutants such as bird-fish to hold their own with other ‘humanoid’ beings, to enter on a dialogue with them) is another means of declaring that originality, that otherness, that difference from the norm existing ‘on the other side of the canvas’. Perhaps this is a reference to some proto-world, some arcadia in which animals still had a right to a soul, thus of course to some archaic matrices of consciousness. In any case, Lamb achieves a sense of unity in this world that is suffused with a single physical sense, a world in which the equality of people and animals has not yet been broken down. (In his time the great Russian poet Velemir Khlebnikov wrote: ‘I see equestrian freedom and the equality of cows.’) Another fixed component ensuring the unity of this world is ambivalence of scale: remember those characters that recall inhabitants of the micro-world seen through a super-magnifying lens. What we have here is freedom of transition from micro to macro and vice versa.

The unity of Lamb’s world can be felt even when the artist is focussed on ‘individual representatives’ of his population and when he presents them up front , in portrait. Even so we have a sense of the unity behind them – unity of environment, common genesis, a single source of energy. One great Russian writer said of one of his heroes, who had been criticised for being uncharacteristic and untypical, that without him the people would be incomplete. I might say the same here: without any one of its representatives, even the most extravagant, Lamb’s world would be incomplete… This simultaneous sense that Lamb’s heroes are mutually complementary and yet each uniquely irreplaceable remains, whether we are looking at those involved in some little story or narrative or those shown individually, close up.

Time to describe Lamb’s peoples.

I see no point in characterising his biomorphic personages or beings, analogies for inhabitants of the micro-world, or his animals: it is sufficient to see them once to recall them; there is no need of verbal descriptions. Nor, I think, is there any need to think up any ‘negative’ history for them, to see in them the result of cosmic or genetic catastrophes or caprices of evolution. Whatever else, they are in no need of our pity. Their function within Lamb’s world is important and worthy. On the one hand they are simple manifestations of the variety of existence. That, surely, is understood. But there is also another, more complex aspect to their being. All of them, regardless of anything else, are necessary as means of transferring mental states from one world (the outer, real world) to another (that which is created and depicted). The less like material reality these creatures are (and their twisted and gnarled physical shape is a sign of their departure from the norm), the clearer is their belonging to the sphere of mental realities. Their presence forces us, the viewers, to keep asking ourselves – whose realities are they?

Do they belong to one of Lamb’s ‘native’ peoples or are they the fruit, the product of our own consciousness? In any case, communication moves beyond the borders of perception and looks towards an inner vision and the work of the consciousness.

Symbolism turned the deepest levels and altered states of consciousness – dreams, meditations and hypnosis and so on, known from the most ancient of times but then apparently omitted for centuries from the sphere of artistic culture – into the material of art. Nicolas de Stael once described Henri Matisse’s painting The Red Room as ‘space hypnotised by colour’. So it seems to me that Lamb’s beings perform another function, personifying different states of consciousness, enchanting us, captivating us, hypnotising us.

Another matter is that of the physically ‘finished’ bearers of Lamb’s iconography, archetypical in their completeness and characterisation. They do not charm us; rather they enter on a dialogue with the viewer, they form a partnership with him or her. Their actions are comprehensible. Let us take, for instance, the numerous images of characters who might be identified as kings (by analogy with one of the most famous paintings by Russian avant-garde painter Pavel Filonov, The Feast of the Kings). Compositions with these characters (they are always large and imposing, picked out by their colour, like in the works of more classical painters) are manifestations of power and strength. And, it looks to me, of vanity. Lamb has a sense of humour, something not truly permitted to a ‘normal’ representative of Outsider Art. He spent most of his life mixing with great men, with the top dogs, and here he transfers this achingly familiar type into his own personal individual world. Permitting himself all the while a certain critical intonation. ‘Yes,’ he seems to say, ‘they’re imposing, colourful, important, masters of their lives. Rulers of fates? That’s over there, on the other side of the canvas, but here in my world, it is I who rule the fates and thus I show them with all the connotations of a Vanity Fair. And in parallel I present my own clowns and jesters for comparison and as an echo.’ ( Note that one of Lamb’s favourite iconographical tendencies is to include images that take something from the traditional European image of clowns).

Irony is important for Lamb’s world overall. The artist cannot manifest it through drawn out narrative or comedy, for his poetics are very different. He does it, therefore, through hats. And indeed, the inhabitants of his world seem to like all kinds of hats: crowns and bowlers, jesters’ caps and sola topis and so on and so forth. The game of hats in Lamb’s world is a response to an eternal call from the other, real world: its battle of self-love, ambition and competition.

