http://brutforce.com/many-terms-continuum-outsider-art/

The Many Terms in Our Continuum: ‘Outsider Art’

• Max Evans
• July 28, 2016

As Priscilla Frank and Kevin Sampson aptly point out, the term ‘Outsider Artist’ is offensive to some subgroups of artists within the art world that has manifested itself outside of the establishment. While we at Brut Force have tried to remain term agnostic, siding with the way the artist prefers to describe his or her self, we think it’s important to acknowledge the terms and classifications that exist and that will ultimately in some form describe this art movement in retrospective.
So for the sake of our readers, we thought it might be beneficial to lay out some terms that are used to describe the artists that we cover. Ultimately, we agree that integration into the larger contemporary art world is the trajectory and the future. At present though, there is still disparity. Below, we’ll attempt to expose the tip of the iceberg for the blurred lines that exist today amongst these terms.

Art Brut

The label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet is specifically focused on artists that create art outside of the art establishment or the established academic tradition. It is a French term that translates to raw art. It was thoroughly explored by this year’s exhibition by the American Folk Art Museum entitled Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet.

Folk Art

Folk Art often gets lumped into the same conversation because of its often rough or naïve nature. Folk art is often not influenced by mainstream art world trends and is not typically created by members of the art establishment. A more stringent definition align folk art with that of indigenous people or tradespeople. Folk art is more closely linked to cultural identity than any of the other categories we discuss.

Naïve Art

Naïve art is art created by a person without formal art education. Naïve art is often grouped with outsider art as its definition may hint. Strict naivety is becoming more and more rare as the forms of self-education have spread.

Outsider Art

This, the most infamous of terms, was coined by Roger Cardinal in 1972 as a synonym to art brut. It is often applied as a catch-all term for self-taught art of all forms though, which draws some criticism. The term though is more lax in its definition typically applied to self-taught artists that outside of the mainstream art world. To make things more complicated, Jerry Saltz argues that there is no such thing as Outsider Art and that the distinction is “outmoded discrimination still in place.” For better or for worse, the term Outsider Art has proven an effective marketing tool for the Outsider Art Fair and other entities tied to the name in recent years.

Self-Taught (Contemporary Self-Taught)

This is the term that Brut Force is most comfortable with and most directly influences our curation and content strategy. The manifestation of the term self-taught and specifically contemporary self-taught art was explained by Duff Lindsay of the Lindsay Gallery as, today’s “artists are not rural, they’re not southern. They might be knowledgeable about art and folk art, but you would not consider them to be outsiders. They’re not isolated from the art world or the art marketplace.” According to Lindsay, it might be hard to tell that a self-taught contemporary did not receive a traditional art education, though in spirit, the work shares something with the visionary, inspirational, or vernacular characteristics that define the genre of outsider art.

The Continuum

One of our favorite articulations of this was applied by Leslie Umberger of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She states that if folk and self-taught are at opposite extremes of a single continuum, “with tradition at one pole and autonomy at the other, and all of it having developed apart from art world trends and markets. To discuss any particular artists you must consider where he or she falls along this line, each individual having varied amounts of traditional skills or ideas and personal vision.”
We look forward to continue to bring dialogue and discussion to the terms and the artists that make up this exciting field.

Art Review

Opening the Folkways of Perception: Outsider Art’s Wide World of Inclusion

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Published: February 11, 2011

• Recommend
• Twitter
• Sign In to E-Mail
• Print
• Reprints
• ShareClose
  • Linkedin
  • Digg
  • Mixx
  • MySpace
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Permalink
  • 
    

I once asked an art dealer how he determined whether someone was an outsider artist, and he offered this criterion: anyone who called up and said he or she was an outsider artist was immediately disqualified. In his view, outsider artists don’t self-identify and they don’t operate telephones.

Enlarge This Image

Harris Diamant

“Drawings 197” by the Electric Pencil, at the Outsider fair.

Blog

ArtsBeat

The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.

