Outsider Art - In Praise of Madness
cypher
You can Check Out my Dublin Art Blog At -
http://thepanicartist.livejournal.com/
Warning My Website Contains Some Images Of A Sexually Explicit Nature
You May find Offensive. My Website Is For Over 18's Only.
Website - www.thepanicartist.com Cypher / The Panic Artist
Salvador Dali famously exclaimed "The only difference between me and a
madman is that I'm not mad." In fact Dali might not have been
clinically mad but he was highly eccentric, neurotic, narcissistic
and a shameful exhibitionist. Remember Sigmund Freud famously told
Dali: "in the paintings of the Old Masters one immediately tends to
look for the unconscious whereas, when one looks at a Surrealist
painting, one immediately has the urge to look for the conscious." In
fact for all their apparent lunacy - Dali's paintings were highly
intellectual, contrived and steeped in the Western painting and
drawing tradition.
Well the only difference between me and a madman is I take my
medication! I have reached a point in my life - where I have come to
accept my madness and I am tired of trying to be normal. While I am
not nearly not as mad as I was in my youth - it still lurks in the
shadows and snares me every few weeks. But I have developed good
coping strategies which help - along with the love of my girlfriend,
family and friends. Paradoxically writing has both helped me
understand my life and become aware of my failings - but it has also
taken somewhat from my art - reducing my passion for painting and my
autocratic spontaneity.
As a teenager I was fascinated by the phenomena of 'the-wolf-boy' and
I thought that I too could be a modern day wolf-boy. It stroked my
vanity to think of psychologists spending years trying to decipher my
personality and biography! But I wasn't going to make it easy on them!
I hoped however that one day they would have been able to tell me what
it all meant.
I knew that I was not a true 'wolf-boy' even I had too many social
contacts! But though I lived with my mum - she was insane and I never
spoke to her. Yes I went to school - but I had stopped talking to
everyone. True I had a television - but that if anything made things
even more interesting. If the question was asked what can you learn
about people and society just from television - my life's example
would have given the conclusive answer - absolutely nothing! Only life
- mixing with people, trying to get along with them, resolving
conflicts, understanding their feelings, learning how to flirt,
learning how to seduce, and learning how to debate without anger - can
teach you how to be a successful human being. Incidentally artists
like Van Gogh, Hans Bellmer, Antonin Artaud and the writers De Sade
and Jean Genet have explored the nature of confinement, isolation and
the inners worlds of the artists Psyche and their works have striking
affinities with Outsider Art.
I still to this day remember flicking through a small book on artists
self-portraits in my local library in 1986 - and coming across the
1919 screaming self-portrait of Franz Pohl (Franz Karl Buhler) - his
crude but heartfelt drawing captured the inner anguish I was feeling
at the time perfectly. I had no idea at the time what Outsider Art
was but I felt an instant connection with this kind of work.
Sometimes I pine wistfully for my mad, bad, days of 1991-1993 - I
forget just how agonizingly suicidal, depressed and self-hating I was.
Instead I remember my messianic faith in my art - my absolute
conviction that the day I walked into a New York gallery with my work
- they would sign me on the spot and I would be famous the world over!
I believed that artists and art critics and collectors would be in awe
of my raw, recklessly honest, truthful and courageous art. I thought
they would would pat me on the back and say: "At last a painter who is
honest about his sexuality and his life!" That is the tragedy and
hilarity of my self-delusions and utter incomprehension of the real
world and the common man. I had absolutely no idea how repulsive, ugly
and hateful my work would look to most ordinary art lovers. And yet
despite my conviction that I was the greatest artist in the world
(living in a three bedroom terrace house with my mother and forigene
students - whom I cowardly hid from in my bedroom) I never actually
even put a portfolio together never mind approach a gallery - until
cajoled into it by the art critic Mic Moroney in mid 1994. I thought
about it - but time and time again I felt I wasn't ready. Perhaps I
was unwilling to leave the protective bubble of my inner world and
face the music of the real world. But I was never a true Outsider
artist in the classic definition. I had far too much technical self-
teaching, knowledge of art history, craft and respect for the Western
Canon.
Every day billions of art works are made around the world. A small
fraction of them are made by trained artists and even less than that
are made by artists whose work sells or has critical respect. The vast
majority of these art works are made by; little kids, school children,
art students, Sunday painters, eccentrics, spiritualists, prisoners
and the mentally ill. The fact is that most of these works will be
binned soon after they are made - as for the rest it will never have
anything but EBay, car-boot, fridge-door or family gift value. Before
the late nineteenth century to anyone interested in art - these
artworks were important only as a negative presence - to the positive
presence of the accepted Grand Western Canon. But by the twentieth
century they had became central to the formation of Modernist art.
Expressionist, Surrealist and Cobra artists in particular intensely
studied the art of Africa, the insane and children in order to give
their work a similar raw power and imaginative leap into the unknown
of the subconscious.
Ask the average man on the street to name a mad artist and they will
probably say Vincent Van Gogh. But if you read most current studies on
Van Gogh you will find the writers play down Van Gogh's madness -
claiming that his madness was an incidental aspect to his great art.
