Outsider Art

From the Margins to the Marketplace

David Maclagan

• Éditeur: Reaktion Books
• Année: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781861897176
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Art General

The term outsider art has been used to describe work produced exterior to the mainstream of modern art by certain self-taught visionaries, spiritualists, eccentrics, recluses, psychiatric patients, criminals, and others beyond the perceived margins of society. Yet the idea of such a raw, untaught creativity remains a contentious and much-debated issue in the art world. Is this creative instinct a natural, innate phenomenon, requiring only the right circumstances—such as isolation or alienation—in order for it to be cultivated? Or is it an idealistic notion projected onto the art and artists by critics and buyers?

David Maclagan argues that behind the critical and commercial hype lies a cluster of assumptions about creative drives, the expression of inner worlds, originality, and artistic eccentricity. Although outsider art is often presented as a recent discovery, these ideas, Maclagan reveals, belong to a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, when the modern image of the artist began to take shape. In Outsider Art, Maclagan challenges many of the current opinions about this increasingly popular field of art and explores what happens to outsider artists and their work when they are brought within the very world from which they have excluded themselves.

1

Art Brut and the Search for the Source
of Creative Originality

Since it was first introduced, ‘Outsider Art’ has become an acknowledged term of reference in the world of galleries and museums, even if people outside those domains are not always sure what to make of it. This is partly because the work it identifies is inherently difficult to digest – after all, it is supposed to collide with our expectations about art – but it is also because its remit is rather elastic, compared with that of Art Brut. To start with, it referred to work that had been created before the term was coined, that was in retrospect deemed to be sufficiently original and unsolicited to warrant being seen as ‘outside’ the conventional framework of art; but it also set up a template for what might be thought to qualify as genuine Outsider Art in future. In this respect it is more like ‘Primitive Art’ than a recognized art movement such as Impressionism, in that while it is a category that has been invented by some members of the art world, it is applied to a variety of work made by people who may not have chosen to be labelled as such. On the one hand it seems to refer to something that already exists – an unsolicited, free-range creativity that is something like a natural given, waiting to be discovered – and on the other hand it plays an active part in establishing that very creativity. As we shall see, this image of a wild or uncultivated form of creativity plays a key role both in Outsider Art and in its precursor, Art Brut, and in fact links them to the very culture from which they claim to be independent.

So ‘Outsider Art’ refers not only to an ever expanding collection of strange and eccentric work, but to a cluster of ideas or fantasies about a fundamental and original mode of creativity and to a set of prescribed circumstances under which this is to be found in its most authentic forms. There is perhaps more of a parallel here with movements such as Expressionism or Surrealism, in which similarly controversial assertions about creativity were made, and where work that could never have aspired to those titles, because it had been created prior to them, was adopted retrospectively because it seemed to fit them. In the case of Outsider Art, both the work and the people who created it have in effect been roped into a reservation that we have constructed for them, and which serves our purposes more than theirs.¹ In this chapter I want to give a brief account of the origins of Art Brut, and its relationship to Outsider Art, and to show what are the underlying images of creativity that inspired them. It turns out that these images have their own previous history in European culture, within which they function as collective constructions. One could even call these ‘myths’, not because they are false, but because they inform how we think about things like self-expression and originality in art and because they are in a sense self-fulfilling rather than open to proof. Outsider Art can be seen as the latest incarnation of these myths, perhaps carrying them to their logical conclusion. The history of Outsider Art has been extensively covered,² and so I shall only go over it briefly here; but along the way I shall point out some of the underlying assumptions that are involved, and how they have evolved.

