Friday, April 6th, 2007

Judith Scott: A Heart Concealed

While the work of Henry Darger represents the posthumous discovery and acclaim that often marks the close of the outsider biography, Judith Scott (1943-2005) is the rare example whose recognition came not only in her own lifetime, but also during a period of intense creativity and stylistic maturity. Working from the studio of Creative Growth Art Center, a program in Oakland, California offering artistic training and support to people with disabilities, Judith Scott was an artist of exceptional and unprecedented talent. For the past 18 years her fiber art, typically large-scale, abstract massses of carefully bound yarn, have gained widespread attention among enthusiasts of idiosyncratic art. However, despite her popularity, Scott remained indifferent to the effects and implications of her fame. With no discernible investment in the reactions to her work, Scott continued to create in the service of her own private, undisclosed motivations. As Scott was born deaf and with Down’s Syndrome, and possessed little verbal ability it was impossible for others to inquire directly about the nature of her art. Given the circumstances, we are left to piece together loose inferences from careful observations of her work and her life, a project attempted with great care and compassion in John MacGregor’s Metamorphosis: The Fiber Art of Judith Scott.

Having watched Scott work at length within the art therapy environment of Creative Growth, MacGregor writes about her remarkable imperviousness to the influence of both her facilitators and the other artists working around her. Engaging in a process of her own invention in which she began with a seemingly arbitrary object selected from the studio, or (consent having no bearing on Scott’s process) from the personal belongings of the staff, she then methodically enclosed the object within a binding of carefully knotted lengths of yarn applied over the course of days or weeks, resulting in organic, cocoon-like forms that offer little indication of what they contain. Whatever lies at their hearts has been thoroughly concealed, protected by layer upon layer of impenetrable knotwork that literally and symbolically denies the viewer access to the innermost soul of the finished piece.

Given the severity of her disability it is unlikely, as MacGregor posits early in his study, that Scott was capable of conceptualizing the “meaning or function” of art, let alone the “understand[ing] that the objects she created were perceived by others as works of art” (MacGregor 1999:2). In light of these restrictions, how do we gain insight into Scott’s engagement with her art work? We cannot ask her and she cannot tell us, but the intensity of her methods, the originality of her approach to her materials and the startling beauty of her objects compels us to venture indelicate queries as to ‘what’, and ‘why’, despite our knowing that the answers can never be more than educated and impassioned conjecture. Nevertheless, MacGregor makes a valid attempt to contextualize Scott’s work through biographical analysis, reasonably citing the social and emotional isolation experienced during the first three decades of her life as a deeply resonant, driving force behind her work.

Born into an era of unapologetic institutionalization, Scott spent thirty-five years living in group homes throughout Ohio. Receiving little contact from her family during this time, it is likely that a compounded sense of loss and abandonment had a profound effect on Scott’s development, despite her inability to articulate such feelings. Fortunately, in an attempt at reconciliation, her twin sister, Joyce, brought Scott to live with her in California and eventually enrolled her as a full-time participant in Creative Growth’s programs.

During the first years of her engagement with Creative Growth Scott worked primarily on paper, producing a series of drawings and paintings in which she set about covering the surface with monochrome scribblings. Although these early works are unremarkable on their own, they reveal a “sudden and spontaneous eruption of creativity after long years of inaction and silence” (MacGregor 1999:6). They also indicate a growing preoccupation with the act of covering and concealing, a theme linking these early works to her late sculptural pieces. This connection, MacGregor argues, is evidence that there is some kind of artistic process revealed in her developing approach to her materials. Moving from the patterned scribbles of her two-dimensional work to her first experiments with the repetitive wrapping of yarn around sticks and scraps of wood, her process “suggest[s the discovery of] an image or object of deep significance to her,” symbolically embodied in and communicated through her art (MacGregor 1999:60). What she was attempting to communicate, however, if this is indeed what she was doing, is forever open to interpretation.

While her sculptures are essentially “non-representational” and bear no orientation as to how they are meant to be viewed, MacGregor posits that “it is worth considering the possibility that rudimentary depictions of the human body occasionally emerge” (MacGregor 1999:81). Indeed, many of Scott’s objects resemble figures, often joined in pairs that are closely bound to one another. The artist was known to refer to her creations as ‘Baba’, cradling them in her arms and becoming upset if they were touched by others while she was working on them (MacGregor 1999: 40 and 79). Perhaps then there is a connection between her work and her relationship with her twin sister? Is it possible that her possessiveness over the objects that she created indicates an intuitive, maternal inclination? Whatever may be inferred from these observations, it is apparent that Scott enjoyed some form of conscious investment in what she was doing. Strange, then, was her attitude towards her finished pieces. While highly protective and possessive of her work while incomplete, she tended to demonstrate “little interest in [their] fate” when finished (Macgregor 1999:40). This, too, appears to be an important aspect of her process, and is perhaps the most difficult to understand. Whereas this abandonment seems to parallel Scott’s past experiences with her family, it is also possible that she simply lost interest in the object at hand as she was compelled to begin the cycle anew.

Despite the questions that they raise, Scott’s objects remain “curiously incomplete but convincing works of art,” incomplete in that we must be the ones to invest them with our own projected values, yet convincing nonetheless because of their aesthetic power and the overwhelming belief of their maker that they were so necessary to her well-being as to devote the last eighteen years of her life to their existence (MacGregor 1999:88). And while Scott may have been indifferent to the rewards of her devotion, her work has become highly sought-after over the course of the last decade, ushered onto the market by the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York City. Most recently, several museums have embraced Scott’s work in their permanent collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, which received two pieces donated by MacGregor, and the Oakland Museum of California through a joint gift from the Folk Art Society of America and Creative Growth in 2004.

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

A. G. Rizzoli: Architect of Heaven

A third individual worthy of discussion is Achilles Rizzoli (1896–1981), an architectural draftsman whose production represents a lifelong obsession with the utopian reconstruction of a troubled past. Widely acclaimed among enthusiasts of idiosyncratic art, Rizzoli stands out as a true outsider artist, “distinguished from the cultural and social mainstream by a compulsive preoccupation” with the construction of a highly “personalized alternate reality” (Hernandez 1997:14). In his work a private world is literally built from the ground up, its fantastic architectural plans reflecting Rizzoli’s struggle to overcome worldly desire in the service of his divinely inspired visions.

