Groundwaters is the first exhibition in Malta to investigate an artistic phenomenon that generally plays second fiddle to the conventional art. Joseph Agius talks to the exhibition’s curator, GABRIEL ZAMMIT, about the underlying concepts of the exhibition.

JA: From where did the idea of Groundwaters originate?

GZ: The exhibition was inspired by a book by Charles Russell, an American academic who wrote a landmark publication, a study of outsider art in America and Europe over the last 100 years. He called this book Groundwaters; his final conclusion was that the freedom of these artists plunges us into the groundwaters of our collective subconscious. It was this thread that I picked up and developed in a Maltese context.

I reached out to Russell, and he wrote a foreword for the catalogue; thus, this exhibition places itself in dialogue with Russell’s research and a wider way of looking at outsider art in Malta. Also, the idea of groundwaters becomes a resonant metaphor specifically within the Maltese context. In Malta there are two groundwaters, there is the actual physical aquifer of water out of which we used to pump 40 per cent of our drinking water, besides water used for industry.

Behind Black Horse (2022) by Emma Attard

There is also our mythological past to be considered. The reference to underground water happens time and time again. For example, the river Styx in the underworld separated the upper world from the netherworld.

The idea of groundwaters dialogues with this physical geological past, with the psychological make-up and with the mythological past as well. The metaphor brings them all together in layers.

JA: When the term ‘outsider art’ is mentioned, the first artist that comes to mind is Henri Rousseau, derided by most of the art aficionados of his time for producing naïve paintings, but celebrated by giants like Pablo Picasso. What really blurs the lines between what is outsider and what is generally categorised as fine art?

GZ: The term outsider art has become a conceptual conflict – the whole definition of outsider art is art that is outside any category and outside the social and cultural centres of normality. In Rousseau’s case, it was the naivety of his style, it was an aesthetic definition. Another way of defining outsider art is art that is stylistically free, does not belong to any other movement and doesn’t conform to any aesthetic.

Temptation 1 (2022) by Salvina Muscat

There is still another way to define it by looking at its transformative intent. Vernacular objects such as ex voto artefacts and ritual African fetish dolls belong to this latter category. Through Groundwaters, we attempt a broad definition of outsider art, one that grapples with this conceptual slippage at the centre of the term itself.

JA: Talking about Picasso, and maybe Gauguin, as their artistic output developed, they became increasingly inspired by African and Oceanic art. Should we consider the original masters, hailing from the African continent and Oceania, many of whom carved, painted and etched what had been propagated through generations, as the real innovators?

GZ: Human beings have always been crea­ting art objects, the first of which were crea­ted in service to ritual, to religion and to magic. That logic got subsequently rarefied and stratified, the aesthetic dimension started to be placed first. As history of art took off and people started to look at different ways of thinking about aesthetics, they started to go back to their roots. Artists started to look at original sources, the more primitive ways of producing aesthetic objects. 

In outsider art, there is this kind of originality that goes back to something that is simple, that doesn’t cohere to a defined aesthetic, that doesn’t belong to a self-conscious way of producing art. This taps into a more subterranean originality, a more fundamental connection to human beings. This is where the idea of Groundwaters comes in. This kind of complete stylistic freedom and this total aesthetic originality allows a type of artmaking that taps into the groundwaters of who we are as human beings. Groundwaters here is a metaphor for the subconscious for the kind of interiority of who we are as a culture and as a society.

An Amulet for Vision by William Driscoll

JA: Jean Dubuffet’s coining of the term ‘Art Brut’ gave outsider art a more defined structure to include graffiti, the work of people suffering mental disorders, primitive artists with no academic instruction, and children. Do you feel that academia deprives art of its spontaneity through the ‘educated’ mind? Does this mean that what we call high art is less truthful, in some sense less artistic, as it doesn’t access what lurks in the depth of the artist’s soul through an exercise of selective filtering?

GZ: There are two ways of looking at this. Dubuffet and his definition of Art Brut was a pushing pack against what he called cultural art. In his eyes, cultural art was enthralled by mimesis and by the unfreedom of the individual within society. Premeditation and this thought-out nature of producing art did stymie genuine creativity, whereas Art Brut, which was being produced by people with mental illness, etc, had this freedom because it got out of this determined way of thinking.

However, there is another school of thought that maintains that all artists are outsiders because, by definition, the moment of creativity and genius is the moment when one jumps out of the borders of constrained thought and convention, whether this comes from a place of premeditation, of artistic practice, or whether it comes from a condition of suffering through some mental ailment that allows the doors of your perception to be cleared or, alternatively, whether it comes from being untrained and producing objects in a vernacular tradition which somehow pick up echoes of the culture that you’re living in.

