Colin Manners

4th May 2012

A Brash of Fervour
OBSERVING 100 YEARS OF OUTSIDER ART AND EXPRESSIONIST PAINTING
For the purpose of endorsing the word outside it is necessary to lay out a chronological context on which outsider art can reside amongst turbulently evolving commercial art. Despite the uncannily crystaline rawness of

some modern art, we can only offer arguments for the thinking that outsider art had leaked into the mainstream. Especially so in that the fervour of expressionism coincided with the recognition of outsider art but opposing impressionism was the natural and likely transition. Conversely, outsider artists werent keeping their work secret either. Certainly from 1922 the public had access to these works at the time of the most fervent of the (Western) Expressionists, such as Marc Chagall, Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch and Paul Klee. An outsider artist is not reacting to past or present movements or isms (the evolving of art), as he is usually ill-educated, creating in his older years and depicting from emotional trauma which often took on the form of compulsive
2

proliferation such that a piece of work in isolation is not as telling as a cyclical ensemble. Another reason for expounding the artistic happenings of their day is that the outsider artist was depicting visions and extractions raw. Raw art that came rough, straight from the core of human psyche nomatter how psychotic or informed the patient may be. This was a new way of working and some of it was quite extensive. Raw-looking abstractions from commercial art were deliberated and designed, and the artists were looking for a right picture, and that the process of getting a picture right cannot even be explained by him. In all spheres of artistic execution it should be said that there is no such thing as art, only artists but if the works of the commercial artists were
3

partly responsible for social reform and sometimes advancing knowledge, what, then, was going on with the art world during expressionism irrespective of any links with and the recording of outsider art?

(1850- controversy!): Avant Garde

Expressionism began at the eve of the First World War during the latter years of the Modernity period which succeeded the traditional and post-medieval historical period in the late 19th century. It was pomoted by the avant garde group of artists. In English, avant garde is a term used for work that is experimental and innovative, particularly in respect to art, politics and culture. It was probably first applied to art by French political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, regarded as the founder of French socialism. He thought that science and technology could solve most problems and that artists would help lead the way to a more just and humane society. He has the artists say to the scientists, it is we, the artists, who will serve as your avant garde. ie the prophets of future events. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant garde movement tracing a history from Dadaism (peaking from 1916 to 1922, born from the negative reaction to the horrors of WW1) through The
5

Situationists (a revolutionary artistic and political movement founded in 1957), and to postmodern artists such as the Language Poets in 1987. Outsider Art had emerged as a vehicle for the avant garde to stimulate definitions of art and artists. Its advocates have constructed an imaginary domain and are protected against anything that may have an impact negatively. The interest in Outsider Art by the avant garde was perceived during the constraints of modernism, but developments in contemporary and cultural discourse have challenged and discredited these perceived limitations in favour of an approach characterised by plurality and diversity. Simultaneously, Outsider Art hadnt ever found itself in a stronger position, as the wealth of publications and exhibitions can testify. Now, as there are a decreasing number of classic psychotic patients a new type of outsider art emerges. The support structure built up around Outsider Art by the avant garde advocates artists like Jean Dubuffet, Victor Musgrave and Monica Kinley, who brought an area to the subject that might have otherwise been confined to
6

medical textbooks. The cultivation of this work may have contributed to art theory and practice, by providing avant garde artists with actual rather than theoretical material to work with (to challenge and renegotiate standards). Outsider Art had helped with practice development and had relinquished its discourse and is now primarily involved in looking after its own.

(1850-1970s) Modernism
At the eve of WW1 we had already seen the Russian Revolution of 1905. Picasso and Matisse were causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspectives (the means of structuring a painting). The period of Modernism, encompassing Modern Art, comes in as the economy is driven by buying and spending and the development and growth of cities after both world wars. Modern Art extended through the 1960s to the 1970s. Abstract Expressionism appeared to be dependent upon the techniques of mass visual culture. This process of replication (eg, Lichtensteins comic strips and Pop artist Andy Warhols screen-prints), though, was not inventive, free or playful, but precise and closely observed. It had led people to expect. At the beginning of the 1960s it was still possible to think of works of art as belonging to one of two broad categories: painting and sculpture. Cubist and other collages, Futurist performance and Dadaist events had already begun to
8

challenge this simple duopoly, and photography had increasingly been making strong claims for recognition as an art medium. Nonetheless, the notion persisted that art essentially comprised those products of human creative endeavour that we would wish to call painting and sculpture.

Modernism: Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement originating in Germany in the early 20th century. It was the start of and was developed as an avant garde style before the First World War. The Expressionist artists (from the period of Modernity, 1920s) were in contention with a greater mass production of consumer goods, especially automobiles, radios and masscirculation magazines. This industrial wave broke down the narrowness of mind (resulting from a lack of exposure to cultural and intellectual activity). This ignorance was called provincialism. The modernist artist also rejected Realism in the visual arts. The term denotes any approach that depicts what the eye can see, such as in American realism, a turn of the 20th century idea in arts; Classical Realism, an artistic movement in late 20th Century that valued beauty and artistic skill; and Literary

realism particularly denotes a 19th century literary movement. In the 20th century, Expressionism was used more neutrally to
10

denote cultural innovators of any persuasion. The Oxford Dictionary illustrates this sense [the pioneers or innovators in any art in a particular period] dates from 1910. Expressionism as a term was sometimes suggested as an emotional angst. It has been characterised as a reaction to the philosophies: of 1. Positivism, from around the 1840s which is a philosophy of science data derived from sensory experience, and logical mathematical treatments of such data; 2. Naturalism, depicting objects in a natural setting advocated by the Realist movement of the 19th century as a reaction to stylised and idealised depictions of subjects in Romanticism, but many painters have adopted a similar approach over the centuries; and 3. Impressionism, a 19th century art movement originating in Paris in spite of harsh opposition from the art community in France. Examples of Impressionism include Claude Monet and Edouard Manet). It is characterised by small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light on its changing qualities often accentuated the effects by the passage
11

