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).

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

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