The son of Swiss-Italian immigrants living in California’s Marin County, Rizzoli’s early years were marked by tragedy when his father walked into the woods with a borrowed rifle, mysteriously disappearing until his skeletal remains were discovered several decades later. Deeply disturbed by the subsequent unraveling of his family, Rizzoli moved to San Francisco in 1915, eventually taking sole responsibility for his ailing mother. During this time the spectacle and unbridled optimism of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition captured Rizzoli’s imagination. Struck by the transcendent potential of architecture to restore order and beauty in the wake of the ruin caused by the fire and earthquake of 1906, he became increasingly preoccupied with the notion of a utopian existence parallel to his own in which heaven may be made manifest through the hand of the architect. Working towards this end, Rizzoli embarked on a series of literary attempts, including a self-published collection of poems, titled Versified Fiction Romancing Total Love in Vivid Terms of Highly Entertaining Monumental Mediums. Needless to say, it was met with universal indifference, leaving Rizzoli and his mother in dire need of a more dependable source of income.

Relying on the limited formal knowledge of architecture that he acquired from membership in the San Francisco Architectural Club, Rizzoli found employment as a draftsman for an architectural firm where he remained until his retirement. His nights and weekends, however, became singularly devoted to the creation of a grand design for his fantastic ‘Expeau of Magnitude, Magnificence, and Manifestation’, an imaginary exposition filled with structures and ornaments intended to function as elaborate personifications of Rizzoli’s scattered family and scarce friends. Executed in ink on rag paper, these intricate renderings of cathedrals, skyscrapers and monuments are primarily influenced by Beaux-Arts ideals, but freely incorporate flourishes of Romanesque, Renaissance, Art Deco and Art Nouveau motifs as well.

These ‘Symbolizations’, as Rizzoli referred to them, served as a kind of surrogate for the engaged social contact missing from his life following the death of his mother. In them the artist explores an inverted “architectural physiognomy” in which “the conventions of architectural form [become] analogies to the character perceived in his human subjects” (Beardsley 1997:92). In this manner, Rizzoli’s mother is memorialized in the Kathedral, the physical and symbolic heart of the intended exposition. Those few who, out of politeness or curiosity, ventured into his small home to see his drawings became the celebrated subjects of additional monumental structures, with their attributes indelibly heralded in the margins of Rizzoli’s drawings.

At times there is a tangible and unsettling sexuality present in his work, particularly in those dedicated to a handful of neighborhood girls. Although he was a lifelong virgin, as dictated by his profound devotion to the Church, several of his illustrations employ architectural features such as spires, gargoyles, and basins meant to be allusions to genitalia. Lacking a crassness indicative of any potential predatory inclination, Rizzoli’s drawings point to a man struggling to remain chaste in the face of wayward desires. Indeed, much of his work may be seen as awkward attempts at understanding the fundamentals of social interaction so distanced from, and abstracted by his reclusive life style. “Not only an antidote to loneliness, but also the expression of it,” Rizzoli’s architectural projects are imbued with a poignant naiveté that explains his peculiar, and at times inappropriate inquires into “a phenomenon he seems hardly to have known at all: interpersonal relationships” (Beardsley 1997:94).

Another defining characteristic of the artist’s oeuvre is his obsessive integration of text within his drawings, a feature that is typical of outsider art. Employing an elaborate vocabulary of his own invention, Rizzoli filled the margins of his work with strange anagrams and acronyms, offering little information as to how they should be deciphered, thereby constructing an enigmatic and private code that restricts access to his intended mythography (Hernandez 1997:33 and 34). This effect is further compounded by Rizzoli’s fondness for adding commentary and critique to his work, often attributing his production to the talents of imaginary collaborators. While the motivation behind these rhetorical devices is unclear, they hint at an increasing yield to a visionary influence that would engage Rizzoli for the remaining years of his life.

Abandoning his Symbolizations and plot plans in 1944, Rizzoli poured his energies into what he referred to as A.C.E., or AMTE’s [Architecture Made to Entertain’s] Celestial Extravaganza. Comprised of 326 vellum sheets filled with prose, poetry and illustrations of architectural forms, the work is punctuated by visionary episodes and mediumistic transcriptions received from various historical figures and saints. Intended as a third testament of the Bible, Rizzoli wavered in his willingness to take credit for its creation, proudly proclaiming himself the author at times, then undercutting his accomplishment by relegating himself to the role of appointed “transcriber [of] saintly intercessions” (Hernandez 1997:57, after Rizzoli 1966).

Despite nineteen years of steady labor on the A.C.E. sheets, Rizzoli did not live to complete his task. After suffering a stroke in 1977 that left him paralyzed and unable to speak, he was moved by his niece to a convalescent home where he died four years later. Fortunately, the bulk of his work was put into storage by his family where it remained intact, but suffering from neglect, until it was salvaged in the early 1990s by Bonnie Grossman, the owner-director of the Ames Gallery in Berkeley, California. Working with Rizzoli’s surviving kin and an array of historical documents, Grossman was able to piece together the fragments of Rizzoli’s background, providing insight into his carefully guarded life. Through her research, Grossman eventually deciphered much of the word play used by Rizzoli, a key element in following the evolution of his ideas and iconography. Due to her ongoing efforts, Rizzoli may now be seen in the way in which he quietly craved: an extraordinary talent whose private visions and personal sacrifices were driven by the cause of utopian ideals and public delight.

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

On Classification

Having offered the above artists as profound examples of outsider art, it is important to acknowledge that, despite the disparate circumstances responsible for the private origins of their work, all three cases, Darger, Scott and Rizzoli, must be viewed in relation to the fine art tradition. It is, after all, the collectors, the galleries, and ultimately the museums that have come to define the very notion of the outsider artist, subsequently shaping public response to their work. This said, the art establishment, as is its nature, has made many attempts to define and compartmentalize non-mainstream production. While the terms ‘naive’ or ‘popular painting’ remain specific to certain politicized, egalitarian ideals of the first half of the century, distinctions such as ‘folk,’ ‘art brut,’ and ‘self-taught’ remain in pervasive use. Often employed as sweeping generalizations in the service of critical agendas, these labels tend to forego accuracy for the sake of convenience. When applied to the outsider in particular, they tend to undermine the importance of the artists and the strength of their work by denying them the distinct individuality and extreme inventiveness that sets them apart in the first place.