of time; ordinary subject matter; the inclusion of movement and unusual visual angles. While Expressionism was used in the modern sense as early as 1850, its origin is often traced to paintings exhibited in 1901 in Paris by an obscure artist JulienAuguste Herve, which he called expressionismes. Although an alternative view was that of Czech historian Antonin Matejcek in 1910 as the opposite of Impressionism. An Expressionist rejects immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures. An important precursor to Expressionism was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), especially his novel Thus Spake Zarathustra a philosophical novel written in four parts between 1883 and 1885, dealing with ideas such as the recurring of the same, the parable on the death of God and the prophecy of the ubermensch, and the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin. Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define because of the other isms of that time such as Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism and Dada. It can be said to be a reaction to the dehumanising effect by industrialisation and the growth of cities;
12

that it rejects Realism; and that it identfies itself as an avant garde movement.

13

A story of Expressionism:

From the Romantic era peaking from 1800 to 1840, Eugene Delacroix La Liberte Guidant le Peuple (1830) It showed itelf from as early as the 1760s usually as landscape paintings with storms and Gothic architecture. JMW Turner (1775-1881) took landscape painting to their extremes, John Constable (1776-1837) stayed closer to the English landscape tradition and Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was regarded as the greatest painter of the Romantic period.

Realists render everyday characters and situations all in a true-to-life manner. Bonjour Mr Courbet, 1854 a realist painting by Gustave Courbet. Realism refers to the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered by the third person objective reality. Courbet painted landscapes, seascapes and still life. He courted controversy by painting subjects that were considered vulgar such as peasants and working conditions of the poor.

The emergence of Expressionism was found in Van Goghs (1853-1890) paintings, such as The Starry Night (1889), it shows exaggerated features and a peaceful essence of flowing structures. Cool dark and firey colours can remind us of our warm childhood years filled with imagination of what can be found in the night. The isolated and magnificent structure on the left, give the picture a sense of depth. Van 14 Gogh painted this while at an asylum in St Remy.

German Expressionist painter Franz Marcs (18801916), de Grollen Blauen Pferde, (The Large Blue Horses) in 1911. He was the founding member of Der Blau Reiter (The Blue Rider), a journal that became synonymous with the artists who had collaborated in it.

1912 Self-portrait of Egon Schiele (1890-1918), an Austrian painter. Majorally a portrait artist and was an early exponent of Expressionist art. Pierrot (Face of a Young Girl) a 1939 lithograph by Georges Rouault (1871-1958). He was a French Fauvist and Expressionist painter. His early work of glass painting would explain his later use of the heavy black line likened to leaded glass. On meeting Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Charles Carmoin it brought him into Fauvism (French for the wild beasts), a short-lived group of painterliness and strong colour.

During Swiss artist Paul Klees (1889-1940) mature years, he secured a 3-year contract with Hans Goltzes gallery giving him major exposure, and some commercial success. 300 works were sold in 1920. He taught at the Bauhaus in Germany who combined crafts with Fine Art. Red Balloon was oil on muslin (a loosely woven cotton fabric) primed with chalk. 15

Late modernist Russian-French born artist, Marc Chagall (1887-1985), synthesised Cubism, Symbolism and Fauvism. Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism. Picasso remarked in the 1950s, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.

1893. Swirls again with structure. And movement.Typically Expressionist, Edvard Munch (1863-1944), a Norwegian artist paints flat, with no real depth to experience apart from perspective lines. The composition holds an unusually high viewpoint. Munch said that it was a study of the soul, the study of himself.

Carl Eugen Keel (1885-1961), a Swiss painter. Less well-known are his oil paintings, watercolours, wood-carvings and wrought iron sculptures. This is a woodcut (xylograph).

Expressionism from the USA was bringing artist like Milton Avery, Stuart Davis (a major component of Cubism), and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). This painting by de Kooning called Woman V (1952-53) appears to be raw, but this appearance was typical of abstract expressionist painting. He was one of the artists/avant garde artists to accuse the New York Metropolitan Museum of hostility towards advanced art. 16

Emilio Giuseppe Dossena (1903-1987), Italian Artist produced expressionist works such as Giorno di Mercato (1976). Both abstract and representational it gives a feeling of nervous energy bursting forth. On returning to Italy from New York in 1982, he returned to his imressionistic style of painting although with a more agressive and chromatic handling.

Postmodernism
Interests date back to the 1950s. Note that art produced since the 1950s is Contemporary Art, and that not all

Contemporary Art is Postmodern, and the broader term encompasses those who still work as late modernist traditions as well as those artists that reject Postmodern. Postmodernism stemmed from the 1970s, and included artists like Chuck Close, David Hockney and Yoko Ono. It holds the philosophical proposal that reality is ultimately inaccessible by human investigation, that knowledge is a social construction, that truth-claims are political power plays, and that the meaning of words is to be determined by readers not authors. In brief, postmodern theory sees reality as what individuals or social groups make it to be. Postmodernist approaches are critical of the possibility of objective knowledge of the real world, and consider the ways in which social dynamics, such as power and hierarchy, affect human conceptualizations of the world to have important
17

effects on the way knowledge is constructed and used. Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II.

