Outsider art

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Adolf Wölfli's Irren-Anstalt Band-Hain, 1910

The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut (IPA: /aʁ bʁyt/, French for "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.

While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "outsider art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the institutions of the mainstream art world; in many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Much outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.

Outsider art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992). The term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art created by people outside the "art world" mainstream, regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work.

[edit] Art of the insane

Interest in the art of insane asylum inmates had begun to grow in the 1920s. In 1921 Dr. Walter Morgenthaler published his book Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist) on Adolf Wölfli, a psychotic mental patient in his care. Wölfli had spontaneously taken up drawing, and this activity seemed to calm him. His most outstanding work is an illustrated epic of 45 volumes in which he narrates his own imaginary life story. With 25,000 pages, 1,600 illustrations, and 1,500 collages, it is a monumental work. He also produced a large number of smaller works, some of which were sold or given as gifts. His work is on display at the Adolf Wölfli Foundation in the Museum of Fine Art, Berne. A defining moment was the publication of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the mentally ill) in 1922, by Dr Hans Prinzhorn.

[edit] Jean Dubuffet and art brut

French artist Jean Dubuffet was particularly struck by Bildnerei der Geisteskranken and began his own collection of such art, which he called art brut or raw art. In 1948 he formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut along with other artists, including André Breton. The collection he established became known as the Collection de l'Art Brut. It contains thousands of works and is now permanently housed in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dubuffet characterized art brut as:

"Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses - where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere - are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professions. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade." - Jean Dubuffet. Place à l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 - February 1988). p.36

Dubuffet argued that 'culture', that is mainstream culture, managed to assimilate every new development in art, and by doing so took away whatever power it might have had. The result was to asphyxiate genuine expression. Art brut was his solution to this problem - only art brut was immune to the influences of culture, immune to being absorbed and assimilated, because the artists themselves were not willing or able to be assimilated.

[edit] The cultural context of the outsider art category

The interest in "outsider" practices among twentieth century artists and critics can be seen as part of a larger emphasis on the rejection of established values within the modernist art milieu. The early part of the 20th Century gave rise to cubism and the Dada, Constructivist and Futurist movements in art, all of which involved a dramatic movement away from cultural forms of the past. Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, for example, abandoned "painterly" technique to allow chance operations a role in determining the form of his works, or simply to re-contextualize existing "readymade" objects as art. Mid-century artists, including Pablo Picasso, looked "outside" the traditions of high culture for inspiration, drawing from the artifacts of "primitive" societies, the unschooled artwork of children, and vulgar advertising graphics. Dubuffet's championing of the art of the insane and others at the margins of society is yet another example of avant-garde art challenging established cultural values.

[edit] Vocabulary

Two detail images of Joe Minter's African Village in America, a half-acre visionary art environment in Birmingham, Alabama. Scenes include African warriors watching their descendants’ struggles in Alabama, tributes to black scientists and military leaders, recreations of the epic civil rights confrontations in Alabama, and biblical scenes.

A number of terms are used to describe art that is loosely understood as "outside" of official culture. Definitions of these terms vary, and there are areas of overlap between them. The editors of Raw Vision, a leading journal in the field, suggest that "Whatever views we have about the value of controversy itself, it is important to sustain creative discussion by way of an agreed vocabulary". Consequently they lament the use of "outsider artist" to refer to almost any untrained artist. "It is not enough to be untrained, clumsy or naïve. Outsider Art is virtually synonymous with Art Brut in both spirit and meaning, to that rarity of art produced by those who do not know its name."

