ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE

To be blunt, I'm not buying into the Hayward's catch-phrase for this exhibition. "Hayward goes wayward," indeed. Sure, the content is a bit off compared to the usual daytime TV trash that occupies popular culture. However, giving 'mavericks, visionaries and outsiders' a chance to show off their 'bracingly unorthodox perspective' is pretty much part of the whole post-modern agenda (deliberately privileging ideas that refuse the mainstream).

And selling the show like that makes it sound like an advert for a visit to a Victorian asylum. 

Alternative Guide to the Universe lets in the artists who aren't working inside 'official institutions

and established disciplines.' I'm not as enthusiastic these days for the outer reaches of thought - there is usually a lack of conceptual rigour, scientific honesty or philosophical consistency - but channeled into art, wild ideas can challenge conventional thinking. And when they are in the gallery, they are doing a great deal less harm than the madcap fantasies of politicians.

Here's the roll-call of artists...

Morton Bartlett: not a great start. Classic outsider artist who made creepy dolls in secret. I'm sure he didn't harm anybody, but the idea of my adult male neighbour making dolls and dressing them up would not encourage me to invite him to meet my niece.

Emery Blagdon made a healing machine. Like many outsider artists, he thought he knew better than most people. To me, this is a bit too close to the whole homeopathic medicine business - pseudo-mystical nonsense claiming a metaphysical cure to natural illnesses. But it looks amazing.

Rammellzee isn't that underground - he was in Wild Style  and is a key voice in Afro-futurism. Generally, if you are part of a movement that has a label on my blog, you ain't street no more. Afro-futurism, mind, does thumb its nose at the academy, and Rammellzee was all about liberating the word from the west.

George Widener 'embeds complex mathematical puzzles in his drawings in order to address a future audience of intelligent machines.'

 Guo Fengyi 'considered her eerily graceful drawings to be "painted prescriptions" that had unique restorative powers.'

 Paul Laffoley's 'visionary art outlines his alternative theories of consciousness.' Looking at his website, I might have found a new hero.

There's plenty more, but I got bored of looking them up online. However, I am pretty excited about this exhibition: it's intriguing when visual art remembers that it is, in fact, fiction, and has the same narrative potential as a science fiction novel. I wonder whether the curation is going to be tight enough - Laffoley and Rammellzee are serious, but work on their own terms, while some outsider artists appear to be nursing mental health issues. 

Not that the latter excludes the validity of their process (or the therapeutic quality of making art), but matching artists because they have an 'alternative vision' may not necessarily respect the diverse intentions of the artists. Indeed, the director sees their impact in terms of the whole, not the individual works.

"These brilliant mavericks expand the spaces in which our own imaginative thinking about the world may venture," says Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff. "However farfetched or outlandish it may seem, their work possesses an intensity and bracing originality that gives it a compelling reality all its own. It invites us to think outside of our conventional categories and ultimately to question our definitions of ‘normal’ art and science."

That said, there's none of the sterile uncertainty here that is marking some strands of institutional contemporary art.

ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre11 June – 26 August 2013