What's New in Contemporary Folk and Outsider Art
Through July 24 at
TAG Art Gallery
1807 1/2 21st Ave. S.
What's new in contemporary folk and outsider art? Well, let's begin with another question: What is contemporary folk and outsider art?
New York artist Joe Coleman's recent ordeal serves as an example of the heated confusion surrounding this debate. In 2003, Coleman was asked not to show his artwork at the annual Outsider Art Fair in SoHo. His wildly detailed paintings of serial killers and degenerates (which fetched prices upward of $50,000) fit the outsider aesthetic, but fair organizers discovered that he had been to art school for two years in the '70s and felt that it was in the best interest of the fair to bar Coleman and several other artists who did not meet "outsider" criteria.
Sounds like a cautionary tale to artists hoping to gain entry into this hot field, and had I been given curatorial control over TAG Art Gallery's current exhibition, "What's New in Contemporary Folk and Outsider Art," I might have disqualified a few folks myself—but not before explaining what makes these art forms unique and why it is important to discriminate. In a genre where there is already much confusion over definitions and maintaining the "purity" of the field, many contemporary exhibits of folk and outsider art do more to confound viewers than to edify them. We can better approach the TAG artists' works by clarifying the terms "folk" and "outsider," since a few of the artists fit somewhere on this continuum, while some do not.
Folk and outsider art are often lumped together in the same category, along with words like "self-taught," "intuitive," or "marginal"; however, there are differences in the history and usage of these terms. Folk art originated from colonial crafts, and there is a further divide between folk art and folk craft. Scholar Warren Roberts identified folk craft as a learned tradition that ultimately led to the creation of a unique, utilitarian product. The same rules apply to folk art, save for the fact that "giving pleasure is dominant over the practical ends," as folklorist Henry Glassie explains it. The people creating folk art are stereotyped as poor, Southern and predominately African American, but they do not have to be any of these things. What is important about folk artists is they share craft- and art-making traditions with their community and are connected to the people around them.
In contrast, outsider artists are recluses, eccentrics and the institutionalized—people who have been shielded from mainstream culture. Outsider art is an offshoot of Art Brut or "raw art," which was defined by French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s. Drawing upon Swiss psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn's work from the early 1920s, Dubuffet looked to the insane asylums of Europe in pursuit of artistic genius. He considered this work far superior to academic or high art, calling it the "white-hot center" of creativity and arguing that art loses its purity and genius the further away it moves from Art Brut's center. Outsider art is considered the next ring around that "white-hot center," followed by intuitive, then self-taught artists.
Ike Morgan is an artist at TAG who would be defined as an outsider. At the age of 19, he was committed to Austin State Hospital in Texas for murdering the grandmother who raised him. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and has been institutionalized since 1977. Morgan has been painting obsessively for the past 20 years, often tearing apart bed sheets and curtains to use as canvas. The state of Texas appointed Julie and Bruce Webb of Webb Gallery to manage the sale of Morgan's work, to ensure that all proceeds go back into a fund to help purchase more art supplies for him.
There are two series of his paintings exhibited here: the presidents of the United States, which he draws from dollar bills, and violent portraits of nude women, likely copied from pornography magazines. His portrayals of women are misogynistic, similar to the frenzy of de Kooning's women, but whether Morgan has an awareness of the brutal and objectified manner in which he portrays them is questionable. Painted with heavy, jagged black lines and filled in with a uniform, cool pink skin, the women are scantily clad in lingerie, their legs acrobatically splayed open, their vaginas exposed, fingers inserted. The works create a certain discomfort: We are voyeurs peering into the artist's realm of sexual pleasure.
Working under similar circumstances, artist Mark Cole Greene has lived in hospitals and other facilities for most of his adult life. Greene was labeled "developmentally delayed" from an early age, and after the death of several close family members, he was hospitalized. In contrast to Morgan, his work is innocent and recalls the works by children with autism currently on display at Vanderbilt's Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. Like much of the art there, Greene's Crayola marker compositions both attempt to make sense of the world around him and hint at the expression of a colorful but under-communicated inner world. Round people resembling rhinoceroses and turtles dance between dollhouses and towering flowers in a patchwork of sherbet-like colors and patterns that fill the page. Each stroke of the marker is discernable, creating a hypnotic pattern that denotes the artist's obsession and patience.