Lamb’s characters usually transfer from one world to the other some kind of communication or message ‘about time and about themselves’, yet many then seem to break away and start to exist on their own. Remember that term, ‘inner necessity’, when the artist transfers not only information and energy through into the other side of the canvas but lives within the reality he has himself created. Of particular importance in this connection are regular features in Lamb’s world such as the characters who listen in on or spy on others. Or those who seem to show the way with a marked gesture, those that we might describe as the ‘agitators’. They are communicating not so much with the viewers, with the auditorium on this side of the canvas, as with Lamb’s own internal depicted world: they live within it and look after it. Quite apart from this we have the native American Indians in their feathered headdresses. They communicate only with themselves, personifying independence, lack of trust and introspection. These are characters from Lamb’s own mythological archive, for Lamb, like Jackson Pollock, John Graham, Barnett Newman and Roy Lichtenstein (American Indian Encounters) before him, saw in the native Americans the embodiment of American spirituality. (Or perhaps it is not just personal, for did not St Francis Xavier see the feathered headdress as a personification of America as a whole)?

What is the nature of Lamb’s universum and what is its population? Who are they, his beings? Are they the first humans (the first beasts, the first birds, the first micro-organisms) that have leaped forth from chaos and are yet inseparable from the earth? Or are they the last humans (beasts, birds, micro-organisms), radically altered in appearance under the influence of some unknown catastrophe?

I think there is not going to be a single and definite answer to such questions. They are probably both of those things. Some of them do indeed seem to contain the drama of having been subjected to outer forces. Yet they contain something else too. These are our own friends and acquaintances, inhabitants of our own world, with all their weaknesses and ambitions: friendly, aggressive, indifferent. But they have been transported to another world and they seek to show their belonging to that world through new means, in accordance with the rules of this new, fantastical existence.

The questions we touched on above – from the artist’s view of the world to professional realisation – are all contained in two large-scale works, Lamb’s paintings in the Peace Chapel of the Parish Church of St Martin in Tünsdorf and in the Austin Hope and Light Center in Chicago .

The religious aspects of Lamb’s work form a complex material. Just as his painting does not accord with traditional religious iconography, so those religious aspects cannot simply be described using the traditional terms of religious faith,. Yet, as Richard Speer noted, ‘The artist’s spirituality, it is clear, is but one part of who he is. He calls it part of his “baggage”, along with his race, age, and place of birth, but make no mistake: Lamb is a traveller, and he keeps his baggage handy.’ (16) Indeed, Lamb’s relationship with spirituality is a developing and very personal process. The artist’s biographer writes: ‘…it is impossible to know his art without knowing his heart, and his heart holds a hybrid of Roman Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Zen, and humanist influences that pour from his brush onto the canvas and from his mouth into nearly every conversation he has.’ (17) I would add to that list the elements of archaic mythological beliefs from what the anthropologists call ‘the non-writing ages’, ages on which the artist – deliberately or by chance – touches.

How can Lamb’s religious credo be defined?

Is it eclecticism, as his biographer writes? I am not sure, for the strength of the union, the reworking of his sources, is too great. Ecumenism? No, the confessional and institutional connotations of this term are too strong. I think there is a more fitting term. By analogy with the history of art of the 1970s (too much of Lamb’s religiosity is artistic) I would call the relationship A New Pluralism. As the art historian writes, ‘a fierce nonalignment characterised the best artists to emerge in the seventies, and that vehement assertion of individuality in itself has vangard implications for a society of mass markets and media.’ De Kooning called this sort of thing ‘a one-man movement’, moreover one that is open to everybody. (18) Lamb’s new spiritual pluralism is undoubtedly also a one-man movement, and also open – more than that, spread wide – to all. Naturally, it has its own keynote view of the world. For Lamb the concept of experience is absolutely vital, experience to be understood as having connotations of inner, spiritual discovery. Neither religiosity nor psychology, nor any other form of learning with its division of labours, provides a precise definition of such experience. An interesting definition of the spiritual (in this context – mystical) is given by Russian philosopher Sergey Khoruzhy: ‘The sphere of mystical experience,’ he states, ‘is made up not so much of rare, even extremely unusual or unique phenomena, as of phenomena that might be called ontologically borderline: phenomena which deal with overcoming borders, emerging beyond the very means of man’s being, the ontological horizon of human existence, i.e. of “outer existence”, available empirical reality.’ (19) This is probably the most important part of Lamb’s understanding of the world: the experience of overcoming set borders. This overcoming, this rejection of the orthodoxy, relates also to his individual cosmogony, his personal religious cosmos, and the question of visual realisation: the transition from abstraction to elements of figurativeness, from the mediated to the speculative, to emotionality and the specific…