This consequence becomes blatant when the misappropriation of the term ‘folk art’ is examined. For the purpose of this argument, Roger Cardinal lays out an excellent definition of the ‘folk’ tradition in his essay The Self in Self-Taught Art. Defining folk art as a “communal medium of cultural interchange,” whereby “recognizable visual ideas, patterns, and standards” are passed down in the form of learned technique, Cardinal places great emphasis on the shared aesthetic values that arise from common experience (Cardinal 2001:69). Because folk art is “firmly rooted in [the] traditions” of a given community, Cardinal continues, it “tends to be consistent” with the evolution of that community, “so that there is never a sensation of dramatic rupture with inherited practices” (Cardinal ibid.). Folk art, then, may be said to be reflective of a group’s social identity, rather than that of the individual. Even if the maker of a specific example is known, the folk object still exudes a certain anonymity in its conformity to collective ideas and tastes. In this manner folk art closely parallels popular art, in that it is originally intended to gain the immediate acceptance of its contemporaries. In fact, folk art may be seen as historicized popular art, made “acceptable, charming, [and] collectible” by the passage of time (Russell 2001:14).

How, then, can a comfortable association be made between folk art and outsider art? Admittedly, Henry Darger used the materials and methods of popular culture in his photo enlargements and tracings of comic book and newspaper clippings, and he may have sought to echo shared sentiments regarding religion and war. Without a doubt Judith Scott’s craft is the product of a transmission between the artist and her facilitators at Creative Growth. Even the work of Rizzoli, divinely inspired and tinged with psychosis, rests squarely on the acquired techniques of the draftsman and the long-standing principles of architecture. Where these artists take a bold turn away from the collective is in the application of that which they have absorbed from their surroundings. All three have managed a decisive and irreversible break from the expectations of tradition. Unlike popular or folk art, an overwhelming sense of dramatic rupture is what may be said to be the single defining and unifying element of outsider art, wrenching it from any historical context and rendering comparison nearly impossible. In light of this, it becomes extremely confusing when the American Folk Art Museum, clearly committed to the preservation and exhibition of Henry Darger’s work, chooses to include his work in its Contemporary Center, or the American Folk Art Society schedules a visit for its members to Judith Scott’s studio during an annual conference (Browne and Oppenhimer 2004:8).

Likewise, the term ‘art brut’ proves an uncomfortable alternative. Although the Collection de l’Art Brut, being a repository for major holdings by the likes of such artists as Aloise Corbaz (1886-1964), Madge Gill (1882-1961), and Augustin Lesage (1876-1954) has become somewhat synonymous with an “orthodoxy of the outsider art field,” art brut as a genre has lost much of its cultural relevance over time (Rhodes: 2000:23). As defined by Dubuffet, art brut was the product of a specific time and place, tapping into the Expressionists’ romantic occupation with primitivism and offering a brief aesthetic alternative to the increasing intellectualism of Europe’s avant-garde. Overlooking the suffering of the mentally ill in the name of artistic advancement, Dubuffet declared art brut and its creators free from cultural influence. While much of what may be considered outsider art, including the work of Darger and Scott, does indeed exude a disregard for mainstream approval, cultural influence (in the case of Rizzoli, cultural reference) abounds. In fact, the very notion of an art devoid of any cultural resonance is a questionable assertion, and has been retracted to some degree by the addition of the Collection Neuve Invention to the Collection de l‘Art Brut. Art brut, then, exists as a paradox in which its tenets “argue against culture from within culture” (Russell 2001:25). Best viewed as a well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed ideology, Dubuffet’s ideas are difficult to sustain beyond their historical context, rendering the Collection in Lausanne a static testament to a moment passed.

In contrast, outsider art continues to spontaneously manifest itself under highly variable and unpredictable circumstances. Recent attempts at classification have resulted in labels born of compromise. These terms, however convenient they may appear, are tied to specific examples and often fail to encompass a broad spectrum of individuals. Rather, to speak of outsider art is to acknowledge a relational distinction stemming from the perspective of the mainstream without placing specific expectations or restrictions on the work itself. Because it is unlike anything before or after, and because it lacks the distinct context and comparison that perpetuates the academic model, I would argue that the term be allowed to stand on its own beyond the confines of overly-compartmentalized genres and rigid classification.

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

Section III: The Institutionalization of Outsider Art

In reviewing the body of literature surrounding the occurrence of outsider art it’s interesting to note that critical discourse on the subject, now encompassing three decades of reflection, appears for the most part to remain anchored in the charged polemics of precise definition and appropriate nomenclature. While these arguments should not be discounted, as they mark an impassioned and intellectual engagement that contributes to the legitimization of their subject, their preoccupation tends to lead towards a collective impasse. As debate over the precision of distinctions continues, important issues regarding the artists, their artwork, and the eventual, if unintended audience are frequently overlooked. At times, the aesthetic theorist Kenneth L. Ames argues, this narrowing of focus is conscious, perpetrated by “advocates and apologists” intent on “shaping or impeding understanding” in the service of particular critical positions (Ames 1994:255). For the most part, however, the failure to examine outsider art from a broad perspective is the result, according to Ames, of the “myopia associated with overspecialization” (Ames 1994:255). By overemphasizing the necessity of an exact terminology, the consideration of the artists’ intention, choice, and process— all key elements in the discussion of mainstream artistic endeavor— are lost, and as a result, the uniquely expressive voice of the outsider is silenced.

Perhaps then, it may be time to move past the project of defining and classifying outsider art in overarching terms for two reasons: first, as instances of outsider art continue to permeate mainstream and academic consciousness, we will continue to need a way to talk about these anomalous objects in a tone that recognizes their unique qualities, and second, it is important to acknowledge the possibility of a more practical, even progressive approach to outsider production by shifting attention to the organizations and institutions directly responsible for not only the collection and care of outsider art, but the way in which it is presented to, and recieved by the public.