18

(1920- ) Outsider Art/Art Brut

Some advocate that Outsider Art began in the nineteenth century when inmates of asylums were encouraged to express

themselves with paint and to display their work. Others believe it was discovered by Hans Prinzhorn in 1920 who said that it stood as a fork in a road, where anthropology, psychiatry and the avant garde converged. Most say of outsider art that there was an unprecedented interest in the work done in the 1970s and 1980s, they were presumed cultural outsiders: non-official talk; not the way we do things around here; deep-seated understandings and assumptions. With its reactions to superceded periods of art and to political events, it can be seen that Western art is driven by cultural values (absolute and relative ethical values based on ethical action) as well as mass consumer ideals. The evolution of art, as well as its stories and influences of two world wars, was separate from Outsider Art. According to Jean Dubuffet, there is a more
19

specialised Art But which incidentally does extend to childrens art. The inmates of an asylum produced works for which he didnt know its name. Outsider Art was a term coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972, legitimising Outsider Art collector Jean Dubuffets term Art Brut. It tends to attract the term grass-roots art. Perfectly brut (a Dubuffet term) was a way of describing unprocessed and spontaneous, and unsolicited fruit of its makers personal resources. A pure aesthetic standard has never been agreed on. The measurement of aesthetics remains an unsolved problem of information visualisation, because there is no satisfactory understanding of what constitutes aesthetic effect. A better understanding could improve the usability of visualisation. Of such crude pictures by psychotics and untrained amateurs: to find the raw material of art by the ordinary man in his spontaneity. Cardinal writes, It captures the hesitancy, the characteristic of the art establishment, to accept the merits of Outsider Art as both a concept and a peripherally-associated aesthetic. Dubuffets

20

thinking was in more concern on the artists status or posture rather than the finished work.

Some examples of Outsider Art

Adolf Wolfli

August Klett

Viktor Orth

Emma Wolfindale

Norman Kox

Christina A. Kapono

Michael Stewart 21 Gail Miller

Some examples of Art Brut

Martin Ramirez

Jean Chanoir

Henry Darger

Vojislav Jakic

Johann Hauser Madge Gill 22

Alexandra Huber Augustin Lesage Gaston Chaissac

Henry Darger

Madge Gill

23

Outsider Art was first recognised in 1921 by Dr Walter Morgenthaler in his book Ein Geisteskranker al Kunstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist) on a psychotic mental patient under his care, Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930). Wolfli had produced an oustanding amount of work of forty-five volumes, with twenty-five thousand pages, one thousand six hundred illustrations and one thousand five hundred collages. It was monumental work. He also made smaller pieces of work, some of it was sold. His work is now on display at the Adolf Wolfli Foundation in the Museum of Fine Art, Bern. This was a defining moment for the otherness of Outsider Art, as collector, German psychiatrist, art historian and philosopher Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933) published his book Bildneri der Geistestkranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), in 1922. It had encompassed studies of ten Outsider Artists, including Karl Brendel, Auguste Klett (pseudonym: August Klott), August Natterer, Johann Knupfer and Victor Orth. It was 1920 that Prinzhorns collecting was arguably the beginning of public recognition for Outsider Art and his collection can be seen at the
24

Prinzhorn Collection at the Psychiatric Clinic of Heidelburg. Hans Prinzhorn strived to cast off the dominant thought patterns which were equating genius with madness. He argued that if a piece of work may be said to constitute genius, judgement by any field, outside standard should have bearing on its intrinsic lasting value. Prinzhorn set out to find common ground between mainstream and outsider art production to actuallise the psyche and thereby build a bridge from the self to others. Although French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) was collecting outsider art from 1920, he later used the term Art Brut as a rich and undefined field of study and was introducing the concept to the consciousness of the progressive art world. Dubuffet who was particularly struck by Artistry of the Mentally Ill and in 1948, he formed the non profit-making Campagne de lArt brut with other artists such as Andre Breton and art critic Michel Tapie. It comprised of five thousand works by two hundred artists but it grew thereafter. The collection is now permanently housed in Lausanne, Switzerland. The outsider artists do not care about the
25

good opinion of others, and not even keeping their work secret. It came from the depths of their own personalities and for themselves and no one else. They made up their own techniques. The Campagn de lArt Brut is now one of the most powerful and overwhelming art museums to be found anywhere in the world. Dubuffet characterised Art Brut as:

those works created from solitude and from pure creative and artistic impulses where the worries and competition acclaim, and social promotion do not interfere are, because of these facts more precious than the products of professionals. After a certain amount of these flourishings of an excited feverishness lived so fully and intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, without art in its entirety, appears to be the game of a futile society; a fallacious parade.
Jean Dubuffet. Place l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 - February 1988). Retrieved from Wikipedia 22 April 2012.
nd

Dubuffets writing on Art Brut was a subject in a noted programme in the Art Club of Chicago in the early 1950s. Dubuffet delivered his lecture Anticultural Positions at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1951 arguing against alienating values of high culture. The Arts Club of Chicago was a club located in Cook County, Illinois, U.S.
26

inspired by the Art Institute of Chicagos handling of the Armory show. It was said to be Postmodernist from its founding. Dubuffet urged the careful consideration of more primal modes of visual expression, insisting that the sincerity and urgency of raw art best reflects the reality of the human condition. Although much of Dubuffets controversy comes across as heavy-handed and a touch hypocritical in light of his own successful artistic career; the sentiment expressed, namely the need for alternatives for the intellectuals trait and for the state of society around modernism, resonated profoundly throughout Chicagos dynamic post-war period. Art Brut was immune to the influences of culture because the artists themselves were not willing to be assimilated. Dubuffets championing of Art Brut is as of another example of avant garde challenging cultural values. Outsider Art can encompass Art Brut. Jean Dubuffets original term later adopted by Collection de lArt Brut at Lausanne, Switzerland. Raw, as in
27