It would not be superfluous here to cite Lamb’s religious metaphorics, as described by his biographer after many conversations with the artist: ‘He says he feels the energy of ancient spirits assaulting him, asserting their presences, imparting wisdom without words. These, he believes, are the archetypes for the spirits he findswithin the irregular surfaces of a dipped canvas. The spirits are not only people; they can be animals, plants, or bizarre creatures of unknown genus.’ All this is far from traditional Christian iconography. But in his central belief, Lamb is absolutely rock steady: ‘The angels and the devils are battling for people’s souls, and we have to pick sides.’ As for the specifics of his Christian iconography, this too is far from canonical. ‘In his take on the Holy Trinity, Lamb sees the Father in metaphysical terms, as the totality and mind of cosmos; the Son in moral terms, as the embodiment of kindness, love and peace; and the Holy Spirit in motivational terms, as a kind of universal foreman who directs individuals toward their life’s missions.’

The paintings in the church in Tünsdorf offered the artist an opportunity to carry out his own personal and artistic missions, as he himself understands them.

Little Tünsdorf is situated in the Saar region of Germany , almost on the border with France and Luxembourg . In this quaint village the legend is kept alive of Martin of Tours, a Roma n soldier, who met a poor man trembling from the cold and severed his paludamentum – his cloak – in half to share it with him. That same night Christ appeared to Martin in a dream and returned to him the half of his cloak he had given away. Lamb chose Tünsdorf, now a little German village, as his artistic base in Europe: here, in an old village house, is a sort of museum where children discover art, where people come from afar to attend seminars; here he has painted several local houses, and here his sculptures are displayed. In other words, Lamb’s striking images, visible from afar – in the form of wall paintings or works of sculpture – are the village’s landmarks. And of course there is the Church of St Martin itself (one of the first buildings to be restored by parishioners immediately after the war), in which he painted a large composition on concrete and created, most importantly, the Peace Chapel. This is not just a matter of wall painting, for he combined painting on the wall and large painted collages with sculpture, with masses made from petrified coral sponge, and also – a kind of ready-made – the celebrated Lamb umbrellas.

Contemporary Outsider artists rarely take up religious subjects, for those subjects are, after all, haunted by the memory of strict regulation and formalised iconographical types. There are of course exceptions, such as William Hawkins with his Last Supper and several others. We must always remember that it was the Catholic Church which provided the first shelter for what we might call marginal religious art, for instance in votive pictures, relating in naïve and simple form the travails from which a particular saint might relieve the worshipper. But cases when an Outsider artist has taken upon himself the artistic resolution of a whole religious site, with all the need for structure and the demands that one follow Christian iconography, are extremely rare. This is another sign of Lamb’s very particular place within the system of relations between Outsider and contemporary art, with their attractive and repulsive forces.

Lamb takes on this responsibility and does it with great confidence, not only in terms of his professional skill but also in his ability to translate the message. He is absolutely convinced that there is only one answer to the question put by His Holiness Pope John Paul II: ‘Does art need the Church?’ (20) And that answer is Yes.

The main impression created by the paintings in the Chapel is of unstoppable movement, a movement that not only runs across the wall surfaces but that seems to take over the whole of the space. Moving through the painting are characters on different scales, of different nature, of varying degrees of corporeal embodiment (this word embodiment is absolutely the right one here, since it encompasses not only the opposition of the corporeal and incorporeal but also varying degrees of anthropomorphousness, since absolutely ‘natural’ human beings exist side by side with human-like and completely fantastical beings). Lamb’s painted umbrellas are also associated with movement, even when they stand still, leaning against the walls – they are the very image of movement or rotation, the wave-like ripples of wave-like colours. The sculptural elements too seem to be taking part in the overall movement: those heads made from petrified sponge seem like observers thrusting their heads forth from the passing crowd.