• Art brut: "raw art", 'raw' in that it has not been through the 'cooking' process: the art world of art schools, galleries, museums. Originally art by psychotic individuals who existed almost completely outside culture and society. Strictly speaking it refers only to the Collection de l'Art Brut.
• Neuve Invention: Used to describe artists who, although marginal, have some interaction with mainstream culture. They may be doing art part-time for instance. The expression was coined by Dubuffet too; strictly speaking it refers only to a special part of the Collection de l'Art Brut.
• Folk art: Folk art originally suggested crafts and decorative skills associated with peasant communities in Europe - though presumably it could equally apply to any indigenous culture. It has broadened to include any product of practical craftsmanship and decorative skill - everything from chain-saw animals to hub-cap buildings. A key distinction between folk and outsider art is that folk art typically embodies traditional forms and social values, where outsider art stands in some marginal relationship to society's mainstream.
• Marginal art/Art singulier: Essentially the same as Neue Invention; refers to artists on the margins of the art world.
• Visionary art/Intuitive art: Raw Vision Magazine's preferred general terms for outsider art. It describes them as deliberate umbrella terms. However, Visionary Art unlike other definitions here can often refer to the subject matter of the works, which includes images of a spiritual or religious nature. Intuitive art is probably the most general term available. The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is dedicated to the collection and display of such artwork.
• Naïve art: Another grey area. Untrained artists who aspire to "normal" artistic status, i.e. they have a much more conscious interaction with the mainstream art world than do outsider artists.
• Visionary environments: Buildings and sculpture parks built by visionary artists - range from decorated houses, to large areas incorporating a large number of individual sculptures with a tightly associated theme. Examples include Watts Towers by Simon Rodia, Buddha Park and Sala Keoku by Bunleua Sulilat, and The Palais Ideal by Ferdinand Cheval.

[edit] Notable outsider artists

Tarcisio Merati's Bird on nest, one of several variant of this subject - 1976

August Natterer's Weltachse mit Haase (Axle of the World, with Rabbit), 1919

• Nek Chand (1924- ) is an Indian artist, famous for building the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, a forty acre (160,000 m²) sculpture garden in the city of Chandigarh, India.
• Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) was a country postman in Hauterives, south of Lyon, France. Motivated by a dream, he spent 33 years constructing the Palais Ideal. Half organic building, half massive sculpture, it was constructed from stones collected on his postal round, held together with chicken wire, cement, and lime.
• Henry Darger (1892-1973) was a solitary man who was orphaned and institutionalised as a child. In the privacy of his Chicago apartment, he produced 15,000 pages of text and hundreds of large scale illustrations, including maps, collaged photos and watercolors that depict his child heroes "the Vivian Girls" in the midst of battle scenes that combine imagery of the US Civil War with fanciful monsters.
• Francis E. Dec (1926–1996) was a U.S. lawyer disbarred in 1961 after what he claimed was a conspiracy and who spent the next thirty years of his life in isolation mailing increasingly paranoid rants to the medias. His outlandish worldview and unique writing style made his rants become cult items circulated as involuntary humour and underground poetry.
• Madge Gill (1882-1961), was an English mediumistic artist who made thousands of drawings "guided" by a spirit she called "Myrninerest" (my inner rest).
• Paul Gosch (1885-1940), a schizophrenic German artist and architect murdered by the Nazis in their euthanasia campaign.
• Alexander Lobanov (1924-2003) was a deaf and autistically withdrawn Russian known for detailed and self-aggrandizing self-portraits: paintings, photographs and quilts, which usually include images of large guns.
• Helen Martins (1897-1976) transformed the house she inherited from her parents in Nieu-Bethesda, South Africa, into a fantastical environment decorated with crushed glass and cement sculptures. The house is known as The Owl House.
• Tarcisio Merati (1934-1995), an Italian artist, was confined to a psychiatric hospital for most of his adult life during which time he produced a vast amount of drawings (several dream toys, bird on nest etc) , text and musical composition.
• Martin Ramirez (1895-1963), a Mexican outsider artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in a California mental hospital (he had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic). He developed an elaborate iconography featuring repeating shapes mixed with images of trains and Mexican folk figures.
• Achilles Rizzoli (1896-1981) was employed as an architectural draftsman. He lived with his mother near San Francisco, California. After his death, a huge collection of elaborate drawings were discovered, many in the form of maps and architectural renderings that described a highly personal fantasy exposition, including portraits of his mother as a neo-baroque building.
• Judith Scott (1943-2005) was born deaf and with Down Syndrome. After taking a fiber art class at an art institute for the disabled, she began to produce objects wrapped in many layers of string and fibers.
• Bunleua Sulilat (1932-1996) was a Thai/Lao myth-maker and informal religious leader who organized large groups of unskilled volunteers for the construction of two religious-themed parks featuring giant fantastic concrete sculptures.
• Miroslav Tichý (1926- ) wandered the small Moravian town of Kyjov in rags, pursuing his obsession with the female form by secretly photographing women in the streets, shops and parks with cameras he made from tin cans, children's spectacle lenses and other junk he found on the street. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negatives he selected. His work remained largely unknown until 2005, when he was 79 years old.
• Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), a Swiss artist, was confined to a psychiatric hospital for most of his adult life during which time he produced a vast amount of drawings, text and musical composition. Wölfli was the first well-known "outsider artist," and he remains closely associated with the label.
• Kiyoshi Yamashita (1922-1971) was a Japanese graphic artist who spent much of his life wandering as a vagabond through Japan. He has been considered an autistic savant.
• Scotti Wilson (1928-1972) (born Louis Freeman), emigrated from Scotland to the United States and opened a second-hand clothes store, found fame when his casual doodlings were noted for their dream-like character.