unadulterated by culture; raw, because it is creation in its most direct and uninhibited form. Its creators were seen to be living outside cultural and society. The purest of Art Brut wouldnt see themselves as artists nor were they producing art at all. (Examples: Aloise, Henry Darger, Madge Gill and Johann Hauser). Outsider Art. It was meant to mean the exact of Dubuffets term Art Brut, although Outsider Art was developed to include works that would not be designated as such. It hadnt the protection as did Art Brut, hence it became undoubtedly obscure. Sadly, it is loosely termed as anything that is untrained art. It is simply not enough to be untrained, clumsy or nave. Outsider art is about being honest. (Examples: Adolf Wolfli, Hauser, Chromo, Traylor and Schroder-Sonnenstern). Folk Art / Contemporary Folk Art. A simple and direct term overused especially in North America. It originally pertained to the idigenous crafts and decorative skills of peasant communities in
28

Europe. It can be anything from chain-saw animals to hub-cap buildings. (Examples: Thornton Dial, Sam Doyle and William Hawkins). Marginal Art / Art Singulier. These are self-taught artists whom are close to Art Brut and Outsider Artists, both in appearance and directness of expression. They are on the margins, the grey area between Outsider Art and mainstream. Art Singulier

encompasses French marginal artists. (Examples: Danielle Jacqui, Marcel Landreau and Gerard Lattier). Neuve Invention. Dubuffet realised that there were some art that was of comparable power and inventiveness to Art Brut. Some had dealings with commercial galleries, and were trying to make a living with their works. As an acknowledgement to these, Dubuffet formed the Annex Collection. in 1982; this became the Neuve Invention section of the Collection de lArt Brut. (Examples: Gaston Chaissac, Mario Chichorro and Gerard Lattier).
29

Outsider Music. A term coined by Irwin Chusid in the mid 1990s are songs and compositions by musicians who are not part of the commercial music industry who write songs that ignore standard or musical or lyrical conventions, either because they have no formal training or because they disagree with formal rules. Lacking structure and emotionally stark, has few outlets. They have greater individual control over the final creative product either because of a low budget or unwillingness to cooperate with modifications by their label or producer. Lowbrow or Lowbrow Art. This describes an underground art movement founded in Los Angeles, California in the late 1970s. It was a widespread populist movement with origins in the underground comix world and punk music, and hot-rod street culture and other subcultures. It is also known as pop-surrealism. It often has a sense of humour, sometimes gleeful, sometimes impish and sometimes it is a sarcastic comment. Most Lowbrow are paintings, but are also toys, digital art and sculpture.
30

Vernacular Architecture. Architecture based on localised needs and construction materials, and reflectiing local traditions. It tends to evolve over time to reflect the environmental, cultural, technological and historical context in which it exists. It has been dismissed as crude and unrefined. It also has proponents that highlight its importance in current design. The Lille Metropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art (LaM). The only museum in Europe to present simultaneously the main components of the 20th and 21st centuries art: Modern Art, Contemporary Art and Outsider Art, and containing some masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Amadeo Modigliani, Joan Miro, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger,

Alexander Calder and the biggest Outsider Art collection in France. It also possesses a library and rich garden of sculptures. It offers an overview of modern and contemporary art. Asemic Writing. There are two types. 1. True, that which the author cannot read his own piece. 2. Relative, that which can be
31

read by some, but not everyone. It is the inbetween where it exists and plays. It may be considered to be a postliterate (a continuation of an education program) style of writing that uses all forms of creativity for inspiration. Other influences are

xenolinguistic, artistic languages, sigils (magic), undeciphered scripts, and graffiti. Asemic writing occurs in avant garde literature and art with strong roots in the earliest forms of writing. An illustrious modern example is the Codex Seraphinianus (originally published in 1981, is an illustrative encyclopaedia of an imaginary world, by Luigi serafini). In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles held on the 8th May 2009, Serafini had stated that the script is asemic. Asemic writing exists as an international style, with artists and writers who create it in many different ways across the globe. One artist who has been practicing asemic writing since the early 1970s, is Mirtha Dermisache from Argentina, also Cecil Touchon from Texas, and Jose Parla from New York. Publications that cover asemic writing include Tim Gazes Asemic Magazine,
32

Michael Jacobsons weblog gallery The New Post-Literate and Marco Giovenales curated blog Asemic Net. Asemic writing has even been found in books, film, artworks and on television and especially distributed on the internet. Examples of Asemic Writing:
Here's a slab quoted from a recent email from visual poet Jim Leftwich (he was explaining himself to an artist named Billy Bob Beamer):
30 years ago i was writing syllabics as a way of creating rhythmic patters unlike traditional metric verse, and trying to lose the influence of eliot, breton and berryman. sometime in the mid-90s, probably 97, a visual poet named john byrum sent me a postcard in response to a series of poems i had sent him. the poems were letteral variations of poems by John M. Bennett. in a ps at the bottom of the card byrum wrote something like "if you continue in this vein you will soon be writing asemic poems". that was the first time i saw the word "asemic". tim gaze contacted me around the same time. i was thinking about purely textual asemia. tim was thinking about a more calligraphic form of writing. my textual work was already letteral, and my visual work was breaking the letter-forms down and becoming a poetry of quasi- or sub- letteral marks. i started making quasi-calligraphic works and sending them around to poetry magazines - and calling them asemic. tim was doing something very similar. that was the beginning of what is now being called "the asemic movement". i promoted the practice (and the word itself) very energetically for several years (8 - 10 years or so). tim has been even more energetic and ambitious, and is still going strong. there is a long and complex history preceding all of this, of course, but this is how the current "movement" got underway. tim can tell you much more about the history of the term itself.
Asemic writing seems to be a gigantic, unexplored territory. Retrieved from Wikipedia 24 April 2012
th