There are many versions of movement in Christian iconography: procession and cavalcade, the very idea of The Way. Each has its own diverse symbolism and set of metaphors. Lamb knows an awful lot about ceremony. As was noted by Michal Ann Carley, ‘Matt Lamb’s visionary sensibility incubated during his years conducting wakes and funerals.’ (21) Yet the moment of procession seems to be of little interest to the artist at this point. Movement here has an impulsive, broken quality, it is what I might call ecstatic. Once upon a time Galileo sought to establish the laws that governed movement of a pendulum, the chandelier in a church, using a ‘physiological clock’, the rhythm of his own beating heart. What we have here is closer to the movement of an artistic clock, a clock that is more emotional, more warm-hearted than any other, the rise and fall of its rhythms determined by an experience which we can attempt perhaps not to analyse but rather to sense, to sympathise with. The ecstatic nature of the movement here seems to me to be a direct expression of the artist’s spiritual state, his childish impatience as he awaits a miracle. What miracle? There is a wide variety of miracles in the Gospels, from the appearance of Christ in the forty days between the Resurrection and the Assumption, to the metaphorical miracle of the loaves and fishes or the miraculous draught of fishes. I nonetheless think that the artist is not making links with specific subjects but rather is interested in the phenomenon of overcoming the empirical world through transformation and metamorphosis. Remember the quotation cited above in this context: ‘The sphere of mystical experience is made up not so much of rare, even extremely unusual or unique phenomena, as of phenomena that might be called ontologically borderline: phenomena which deal with overcoming borders, emerging beyond the very means of man‘s being, the ontological horizon of human existence, i.e. of “outer existence”, available empirical reality.’ Lamb is concerned, it seems, with this very aspect of mystical experience. Including the experience of overcoming corporeal presence per se. Hence his favourite subject, the metamorphosis of the flesh. He gives visual form to this subject in several different ways. One method is the thinning down and gradual dissolution of the image’s physical plane within the colour surface, resulting in the emergence of beings that seem bodiless, mirage-like, ‘people of the moonlight’ as the Russian mystics would have said. Another method is to work with that concept of the anthropomorph, in which fantastical hybrids of man, birds and fish make their appearance. Images that express some kind of dissatisfaction with the staircase of evolution.

In his interesting and polemical work on Lamb, Donald Kuspitt asserts that the artist reveals the absurdity of modern life, ‘explicitly symbolised by the foreground creature that is, absurdly, bird and fish in one’. (22) I dare to differ: Lamb’s religious works (unlike others, in which, as I have sought to show, he is quite capable of irony) are not really driven by the critical impulse. Nor indeed, by a sense of the absurdity of life. On the contrary, his message is one of expectation of – even readiness for – the miracle, of childish impatience. Why childish? Above I looked in detail at one aspect of the category of ‘childishness’ with regard to Lamb. I shall continue here, for it is of key importance for our understanding of the phenomenon that is Matt Lamb. Not at all because, as at least in part an Outsider artist, he by definition represents naivety and childish consciousness and outlook. The matter is far more complex. Ingenuousness and impulsiveness and a reliance on what we might call (to use the language of psychoanalysis) instinctive energies, do of course lie behind Lamb’s art practice. But they are not only qualities of outlook and perception: they are also instruments. Lamb is an informed artist, capable of mastering this ‘toolbox’ (from Wittgenstein’s description of language as ‘a toolbox’). A language that is childishly naïve, defencelessly ingenuous, ‘of another world’ – such is the toolbox used with virtuoso skill by Marc Chagall (an artist admired by Lamb) to provide the motive that allows the existence of his created world, distanced and alienated from the norm. It is within this context that Lamb has need of ‘childishness’. What for? Because it is important that he articulate ingenuousness as something functional. As a means of ensuring transmission of his message. We believe a message when it is well-argued, supplied with evidence, logical and objective. But a message built on very different grounds can be no less convincing and intelligible. A message that is totally subjective and naïve, ‘of another world’. A message that comes from ‘other shores of consciousness’, from children, the mad, people on the margins; if we relate this to the medieval tradition then it is the message that comes from the jesters and wandering actors of the world. In the Russian tradition, it is the message that comes from the men known as God’s fools who, as we know from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, dare to speak the truth to kings, even while kings are forced to listen. In the popular mind, it is a great sin to punish a ‘fool’.

This articulation of the ‘childish’ (the naïve, psychotic, abnormal) has also another level. Lamb is painting here a church, a chapel. The mad of this world (the God’s fools, the poor who gather around the church porch) are, according to ancient tradition, people of God, providing another meaningful link that ties the ‘alien’ nature of Lamb’s world to his religious message. (Running on ahead slightly, we should note here that Lamb often introduces characters in strange dunce’s hats into his paintings, perhaps Magi in their oriental robes and headwear or Tertullian’s kings, or yet again they might be jesters and God’s fools…)

It is thus most certainly not the absurdity of modern life that we see in Lamb’s work here but rather a (possible) attraction towards any kind of miracle that can be set against that life. This is the feeling that I understand as setting the ecstatic or perhaps simply impulsive rhythm, the childishly impatient movement of Lamb’s characters. That attraction serves as a unifier for the crowd. Donald Kuspitt writes of the ‘lonely crowd’ and of ‘the nightmare of the crowd’. To me it seems that this attraction towards and belief in miracles, this expectation of a miracle, is a powerful unifying factor for Lamb’s crowd. Each of the characters is awaiting his or her own miracle. But to look at the whole, the image gives explicit form to a very different phenomenon: the overcoming of barriers and borders.