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

Exhibition History

Nonacademic art has enjoyed a continual public presence throughout the course of the last hundred years, fueled at first by the avant-garde’s 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 Douanier’ Rousseau (1844-1910) were held aloft by modernists, along with colonial plunder from Africa and the Americas as salvation from industrialization’s 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 Sculpture: The Work of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Craftsmen’. In 1932, while serving as director of New York’s newly formed Museum of Modern Art, Cahill curated the sweeping and patriotically named ‘American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in 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 Modern’s 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 Barr’s belief in the pluralistic roots of international modernism,” a radical conviction “that his trustees did not share” (Smith 2005:B29).

In a more conservative accommodation of Barr’s 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 Hirshfield’s 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 art’s inordinacy (Janis 1942:1).

While interest in marginal art continued to surge throughout Europe, rallied for the most part around the activities of Jean Dubuffet’s Collection de l’Art Brut and a growing network of galleries committed to the display of work by children and the mentally ill, 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 brut’s presence in the United States. Shortly after his decision to house the Collection de l’Art 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 Dubuffet’s 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 Chicago’s dynamic postwar period.

During the 1960’s 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 1880’s-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 world’s 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 across the hallucinatory renderings of extraterrestrial encounters by P. M. Wentworth (dates unknown) and the meticulous collages of Martin Ramirez (1895-1963). Originally 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. Pasto’s 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 60’s, 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 l’Art 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 institution’s focus, making the museum an instrumental force in fostering public awareness of the democratic possibilities of untrained artistic ability.

By this time, Roger Cardinal’s 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 Hemphill’s 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 of outsider art, curated ‘Outsiders: An Art Without Precedent or Tradition’ at the London’s Hayward Gallery. Funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, the accompanying catalog contains a revealing preface by the Council’s 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 Art’s exhibit, ‘Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art Inside North Carolina’. The 1980’s also saw an increase in international institutions dedicated to outsider art. In 1986, both the Musee d’Art Naif and L’Aracine: Musee d’Art 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 artist’s 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 Dublin’s 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 Chicago’s Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. A nonprofit lacking the staff structure of a 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 Intuit’s 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 institution’s 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 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 museum’s collection objectives, eventually settled on a brilliant compromise (Fine 2004:252). In 1997 the museum’s 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 museum’s 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 museum’s 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 mainstream’s 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 Europe’s 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 Europe’s 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 field’s 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 art’s 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 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.

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

Biographical Emphasis

By far the most prevalent tendency in the presentation of outsider art, the practice of framing the work of outsider artists within the circumstances of their biographies began with Dubuffet’s rigid criteria for inclusion in the art brut canon. While his early intentions were to valorize the creative potential of the common man, Dubuffet became increasingly preoccupied with an ideology aimed at the erosion of the academic establishment and its aesthetic supremacy. Knowing that the work of the average autodidact couldn’t bear the weight of his radical theories, Dubuffet favored extremity, placing great emphasis on the degree to which an individual was removed from the taint of high culture. According to his selection process, to be uneducated was good, but to be uneducated and interred was even better. Dementia, although not a prerequisite of art brut, was viewed as divine. For Dubuffet, the life of the artist dictated the degree of purity to be found in his or her work, making biography the ore from which both integrity and proof of native genius may be extracted.

While Dubuffet’s fervor remains unique, his biographical predilection has become standard in the discussion of nonacademic art. In They Taught Themselves, the catalog for the eponymous 1942 exhibit at New York’s MOMA, Sidney Janis employs the biographies of a selection of self-taught American artists as a means to draw a clear distinction between homespun, ‘naive’ painting, and modernist practice. Giving each artist a separate chapter, Janis’ table of contents reads like a laundry list of tribulation: “William Samet, Inmate; Hazel Knapp, Former Invalid; Horace Pippin, Disabled War Veteran (Negro); Cleo Crawford, Laborer (Negro)” (Janis 1942:2). By highlighting such adverse conditions (in 1942, within the rarefied world of the art museum, being anything other than an educated, white male could be considered an extreme adversity), Janis is successful in arousing the interest of his audience in a way that makes it difficult to dismiss the artists’ work as merely the product of inferior artistic ability. Instead, Janis relies on the authenticity of experience, as characterized by his hard-boiled accounts of the artists’ lives, to impart a new kind of value on the paintings being exhibited. The viewer, upon reading these biographies, is prompted by Janis to interact with the work on an emotional level that is willing to forgive aesthetic naivety for the sake of achieving a deeper, humanistic content. Though Janis’ methodology may be cringe-inducing in hindsight, given that it is likely to have fostered more sympathy than empathy, it should be noted that his intentions were egalitarian in nature, meant to attune the public to the inclusive potential of art, an idea that in its own right was as revolutionary as Dubuffet’s, being similarly aimed at breaking down the barriers between the academy and its peripheries.

In the realm of outsider art biography provides the same kind of leverage, enabling the viewer to access work that does not immediately appeal to our conditioned appraisals of fine art. Without the aid of explicit aesthetic and/or intellectual points of reference, the absence of which tends to be a hallmark of outsider art, it’s tempting to dismiss this art as scattered instances of autistic indulgence. “As a formal aesthetic domain,” writes Gary Alan Fine in Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity, self-taught art, including that of outsider artists, “does not coalesce well,” being the result of “too many styles, media, forms, and contents jumbl[ed] together” without the justification and support of “consensually held theories” (Fine 2004:284). Given this, Fine argues that what transforms such disparate elements into “a recognized sphere of work” is “the identity of the artists” and the commonality of “their outsider status– however [it may be] defined” (Fine 2004:284).

