Art inside out

Working with contemporary art is a complex business. Working as a curator, it seems to me that there is a commonly held expectation that those who work within what is dishearteningly referred to as the art world have an encyclopaedic knowledge not only of contemporary art, but also of recent to ancient art history, architecture, philosophy, governmental cultural policy, the history and theory of psychotherapy, and genus studies among other fields. It follows that if art today can potentially cover all these fields and more, then presenting and mediating contemporary art to both initiated and uninitiated audiences can be tricky to say the least.

I went to art college, where like many other a student I was convinced of my own genius. At college I played with different media, made some work I was happy with and obsessively read and re-read a number of books about developments in modern and contemporary art. It was there that I laid the foundations for my future career, by becoming more interested in other artists’ work than in my own practice and eroding all vestiges of belief in my own artistic vision.

After ten years, two post-grad courses, and having worked freelance and for galleries and institutions, I am still learning, relearning and re-evaluating the knowledge that somehow entitles me to carry out my chosen profession in being professionally opinionated. There are of course many professions where this is the norm, journalism perhaps being one of them.

In an article in frieze magazine in 2008, the curator Tirdad Zolghadr makes reference to the expectations that curators and other art professionals have the ability to miraculously hold forth on a range of subjects as varied as “...London architects, Arab migrants, Leninism, the eastward expansion of Europe and the early history of western philosophy.” (1) Zolghadr’s article goes on to make a number of striking arguments about the jack-of-all-trades position that has become the norm in working with art. His tentative, critical and humorously self-deprecating position is that the interdisciplinary nature of visual art often deprives curators, critics and other professionals of the possibility of making truly critical delineated arguments about art and it’s qualities and value. Zolghadr does not argue for a return to an absolute delineation of artistic canon, value and quality, but he is presenting the importance of awareness of the fragility of various intellectual and artistic positions. Art practice and representation can be floating, non-linear, illogical, contradictory “crazy fun” but this mercurial situation should not end up being a pre-defined and calculated position in itself.

But there we are, floating along in the maelstrom of interdisciplinary practice and strategy, constantly fighting to keep abreast of all the various positions and forms that art can take. It seems like an indomitable and ungraspable force, a compelling but indefinable zeitgeist. The art world (shudder) basically functions according to the institutional rules; anything goes as long as there is some kind of institutional acceptance for it. There are fluid and flexible codes of acceptance and understanding and all players in any given situation have to have some kind of silent strategic understanding of the specific codes of the situation they find themselves in. It can be easy to present and propose ideas as long as you have mastered the language (or specific dialect) of the context. So aside from being intellectually omnivorous, artists and arts professionals alike have to be accomplished and self-confident socialites. This is but a brief sketch of the complex power relationships that define the art world.

And what of art that is made and presented outside this framework? There are innumerable galleries showing work in a variety of “traditional” media that are never really marked on the map in terms of the zeitgeist of contemporary art. There are a multitude of artists working away in total ignorance of the various codes of fashion and intellectual rigour that define the glamour and/or credibility of contemporary art. Their oil paintings and watercolours, driftwood sculptures and batik prints are not really considered worthy of discussion. These artists’ works and careers exist and develop in a parallel unfashionable art world which at best is viewed with mild boredom and amusement, and at worst scorned and deprecated by arts professionals. This position is a combination of dedication to the values of the progressive avant-garde and simple lazy snobbery.

But beyond the realm of the Sunday painter, the happy and enthusiastic amateur, there is yet another world, the world of the outsider artist. Here we can locate most contemporary folk art, the art of the insane, the art of religious visionaries, and the art of the eccentric loners. There are many individuals whose work and activities have become the focus of interest in a wider cultural field and specifically in the world of contemporary art.

