Outsider Art: Just another put-down?
by Bruce Campbell

Cocoon by Judith Scott, courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

The phrase is almost irresistible: Outsider Art. It sounds sufficiently rebellious, yet also decorative. In case you're one of those people who must have been sleeping instead of reading fine art journals, Outsider Art is definitely in – so in, in fact, that some are making real money at it, begging the question of its outsider status. In a word, Outsider Art is one name given to artworks made by non-mainstream, untrained and/or unexhibited artists. Politically, the term is supposed to embrace artists who have worked without interest – and presumably without hope – of entering the fine art marketplace. Other terms for the same art have been "naïve," "art brut," "self-taught," "visionary," and – is this offensive? – "southern."

At least one semi-prominent northern institution, the Chicago-based Intuit ("The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art"), has built a non-profit business plan behind the phenomenon. Their website says that Outsider Artists have come to include "rural African Americans, eccentrics, isolates, compulsive visionaries or the mentally ill" – or, more generally, artists not in New York.

Good church people, like you and me, might say we have been acquainted with this stream of creativity perhaps all too well. It has been easy to feel sentenced to life, for only the crime of parish membership, amidst an unending parade of banners, murals, crèches and festive vestments whose sole claim to beauty or greatness was their intention. If you have ever felt this, you're on to something, because one of the significant tracks of Outsider Art is art with religious or devotional imagery. Unlike most (but not all) Parish Art, these works have an obsessive quality: highly detailed diagrams of heaven, words or phrases in tiny scrawls lacing through images, exorbitant or psychedelic renderings of eternal judgment. In the days of Shaker "spirit drawings" or Native American sand paintings, such works as these used to be referred to as folk art, which for a long time meant you couldn't buy them because nobody would sell them.

But now there is a market for them, and by all accounts it is growing. Undoubtedly some people are seeking authenticity at a modest price, relative to the inflated price they paid to dry-mount, matte and frame that Picasso show poster. For others, this is an aesthetic protest against non-representational art they don't like, don't understand and don't want around the house. More depressing is the possibility that people are awed at art from people who aren't expected to make any.

The basic appeal, according to the website of Raw Vision magazine, may go back to the roots of this category of art: the paintings and drawings of asylum patients in the early 1900s. People seemed to want to see these "raw" expressions of untrained artists as a way of knowing the unknowable visions of the mentally ill, a pure pipeline straight from the brain without the shapings of acculturation or even consciousness. This sentiment was an echo of the persistent stereotype of the mentally disabled as somehow more truthful or wise than the rest of us, a praise as limiting as any other stereotype.

Judith Scott, an Oakland, Calif.—based sculptor, has made her name through her creation of "cocoons," which are everyday objects she has proceeded to wrap elaborately with fabric, ribbon and other small found objects until they are large, retaining the vague shape of the original object. She has had an exhibition at a New York gallery, but this summer, her stuff wound up at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a local museum of "science, art and human perception." Why there? Because, as a press release explained, "Judith Scott's work is even more remarkable because Scott is a 59-year-old woman with Down's Syndrome [sic]. In addition, she cannot speak or hear."

There are enough —isms in that descriptor to launch a diocesan task force. In the case of mental retardation, the fact that we find artistic output "remarkable" is in the end an indictment of our culture. The only truly remarkable thing is that Scott's work is being publicly exhibited at all.

The fascination with unacknowledged creativity is understandable, but in the end probably more so to art consumers than to artists. Artists know that the quality of their creative urge is not a function of their consciousness or lack of it, or the LSD generation would have brought us the next Dutch Masters. They also know that everything they make is an expression, with a shape and a purpose, so that lauding Outsider Artists for unconsciousness or naïveté is at best insulting. People of faith should know this, too. The fact that these artists bust apart our categories for what comprises art is arguably their greatest contribution, one they probably did not set out to make. The challenge is left to us to accept – or not – yet another display of the unquenchable creativity of God and, thereby, the children of God.

[Ed. note: Two extensive directories of web sites featuring Outsider Art are:http://www.janesaddictions.com/jadmain.htm and http://www.interestingideas.com/out/outlinks.htm]