Roger Cardinal’s Outsider Art

Following Dubuffet’s declaration and defense of art brut, the radical notion of visual production free from cultural influence began to take hold within critical circles, thanks in part to the timely efforts of the British scholar Roger Cardinal and his publication of Outsider Art in 1972. Essentially a survey of art brut and its artists, the book remains highly influential to this day and is credited with the first use of the term ‘outsider art’, intended by Cardinal to serve as a functional English approximation of Dubuffet’s poetically imprecise terminology.

While the book is primarily intended as a summary of the theories of art brut as supported by a detailed examination of a representative selection of qualified art brut examples, Cardinal devotes its first chapter to the forging of a critical approach appropriate to the particular demands of outsider production. Wary of Prinzhorn’s eagerness to cite archetypical motifs linking the “art of schizophrenics [to] the art of primitives or children,” Cardinal argues that such generalizations, grounded in the superficiality of formal comparison, lead to little more than “cliché[s] of thought” rife with “the inadequacies of comparison” (Cardinal 1972:49). Rather, Cardinal posits that in dealing with the work of outsiders in which “autistic attitudes” are responsible for “an aggravation of individualism and the consequent concentration of creativity,” it becomes “far more useful to stress the distinctness [and] independence of the artists” themselves (Cardinal 1972:47, 51). As far as Cardinal is concerned, it is only through engagement with the individual lives and circumstances of each artist that the essential nature and intention of their work may be accessed.

Putting this theory of “creative empathy” to the test in the latter half of his book by carefully regarding the work of twenty-nine artists within a biographical context, Cardinal attempts to enable a response to outsider art that is premised on a genuine “feeling of personal involvement,” a response that he hopes will eventually “provide a healthy alternative to cool aesthetic appraisal” (Cardinal 1972:53). While it is impossible to measure the ultimate success of Cardinal’s attempts to reorient the viewer towards a more personalized response to the work of outsiders, it may be said that his emphasis on biography as a means of reinforcing the notion of marginalized creativity has remained the most pervasive and popular approach to outsider art.

Posted by admin on April 6th, 2007 | Filed in outsider art | Comment now »

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.