The Prisoner of Passage

I've been reading as much as I can about the artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario.  There is a collection of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and bits a pieces of information about him as an artist who lived in an asylum in Brazil for much of his artistic production.  The author Eduardo Galeano wrote about Bispo do Rosario in his book Mirrors: 

Arthur Bispo do Rosario was black and poor, a sailor, a boxer, and, on god's account, an artist. He lived in the Rio de Janeiro insane assylum. There, seven blue angels delivered an order from the diving: God wants an inventory taken of the world. 

The mission was monumental. Arthur worked day and night, every day, every night, until the winter of 1989 when, still immersed in the task, death took him by the hair and carried him off. 

The inventory, incomplete, consisted of scrap metal, broken glass, bald brooms, walked-through sneakers, emptied bottles, slept in sheets, road-weary wheels, sea-worn sails, defeated flags, well-thumbed letters, forgotten words, and fallen rain. 

Arthur worked with garbage, because all garbage is life lived and from garbage comes everything the world is or has ever been. Nothing intact deserved a listing. Things intact die without ever being born. Life only pulsates in what bears scars.

Eduardo Galeano, "Mirrors"

As someone who uses a lot of different materials and makes a lot of different works, Bispo do Rosario is a pretty interesting example of how one can make a large amount of work.  I often times feel that contemporary art (which, of course, ABdR is not working within) encourages a strict studio practice in which artists a singularly directed with one body of work until they move on to the next.  Through graduate studies, I certainly understood the benefit of this in the sense that I was able to really contemplate what the meaning of the work I was making, with the help of my faculty mentors, in a way that is really only possible with intensive thought and practice with a single body of work.  What I am referring to, in terms of a body of work, is a group of works that are aligned in terms of content, visual aesthetic, materials.  

What works best for my studio practice now, however, is to push myself in materials and not restrict myself to a single body of work.  I'm sure it puts me in a awkward place for commercial galleries and is not recommended in terms of professional development.  And like Bispo do Rosario,  I think it is just a matter of looking at the broader spectrum of my work to see how the many "bodies of work" link together in terms of meaning, content, and even visual aesthetics.  While some might propose that my multi-faceted trajectory doesn't allow me to fully develop one body of work to being masterful, I say that the bigger picture is, in fact, working towards a sort of total understanding of the meaning behind my studio practice, work, and ideas.  

ABdR also brings up the contemporary concepts of folk art, outsider art, and other commercial terms for what it is that he does.  I'll get to that in the next post, but for now, here is a few of his works (along with some questionable music in the background).  On Vimeo you can see a clip from an older documentary made about him called The Prisoner of Passage.   I've also got a number of images of his on my pinterest pinboard titled 'Nomadic Reverie', some of which are more striking than what you could find with a image search of his name, so check those out as well.