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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