Who are the characters caught up in this unstoppable movement? In this loop (and remember that Lamb is an inhabitant of Chicago , so we should note the relevancy of word, used locally to describe downtown Chicago ) of life and death and rebirth in new form? What are the barriers and borders that are being overcome? Well before he started work on these wall paintings Lamb had already worked out his own diverse pictorial lexicon , including his religious lexicon. (I dealt with his secular, non-religious lexicon above.) I think it would be an exaggeration to seek any hierarchies or quasi order in that lexicon. His is far from being a canonical art that does not permit (albeit unsuccessfully) any splitting or disintegration of meanings. As M. Dvorzak wrote: ‘In the medieval view of the world nothing in the universum is without significance, since any object, even the tiniest, exists in relation with the whole ruling wisdom of the divine world order.’ (23) No, of course there is no such hierarchical structure in the works of Lamb. His universum is inhabited by hosts of characters of varied significance without any one of which, as I noted above, Lamb’s world would be incomplete. But in his church wall paintings another, new, even more rare link appears. The characters here are linked by what is, in essence, by some kind of personal link, what seems like a family tie. Yet there is no familiarity: Lamb pays all necessary respect and homage to the biblical characters. Even so, these are still images from his inner circle, images with which he spends his life, and thus he has established his own means of personal communication with them. They cannot but inhabit his church wall paintings, which are an unparalleled realisation of his full and final artistic and personal statement.

Those key images within his pictorial lexicon are naturally impressive. They seem like visual archetypes, endowed with great metaphorical potential. Nearly all of them take part in the action; some have been specially adapted to more traditional iconographical types and to the specific space of the chapel (groups of angels, processions of holy men and women). But – as I have said – the religious images authored by Lamb, visualised according to Lamb, accompany the artist wherever he goes. ‘The Wise Man’, ‘The Nativity’, ‘The Divine Revelation’, ‘The Wedding’ and so on. The artist apparently rejects the very idea that anything is simply apocryphal. In any case, Gospels parables are treated with dismaying independence. Such, for instance, is Lamb’s interpretation of ‘The Wedding’: ‘Water becomes wine as a new promise, a new spring time, unfolds as a proud mother’s request. A new covenant is foretold, an umbrella unfurls to shelter a larger audience, and the Spirit of God continues to be revealed.’ (24) That of course is text, whereas Lamb’s visualisation is considerably more extravagant: absolute freedom in creation of form, allowing the combination of more or less naturalistic moments with anthromorphs and even biomorphs, a provocative daringness in the details, with yellow and red hair, red hats and green hoods; a clash of old physical symbols (the chalice) with utterly unexpected (in terms of the original story) but totally necessary (in terms of Lamb’s individual mythology) realities (umbrellas). Alongside traditional biblical characters, however wilfully treated, these wall paintings contain far from canonical images, notable those bird-characters that represent Lamb’s ‘people’ as described above.

At this point it would be appropriate to look at the question of visualisation itself.

Lamb’s visual poetics can be described using a metaphorical system of layers or horizons. In describing the Outsider artist authors usually articulate some general ‘collective’ qualities, common to the whole of this type of artistic thought. Certain mental registers that can be described using the terms of structural anthropology and psychoanalysis. Claude Levi-Strauss set out the basis of these procedures in The Way of the Masks, and in The Savage Mind he extended the threads that link the art of so-called ‘primitive’ communities with contemporary art, including that which has come to be called Outsider Art. (Levi-Strauss cautioned against seeing the superiority of professional art over all other forms of Outsider Art as something that lies in the presence of codes, but to this day many authors continue to divide the two different kinds of art practice from just such a position. The professional artist, they say, works with cultural codes, perhaps at the cost of his own self, while the Outsider artist simply projects his limited number of self-predicates onto the artistic space. Levi-Strauss demonstrated that there was a diverse and complex system of codes inherent in the culture of tribes along the northern shore of the Pacific Ocean .)