Oak Ridge, Tenn., social studies teacher Robert Simon hid his art under his bed until a friend coaxed him into showing work at an outsider art exhibit, where it was well-received and highly sought after. Simon's painstakingly neat ink drawings depict obsessive, trance-like designs mutating into increasingly complex patterns. He clearly invests a great amount of time into each 24-by-36-inch work, which is obsessively filled with perfectly colored and rendered designs. These pieces fit the aesthetic of outsider art, but unlike Morgan, Simon is a part of "cultured society," despite his limited contact with the art world. Without a clear definition of outsider art, it is difficult to say whether he should be called an outsider; it might be more accurate to say that Simon leans toward being called self-taught.
In Morgan's, Greene's and Simon's work, there is an apparent "folk aesthetic," as defined by Glassie, who identified repetitive, symmetrical patterns as a universal characteristic of folk art—one unknowingly carried through most modern art, design and architecture. The work of Chad Poovey sits on the verge of being folk art because of its reliance upon a traditional craft, but his work is a satirical and witty commentary on contemporary life, a product of popular culture. Poovey is a skilled woodworker who creates sculptural dioramas, including "Executive Action Figures," which depicts Bush and Cheney dressed in chicken costumes, and "America Leads in Telephone Service," in which a nude couple sit in bed talking on cell phones, staring blankly forward, mouths agape, ignoring each other.
Like Poovey, both Sheila B. and Dan Phillips may identify with folk or outsider artists, but their work sits squarely outside of these parameters. They lack the disconnection from mainstream society that defines the outsider artist, and betray none of the connections to tradition that define the folk artist. Sheila B.'s paintings of Johnny Cash and other country music stars are on par with the velvet Elvises of yesteryear, while Phillips' redundant line drawings on paper scraps would perhaps best be described as the handiwork of a doodler.
Feeding the outsider art trend is the idea that "anyone can be an artist" or that "everyone is an artist," a novel concept in the context of art history. Until the turn of the 20th century, art has been steeped in the refined traditions of European art, a symbol of high culture, wealth, power and the bourgeois class. Up until this time, artist typically meant a wealthy, educated white male, but an interest in primitivism and the works of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys created a shift in the common definition of art, which in turn set the stage for folk and outsider art to be recognized. As art historian and literary critic John Berger declared in his essay "The Primitive and the Professional," such forms of expression "could never be said with any ready-made skills... For what it was saying was never meant, according to the cultural class system, to be said."
The art world nonetheless has difficulty finding a place for these art forms, mainly because the terms are abused and artists frequently adopt the "outsider" label to produce fast, sloppy paintings in a naïve style that can be sold at affordable prices. Likewise, folk artists begin mass-producing artwork when they learn how easily an innate cultural tradition can translate into a valuable commodity. Such practices, which run rampant in the art world, deteriorate the legitimacy and public understanding of true outsider and folk art. But how does a critic or gallery owner judge the sincerity and motive of an artist? It seems foolish to say that anyone who wants to exhibit under the label "folk" or "outsider" must submit an application for approval, but this genre is typically characterized by the circumstances of the artist—his or her personal history—more than by what he or she is actually creating. In many ways, as Mr. Coleman's story exemplifies, that is what the genre has come down to.
TAG's current exhibit presents a few textbook cases of outsider art, which effectively argue the validity and powerful expression of such work. But no matter how much their work might "look" like it, Sheila B., Dan Phillips and Chad Poovey don't really belong in an exhibit advertising outsider and folk art. (That's my curatorial two cents.) Perhaps my definitions are narrow, dated and romanticized, but these labels should not become a catch-all for every Sunday painter who doesn't fit into a particular art-world genre.
"We're hit up by more artists than you can possibly imagine who claim they are 'outsider' artists," gallery owner Jerry Dale McFadden says. "Most true outsiders, though, never know there's such a thing as this art category." As for the content of the current show, McFadden acknowledges, "It still comes down to whether we like the work or not. We've loosened our definition of what gets shown at TAG. We only show about 50 percent of what is considered folk and outsider art."
No matter what the label, a judgment must be made about whether the art is any good. But even this question is loaded, since folk and outsider art defy all academic standards of "goodness." So what is it about Morgan's disturbing paintings or Greene's ridiculously sweet marker mania that we should appreciate? The compositions are balanced, the colors are nice and the other elements of design are pleasing too. But more than this, there is something uniquely compelling, even moving, about the folk and outsider world that's not so much about what the artists create, but rather who they are. (After all, if conceptual art can be focused more on ideas than the actual art product, then our judgments of this work should be allowed to focus more upon the creator than the creation.) In these artists, we find a sliver of the population disconnected from the modern world as we view it, people uninhibitedly creating for nothing more than the sheer pleasure or need to make something.
Perhaps we are the outsiders looking into a disappearing world, a social phenomenon we cannot be a part of, and that is what makes this work, the record of these people's experiences, so different, so forceful—and something worth discriminating.