Indeed, as museum professionals continue to wrestle with the aesthetic and cultural implications of the field, attempting to define and present outsider art in a way that is relevant to more mainstream, public experience, biographical emphasis can be seen as a necessary and almost inevitable strategy of promotion. As Eugene Metcalf, Jr., a theorist in the field points out, when first encountered by an audience unaccustomed to its unusual visual language, outsider art tends to inspire an intuitive response akin to Dubuffet’s original interpretation. Seen as the “self-inspired product of social [and psychological] misfits,” outsider art is easily perceived as something “exist[ing] apart from culture, in a state unaffected by the influences and pressures” of normative social engagement (Metcalf 1994:215). Viewed in this light, Metcalf cautions that outsider art becomes relegated to a place of extreme otherness, authenticated only by way of a flimsy association with constructs of primitivism and exoticism (Metcalf 1994:220-21). Biographical information, however, may be employed as a powerful tool in reorienting public perception by recasting outsider art as a response to social disparities within the world at large, thereby helping to “map the boundaries and chart the nature of cultural identity” (Metcalf 1994:215). While aesthetic considerations are crucial in ensuring the quality of connoisseurship that museum representation demands, it is the way the artist interprets his or her experience that makes for truly great and lasting art. With the help of biographical context, the eccentric approach of outsiders becomes more perceptible as an impassioned dialogue with the circumstances that shape their need to create. In this manner, biography has the potential to amplify the voice of the disenfranchised, enabling a resonant connection between outsider artists and their developing audiences.

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

Formal Emphasis

Having discussed the merits of biographical context it’s important to give equal weight to an alternative approach towards the representation of outsider art that is currently gaining momentum among certain museums and critical circles. While biographical emphasis remains common practice, it may be argued that such practice, if overindulged, comes at great cost to both the artist and the artwork. Precedented by a network of dealers and collectors eager to surrogate sensational circumstance for true quality (because in the market, obscurity implies rarity, which in turn demands value), the outsider field has become increasingly troubled by preoccupation with back-story. This is not to say that the life of the artist need be overlooked, but when it threatens to overshadow the actual art work, becoming in itself a collectible commodity, something has clearly gone awry.

This trend, identified by Roger Cardinal as “biographical reductionism,” is detrimental to outsider art in two important ways. First and foremost, when “active artistry” becomes “subordinate to the unwitting impression left by the life-story,” Cardinal asserts, “the actual work can be dismissed” as merely consequential, “exposing it to condescension or sentimental curiosity” (Cardinal 1994:79). In this regressive paradigm, outsider art is reduced to a symptomatic presence that poses an absolute affront to the creative determinacy of the artist, in essence paralleling the manner in which the artistic activity of the mentally ill was perceived during the 19th century. As if the potential to inadvertently wrest control away from the artists isn’t reason enough to exercise caution in our approach to the genre’s representation, the critic Tessa DeCarlo argues that over-reliance on biography has served to impede critical discourse. “Collecting life stories has too often been treated as substitute for real intellectual engagement with [the] material,” DeCarlo writes. “Moreover, it makes the discussion of quality almost impossible . . . when we hold up social, mental, or physical disadvantages as the primary standard, we close off our ability to talk about whether the work succeeds as visual expression” (DeCarlo 2002:27).

As a means to avoid the pitfalls of biographical dependence, it is worth considering the logical alternative of formal emphasis, an approach that favors aesthetic engagement with the artworks and encourages critical evaluations of the assumed polarities of outsider and mainstream art. Whereas biography serves to underscore the cultural disparities between art world insiders and the disassociated creations of the outsider, a formal approach strives to allow the work to speak for itself, inviting the viewer to make judgments based on the artists’ aesthetic choices. These choices, bearing the influence of cultural context either consciously or unconsciously, are in themselves capable of communicating where the artist perceives him or herself in relation to the mainstream. Outsider status, therefore, becomes the product of the individual’s art-making process and the intended use of the art object, rather than the particulars of a person’s life-story. The issue of quality may also be examined in relation to the artist’s visual practice, with subsequent valuations determined not by the elements of a sensational biography, but by the success of the aesthetic choices executed in the rendering of a given art work. In this way, formal considerations function to level the playing field between inside and out, placing the burden of proof where it belongs and where the public expects it to be: squarely on the art itself.

At the forefront of this approach is the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. As caretaker of the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, an extensive archive of international examples of outsider art entrusted to the museum on indefinite loan, the IMMA has initiated an innovative approach to the representation of outsider material. Following 1998’s ‘Art Unsolved’, a showcase exhibition of the Musgrave Kinley Collection, the museum has committed itself to including work from the archive in every exhibit of the permanent collection. Rejecting a segregated approach, Catherine Marshall, Senior Curator of the IMMA’s collection presents outsider art side-by-side with the work of mainstream artists, often organizing gallery spaces thematically rather than stylistically so as to de-emphasize the juxtaposition.

Because museums and exhibits focusing solely on the presentation of outsider art risk inadvertently fostering a context where the work may be statically appraised as artifact rather than art object, the IMMA’s decision to initiate a literal integration of outsider art into the territory of the mainstream forces an interactive relationship between the two, charging both with a vitality that defies comfortable compartmentalization. Echoing the museum’s “founding principle that standing definitions of artist and non-artist must be renegotiated,” Marshall’s willingness to challenge institutionalized divisions through the assertion of a work’s formal merits is exceptional in that it presents “a new way of looking at and thinking about art which is open and inclusive rather than closed and exclusive” (Marshall 2000).

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

Appropriative Emphasis

For some, value based solely on the formal and aesthetic content of outsider art does a disservice to its makers, muting their individual voices and, as Eugene Metcalf argues, “obscuring important ethical questions about the personal and social costs of the production of this art” (Metcalf 1994:221). If the preceeding strategies are so diametrically opposed, how do we go about forging a balance “where one can register the intrinsic impact of the work while remaining alive to the presence of its maker” (Cardinal 1994:79)? In an attempt to answer this question, it may be useful to turn to art-historical practice and its influence on museums.

