LET'S ALL BLAST OFF AND HEAD INTO OUTER SPACE — RIGHT NOW

Daniel Wojcik is a professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and the author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art (University Press of Mississippi, Folk Art and Artists Series, 1995) and Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma (University Press of Mississippi, 2016).

Wojcik knew the Romanian-born outsider artist Ionel Talpazan (1955-2015), collected his work, and, recognizing the uniqueness of the painter-sculptor’s creations and life story, began documenting them many years ago. Now he is assembling a new book, Artist as Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan, which will be published in the near future in the United Kingdom by Strange Attractor Press and distributed in the U.S.A. by MIT Press.

The book will offer an overview of Talpazan’s life and art-making career. In addition to an in-depth essay by Wojcik, the new volume will feature appreciations of the artist’s work — a group of shorter, illuminating texts — by a variety of artists, art historians, and other aficionados of the work of an artist whose deep obsession was unidentified flying objects. The book will include photographs of more than 150 of Talpazan’s works, many of which have never been presented publicly before.

brutjournal now publishes an exclusive excerpt from Wojcik’s forthcoming book and the author’s research notebooks. We, too, love UFOs and outer space; given this magazine's interests, what could be more unclassifiable?

We say, emphatically, “Beam us up!”