• More Arts News

Standing inside the 19th annual Outsider Art Fair at 7 West 34th Street in Manhattan on Thursday evening, Colin Rhodes, an Australian art historian who’s written a book on the subject, disagreed. “Pathology is not the defining criterion,” he said. For him, an outsider artist is not an amateur, just someone working outside the regular art world structures.
In any case, the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled and the self-taught generally rule the field — the dearth of art by prisoners at these fairs is a continual surprise; they’re an extremely creative, productive and expanding population — and their stories haunt wall labels throughout the 33 exhibitors’ booths. But this is a strong fair whose work begs to be considered along other lines.
There are, for instance, pieces characterized by striking or unusual materials, like Jim Work’s drawings of farms and rural roads done in crayon on opened-up paper grocery bags, at the Pardee Collection; or George Paterson’s carved skateboards, which look like tribal objects, at Cavin-Morris. David Butler’s cut-and-pounded-tin birds and creatures, on view at Gilley’s Gallery and Ricco/Maresca, were made to decorate his yard in New Orleans or hang in his windows, casting distinctive shadows into the interior of his home.
Outsider art also accommodates the late bloomer. Aaron Birnbaum, a retired New York tailor, started painting at 65. His lovely “Two Peacocks in Tree” from 1985 at Maxwell Projects is framed by painted pieces of a wooden crib found in the street. Giorgos Rigas began painting scenes of the Greek countryside from memory at 56. His Grandma Moses-like canvases are hung salon-style at C. Grimaldis.
Religious visionaries are a perennial presence. Nikifor at Wasserwerk Galerie Lange created small, beautifully colored images, including a self-portrait as a Greek Orthodox bishop. The legendary Howard Finster offers an urgent pronouncement at Ames Gallery — “Warning! Take Heed or Fail!” — from 1984.
And pathology can’t always be ruled out. Some of the best works in the show were made by artists afflicted with something — although institutional records often prohibit us from knowing what. William Rice Rode, a patient in an Illinois mental hospital around the turn of the last century, made extraordinary drawings of flying machines, people and text written in a self-invented language, on bed sheets; examples are on view at the Carl Hammer Gallery.
At Ricco/Maresca, George Widener’s large ink-on-paper drawing “Untitled (4421)” from 2010 doubles as a “robot teaching game” for future generations of intelligent machines. The systematic structure, numbering and pattern are credited by his dealer largely to Mr. Widener’s being an autistic savant.
Some of the most widely admired work here is by the Electric Pencil, an anonymous patient at State Lunatic Asylum No. 3 in Nevada, Mo., whose drawings from the early 20th century were discovered in a trash can in 1970. Assembled and displayed by the New York artist Harris Diamant — who also provided the “electric” moniker — the Pencil’s drawings of animals and specter-eyed figures often appear on hospital stationery.
Established masters hang alongside newer discoveries. The old guard includes Bill Traylor, Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, Mr. Butler, Sam Doyle, Mr. Finster, James Castle and Adolf Wolfli. Mr. Rode and the Electric Pencil are among the new.
And then there is the catchall category of general weirdness: illustrations made to accompany Dr. Carrie F. Young’s 1875 lectures on the effects of alcohol on the human stomach at Ames; Haitian voodoo objects at Bourbon-Lally, made to please spirits or protect households; the virtuoso ink drawings of Leonard L. St. Clair (a k a Stoney), a dwarf tattoo artist who lived in Columbus, Ohio, at Maxwell Projects.
Written next to the images in Mr. St. Clair’s drawings — which were made as tattoo samples — are numbers designating prices for the real things. He might be surprised to learn, 31 years after his death, that the drawings themselves have acquired financial value as art objects.
Perhaps more than any other factor, this is what binds together the work in the Outsider Art Fair: Much of it wasn’t created to sell, or to achieve, acclaim, but for other purposes — often merely to satisfy a raw creative impulse. For those of us caught up in the art world, it offers a corrective, or at least a temporary window into another world.

The Outsider Art Fair continues through Sunday at 7 West 34th Street, Manhattan;
sanfordsmith.com.

A version of this review appeared in print on February 12, 2011, on page C3 of the New York edition.

• Sign In to E-Mail
• Print
• Reprints

Order "India Calling" by Anand Giridharadas who discovers an old country making itself new