Certain registers that are collective and common to the whole type of thinking, certain mental matrices, do indeed exist (although to me it seems that the extreme articulation of the psyche, and particularly the misuse of the techniques and lexicon of psychoanalysis in the study of the Outsider artist as an artistic phenomenon, is most unproductive). There are also certain matrices of visual representation: take, for instance, the widespread principle of the horror vacui, elements of the so-called ‘corporeal vision’, the use of cryptic texts, simultaneous intensity and inwardness, and so on. Does this horizon – these common aspects of form creation – have any relevance to Lamb’s work? Of course it does, since he is in some way linked with this very kind of artistic thought. Another horizon is also linked to common mental practices, that to which I tried to give metaphorical form as the concepts of the noosphere and the more focused iconosphere: this lies in the presence of certain visual archetypes floating in the air (cosmos) of contemporary civilisation. These are represented above all, it seems to me, by images of classical Modernism – Picasso, Miró, Dubuffet, Chagall and a few others. Why are these particular images so widespread? Not only, I think, thanks to mass reproduction and distribution. With their clear openness and demiurgic permissiveness (‘I do not create according to any set likenesses but rather just as I please’) these images satisfy some hidden creative hopes that lie within the mass consciousness (‘I can do that too’). Does this horizon have any relevance to Lamb? It clearly does, particularly with regard to the period when his art was still taking shape. Moreover, he sometimes make quite transparent hints in the direction of his predecessors: here his characters pout their lips just like Chagall’s canonical images of lovers; here they form a silhouette hieroglyphic shape, as in Picasso’s late works; here he makes use of a compositional device, repetition or cloning, as in the works of Andy Warhol. The very openness and transparency of these hints seem to say: ‘I see and understand. But as Courbet once said, I take off my hat and pass on by: I am someone different.’ (Later, as he developed artistically, conventional Modernist imagery seemed to become focused and made relevant and actual at the cost of Neo-Expressionist imagery. Lamb began work during the height of Neo-Expressionism and the careers of George Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Although I would not see this as direct contacts and borrowings – Lamb’s interests are focused again on a certain ‘common component’ with Neo-Expressionism, on the overall rules of its language. That which hangs ‘in the air’.)

The further he advanced, however, the more that ‘collective’ element, the conventional matrices, ceased to have effect. Lamb emerged onto his own personal horizon, his own individual level. Now his own unique experience, his own life and his inner soul, began to take effect, and at this stage he positioned himself at the cusp of relations between Outsider Art and contemporary art. Now he was roused to create his own individual visual poetics.

Thus it was that Lamb’s own archetypes came into being, accumulations not only of his own secrets of form creation, but also his own profoundly personal mythology. We might take as an example an image characteristic of the paintings at Tünsdorf, such as the ‘ Archangel ’, a strange, whirlwind-like being. Whirlwind like, tornado-like, a torso, a body: it seems to twist tightly in space. The head is mirage-like, non-corporeal: it has the aureole of certain emissions of force – energetic? metaphysical? – the throbbing haze of fantastical colours. What stands behind this image? Some inexplicably necessary (to Lamb) emission of internal energies that eats away inside him? – Of course. The image of a sort of transcendental force that can punish and also give hope? The image of the transmission of God’s message, of immaterial movement through time and space (the Archangel as God’s messenger)? Such an interpretation too is quite apt. Which is why the author’s poetics are so individual, in that they translate not some formalised, conventional, accepted system of symbols and readings, but are open on the contrary to numerous interpretations, counting on the active presence of the viewer.

One could go on forever classifying the iconography of Lamb’s images. It is more important, however, to understand the nature of the miracle – in addition to the miracles set out in the Gospels – that awaits these characters. Lamb gives us no concrete answers of course. It is enough that he is steadfast in setting out his main coordinates: Good vanquishes Evil; Father, Mother, Son and Spirit unite in celebration of their endless victory. Meanwhile he allows himself some independence in his treatment of subjects. Christ wears a biting yellow robe that seems like the yellow shirt of one of Earth’s victors, the Tour de France Cycling Champion Lance Armstrong, while the charity and love of mankind that are inherent in the Trinity are visualised as an umbrella. Sheltered below it is all of existence, only Beelzebub deprived of its protection.

The paintings in the Austin Hope and Light Center are similarly representative of this New Pluralism, this one-man movement, open to all, as we have termed Lamb’s religious outlook, and of the current state of his artistic thought.