The mythical Henry Darger, whose epic and violent tales of the Vyvian girls were written and illustrated in an immense body of work that was only “discovered” after the artists death. A great deal has been written about Darger without me adding anything further in this text, suffice to say that Darger has been enormously influential on the work of many contemporary artists.(2)

Daniel Johnston, the manic-depressive, savant folk singer and artist has been a kind of underground icon for more than twenty years in the world of American rock music. Johnston was trained as an artist before embarking on a music career punctuated by serious mental health problems. He has created an enormous body of naïve, pop-culture related drawings and paintings on the subjects of good and evil, Jesus, love and music. (3)

Miroslav Tichy, an artist from the Czech republic now in his eighties has gained critical acclaim for his voyeuristic photographs, which he takes and develops with crudely constructed home made equipment. He was frequently harassed and abused by the communist government authorities of Czechoslovakia because of his extrovert eccentricity. (4)

Moscow Joe McKinley worked in relative obscurity for years in his farmhouse outside Ballymena in Northern Ireland, sculpting and painting and obsessively collecting junk. McKinley surrounded his home with his chaotic sprawling artworks, all of which were destroyed by his family after his death a few years ago. (5)

Chickenman Mkhize was a religious visionary working in South Africa who exhibited naïvely-constructed art works expressing sharp and biting social commentaries in public spaces. His works were swiftly assimilated into official art discourses, and led to an increase in interest in artists and craftspeople working in similar ways. (6)

Perhaps also for inclusion in this list is Yayoi Kusama from Japan, whose life’s work is the application of dots and spots on various surfaces. A trained and respected artist, Kusama has been seriously mentally ill for most of her life and claims that her artworks are manifestations and expressions of her condition. (7)

Common to all these figures is an extreme eccentricity, a wayward lifestyle, the details of which are as fascinating as their art, if not more so. They often live in isolation, sometimes in extreme poverty or chaotic confusion. There have in many cases been questions raised about the artists’ mental health. They all have a naïve, individualistic form of expression that gives the impression of being unaffected by or uncaring of the opinions of possible audiences. All the artists I have mentioned above have in some way been introduced and assimilated into official art discourses. They are referred to as outsider artists, yet they have become part of the system. In all cases it is because the system has invited them in, entirely on the artists’ own terms, whereas ‘insider’ artists have to struggle, suffer, and compromise for their place in the hierarchy. A cruel irony perhaps?

Outsider artists are almost always aware of themselves as artists. Others define them by their eccentricities, their refusal of criticism and their imperviousness to outside influence and creative anxiety, and often the artists themselves are aware of this. Outsider artists are not so naïve that they don’t know the nature of the contexts they have been invited into. Speaking generally though, they do have enough personal integrity to remain largely unaffected in the face of flattery and golden promises, unlike many of their insider friends.

They are the final exotics. These artists’ works are what some curators’ dreams are made of. There is a simplicity in the relationship between the outsider artist and the art world professional. Speaking in generalisations, outsider artists don’t need the art world. They broadly like the idea that their works will be seen, and often the possibility that they will be sold, but it doesn’t affect them in any radical ways. They carry on as before according to their own routines. For the curator, there is a stability to the work of the outsider artist. The work will always have a guaranteed quality or form. There will be no crises of creativity or career anxiety. There will be no professional rivalries to take into account. The curator can uphold his or her reputation for being intellectually and critically engaged, whilst essentially working with quite traditional ideas. The outsider artist is occasionally accepted for inclusion in art world contexts and is often treated as a kind of ‘pure visionary’. The outsider artist is as close as you can get these days to the ridiculously unfashionable idea of the genius. The outsider artist is a genius you have an alibi for.

Although it might seem like exhibitions of work by outsider artists are fine examples of radical gesture, the differencing and broadening of the canon or of well-argued creative choices, I would argue that the outsider artist is almost symbolic of a kind of nostalgia for the days of the indisputable canon. The days when you knew who was a ‘real’ artist and who wasn’t, when it was permissible or acceptable to say someone’s work was really special and make it sound like it meant something.

The issue of the art world occasionally adopting outsider artists isn’t really controversial. It’s often enough done in a respectful manner, because nobody would dare do it any other way. It does however reveal a crack in the art worlds’ interdisciplinary, intellectually omnipotent façade. The contemporary art world wants a good old-fashioned genius to revere but without the awful politically incorrect baggage that he often enough carries with him. The outsider artist is often enough a kind of travelling string salesman. He doesn’t have any luggage at all.

Finbar Rosato is a curator based in Sweden

(1) http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/whats_it_all_about/
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger
(3) http://www.hihowareyou.com
(4) http://www.tichyocean.com/
(5) http://www.recirca.com/backissues/c95/outsider.shtml
(6) http://www.tatham.org.za/chickenman-mkhize.html
(7) http://www.yayoi-kusama.jp/e/information/index.html