Gerry’s Pompeii and the Lure of Obscure Prolificacy
Outsider Art and Bear Shaped Honey and Queen Maeve
First, just a quick note first to say that the next edition of Continuous Music will take place on Wednesday 19th February from 19:00-22:00 at St Giles Cripplegate. Put it in your diary.
Queen Maeve a song by me inspired by the Gerry Dalton statue of the same name. Performed by Alex Lyon, Duncan McTaggart, Phoebe Harty, Lileth Chinn & Seth Bye at a Verry Gerry Christmas 2024.
Bear Shaped Honey Bottles
My current favourite Wikipedia page is the “List of Outsider Artists”. Every blue link leads to a new world.
I first read about Henry Darger in Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and I’ve since considered him the model for the outsider artist. He was ridiculously prolific and made collages and tracings and manuscripts. It is up for debate whether he considered what he made to be art. Laing goes into the debate over whether Darger’s work is just a manifestation of his mental illness and whether that has any baring over whether it’s art. Darger never showed his art to anyone it was just discovered by his landlord Nathan Lerner shortly before Darger’s death. Yes, that’s right THE Nathan Lerner who invented the honey bottle shaped like a bear. If Darger’s manuscripts hadn’t been discovered by someone with an idea of their artistic value then I reckon they’d have just thrown it all away. Most landlords aren’t compassionate enough to check whether their reclusive tenants might have been making valuable art. For every discovered Henry Darger I reckon there are thousands of prolific artists whose art is never shared.
Henry Darger was the mould for Vitriol Dease, the fictional artist in the film Velvet Buzzsaw in which the paintings of a reclusive old man are discovered in his flat after his death. The paintings then come to life and murder everyone that profits from them but John Malkovich gets away because he’s drawing lines in the sand. Through a series of gruesome deaths, the film is telling you: that if you try and exploit art for money then it will kill you but if you do it for its own sake then you’ll survive.
A Verry Gerry Christmas
I first learnt about Gerry Dalton last year when I played the saxophone with Gentle Stranger for the Verry Gerry Christmas in 2023. Rather than paraphrasing, you can read about Gerry here. Sasha Galitzine (who has done so much to ensure that Gerry’s Pompeii continues to exist and affect the world) had asked Gentle Stranger to write a song in response to one of the statues and they chose Fish Boy so along the canal and down Hormead Road we played this ode to Fish Boy. It felt very important and it felt like a six-piece band and a whole street of people in costumes and special wreaths on their doors was the respect that the little Fish Boy statue deserved.
Then for Verry Gerry Christmas 2024, Sasha asked me to put together a bunch of folkies to play some Irish trad music in honour of Gerry’s Irish heritage which is often overlooked when talking about his art because so many of his statues are British monarchy figures. One of the statues is of the Irish folk figure Queen Maeve, who was buried standing up so that she could face her enemies in battle. I liked the statue and the idea of having an influence even in death so I wrote a song for Queen Maeve:
For all my fears
The world may know
I never faltered
I’m watching still
Let others lie
To face stars
I will be buried on my two feet
I do not seek
No great abandon
How could I dream
Of Leaving You
So when you come
And visit me
You will not look down
At your feet
You will not bow
To hear me sing
I never left you
I never will
I think some people are buried standing up. Still watching, having an effect.
I found it hard to describe to all the new people who hadn’t been on the street or seen the statues before. I said “Gerry was this guy and he made all these statues and no one saw them until he died and then they found them and now we do this Christmas party to make sure that they're looked after”
But this year at a Verry Gerry Christmas I learnt more about Gerry and I learnt that people did see the statues when he was alive and that he was a lovely person and a part of his community. There was maybe not a full sense of the scale of the work he had done but people knew about it. Since his death people have worked hard to preserve and promote his work for the benefit of him and the community. I get the impression that a large part of the reason people have worked hard to promote his art is because he did exist in his community during his lifetime.
Maybe there’s a romanticism to the mystery of art existing without anyone knowing the character of the artist; the artwork could be perfect because it wasn’t tethered to a real person. This isn’t the case with Gerry, people knew him and his work and that’s good. I don’t want to infer too much about the character of someone I have never met but I found that I was tempted to write something like ‘it’s just a shame he didn’t get more recognition in his lifetime’ but there’s every chance he didn’t want any ‘recognition’.
From my clicking through the outsider artist Wikipedia page there seems to be a correlation between being prolific and being an ‘outsider’.
I imagine thousands and thousands of scores being found when I die. Scores for ridiculous forces, two hundred pianos and violin. Chattering teeth. An opera for ten Ondes Martenot’s, Chorus, Organ and double Orchestra, something that would put Carl Orff’s Antigonae to shame. The mystery and intrigue created by these scores discovered after my death would probably be the only thing that could create enough traction to get them performed. However, I’ve already ruined the outsider artist story by studying at Guildhall and having a large community of musicians around me. If/when I’m discovered at age 90 with thousands of scores then I won’t have the mystery of an outsider I’ll just be someone who didn’t get any of their scores played.
Butterfly Wings
I do believe in art that is never shared. It is an important part of lacing the universe together. I cringe at saying ‘music is my religion’ after the phrase seems to have become synonymous with the 2000s emo scene and misspelt tattoos. But music is of religious importance to me (means the same thing I know). I believe that any playing, writing, or thinking about music is creation in a divine sense regardless of audience.
I went to see the saxophonist Sherman Irby talk about his Space Suite that he’d written for big band. The space theme had opened up vast questions about life and the universe. He said quite plainly that absolutely everything you play has an effect so you should choose what you play very carefully. Regardless of how spiritually you take that statement, it’s undeniably true. It does have an effect and if you decided to play something different it would have a different effect and if you get all butterfly effect about it then it can be both inspiring and paralysing. Irby said playing a note on your saxophone will affect things on the other side of the world, that’s a big stage to always be on.
“They’ll be astonished by what they’ll find in my garden in years to come.” - Gerry Dalton
This quote from Gerry made me think of Derek Jarman’s Garden. A garden and a cottage in the shadow of a nuclear power station in Dungeness. Derek Jarman had been diagnosed with HIV the year before he bought the cottage in 1987. It’s impossible to think about gardens without thinking about life and particularly the influence you will have beyond your own life. Jarman’s friend, Howard Sooley said that Jarman had ‘cheated death hiding amongst the flowers and dancing with the bees’.
Planting anything stretches you into the future. Maybe Gerry made statues like some people plant flower beds.