We have already seen that behind the current concept of Outsider Art lies Jean Dubuffet’s notion of ‘Art Brut’. He embarked on a series of prospecting expeditions searching out and acquiring, by gift or purchase, works that seemed to have been created without any external encourage ment and which, even if they were often modest in scale, had a striking and unprecedented quality to them. In 1947 he found a space in the basement of Réné Drouin’s Parisian gallery that became the Foyer de l’Art Brut. Although the space was small, a series of exhibitions introduced the Parisian public to the work of the psychotic artists Wölfli, Aloïse, Tripier, Müller and Gaston Duf, the spiritualist work of Crépin, as well as uncategorizable work by Jura and Gironella. Exhibiting these works was itself a controversial move, but from the start he envisaged a series of publications presenting this material, which at first included Oceanic carvings and Swiss carnival masks as well as works from psychiatric hospitals and elsewhere, in a more permanent form; but soon his focus concentrated on the work of autodidacts, eccentrics and other creators who seemed outside cultural norms, but were not officially ‘mad’.

Dubuffet saw himself as a kind of ambassador for these unknown artists: ‘At the end of the day I believe that the real discoverer of a Wölfli’s or an Aloïse’s art is none other than Mr Wölfli or Miss Aloïse themselves, and that competitions between people who put themselves forward as having been the first to recognize them are tedious.’³ In 1948 the Compagnie de l’Art Brut was founded and given legal status, including André Breton among its founder members. At this point Art Brut was something only known about and appreciated by a small number of enthusiasts, but both Dubuffet’s collection and public interest in it were to grow steadily over the next thirty years. Art Brut can now be said to have its own tradition based on a canon of authentic works, including well-known artists like Wölfli, Aloïse and Lesage, and hence to have acquired a certain status and authority.

Although Dubuffet was understandably to shift his position over time, Art Brut started life as a vigorously polemical assertion, backed up by the work that he accumulated in his collection: that of a popular, unsophisticated creativity that is beyond, or in some way more fundamental than, the versions of it to be found in our schools, academies and galleries. As he put it:

I am well persuaded that in every human being there is an immense stock of mental creations and interpretations of the highest possible value, and much more than is necessary to evoke in the artistic domain a body of work of immense scope . . . I do not believe the notions, commonly held nevertheless, according to which only a few men, marked out by fate, would have the privilege of an internal world worth the trouble to externalize.⁴

This is a democratic, almost universal, image of creativity, and it sits uneasily with the more defiantly anti-social aspect of Art Brut that he also highlighted:

If the so-called ‘gifts’ attributed to ‘artists’ are, in our view, very widely distributed, rare on the other hand, extremely rare, are those who take the risk of exercising them in full purity and licence, and who free themselves for that from social conditioning – or at least keep a safe distance from it. We must note that this liberation implies an asocial disposition, a stance that sociologists call alienated [aliéné]. Never theless it is this disposition that seems to us the mainspring of all creation and discovery – the innovator being essentially someone who is not content with what others are content with, and thus takes up a contestatory position.⁵

It’s significant that the double meaning of the French aliéné refers both to someone who refuses to conform (a rebel) and to someone who is unable to (a madman). Certainly Dubuffet was inclined to identify the two, but the question as to what extent this exclusion is the consequence of choice or fate, found already existing or made retrospectively by us, is one that will crop up again when I deal with so-called ‘psychotic art’, which formed more than half his original collection.

Over the next thirty years this expanded (in 1963 it amounted to more than two thousand items, by 1966 to five),⁶ and shifted locations from Europe to America and back again. Its exile in America was partly prompted by Dubuffet’s anger at the indifference or hostility shown by the French cultural establishment, and it also signalled the break-up of the Compagnie de l’Art Brut and its connections with Parisian intellectuals, especially Breton and the Surrealists. On the collection’s return to Europe in 1962, a second Compagnie was set up and Dubuffet, the success of whose own work had made him better off, set about acquiring new artists. Some of these, such as Laure Pigeon, Raphael Lonné and Madge Gill, were mediumistic; others, such as Wölfli or Carlo Zinelli, were classic examples of ‘psychotic art’, and others were less categorizable.

