Jarvis Cocker's curated a new exhibition in London based on his 90s art series Journeys to the Outside

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Jarvis Cocker is revisiting the spirit of his Channel 4 series, Journeys to the Outside, in a new exhibition at The Gallery of Everything

In 1998, as the embers of Britpop were fizzling, Jarvis Cocker was halfway up a brightly-coloured hill known as Salvation Mountain. He’d followed the ragged truck of Leonard Knight, an affable New England artist who’d wanted to launch his handmade 200-foot hot air balloon, inscribed with the words ‘God is Love’.

Knight failed, instead deciding to paint the giant message on a nearby hill in the Colorado Desert. “I was never an artist before at all,” Cocker was told by Knight, whose death in 2014, at the age of 82, left behind a monument once feared by the authorities for its supposed toxicity.

The sandal-and-sunhat wearing singer was enamoured: despite his filming commitments, he stayed late with the artist, and was seen off with a song. “People didn’t make them for any glory or recognition they might get for it,” Cocker told the viewers of his Journeys to the Outside series on Channel 4.

“They made them because they got such a kick out of what they were doing, they really couldn’t help themselves.”

The connection has clearly endured if the new exhibition he has co-curated, in homage to the TV show, is anything to go by. The Gallery of Everything is set inside a former barber’s shop in London, aiming to communicate an alternative history of art to a wide audience, with works of various prices on sale in support of the non-profit Museum of Everything.

The artists include Nek Chand, the self-taught Indian who is perhaps best known for creating the 18-acre rock sculpture garden in Chandigarh, and St Eom, a headdress-wearing self-named visionary from Georgia responsible for a seven-acre artscape featuring a late 19th century farmhouse (one of six buildings) and more than 2,000 paintings, sculptures and drawings.

Howard Finster – another Georgian who also, in his religiosity, bore commonalities with Knight – claimed a higher calling drove his folk art sculpture garden, which contained 46,000 pieces of art.

The links with music don’t end with Cocker, either: Finster created album art for REM and, in the cover for the sixth Talking Heads album, 1985’s Little Creatures, a Rolling Stone album artwork of the year.

If the gallery can condense all this expansiveness into a humble hairdresser’s, it might claim some of the divine inspiration several of its artists once called upon.

• The Gallery of Everything is at 4 Chiltern Street, London until November 20 2016.

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting-and-drawing/art562757-jarvis-cocker-museum-everything-gallery-london