[edit] See also

• Asemic writing
• Category: Outsider artists
• Outsider music
• Lowbrow (art movement)
• Stuckism
• Vernacular architecture

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Outsider art

• "What is Outsider Art?" at Raw Vision Magazine
• The Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg
• Intuit The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago
• American Visionary Art Museum, collects art by "self-taught individuals"
• Outsider Art, Denmark
• Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland
• The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
• Diagnosed Artists

[edit] Further reading

Please expand this article using the suggested source(s) below. More information might be found in a section of the talk page. This article has been tagged since March 2009.

Alphabetically:

• Greg Bottoms, I Colori dell'Apocalisse - Viaggi nell'outsider art, Odoya, Bologna 2009 ISBN 978-88-628-8026-8
• Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art, London, 1972.
• Roger Cardinal, Art Brut. In: Dictionary of Art, Vol. 2, London, 1996, p. 515-516.
• Marc Decimo, Les Jardins de l'art brut, Les presses du réel, Dijon (France), 2007.
• Turhan Demirel, "Outsider Bilderwelten", Bettina Peters Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-939691-44-5
• Jean Dubuffet: L’Art brut préféré aux arts culturels [1949](=engl in: Art brut. Madness and Marginalia, special issue of Art & Text, No. 27, 1987, p. 31-33).
• Hal Foster, Blinded Insight: On the Modernist Reception of the Art of The Mentally Ill. In: October, No. 97, Summer 2001, pp. 3-30.
• Deborah Klochko and John Turner, eds., Create and Be Recognized: Photography on the Edge, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004.
• John M. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Princeton, Oxford, 1989.
• John Maizels, Raw Creation art and beyond, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 1996.
• Lucienne Peiry, Art brut: The Origins of Outsider Art, Paris: Flammarion, 2001.
• Lyle Rexer, How to Look at Outsider Art, New York:Abrams, 2005.
• Colin Rhodes, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.
• Rubin, Susan Goldman. (March 9, 2004). Art Against the Odds: From Slave Quilts to Prison Paintings. Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers. ISBN 0-375-82406-5
• Michel Thévoz, Art brut, New York, 1975.
• Maurice Tuchman and Carol Eliel, eds. Parallel Visions. Modern Artists and Outsider Art. Exhb. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1992.
• Allen S. Weiss, Shattered Forms, Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism, State University of New York, Albany, 1992.
• Self Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998