In his essay “Art History, Museology, and the Strategy of Modernity,” Donald Preziosi (Preziosi 1992:296) identifies the two dominant paradigms of art history that have shaped the way in which art is presented to the public, namely the “internal conditions of creativity and the external circumstances of production.” In the case of the outsider artists, these conditions can be seen as cultural context and the way in which the individual chooses to formalize his or her experiences in an art object. In other words, biographical orientation and its aesthetic manifestation. As we have seen, critical opinion and curatorial tendency are often sharply divided along these lines. In spite of this, it’s important to acknowledge that, in theory, both camps share the same objective of contextualizing the art in a way that enables “the intentions, attitudes, values, or thoughts of a maker [to be] conveyed to the mind of the beholder or observer” (Preziosi ibid.). In reality, however, these “predicative frameworks” eclipse the organic control of the artist over the impressions of the viewer, supplanting it with “an authority” derived from “the systems of art history” (Preziosi 1992: 299 and 305). This authority is implicitly present in the way museums present art, making them “in direct and poignant ways,” complicit “institutions of empowerment and disempowerment,” a role that is particularly evident within the modernist agenda (Preziosi 1992:305).

Because the museological treatment of modernity is rooted in dialectical analysis, outsider art is easily dismissed as an aberrant footnote, unconcerned with the synthetic resolution of aesthetic or stylistic problems. That museums holding modern or contemporary collections are hesitant to acknowledge the presence of outsider art is understandable, as is the lack of an agreeable approach to its representation. But as the field continues to struggle to contort outsider art so as to fit into pre-existing frameworks, perhaps it’s worthwhile to consider alternative modes of organizing the very concept of modernism. This is precisely what the Los Angeles County Museum of Art sought to do in 1992 with its highly influential exhibit, ‘Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art’.

In a sweeping survey of modern art’s many mutations, the organizers of ‘Parallel Visions’ sought a postmodern perspective in their approach to the traditional art-historical model. Departing from the typical linear advance through the evolution of styles and movements, the exhibit was designed to lead its audience on an unhurried meander through the myriad “directions, affiliations, feedbacks, and interactions” that serve to expand the narrative of modern art (Preziosi 1992:304). Beginning with the expressionist’s romance with the art of children and the insane, the exhibit explored artistic interactions with visual alternatives to academic precedent. Ranging from the experiments of Paul Klee to the unappologetic pastiches of Claus Oldenburg and Julian Schnable, ‘Parallel Visions’ cites a vast spectrum of artists who have found intellectual and aesthetic inspiration beyond the creative confines of the mainstream. In exposing this propensity for appropriation, the exhibit succeeds in undermining the myth of high art’s impenetrable self-obsessions, thereby inviting the audience to consider a new vision of modernity that “restores heterogeneity and multiplicity— complexities occluded by conventional art history and museology” (Preziosi 1992:305).

In this imaginative recasting of the relationship between modern and outsider art, ‘Parallel Visions’ de-emphasized the stock frameworks of biographical and formal analysis, positing in their place a flexible practice of outsider art’s valuation based on useful “interactions among object, beholder, and environment at a given time and place” (Preziosi 1992:305). By focusing on individual relationships between the art work and the viewer, we may then become attuned to the significance of what Roger Cardinal calls “the form giving presence,” meaning the place where the internal and external meet in a powerful fusion of “expressive intimacy and communicative universality” (Cardinal 1994:79-80).

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

Patrimonial Emphasis

The fourth model I propose requires a slight stretch of the imagination and, admittedly, may not be applicable to all instances of outsider production. Nonetheless, it’s worth contemplating as part of a larger conversation (too large for the confines of this paper, I’m affraid) regarding the inevitable necessity of preserving marginalized art forms from the increasing homogenization of cultures, as well as from the art market’s insatiable commodification of the construct of authenticity. While the implications of the following argument may be global in scope, I intend to use what is most familiar, American examples, to frame my point.

To begin one must consider a seemingly far-fetched comparison between a privately owned pre-Columbian mural fragment from Central Mexico and a twenty-foot scroll of newsprint bearing the collaged images of an army of children waging war on their adult oppressors. Such a clumsy juxtaposition begs the question of what similarities, if any, might be gleaned from these disparate objects? While the former may be acknowledged as the crowning artistic achievement of a highly sophisticated ancient civilization, the latter, created by Henry Darger in his cluttered apartment, appears as strange and incongruous company. Pushing the envelope even further, what correlation can be drawn between a 16th-century Benin relief offered at auction, and a piece of ‘yard art’ cleaved from corrugated tin by Mary T. Smith, a seventy-four-year-old African American woman from Hazelhurst, Mississippi? As it turn out, the two have more in common than one might think.

Though the above examples appear extreme, all of these objects have been subjected to like treatment by the art market. As with the mural fragment and the relief, the work of Darger and Smith, two outsider artists deemed in the last decade to be “blue chip” commodities by dealers and collectors, have been subjected to removal from their original context and assigned value based overwhelmingly on their relative scarcity (Hamilton 2003:A1). Divorced from their intended purpose and alienated from their origins, the fate of these artists’ creations is indicative of the issues currently facing the preservation of a range of self-taught forms, including outsider art.

In this final section I intend to draw such parallels between the greater implications of subjecting ‘cultural properties’ to movement on the international market and those challenges particular to growing interests in the commercialization of what I will refer to, for the sake of convenience, as American vernacular art. In no way, however, do I wish to trivialize the repercussions felt by cultures and communities affected by the loss of their heritage to the trade in art and antiquities. Rather, I hope to channel the gravity of such experiences into a cautionary examination of the impact of American attitudes towards an expressive modality that uniquely reflects important elements of our collective identity. In doing so, it is my intent to call attention to the need for a pragmatic and responsible approach to the conservation of our rich vernacular traditions.

With roots stretching back to colonial America’s impulsive reinterpretation of dominant European aesthetics and the unprecedented intermingling of disparate cultural influences due to slavery, mass immigration and migration, vernacular art marks a truly democratic expression of deep-seated notions of the American experience. Encompassing a wealth of subcategories including folk, visionary and outsider art, the work of vernacular artists is highly individual, often irreverent, and characteristically rough around the edges in a way that radiates an essential dissonance within the presupposed ordering of high art. Evident in this discord is the elemental nature and architecture of American culture, “disorderly in its natural sense of evolving improvisation” (Morris 2001:118). In this sense, it is plausible to argue that American vernacular art is a valuable cultural resource, worthy of our attention and admiration as an honest and exuberant reflection of the pluralism inherent in, and fundamental to the American experience.