In the early 1960s a series of publications, the Cahiers de l’Art Brut, began to appear under his direction. Dubuffet wanted the presentation of each artist to be as documentary as possible, ideally letting the artist speak for his or her self, with no attempt to interpret or analyse their work. The work in his collection was not for sale, although a few works were sold in the early years, and he did not allow it to be lent out, thus confirming its distance from the conventional cultural world. Nevertheless he was anxious to find a larger and more permanent home for it, and eventually in 1976 the collection was housed in the Château de Beaulieu in Lausanne, where it is now presented as a kind of anti-museum. As Art Brut became better known, other collectors have followed in Dubuffet’s wake: the creative role of such collecting is something I shall deal with in the next chapter; but the Collection de l’Art Brut now has a definitive status and authority that differs from the rather eclectic criteria applied to Outsider Art. For the moment I want to focus on his claim that such work exemplified an unsophisticated and radical form of creativity that owed nothing to established cultural expectations.

In fact Dubuffet’s concept of Art Brut, despite its claim to be anti-cultural, fits into the history of an increasing preoccupation in the early decades of the twentieth century with sources of untaught creativity that are not burdened by the dead weight of artistic tradition and conventions. The idea that natural, unsolicited forms of creativity existed that were more spontaneous and genuine than those that were so painstakingly cultivated in the training of artists was a seductive one to many of the pioneers of Modern Art, such as Klee, Picasso or Miró, and they sought out and accumulated objects, from obscure artworks to found objects or anonymous artefacts, that seemed to embody it. Early Modernist movements (Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism in particular) intensified this search, and an interest developed in the art of the supposedly untutored (child art, folk art and primitive art), or the deviant (art by criminals or the insane) as demonstrating that exciting forms of creativity could be found that owed little or nothing to technical or professional standards. Dubuffet himself amassed a considerable collection of children’s art before embarking on his collection of Art Brut. Indeed the recognition and collection of such work was just as creative and controversial as was the creation of the avant-garde art that was inspired by it. Artists, particularly in Expressionism and Surrealism, were also fascinated by the psychological and social alienation that might have been responsible for these extraordinary works, and by the resulting intensity of their expression, and sometimes christened them ‘Expressionist’ or ‘Surrealist’ in retrospect.

This free-range creativity seemed to combine artistic originality with the expression of an exceptional individuality and, besides the work of autodidacts, ‘psychotic art’ appeared to show this in its most extreme forms. Even though collections of psychiatric art had begun to attract interest in the early years of the twentieth century, it was the publication of Hans Prinzhorn’s ground-breaking work Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) in 1922 that inspired a number of avant-garde artists (such as Kubin, Ernst, Klee and Dalí) with its astonishing range of illustrations, even if they could not always read the German text. These included the work of psychotic artists such as Adolf Wölfli, Heinrich-Anton Müller, Peter Moog, Franz Bühler and August Natterer. Prinzhorn himself claimed, in a statement that could equally well have been applied to many of the creators of Art Brut, that ‘The configurative process, instinctive and free of purpose, breaks through in these people without any demonstrable stimulus or direction – they know not what they do.’⁷ Despite the impression given by Dubuffet that he was a pioneer in rediscovering this material (he visited the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg in 1950, but was not much impressed by it), the notion was already current in Paris between the wars that such work, with its focus on inspiration and intensity of expression rather than on technical skill, offered an exciting alternative to traditional and academic art.⁸ Dubuffet’s invention of the concept of ‘Art Brut’ is clearly a more systematized version of the interest in this phenomenon, and it constructed an alternative vision of a creativity that was essentially outside official culture.

