Why Do I Do It?
I am primarily concerned with exploring the unconscious in that I print, draw and sculpt to document visions, hallucinations, figments, apparitions and animist spirituality. Because of my 30 year long association with madness I try and observe that part of the unconscious that spills over to the conscious.
The tradition for this artwork in the past has been called Outsider Art or Art Brut.
I first saw other Art Brut objects in 1984 in Sydney and realised that there were other people doing the same kind of work.
Materials that I use include: Etching paper, canvas, board and wood, Chinese inks, acrylic and gouache, texters, felt tip including Artline pens, varnish, mouslin cloth, faber castel and other pencils, metal, solder, scrap timber, draftsman's patterns, oxides, nuts, bolts, fulcrums and found objects of importance.
My artistic output over the last twenty-five years has had one point and that has been to document the landscape of psychosis and the unconscious. It involves an intuitive invention of cultural anthropology to make some order of the plethora of hallucinations, visions, spirits, ghosts, apparitions, and creatures, which populate this, altered perspective. I have learned my trade myself; patterns, designs and artifacts I have observed in all worlds go to form a network of technique. In this way my art is pragmatic and pluralist. Never the less, particular interest is taken with regard to the structural construction of my mad world as there seems to lie a basic truth about what should be drawn and how. It is interesting to consider the hallucination. It comes from the unconscious world and has truth buried in the language of that world. It has an emotional, almost occult impact and everything is seen in an instant. This is the meaning of a great deal of my art – to be a documenter and to some degree a translator of these strange occurrences. Not withstanding it is my emotional and intellectual intrigue and I hope to do the best with it I can.
The single most unbroken line has been my artist’s books. Some are constructed from the ground – others are occupied books – I will take some aspect of the unconscious and explore it until it is finalized. My single drawings don’t have this timeline and process but tend to be emotional and intellectual moments, which are grasped and known immediately.
I usually exhibit as an “outsider” artist. There were years I didn’t involve myself with popular culture and lived in quite an isolated fashion, however at last you give in to newspapers and television. That is not to say that these things do not possess the psychotic, they do but now my work is more about the shared consciousness of the unconscious rather than a highly personalized idiocentric journey. To a degree because of this my work has been accepted by society but it still contains that germ of ‘otherness’, which you can only get from an altered state.
Anthony Mannix
Photography: Adam Hollingworth
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