33

Outsider Art/artists:
Nek Chand (b. 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 (18361924) 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. Felipe Jesus Consalvos (1891c.1960) was a Cuban-American cigar roller and artist, known for his posthumously-discovered body of art work based on the vernacular tradition of cigar band collage. Henry Darger (18921973) was a solitary man who was orphaned and institutionalized as a child. In the privacy of his
34

small north side Chicago apartment, he produced over 35,000 pages of text and hundreds of large scale illustrations, including maps, collaged photos, and watercolors that depict the heroic struggles of his child characters, "the Vivian Girls," engaged in activities such as battle scenes combining imagery of the US Civil War with the presence of fanciful monsters. Francis E. Dec (19261996) was a disbarred U.S. lawyer in 1959 who spent thirty years of his life in isolation mailing increasingly paranoid handwritten rants (which sometimes include drawings) to the media. Charles A.A. Dellschau (18301923) born in Prussia, Dellschau emigrated to the US and in his 70's secluded himself in an attic and over the course of 20 years created 12 large scale books filled with mixed media watercolors depicting the inventions of the Sonora Aero Club, chronicling the birth of the age of aviation . It is unknown if his subject was factual, fictionalization, or a delusion.

35

Paul Gsch (18851940), a schizophrenic German artist and architect murdered by the Nazis in their euthanasia campaign. James Hampton (19091964) was an African-American janitor who secretly built a large assemblage of religious art from scavenged materials. Vojislav Jakic (19322003), a Serbian artist who spent most of his life in a small town of Despotovac producing drawings up to five meters long evoking the memories of his own life, his obsessions with death and reflections on art. His works mix abstraction and graphic signs and writings. Alexander Lobanov (19242003) was a deaf and autistically withdrawn Russian known for detailed and self-aggrandizing selfportraits: paintings, photographs and quilts, which usually include images of large guns. Helen Martins (18971976) transformed the house she inherited from her parents in Nieu-Bethesda, South Africa, into a fantastical
36

environment

decorated

with

crushed

glass

and

cement

sculptures. The house is known as The Owl House. Tarcisio Merati (19341995), 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.

The Philadelphia Wireman, a creator of wire sculptures. Nothing is known of his (or her) identity and he (or she) is presumed deceased. Martn Ramrez (18951963), 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.

37

Achilles Rizzoli (18961981) 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. Sam (Simon) Rodia (1875-1965) was an itinerant construction worker and untrained in the arts. Plagued by personal problems, he abandoned his family to ride the rails until he settled in Los Angeles and created the landmark Watts Towers. Abandoning his monumental life's work, he returned to die with his family, among whom he was regarded as a bum, artist, crazy or a genius. Judith Scott (19432005) was born deaf and with Downs

syndrome. After being institutionalized for 35 years she attended Creative Growth Art Center (a center for artists with disabilities in Oakland, CA) and went on to become an internationallyrenowned fiber artsculptor.
38

Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907-1975) produced photographs, paintings, drawings and writing connected to his unorthodox theories about the history of life on earth. He believed that certain stones were actually image-filled "rock books" created by an ancient superior race, and that sadistic decedents of those ancients live inside the earth, using ancient "ray" machines to torment humankind. His paintings, based on rock slices, often incorporate unusual materials such as soap flakes. Miroslav Tich (19262011) was a photographer who took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials. Willem Van Genk (19272005) is the best known Dutch representative of outsider art. He was considered schizophrenic and autistic, and made drawings in view from above of stations

39

and wirings, European cities, buses and trolleys, zeppelins and bombers. He also created 300 intricately decorated rain coats. Wesley Willis (1963-2003), a schizophrenic musician and artist from Chicago, known for his prolific (and bizarre) musical recordings as well as his hundreds of colored ink-pen drawings of Chicago land and street-scapes. Many of his drawings appear as covers to his albums. Although Willis was poor and often dependent on the charity of friends for housing, his drawings now sell for thousands of dollars apiece. Scotti Wilson (19281972) (born Louis Freeman), emigrated from Scotland to Canada and opened a second-hand clothes store, found fame when his casual doodlings were noted for their dream-like character. Kiyoshi Yamashita (19221971) was a Japanese graphic artist who spent much of his life wandering as a vagabond through Japan. He has been considered an autistic savant.

40

Joseph Yoakum (18901972), an African-American artist who spent his last years producing a vast quantity of sinuous, surreal landscapes based on both real and imagined travels.
Source: Wikipedia

41

On Outsider Art and the Margins of the Mainstream By Marcus Davies (Art writer, including Text for Folk Art: a book for non-readers) Exhibition History
Nonacademic art has enjoyed a continual public presence throughout the course of the last hundred years, fueled at first by the avant-gardes interest in primitivism and visual manifestations of the unconscious. In Europe, psychiatric collections, mediumistic art work, and paintings by autodidacts such as Alfred Wallis (1885-1942) and Henri le

Henry Rousseau Primitivism. European colonisation of Africa inspired jungle stories in naive or primitive paintings.

Douanier Rousseau (1844-1910) were held aloft by modernists, along with colonial plunder from Africa and the Americas as salvation from industrializations increasing ravages (Gale 1999:16 and 17). Across the Atlantic, a similar fascination with naive expression was taking place. Championing the romanticized notion of a fast-fading authenticity inherent in Anglicized American heritage, certain collectors, scholars, gallerists, and museum professionals turned their attentions to folk traditions. In 1930, American Primitives, curated by Holger Cahill, a specialist in American folk art, opened at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, followed a year later by American Folk

American Primitive Folk Art: 1. Warren Kimble 2. Catherine Holman 3. Painting by unknown artist.