Quite possibly, it’s this ability to simultaneously embody individual and collective interpretations of American culture that is responsible for the rise of vernacular art’s popularity in America. While a scattering of museums have made efforts to incorporate representations of the genre in their collections, fascination with vernacular art is particularly evident in market activity. Sought after by collectors for the better part of the century, interest in vernacular artists has reached an all-time high in the last two decades, exemplified by the first stand-alone auction of 20th-century self-taught art at Christie’s, New York, in January 2003.

Comprised of art from the collection of Robert M. Greenberg, including work by Darger and the stone carver William Edmondson, the Christie’s sale, while undoubtedly affording the genre well-deserved public exposure, has been criticized as a single collector’s shortsighted attempt to liquidate his assets at an inflated cost. Writing in the New York Times on the eve of the auction, William Hamilton expressed concern over Greenberg’s agenda, implying that the collector’s insistence on “aggressive” estimates was motivated by the desire to “rais[e] money for architectural projects” (Hamilton 2003:A6). Commenting on the potentially damaging long-term effects of the sale, Hamilton cites the possibility of a subsequent “critical shakeout” that would launch the more rarefied and sought-after objects in Greenberg’s collection “into the vault of collectible contemporary art,” while leaving the work of other important vernacular artists “as devalued as slag by the publicity of [the] auction” (Hamilton 2003:A6). In the same article, Lyle Rexler, a scholar specializing in outsider art, acknowledges that vernacular art exists within a greater “nexus of contemporary art,” making it equally subject to valuation based on demand and marketability (Hamilton 2003:A6). For collectors to stimulate interest in the genre through auction is not unheard of, Rexler continues, but the assumption that interest equates understanding is misleading. “Making art visible and making it meaningful,” he concludes, should not be assumed to be the same thing (Hamilton 2003:A1).

True to this argument, the popularity of vernacular art in America is inclined to rest, for the most part, with the speculative investments of dealers and collectors while scholarly engagement struggles to stay abreast of those trends initiated by the market. Although this tends to be the natural ordering of the art world, it’s apparent in the case of vernacular art that something is inherently lost in the symbolic function of the object when rendered as a commodity. An excellent example of this can be seen in the work of Mary T. Smith.

Painted on scavenged panels of wood and tin, each piece by Smith bears a highly expressionistic and “allegorized” record of the artist’s religious convictions (Maresca and Ricco 1993:220). Displaying them for years in her front yard, Smith regarded her assemblage of paintings, often depicting friends and neighbors, as a kind of evangelical experience intended for the moral edification of her immediate community. Inevitably, her creations caught the eye of a dealer trawling back roads for fresh discoveries, who, as the story is told, “backed his truck up to [Smith’s] yard,” and for “a price that would now buy a single piece, carted everything off to a warehouse” to appreciate until the climate was right to enter it into the market (Maresca and Ricco 1993:xii). Unfortunately, little first-hand documentation of the work’s original environment exists, lending the tragic impression of a creative spirit cut loose to haunt the white-walled purgatory of a SoHo gallery space.

The manner in which Smith’s art was acquired calls attention to a troublesome issue. Much like the pre-Columbian mural fragment or the Benin relief, the intended use and cultural relevance of works by vernacular artists are shadowed by the imposition of subjective aesthetic and financial considerations. It’s unrealistic, however, to advocate for a remedy that excludes private acquisition and ownership. In fact, there are many examples of dealers and collectors who have been instrumental in the promotion and preservation of vernacular production, fostering relationships with artists grounded in a profound respect for their creative processes and the social/cultural environments that inform their work. This said, it is crucial to articulate an approach to the continued activity of collection that perpetuates the notion of responsible acquisition and provides a model for the enlightened stewardship of vernacular traditions. Perhaps then, a useful place to turn for inspiration regarding this challenge is the ongoing issue of creating and implementing effective protection for cultural properties.

Article One of the 1970 UNESCO Convention defines cultural property as that which, on either religious or secular grounds, is determined by a nation to be of unique importance for reasons relating to history, science, or art. Included under the category of “property of artistic interest,” the Convention identifies “pictures, paintings and drawings produced entirely by hand, works of statuary art and sculpture, and artistic assemblages and montages in any material” (Malaro 1998:458). While it is doubtful that vernacular art was on anyone’s mind when this definition was penned, certain correspondences are obvious. Though no specific regulations stand in the United States regarding the genre, for the purpose of this argument it is sufficient to focus on the spirit, rather than the letter of the law, while keeping in mind that today’s vernacular art could well be tomorrow’s cultural property.

Turning to the theoretical foundations of the legislative efforts currently protecting cultural properties, Karen J. Warren’s essay, “A Philosophical Perspective on the Ethics and Resolution of Cultural Property Issues” serves to articulate the key incentives for increasing our awareness in the collection and care of vernacular art works. Recognizing the inherent conflict between the rights of artists, dealers, collectors, and the greater public, Warren asserts that, although property rights belong to the first three invested interests, general access and inheritance of cultural heritage must be considered whenever discussions of cultural property take place. In order to do so, the author continues, we must begin by examining the “conceptual frameworks” from which we operate, meaning “the values, attitudes, and assumptions through which we conceive ourselves and our world” (Warren 1999:11). Too often, Warren cautions, these conceptual frameworks become “oppressive” in their construction of “dominant-subordinate relations,” and are typified by values based on “hierarchical organization and exclusive dualisms” justified and perpetuated by a supportive “logic of domination” (Warren 1999: 12). In the case of the prevailing attitude towards the treatment of vernacular art and the larger realm of art not of the mainstream, it’s this repressive framework, perpetrated by art history’s narrow margins, that’s responsible for perpetuating the long-standing schism between high and popular art. This divide, in turn, adds to the ease with which vernacular material may be commodified with little regard to its potential cultural significance.

