by Onajídé Shabaka - 17 Nov., 2006

   Why Look Like Outsider Art?

    by Onajídé Shabaka

During the month of October there arose a question regardingf the nature of some artworks namely, works that might fall under the heading of naïve, art brut, or untutored. None of the artists mentioned or viewed actually fall into any of those categories in any sense or definition of those types of artists but, there is some interest in looking at some art classified in those categories and, why that work has some appeal.

Author Lyle Rexer asks some interesting questions in his recent book but, since his text seems to favor non-formally educated creators, his attitude toward formally trained artists is generally one of disdain. He asks:

Why look at outsider and self-taught art, if not out of romantic nostalgia for some image of unfettered individuality and expressive freedom? We live in a time of unprecedented artistic production. Thousands of graduates of hundreds of art schools and university programs in the United States alone produce an almost uncountable number of artworks. Multiply that by the growing number of artists in China and India, to take two examples, and the volume of contemporary art making can barely be comprehended. The category "artist" has become a full-fledged professional class like "investment banker," "lawyer," or "computer programmer." We are inundated by art, and in a time when canons of taste have fallen, there is something for everyone, usually with an appropriate pedigree of exhibition and critical certification. In the face of this avalanche, why do we need outsider art?

Contemporary works lack a sense of necessity (for their production and being). Even lesser works of ‘outsider art’ have the capacity to express a demanding urgency and to testify to the overwhelming reality of being alive.

"Romantic nostalgia" is an interesting notion. Rexer seems to be longing for some mythic past out of which the (economically) poor man and, sometimes woman, climb out of their circumstances to create some epic visually stimulating, and profound art work.

Cultural production continues by professionally and academically trained and untrained because there are people out there who are buying what is produced. Although some find there is a need to produce art but, fewer still find there is a need to possess art. Outsider art falls within the capitalist art economy, not outside it. There seems an assumption that outsiders have a different need to make art than those with formal training because they lack the skill to market it, or, their ego is less a part of the equation. Being an artist in today's world means that they are business for themselves and they'd better learn what they have to face or risk failure. As we all know, having all the requisite skills in both art and business is no guarantee for success.

"Canons of taste have fallen"? Or, is it that canons have changed and, is there a need to repeat why this has happened or, do we want to continue along the path of racial hierarchy that has been the norm based on Western European and American male cultural dominance?

However, the primary interests of this article began with the work, not the quoted authors. There is something in the work.

Colin Rhodes addresses several notions of the discussion in a general way that speaks to the various issues at hand:

[Jean] Dubuffet's original conception of the Art Brut creator was someone 'unscathed by artistic culture' whose expressive means and content derived entirely from his or her own 'impulses', as opposed to the conventions of 'cultural' art. Many writers have since pointed out that the ideal of which Dubuffet spoke has progressively disappeared since the Second World War. Indeed, if one includes the necessity of being resistant to all cultural imperatives — popular and minority, as well as dominant — in this definition of an 'art without precedent', this mythical creator never existed in the first place. The post-war increase in general literacy and the inescapable visual domination of advertising and the mass media are important factors in the impossibility of remaining impervious to the dictates of culture, but there is also clear evidence that popular and mass imagery influenced artist outsiders even from the outset. [Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives, Rhodes, Colin, (Thames & Hudson, April 2000, 224 pp. ISBN: 0500203342) p. 131]

It is tempting to call Ms. Sarah McEneaney (Philadelphia, PA.) an outsider or folk artist or a faux-naïf. But who exactly is outside what? Ms. McEneaney's works belong to a prolific tradition of painting that has flourished worldwide for centuries, in blissful ignorance or willful rejection of the vaunted vanishing point of High Renaissance art. (She was supposed to show for an exhibtion I was attending in Philadelphia in mid-October but, I had to leave early to visit with relatives and missed her.)

Carol Jazzar's October, 2006 exhibition featured the work of Matthias Saillard whose obsessive ink drawings of chiaroscuro nudes were scratched out in ball-point pen. Malcolm McKesson's work is created in a similar fashion but, obviously, with different subjects and motivations.

Mistress Turning Man to a Page c. 1975

In direct opposition to the outsider myth, though self-taught, McKesson came from a privileged background. Born in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey to a wealthy New York City family, he was a Harvard graduate, served in the U.S. Army and was socially well integrated. However, in 1961 he withdrew from his business and social life in order to devote himself to his wife, the poet Madelaine Mason, and to art. Though it lasted forty-eight years, the marriage was probably never consummated, with McKesson adopting the role of devoted servant, in awe of what he described as 'the strength and wisdom of the female'. He pursued his art in private, only revealing its existence after the death of his wife in 1990 and when he was well into his eighties.

This exquisite drawing possesses a general aura of sanctity and tenderness, but characteristically it also has an unremittingly sexual undertone. In the act of blessing we also witness the absolute submission of the one being blessed. McKesson said that when he drew he wanted to 'see the form of the undrawn' and 'to rediscover a buried tradition, to rediscover the female in the man'. He professed to having 'never had any sexual development'. As an adolescent he did not experience sexual longing for girls or have feelings about masturbation, and later declared himself 'basically oIsexual'. But some drawings were produced in what one writer has described as a 'hypnagogic, febrile state of sexual excitement coupled with anxious torment' (M. T. Wilner, in Malcolm McKesson: An Exquisite Obsession). Yet their sado-masochistic content is usually only revealed in titles or short texts written on the drawings. McKesson's fantasy world of servitude at the hands of powerful women is delineated in his 'autobiographical' novel, Matriarchy: freedom in Bondage, but it is in the drawings that he attains some kind of transcendence. [via]

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