Sculpture: The Work of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Craftsmen. In 1932, while serving as director of New Yorks newly formed Museum of Modern Art, Cahill curated the sweeping and patriotically named American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in 42

America, 1750-1900, a short-lived effort to encourage the awkwardly egalitarian marriage of popular and fine art within a single institution. A year later, Alfred H. Barr Jr., the Moderns founding director, organized Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, a survey that included for the first time in a major American museum works by children and the mentally ill. In 1937, Barr orchestrated the debut of work by William Edmondson (1870-1951), a self-taught gravestone carver from Nashville, Tennessee. Not only did the exhibit mark the first solo showing of an African-American artist at the Modern, it also demonstrated Barrs belief in the pluralistic roots of international modernism, a radical conviction that his trustees did not share (Smith 2005:B29).

Dada: 1 and 2. Raoul Hausman 1969, 3. George Grosz and John Heartfield 1919, 4. Kurt Schwitters 1919.

In a more conservative accommodation of Barrs ideals, the Modern hosted They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the Twentieth Century in 1942, curated by the art dealer Sidney Janis. In his accompanying catalogue, Janis presents the biographies of thirty noteworthy self-taught talents, including Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946) and Horace Pippin (1888-1946) (Janis 1942:1). These vital discoveries, Janis writes in the catalogue, express [themselves] with a humility and an easily comprehended human quality, yet remain removed by circumstance from the world of art (Janis 1942:4-7). Without (we hope) intending any overt condescension, Janis refers to art with a capital A, meaning the institutionalized dynamics of the established academic tradition. Working in the vein of the Sunday painter, these artists created independently and in relative isolation from one another, utilizing techniques and strategies born of individual necessity. Due to the absence of communal transmissions of tradition, it is impossible to shoehorn their work into the folk paradigm. In fact, when viewing paintings such as Hirshfields zaftig odalisques it becomes apparent that many of the artists possessed, at the very least, a cursory knowledge of academic standards and practices. Consequently, Janis position brings into focus a genre that, despite its marginality, held the potential to inspire a consciousness of the validity of [alternative] expression, thereby paving the way for eventual consideration of outsider arts inordinacy (Janis 1942:1). While interest in marginal art continued to surge throughout Europe, rallied for the most part around the activities of Jean Dubuffets Collection de lArt Brut and a growing network of galleries committed to the display of work by children and the mentally ill, 43

American institutions willing to contest the boundaries of cultural hegemony remained few and far between. Public collections such as the Museum of International Folk Art, founded in 1953 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Popular Art Center, opened in 1957 in Williamsburg, Virginia, presented a fairly orthodox sampling of folk art. In New York, the collection of the Museum of American Folk Art (MAFA), founded in 1961 under the direction of Herbert W. Hemphill, perpetuated a certain mythologized urban nostalgia for rural forms. Showcasing objects such as quilts, weathervanes and carved decoys, these emerging folk art museums exhibited a tendency to sublimate instances of singular, often eccentric expression in favor of anonymous examples of traditional craftsmanship. Despite the conventional nature of public and institutional tastes regarding nonacademic art in America during this period, there is perceptible evidence of an increasing fascination with artistic production far removed from both the academic and folk experience. It may be argued that the impetus for this outsider awareness is directly linked to art bruts presence in the United States. Shortly after his decision to house the Collection de lArt Brut in the Long Island home of the artist Alfonso Ossorio, Dubuffet delivered his incendiary lecture, Anticultural Positions at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1951. Arguing against the alienating values of high culture, Dubuffet urged the careful consideration of more primal modes of visual expression, insisting that the sincerity and urgency of raw art best reflects the reality of the human condition. Although much of Dubuffets polemic comes across as heavy-handed and a touch hypocritical in light of his own successful artistic career, the sentiment expressed, namely the need for alternatives to the intellectual decadence of modernism, resonated profoundly throughout Chicagos dynamic postwar period. During the 1960s art and art history instructors at the Art Institute of Chicago, such as Katherine Blackshear, Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, sought to integrate examples of non-mainstream art into their curricula, offering their students images of art brut and work by the likes of Hirshfield and Rousseau (Bowman 1992:155 and 161). Yoshida was also a strong advocate for local self-taught artists, including Lee Godie (1908-1994), a homeless woman and self-proclaimed French Impressionist who haunted the steps of the Art Institute, and Joseph Yoakum (late 1880s-1972), the owner of an ice cream store whose mediumistic drawings, achieved through a process he called spiritual unfoldment, have since earned him praise as one of the great interpreters of the American landscape (Beardsley and Livingston 1982:165). While it may be argued that the active courtship of the art worlds attentions may preclude these artists from being labeled as true outsiders, the recognition and support of Yoshida and his colleagues marked the beginning of an academic awareness of contemporary American vernacular expression. Such enthusiasm for unconventional expression soon rippled out from the Art Institute, permeating the work of the Chicago Imagists, a loose-knit association of artists whose rejection of ideology and emphasis on organic extension of form was profoundly shaped by their understanding of outsider propensities (Bowman 1992:160). In 1968, Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, both established members of the Imagists, moved to California, where Nutt had accepted a teaching position at Sacramento State University. While searching through crates of artwork in the campus audiovisual room, Nutt came 44

across the hallucinatory renderings of extraterrestrial encounters by P. M. Wentworth (dates unknown) and the meticulous collages of Martin Ramirez (1895-1963). Originally

Two images each Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson. Called themselves Imagists. Nutt was an American artist who founded the American Surrealist movement. Nilsson was one of the original Chicago Imagists.