Fortunately, Warren offers a remedy for the problem, obtainable in two crucial steps. The first step requires the recognition of the frameworks informing our view of particular objects of cultural heritage. With vernacular art, scholars in the field actively examining the validity of art history’s paradigmatic assumptions have recently initiated this process. The second step involves factoring context into our understanding and appreciation of those objects linked to cultural heritage. Because “all cultural properties come with context,” Warren writes, to dismiss their contextual relevance renders them “dispossessed of the very sorts of information that are essential to their constituting a cultural heritage” (Warren 1999:22). The notion that the “true value” of our heritage “can be appreciated only in relation to the fullest possible information regarding its origin, history, and traditional setting” is further reiterated by UNESCO, illustrating the concept’s overwhelming importance to all issues concerning cultural property (Malaro 1998:457). Therefore, whether inadvertently or with careful calculation, those individuals engaging in collection practices that irreparably alienate the object from its context, as in the case of Mary Smith, make it impossible for the life and work of a given artist to contribute to a collective heritage.

Recently, several American museums have begun to integrate examples of vernacular art into their permanent collections with careful consideration as to the representation of the cultural contexts informing the artists’ creative endeavors. One such collection comprised of Henry Darger’s puzzling masterpieces, part of the American Folk Art Museum’s Contemporary Center, functions as an ideal model for the thoughtful treatment of a difficult body of outsider art. After Darger’s death, Nathan Lerner took immediate steps to document the artist’s output by photographing the contents of Darger’s room and meticulously preserving its contents, including the massive amount of source material used in Darger’s illustrations. While some pieces were relinquished over the years to eager collectors, the great bulk of Darger’s production was maintained as a whole by Lerner and later donated by his wife, Kiyoko Lerner, to the AFAM in 1997. Faced with the challenge of making the material accessible to both scholars and the public, Lerner envisioned a detailed archive where the work could be experienced collectively. This idea was eventually realized with the opening of the Henry Darger Study Center in 2000. Now the definitive repository for Darger’s manuscripts and illustrations, as well as for Lerner’s records of Darger’s cluttered apartment, the center plays a crucial role in the excavation of Darger’s eccentric vision. Brimming with references to American history and popular culture, the artist’s oeuvre contains an inestimable wealth of information pertaining to the American experience. In recognition of the collection’s cultural value the AFAM has assumed guardianship over this precious time capsule, ensuring its careful analysis by generations to come.

Greater than any monetary value that may be assigned, this is the true worth of the collection, as may be said for the great majority of vernacular expression produced in this country. Examined as a whole the vernacular tradition, whether manifested in folk or outsider material, perfectly exemplifies the plurality of identity, experience and vision that combine to form a shared heritage. That the work of American vernaculars will continue to enter the art market is an undeniable reality. In light of this, cooperative measures between those involved in the collection and representation of the art work must be enacted to guarantee that its cultural context remains closely associated. By looking to recent efforts in the preservation of cultural patrimony, a reasonable model for the protection of the public’s investment in a wide range of artistic production may be implemented, with museums at the forefront of this rich resource’s preservation.

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

Conclusion

In making the case that outsider art is a distinctive aesthetic and cultural phenomenon worthy of academic appraisal I’ve emphasized the role of the mainstream and its organizations, and suggested that the shaping of outsider art’s history, as outlined in Section One, has ensured an authentic understanding of its intrinsic value. This said, it is my belief that those art museums whose missions allow the collection and exhibition of outsider art provide a model staging ground for the ongoing project of developing an appreciation for outsider art. Offering an ideal intersection of the public realm and the more hermetic world of the art academy, such museums are well positioned to engage in the exploration of outsider art’s meaning, importance, and historical development.

Rather than continue to marginalize outsider production as something altogether alien and wholly removed from the accepted canons of art history, it would be more beneficial to allow this perceived distance to illuminate the vast range of visual strategies available to, and employed in the artistic process. In this way outsider art, when integrated into the museum environment, possesses great power to affect the manner in which we look at art. Whereas neat classifications may influence our observations to the point of distraction from the uniqueness of separate artworks, outsider art, aptly described by Lyle Rexer as “those works that resolutely resist such invisibility by confounding our conceptual categories,” forces us to focus our gaze on the object, thereby acting as “a spur to aesthetic conscience” (Rexer 2005:170). By allowing outsider art into their galleries, museums and their constituencies gain a refreshed perspective, one that is able to see beyond the hegemony of art-historical assumptions and consider the specific intentions of a given object’s creator.

Once the decision is made by a museum to incorporate outsider art into its collection and exhibition activities, the institution must begin the process of strategizing interpretive methods by which to organize and contextualize outsider material. Beginning with a decision regarding the precise language to be used in didactic materials, museums must undergo a careful examination of the implications associated with critical terminologies. As discussed in Section Two, these are often misapplied to outsider art, with the result being an inaccurate attempt to impose inappropriate genealogies at best, and at the very worst, the perpetuation of offensive and oppressive stereotypes. In positing the term outsider art, I hope to provide a useful and agreeable alternative that serves both public understanding and the academic necessity of utilizing signifying language.

As for the way in which a museum chooses to interpret outsider art, Section Three may be used as a resource for exploring various curatorial approaches based on precedents set by past exhibitions. By extracting and articulating four dominant organizational tendencies prevalent throughout the history of institutional responses to outsider art, it is my hope that each will suit the particular needs of various curatorial methodologies. For those who are primarily concerned with underscoring the concept of outsider art for their audience, the proposed model of Biographical Emphasis will prove an effective strategy. Formal Emphasis, on the other hand, is a useful strategy for highlighting the aesthetic merits of outsider art while seamlessly incorporating it into the greater context of a given collection or exhibition. For museums wishing to adhere to more traditional art-historical organizations, Appropriative Emphasis seeks to accentuate the intellectual and aesthetic interchange between outsider art and mainstream examples. Finally, for anyone concerned with the far-reaching cultural implications of outsider production and the vernacular practices from which it springs, a methodology grounded in Patrimonial Emphasis provides a philosophical outlook premised on the preservation of culturally significant creations in deference to their specific social contexts.

Bearing in mind that the genesis of marginalized artistic production is far removed from the very concept of museums, it should not be assumed that museums are inherently antithetical to attempts at comprehending outsider art. In light of this, I strongly believe that museums should embrace the opportunity to openly examine those factors within academic tradition and public perception that create boundaries between the mainstream and its margins. In doing so they may continue the process of forging a formalized approach to outsider art, while at the same time exposing their audiences to the vast spectrum of imaginative creation.

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