Outsider Art and Beyond

 D. Hall: Teddy, ballpoint pen on paper, (2015)

The phrase outsider art was coined by critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English translation for the French term art brut invented by Jean Dubuffet to describe works created outside the boundaries of official culture by those who are often socially marginalized, such as those suffering with mental illness, for example.

Those labelled as outsider artists are typically self-taught and there is often a naive beauty or innocence to their work, which compensates for lack of technique or sophistication. Usually, outsider artists have no contact with the mainstream art world and make no attempt to exhibit or establish careers. In many cases their work, born of solitude and isolation, is discovered - if at all - posthumously and thus makes money only for others; outsider art having now become a successful marketing category within the art world, despite Dubuffet's hope that it would prove immune to this process.

Interest in the art of those who exhibit extreme states of neuro-cognitive disorder and diversity - as well as young children, native peoples, and animals - is, of course, nothing new. Modernism might almost be said to be nothing other than the brilliant (sometimes cynical, often ironic and subversive) imitation and assimilation of such work, rich in unconventional ideas, fantasy, and expressive power. It's certainly true that many important figures associated with the avant-garde were fascinated and inspired by madness and primitivism (and that some had their own very real mental health issues to deal with).   

This interest in outsider practices among modern artists must, of course, be seen as part of a larger project; one that Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. Not that my mother, who is ninety and living with Alzheimer's, cares anything about any of this. She just doesn't know what else to do when alone and frightened and unable now to read the paper or follow her favourite programmes on TV other than pick up a pen and draw little pictures of familiar objects and faces.

And I don't think she's ever used the word art in her life or grasps it as a concept; her relation to art can hardly even be described as one of exteriority. In a sense, she's on the outside of that which is outside art and I have no idea what we might call that space ...    

The Object is Poetics

Jean Dubuffet, Personnage Hilare 

(Portrait de Francis Ponge), 1947

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 

In a text entitled The Object is Poetics, Francis Ponge correctly points out that the relationship between man and object is not at all limited to possession or use. Our soul is transitive, writes Ponge. By which he means it needs "an object that affects it". For man is a curious body "whose centre of gravity is not in itself". 

We have our being, in other words, in the infinite number of things outside ourselves. There are thus as many ways of being as there are objects and relationships. Arguably, the artist understands the multiple and decentred nature of man best of all; understands that the world is not only populated with other human beings, but with birds, beasts and flowers - and, indeed, with objects belonging to the inanimate world:       

"The world is peopled with objects. On its shores, we see their infinite crowd, their gathering, even though they are indistinct and vague. Nevertheless, that is enough to reassure us. Because we also feel that all of them, according to our fancy, one after the other, may become our point of docking, the bollard upon which we rest."

But, in order for this to be true, we must choose true objects, says Ponge. By which he means real objects that exist as such, with their own weight, mind independently. All too frequently we become enthralled by our own ideas: "Most often, man only grasps his emanations, his ghosts. Such are subjective objects". 

These pseudo-objects endlessly sing the same dreary song - the song of a triumphant humanity. True objects, however, exist outside of our own thoughts and desires and are not merely decorative or background features. They emit a black noise, inaudible and alien ... 

See: Francis Ponge, 'The Object is Poetics', in The Sun Placed in the Abyss, trans. Serge Gavronsky, (SUN Books, 1977). 

Note: this post forms part of a longer (as yet untitled) project on Ponge, poetry, and object-oriented philosophy being worked on in collaboration with Simon Solomon.