collected at the DeWitt State Mental Hospital in Auburn, California by Dr. Tarmo Pasto for use in his art-therapy courses, the work immediately struck Nutt as extraordinary artistic statements worthy of preservation. Phil Linhares, currently the Chief Curator of Art at the Oakland Museum of California was also taken by Dr. Pastos collection, borrowing several pieces for an exhibition of California folk artists at the San Francisco Art Institute, an event that marked the official debut of outsider art on the West Coast (Bowman 1992:164). Roger Brown was another artist deeply influenced by his exposure to non-mainstream production at the Art Institute of Chicago. Studying with Yoshida and Halstead in the mid 60s, Brown was introduced to the theories of Dubuffet and the outsider environments of Simon Rodia (1879-1965) and Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924). In 1970 Brown traveled to Europe, where he toured the Collection de lArt Brut, now housed in a chateau in Lausanne, Switzerland. Returning to the States, he embarked on a series of trips through the Midwest, photographing a number of folk art environments. Brown then shared these photographs with Herbert W. Hemphill, who was eager to include them in the catalogue to his 1974 exhibit, Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists at the Museum of American Folk Art (MAFA) (Bowman 1992:167). The inclusion of such roughhewn assertions of creative individuality proved to be a groundbreaking move for the museum. In spite of his trustees deference to a long-standing tradition of American craft, Hemphill encouraged the diversification of his institutions focus, making the museum an instrumental force in fostering public awareness of the democratic possibilities of untrained artistic ability.

Roger Brown (1941-1997), Chicago artist and Imagist

45

By this time, Roger Cardinals Outsider Art, published in 1972, had caused an international stir, legitimizing art brut as a rich, but relatively undefined field of study, and introducing the concept of outsider art to the consciousness of the progressive art world. Following Hemphills lead, other museums ventured their interpretations of this newly discovered phenomenon. In 1975, the divinely-inspired drawings of Minnie Evans (1892-1987), a gatekeeper at the botanical gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 1979, the work of Henry Darger, Lee Godie and Joseph Yoakum was showcased at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. During the same year, Roger Cardinal and Victor Musgrave, an avid collector

Outsider Artist images from Henry Darger, Lee Godie and Joseph Yoakum

of outsider art, curated Outsiders: An Art Without Precedent or Tradition at the Londons Hayward Gallery. Funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, the accompanying catalog contains a revealing preface by the Councils Director of Art, Joanna Drew. In it she invokes [a] cautionary note, warning the reader that the views expressed in [the catalog] are those of the authors and not necessarily of the editors (Cardinal and Musgrave 1979:7). Tongue-and-cheek perhaps, but a telling comment nonetheless, in that it captures the characteristic hesitancy of the art establishment to accept the merits of outsider art as both a concept and a peripherally associated aesthetic. Nonetheless, the eagerness of its proponents and the curiosity of the public continued to propel the representation of outsider art within museums. In California, the Long Beach Museum presented Pioneers in Paradise: Folk and Outsider Artists of the West Coast in 1984, attempting a regional approach echoed several years later in the North Carolina Museum of Arts exhibit, Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art Inside North Carolina. The 1980s also saw an increase in international institutions dedicated to outsider art. In 1986, both the Musee dArt Naif and LAracine: Musee dArt Brut opened in Paris. In Tokyo, the Setagaya Art Museum was founded, dedicating its collection efforts to representing Japanese outsider artists. By 1989, the work of Martin Ramirez was shown for the first time in the artists native country at the Centro Cultural in Mexico City, and in 1998, the Outsider Archive, an impressive selection of European art brut assembled by Victor Musgrave and his partner, Monica Kinley, was taken in on long-term loan by Dublins Irish Museum of Modern Art. In addition to these traditional, collection-based institutions, a new model for the promotion of outsider art was introduced in 1991 with the founding of Chicagos Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. A nonprofit lacking the staff structure of a 46

typical museum, Intuit relies on its board and membership to maintain a mission that strives to promote public awareness, understanding, and appreciation of intuitive and outsider art through a program of education and exhibition (Intuit Online: http://outsider.art.org/). In service to this mission, the Center offers a schedule of rotating exhibits, a variety of educational programs within local schools and annual fellowships for high school educators interested in implementing lesson plans including the study of outsider art within their classrooms. Operating without a permanent collection for the first ten years of its existence, Intuit successfully positioned itself as an influential nexus for enthusiasts of outsider art, creating an extended community of support for art existing beyond the scope of many major museums and critical circles. Following Intuits innovative lead, the American Visionary Art Museum was founded in 1995 in Baltimore, Maryland. While it currently boasts a permanent collection of over 4,000 objects displayed on rotation, the bulk of the institutions efforts are concentrated on mounting large-scale, thematically oriented exhibits that present a sweeping range of self-taught artwork selected by guest curators. While the museum does not explicitly endorse the notion of outsider art, its mission draws a clear distinction between folk tradition and the entirely spontaneous and individualized nature of the intuitive creations it strives to represent (American Visionary Art Museum Online: http://www.avam.org/stuff/whatsvis.html). In light of this, the AVAM may be viewed as an influential force in the developing institutional awareness of non-mainstream art in America, a trend that continued to swell throughout the 1990s, eventually culminating in two major changes to the Museum of American Folk Art. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the MAFA became the recipient of many substantial examples of contemporary self-taught pieces, as well as several outstanding works of outsider art by the likes of Martin Ramirez, Morton Bartlett (1909-1993), and P. M. Wentworth. With the acceptance of these gifts the museum and its board were faced

Outsider Artists: Martin Ramirez, Morton Bartlett and P.M. Wentworth.

