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.

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

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