Thanks to the way space is organised in the church, the various artefacts had to be scattered through different areas. Thus the painting lacks the visual integrity which Lamb achieved in the Church of St Martin . On the other hand, to me it seems that this work represents Lamb’s fullest realisation, his Gestalt. The painting forms, the sculptural objects – heads of observers, Lamb’s painted umbrellas – all have a potential for movement, for rotation, for more complex manipulations, not just playful but also symbolic. (As we have already noted, the umbrella is one of Lamb’s favourite motifs. He uses it as an object, a ready-made, painting it or providing it with a textual message. After 9/11 the artist developed a multi-stage programme, a symbolic action drawn out over a long period of time, the root of which is the umbrella. Lamb laid its foundations by gathering together children who had lost loved ones during the terrorist act of 9/11 and giving each of them an umbrella and the simplest of materials, paints and brushes and such like. He suggested that they paint the umbrellas’ outer surfaces, allowing them to choose their own themes, whatever they loved most or found most interesting. On the inner surface of the umbrellas he suggested that they stick letters written to those they had lost. Thus for Lamb the umbrella is a deeply symbolic form. ‘I love the symbolism of the umbrella. If it is pouring down rain and you are wearing your best suit, and somebody offers you a place underneath a big oversized umbrella, you are not going to refuse just because the person is an Irishman, a Jew or a Latino.’ And from this banal symbol was born a more general metaphor of the umbrella as heavenly protection, a symbol of unification and salvation. Lamb has a great gift in being able to catch people up and sweep them along with him: the children and the artist painted their umbrellas and went forth onto the streets of Chicago to demonstrate, to parade, in defence of peace. A socio-artistic action aimed directly at taking the message out unto the world. I don’t know if Lamb had in mind here the celebrated actions of Joseph Beuys in the early 1970s, such as Sweep Out the Rubbish. He possibly knew nothing of them, but the vector of his art activity runs in the same direction, towards extreme simplification of the signifier component, to everyday, ‘uncoded’ reality. ‘Lamb Umbrellas for Peace’ took root and spread around the world, both with and without Lamb’s own participation. But the main component of the Gestalt lay in the participants, the children. I myself saw how African Americans, parishioners of the Austin Hope and Light Center , related the subjects of Lamb’s religious painting to children. Surprisingly, these children were able to orient themselves within his complex pictorial lexicon without too much trouble. Most importantly, they felt sympathy for what was depicted, they felt as though they themselves were part of it. More than half a century ago Otto Demus noted that ‘In Byzantium there was no distance between the viewer and the image, since the holy space of the image was open to the viewer and the image in its turn gave shape to the space in which the viewer moved. The viewer was rather a “participant” than a “viewer”.’ (25) In the Austin Hope and Light Center I seemed to feel even more ancient cultural impulses – mystery, dance – given new relevance by Nietzsche in his philosophy of corporeality. (Nietzsche suggested that one think in terms of scenes, i.e. to think without drawing on the concepts of classical philosophy, and to turn not to theory but to ‘the staging of a profound experience of the body’.) For the children and their parents began to dance and sing, united by the energy of Gospel.

The feeling was quite amazing: depicted movement (as in the paintings in the Church of St Martin, Lamb’s painted images in the Austin Hope and Light Center are filled with unstoppable, spontaneous movement) entered on a relationship with the real movement. And the relationship was one of partnership, the characters in the painting – all of them, not just those recognisable in terms of their iconography, not just those that are more or less traditional, but even the absolutely fantastical and biomorphous characters – moving in some mysterious dance, along with the parishioners, dancing women and children in colourful clothes, and the young Reverend in his piercingly violet suit. Moreover, there was a sense that space itself – not just the ‘stage’ in the traditional sense, but the whole of the space – was in partnership with the dancers. There was a unity of space and time as a form of movement. That quality so consistently sought by contemporary art as it seeks to move away from what has gone before, from set formats and the shackles of traditional cultural signs. (Contemporary cultural studies set out two hypostases of culture and thus two forms of mankind’s existence within the world. This forms a kind of opposition: structure and format, word and sign, finiteness and limitation on the one hand, and on the other the everyday, pre-word, unstructured, inner rhythm of existence, of the impossibility of completion. For all the approximate nature of these poles of opposition, in contemporary art – and on the sharp edge of experimentation stand performance, contemporary dance and plastic theatre – we can clearly see a kind of nostalgia for the primordial and pre-word, an attraction towards the everyday, the gestures which break down aesthetic canons. In the language of cultural studies, such movement is described as the replacement of classical narrative by ‘singular narrative’ (‘Not death, not flight, but to die and to fly’). This trend in artistic thought has particular interest in worlds in which the traditional cultural sign has been ‘discredited’, in which it has ‘gone mad’ or ‘turned childish’. The current peak of interest in Outsider Art manifested in the very latest contemporary art should be seen as falling within the context of this movement.)

And so, Lamb has found worthy counter-agents. In the space of his painting children do not so much ‘read’, ‘decode’ and ‘hear’ (although this working of cultural signs cannot but be present, for otherwise all cultural communication would be broken off) but rather, to a much greater degree, they respond to his message directly and emotionally, in corporeal manner. They express themselves and their belief (Gospel being a reflection of the Christian salvation and hope) through song, dance, gesture and movement. Gospel itself, as a form of musical behaviour, is unmatched in its ability to transmit Lamb’s message, that which I have dared to call a New Pluralism: that one-man movement, open to everybody. Here the Gospel texts and the understanding (derived from African culture) of music as a powerful instrument of psychological interaction, as a complex of psycho-physiological practices that create a peculiarly emotional mood, from calm to ecstasy, are truly woven into one. (As musicologists say, structural antiphony, the two-sided interaction so often used in African and Afro-American music, places the individual in perpetual dialogue with his society, even while preserving both the voice of the individual as a separate being and the commonalities of group members.) This is what Lamb wants, this artist with his powerful individual voice, this ‘last preacher’: a mobile, trusting, openly emotional auditorium, with which he has an almost physical emotional link. Which he covers with the umbrella of his art to protect it from all dangers, with the umbrella of hope…