Hence what we are faced with in Art Brut, and subsequently in Outsider Art, is not just a heterogeneous collection of bizarre and ‘original’ works of art or artefacts, but behind them a cluster of ideas and theories about the true nature of creativity, where it is to be found in its purest forms and its relation to the established apparatus of artistic conventions. If I call these ‘myths’, it is certainly not to disparage them, but rather to indicate that fantasies, assumptions and images often precede the intellectual arguments that are constructed on their basis. Art Brut appears to refer to a body of extraordinary work that already exists, and indeed it is part of its trade mark that the work in question has been created in advance of and in utter ignorance of the label. However, these works are treated as evidence of a radical creativity, the profile of which was being built up at the same time as they were being discovered. In other words, there is a kind of circularity involved, between the discovery of the works that came to constitute the Collection de l’Art Brut and the pronouncements about authentic creativity that validated them. This means that we cannot simply consider the evolution of Art Brut in purely art-historical terms, but must take into account the myths of creativity that are embodied in it. These myths surface at particular moments in European culture – the years immediately after the first and Second World Wars – and reflect, as well as contribute to, cultural crises that can be seen as a response to contemporary political, economic and social events.

However, this does not mean that these myths of creativity do not have quite a long history. In fact it is one that goes a lot further back than Modernism, as far back as the post-Renaissance cult of melancholy and the Saturnine temperament, and the concurrent interest in the artist as an individual and exceptional figure.⁹ Elements of this cultural construction include: the idea that the artist’s vocation is marked by special signs (as in Leonardo’s autobiography); a fascination with the peculiar and eccentric details of their life (as in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists); an intense curiosity about the creative process itself (witness the growing market for sketches); the assumption that invention is linked to self-expression (the ascription to artists of pazzia or furor), and a belief in the extraordinary power of images (supported by neo-Platonic philosophy). Versions of all of these features figure in the myth of ‘raw’ creativity promoted by Dubuffet’s Art Brut and subsequently elaborated in the concept of Outsider Art.

It’s of particular relevance to Outsider Art that the sixteenth-century notion of melancholy, which was closely linked to this tradition, gave a peculiar temperamental colouring, based on the theory of humours and astrology, to the profession of artist, along with those of philosopher and mathematician. This Saturnine character was supposed to involve long periods of isolation and the protracted contemplation of images, which resulted in pronounced eccentricity and a suspicious attitude towards others – all characteristics that reappear in Outsider Art. The cult of ‘originality’, which was also a part of this myth, put the artist on the horns of a dilemma: to create their own unique form of expression they had to depart from accepted conventions; yet to step too far out of line meant risking misunderstanding and rejection. Hence artists were associated with exceptional forms of expression in a highly ambivalent way: they might demonstrate power of invention and mastery of form; but they could also slip into something beyond conscious control, or too far outside the normal range of communication; perhaps even into a serious disorder that could easily be taken as a symptom of ‘madness’. Indeed in the case of the ‘psychotic art’ that formed over half of Dubuffet’s original Art Brut collection, it is as if, in a reversal of this process, such patients began to create their work at the deranged end of this spectrum and were subsequently proclaimed authentic artists.

The parallels with Outsider Art are obvious: however, there are some caveats to be taken into consideration. One is that the cult of melancholy was itself a recognized, collective category to which artists often chose to adhere, whereas those creators who were recruited into the canon of Art Brut were by definition unaware of the heresy into which they were being introduced. Another is that the ‘originality’ that the work of both seventeenth-century artists and Outsiders exemplifies is not an absolute or natural phenomenon, but one that stands in an antagonistic relation to contemporary aesthetic standards. This means that once such art becomes assimilated into the wider culture its originality becomes less distinct. In other words, although Outsider Art, and more obviously the Art Brut that preceded it, claims to belong outside culture, it is actually something like a reaction formation from within that culture, intended to contradict or subvert it. Once it is made public, as it was by Dubuffet’s exhibiting and writing about Art Brut, there is a real question of how long this distinction can remain effective, given that the breakaway concept could either just evaporate or else must be faced with its eventual assimilation within that culture.

Another key element in this mythological complex is the idea that art and creativity are indelibly marked by sickness and suffering. Creativity and disturbance have a tangled relationship: even at the start of the tradition I have just sketched, it is often unclear whether suffering is a cause of creativity or a result of it. In fact creativity is a mixed blessing for the artist: whilst it can provide deep fulfilment and moments of ecstatic joy, it also involves a familiarity with the...