with the challenge of contesting the long-standing boundaries between folk traditions and contemporary production. Whereas the former tends to be imbued with relatively conservative values of ruralism and collective authenticity, the latter, in sharp contrast, often reflects an urban orientation and an aggressive assertion of individual vision. How then to reconcile the two, thereby successfully incorporating contemporary work into the higher-status traditional domain (Fine 2004:41)? Wrestling with this issue, the board, at times divided by subjective issues of personal taste and interpretation of the museums collection objectives, eventually settled on a brilliant compromise (Fine 2004:252). In 47

1997 the museums Contemporary Center was formed under the direction of Gerard C. Wertkin, presenting as its inaugural exhibit Henry Darger: The Unreality of Being. Unable to deny either the artistic merit of the field or burgeoning public interest, the MAFA chose the high road, electing to assume a position of leadership in its attempt to foster increased recognition and appreciation . . . not only in the United States, but in the international art community as well (Folk Art: Magazine of the American Museum of Folk Art 1997:33). Recognizing the need for a public commitment to the museums new expansive goals, the MAFA took its second bold step in becoming a beacon institution in the world of nonacademic art. In 2001, in conjunction with the opening of its current location on West 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, the museum changed its name to the American Folk Art Museum. Simultaneously modifying the focus of the museum and allowing for a more inclusive and permeable definition of folk art, the shift, although subtle, was successful in opening the museums permanent collection and gallery spaces to a more holistic representation of non-mainstream art, including the work of outsider artists. And while this studied ambiguity intentionally refuses a concretized institutional agenda, it is indicative of a growing trend of recognition aimed at exploring the relevance and artistic potential of the mainstreams crowded margins (Fine 2004:253). Judging by the flurry of activity in recent years it is clear that there is much catching up to do. In 2002 the Prinzhorn Collection at the Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg was finally established as a public museum, demonstrating the lasting importance of a body of artworks that, decades before, fired the imagination of Europes Dada and Surrealist circles. In the same year, the EU announced a grant of one million euros for a cultural program titled Equal Rights for Creativity, an effort providing funding for a network of organizations dedicated to the documentation and preservation of Europes vast contemporary folk art and outsider heritage. In America, a number of museums continue to mount exhibits of outsider art, many of which are characterized by an examination of the fields pluralism. In 2004 the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco unveiled Create and be Recognized: Photography on the Edge, a first-time look at outsider photography and photographic processes that included examples by Henry Darger and Lee Godie. And in the spring of 2005 the Museum of Biblical Art opened in New York City, presenting as its first exhibit Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, and the American South, a show devoted to the impact of evangelical Christianity on 20th century folk [and] outsider artists (Johnson 2005:B29). Clearly, the presence of outsider art within museums is enjoying an upswing that shows little sign of subsiding . Despite the persistence of linguistic partisanship it is evident that museums are willing to venture past the academic stalemate of outsider arts classification, concentrating their energies on the recasting of cultural assumptions and the reconsideration of aesthetic hierarchies. With the will to include outsider art in the public dialogue, the way in which it is presented remains wide open for interpretation. It would be useful then, for the sake of those museum professionals invested in the representation of outsider art, to attempt at this point a discussion of the methods by which outsider art may be effectively contextualized for public exhibition. Working with a variety of existing examples, it is possible to identify four dominant, overarching curatorial models that remain instrumental in shaping the way we look at, and respond 48

to, outsider art. Not without certain flaws, these strategies, as outlined in the following chapters, will hopefully invite reinterpretation and variation over time. In this way the process of invention and discovery that is so crucial to the existence of outsider art may be transferred to the viewer, ensuring a dynamic and powerfully empathetic experience.
Davies, M. On Outsider Art and the Margins
th

of

Mainstream

Retrieved
th

from

internet

address:

ibiblio.org/frenchart/outsider-art/exhibition-history, April 24 2012, posted by admin April 6 2007

Expressionism, as with Outsider Art had no real programme. It was identified by content. The voice above all is individual. Artists of this period were becoming aware of outsider art and were taking aspects of these works to inspire and enhance their own creations. It drastically changed the attitude of the public towards minority groups such as the insane. The madman was becoming the romantic ideal. German expressionists looked to convey certain aspects of outsider art in their own quest to create a language that was undoubtedly
49

critical

response

to

contemporary political and social problems. Expressionist artists were imitating the closed-off worlds of the mentally ill. Alienation was a mutual factor. They sought the original and primitive to inform their works. The outsider artist could effortlessly achieve this much-desired uniqueness. Expressionist art was not insane, rather it was reflecting the contextual tensions and conflicts occurring within politics and society in Germany at the time.

50

Research Source
wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art www.rawvision.com/outsiderart/whatisoa.html www.spyrock.com/nadafarm/html/outsider.html www.deanjensengallery.com www.ibiblio.org/frenchart/outsider-art/exhibition-history/ www.sciencedirect.com www.ieeexplore.com

katedavey-outsiderart.blogspot.co.uk/view/classic
www.ted.com/talks/thelma_golden_how_art_gives_shape_to_cultural_change.html

www.pbs.org/howartmadetheworld/resources/lesson www.artforsocialchange.net/home.html
The Dictionary of Art Volume 2, Edited by Jane Turner page 515 The Oxford Companion to Art edited by Harold Osborne. Oxford Press The A-Z of Art [The Worlds Greatest and Most Popular Artists and their Works] Nicola Hodge and Libby Hanson. Carlton Press Oxford Dictionary of 20th Century Art Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press Cubism and Culture Mark Antiff and Patricia Leighton. Thames & Hudson World of Art Art Since 1960 [New Edition] Michael Archer. Thames & Hudson World of Art The Grove Dictionary of Art, From Expressionism to Postmodernism Styles and Movements in 20th Century Western Art Grove Art

51