It’s difficult to say whether any different type of artmaking closes down the possibility of genuine creativity. I find myself on the fence about this question.

The idea of groundwaters dialogues with this physical geological past, with the psychological make-up and with the mythological past as well- Gabriel Zammit

JA: The artists chosen for Groundwaters are very diverse. I believe two of them have suffered some terrible ordeal while others maybe have ditched an accepted academic way of doing art through a conscious decision. I’m thinking of Joe Vassallo as one belonging to the latter category. I’ve known Joe for about 30 years, and he strikes me as culturally educated as he has visited countless museums and met the most amazing of people from the art world and the cultural one in general. What categorises his work as outsider?

GZ: I think all of the artists in the exhibition are cultured in one way or another. William Driscoll speaks 14 languages; he is absorbed in the study of Sanskrit and mysticism. Emma Johnson has a practice as a playwright. Anonymous writes poetry and produces other types of art which engage with the wider sphere, Emma Attard, who uses her artwork to deal with various internal and external traumas, studied for a fine arts degree. Adrian Camilleri is an anthropologist and a sound artist. So, many of the artists in Groundwaters have different creative outputs. However, each one of them has a side to their creativity which enables them to be free.

Self-Portrait by Joe Vassallo. Photo: Michaele Zammit

For example, Joe Vassallo has a fine-art practice, he has collaborated in exhibitions all over the world. He is on the inside of the cultural world in that respect. But he’s constantly scribbling and doodling, his mind going off in different directions. He’s constantly putting things together, there is this quasi-obsessive nature about the way he creates. The objects in the show are not his thought–out artworks – they are boxes full of scribbles on the back of business cards, his self-portrait which is an old type of drawer filled with bits and bops that he’s been collecting since the 1970s.

The Emma Johnson works I chose have nothing to do with her practice as a playwright. It’s all about the struggle and an attempt to build a world or alternative home in response to certain conditions in her life. Adrian produces sound and video has this parallel practice of painting and drawing where he tries to externalise his feelings and manifest his way of dealing with the world. This might sound almost artistic but it’s different – it is art as ritual, art as process, art as a tool to access something more fundamental that is transformative. What I’ve brought together here, what makes the artists who also have an alternative artistic practice relevant, is that the work chosen is art as transformation, art not as a tool for art’s sake but one for a deeper kind of need.

A Head is a House (2015) by Emma Johnson

JA: Do you think that the Malta art-loving public is mature enough to actually purchase artwork which reflects such deep-seated personal pain as is the case of most work in this exhibition? Are we ready to invite depictions of personal tragedy, not imagined ones, into our living rooms?

GZ: I would hesitate to comment on the maturity of the art-buying community in Malta. The reason I chose these pieces is not because of the pain they contain but because of the transfiguration of that pain into something else, a fragment of hope or Utopia. For example, even though Emma Attard’s drawings are explicit and contain that kind of gut punch that places us within arm’s reach of an understanding of her trauma, which verges on the voyeuristic and the fetishist, her work presents hope, her struggle to move from this position of pain into an altered one of hope. It would be horrible if people were to purchase her work to satisfy a fetishist need to look on people’s trauma.

JA:  The Groundwaters exhibition relates to contemporary artists in the genre. Do you feel that we have lost a lot of Maltese outsider art, at least in the 20th century?

GZ: There has never been research done on outsider art in Malta. Undoubtedly, there have been and still are individuals who would be making art outside of the mainstream; vernacular artists, people making things in their garage without academic training. In our history, I’m sure that there must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people who made their art, lived, died and everything went off into a skip. I think there is a lot of stuff that is happening outside of the mainstream that gets lost. I live in hope that the situation is remedied – research should be done in this field. I hope that this exhibition will be helpful in this respect.

Untitled by Anonymous

My hope is that by placing these works into a curatorial concept which looks at them in terms of transformation rather than in terms sheer expression of trauma, something more fundamental comes out of them. We can move beyond the gut punch of the trauma and look at them as almost magical objects, like the ex voto paintings which depict trauma as well, in the ships sinking and bodies bleeding on the ground. However, the paintings themselves are prayers in material form, they are exercises in sensitivity, there’s hope at heart.

Groundwaters, curated by Gabriel Zammit and hosted by Valletta Contemporary, Valletta, is on until November 12. Consult the gallery’s Facebook page for opening hours.