In Matt Lamb’s studio I remember a particular work that seemed to me to say more about the artist and the man than any written biographies or interpretations. Pages from Lamb’s Diary is a work on canvas depicting an opening from a desk diary: seven squares, one for each day of the week. It is a painting, with only one of the squares, I think, a collage, a piece cut out from a newspaper, although the artist has passed his brush over that too. My point lies in this. Each square is tinted: Lamb’s week consists of seven bright flashes of colour, seven different coloured experiences! His life, naturally, has everything – drama and illness and everyday routine. But, it seems, there are no dim, colourless days. Such is the enviable outlook that the artist has bred in himself. Such is the autobiography of the self-made man that bred the artist in himself.

Alexander Borovsky

Footnotes

1 All quotations from the artist are cited from his biography: Richard Speer, Matt Lamb: The Art of Success, Hoboken , NJ : John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2005.

2 There is a whole body of literature on the contradictions in this term and its adequacy as a means of describing the phenomenon. See e.g. Annie Carlano, ‘Introduction’, in: Vernacular Visionaries. International Outsider Art, New Haven : The Museum of International Folk Art and Yale University , 2003). There are quite direct contradictions. In the USA, for instance, the term is considerably more flexible and takes in a much wider spectrum of material, including not only traditional naïve and self-taught artists, but also folk art, the work of all kinds of ethnic groups, the institutionalized and even children, while in Europe Outsider Art is considered to be more idiosyncratic, even intense and obsessive, made by peоple unaware of or indifferent to what are considered the ‘norm’ of artistic and even social standards. Corlano and other scholars such as John Beardsley and Susan Brown McGreevy, writing in Vernacular Visionaries, which provides surely the fullest theoretical coverage of any publication in recent years, are united in seeing the term, for all their caveats, as the most conventionally accepted.

3 Cited in Filosofiya naivnosti [The Philosophy of Naivety], compiled by A. Migunov, Moscow : Moscow University Publishers, 2001, p. 36.

4 J. Derrida, De la Grammatologie. Collection Critique , Paris: Minuit, 1967; cited from Russian translation, O grammatologii, Moscow , 2000, p. 226.

5 Annie Carlano, Op. cit., p. 2.

6 To put it more simply, the stimulus was provided by a doctor’s dramatic prognosis of approaching death as a result of a veritable bouquet of illnesses. In almost mystical manner the doctor’s death sentence was not confirmed and Lamb, in no less mystical manner, felt a need for painting in his life. He gradually gave up his business affairs – in an irony of fate this included, among others, a funeral business, with one of the largest family managed funeral home groups in the Midwest – and made dramatic changes in his life.

7 See Vernacular Visonaries, Op. cit., p.10.

8 Randy Cannady, ‘Man-Child in The Promised Land’, The New York Times, 19 February 2006.

9 Cited in Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut. The Origins of Outsider Art, Paris : Flammarion, 2006, p. 164.

10 Annie Carlano, Op. cit., p. 2.

11 See Richard Speer, Op. cit., p. 218.

12 Cited in Lucien Peiry, Op. cit., p. 160.

13 Cited in Ontologiya iskusstva [Onthology of Art], an anthology of scholarly essays, Orenburg , 2006, p. 218.

14 Cited in Klod Levi-Stross. Put masok [Claude Levi-Strauss. The Way of the Masks], Moscow : Respublika, 2000, p. 97.

15 Cited in M. Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom. Discipline, Guggenheim Museum , New York , 1996, p. 212.

16 See Richard Speer, Op. cit., p. 139.

17 Ibid.

18 Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940. Strategies of Being, 2 nd edn., London : Laurence King, 2000, p. 381.

19 Cited in Kseniya Bogemskaya, Naivnoe iskusstvo. Pavel Leonov [Naïve Art. Pavel Leonov], St Petersburg : DB, 2005, p. 115.

20 Cited in: Lamb. Peace, Tolerance, Understanding, Hope and Love, Tünsdorf: Smkt University Press, 2002, p. 202.

21 Ibid., p. 48

22 Donald Kuspitt, ‘Madness and Matt Lamb’, in: Lamb. Peace, Tolerance…, Op. cit., p. 20.

23 M . Dvorzak, Istoriya iskusstva kak istoriya dukha [The History of Art as the History of the Soul], St Petersburg , 2001, p. 87.

24 Cited in Matt Lamb. Millennium Art Exhibition, Westminster Cathedral, London , 2000.

25 Otto Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, London , 1948, quoted from Russian translation, Mozaiki Vizantiyskikh khramov, Moscow , 2001, p. 18.