So what is the truth? Well it's a bit of both. Van Gogh worked far too
hard to acquire the traditional skills of a figurative artist to be
merely an Outsider artist. There is far too much realism, cultural
awareness, technical mastery, intelligence and humanity to his art to
be just the work of a madman. But in certain respects it had
affinities with Outsider art. Vincent's need to convert the whole
canvas or sheet of paper into a field of energetic lines is similar to
the Outsider's need to fill up every square inch of their work with
detail - a fear of what they call the horror-vacui. However the fact
remains that Van Gogh spent his life fighting off madness - at those
times when he succumbed - he was unable to create. But when lucid he
was able to mix his mad energy with Impressionist grammer - to create
art works of undisputed greatness which communicated deeply with all
of humanity and not just a few specialists in the human mind.
Real Outsider or Art Brut is art made by schizophrenics, primitives,
visionaries, obsessives or mediums. If we term art training as four to
seven years in an art college - then most of these artists were self
taught. They might have had some experience of art in school - but
that's usually as far as their training went. Outsider artists are
different from naive painters like Henri Rousseau or L.S. Lowery
because their similar unworldliness, lack of training and eccentricity
was compounded by sever, debilitating, mental illness. While the work
of naive artists can look fanciful or odd - they rarely look demented.
Moreover naive artists crave desperately to be taken seriously as
painters - but Outsider artists have no such fascination with the art
elite - they are lost in their own private world. Some of the
characteristics you can see in their artworks are all-over treatment
of the page, eccentric colour combinations, obsessive detail, symbolic
imagery, crude drawing and often the mixing of drawn elements, collage
and handwritten prose. The materials they use are often the cheapest
and most degraded - no fancy French handmade papers or artists paints
- instead cheep wrapping paper and some crayons. Because many of their
works were made in secret - they are typically on a very small scale.
Moreover most Outsider artists seemed to arrive at their own wild
compulsive style very quickly - and never deviate from it for the rest
of their lives (though the same could be said for many of today's art
world stars).
Since the early 1900's psychiatrists like Dr Hans Prinzhorn had been
fascinated by the outpourings of the mentally ill. Dr Prinzhorn
established the first collection of Outsider art - usually the work of
his patients and later published a very important book on the subject.
Prinzhorn and artists like Klee who read his book were seeking
insights into the workings of the subconscious and the origins of
creativity. As the twentieth century progressed other artists used the
raw coal of Outsider art to fuel their own work. But commercially -
neither Outsiders nor their families benefited much from this exchange
- or creative robbery depending on your viewpoint. One artist who did
seem to give back was Jean Buffet who avidly collected 'Art Brut' as
he termed it, and his collection was later established as a public
museum in Lausanne in Switzerland in 1976. By the turn of the
millennium the oeuvres of dead artists like Adolf Wolfli and Henry
Darger had become blue-chip investments and countless other living
reclusive artists were courted.
Outsider art became so popular in the art world of the 1990's because
it was enthusiastically adopted by many art lovers tired of the slick,
commercial and academic nature of art in the 1980's-1990's. After a
decade of pompous, vain and media savvy artists like Schnabel, Salle
and Koons there was something of a backlash against the art-world star-
system which had reduced art to crass commerce, media-celebrity,
factory-like production of paintings or sculptures and insincere
pastiche's of modernism. Outsider art in contrast offered obsessive
handmade art by forgotten or anonymous artists who made art with a
painful sincerity and lack of concern for art history, public
recognition or common sense. A cynic however might have suggested that
the bottom line in the art world is money - and in the early 1990's
dealers caught on to the cheep and easily exploited world of outsider
art. Personally I turned in part to Outsider art in 1995 - as a relief
from the diet of clever-clever conceptual art, prefabricated
sculptures and pretentious videos that were on offer in every gallery
I visited. Whenever I saw outsider art works in the same museum as
contemporary academic conceptualists (as I did in I.M.M.A. many times)
- I was struck by how the compulsive Outsider Art blew away the
pretentious and lifeless work of artists with a Masters in Fine Art.
Moreover as I read about the lives and art of these tormented artists
- I profoundly identified with them and their obsessive productions.
Of course there is much suspicion amongst the general public that many
of these Outsiders are lucky opportunists lauded by a gullible art
world. In one of my favorite Simpsons episodes Homer Simpson was
trying to build a dog house - yet again his attempts at DIY ended in
disaster! In frustration he threw all his tools, the wonky dog house
and wet cement into a wheel-barrow and flung it down a hill where it
crashed and was spotted by a female art dealer passing in her car. She
loved the work! It was the anguished cry of the suburban man! All her
Euro-Trash friends liked the work too and a show was arranged. Homer's
wife Marge was peeved that her dumb husband who had no training in art
was given an exhibition - while she had never had any similar offer -
despite spending her life trying to master the craft of painting.
Homer worked tirelessly creating more and more elaborate 'outsider'
works. Then the work was unveiled - and the art public sighed in
boredom. Its was all too contrived and passe! After the disappointment
of his show - Homer floods Springfield in homage to Turner's
watercolours of Venice and Christo's urban interventions - the art
dealer loves it!
This story perfectly illustrates the difficulty of the Outsider in the
Art world - even those who are genuine and are picked up by galleries
- can find themselves just as quickly dropped once the novelty of
their work wears off. The whole idea Outsider art is antithetical to
the ethos of the art world. Outsider art is made beyond the realm of
the professional, social and public world. It is not comminished, it
is often not for sale, it may even never have been intended to be seen
by anyone except its creator. But the art world is about creating
money and to do that it means creating reputations, connections and
understanding. Outsiders are very good at making art - but very bad at
making or maintaining friendships - and that's what counts in
galleries.
So what kind of exchange is really going on between the public and the
Outsider artist? Is the outsider artist a privileged exotic - forgiven
sins that would have most people written off dinner party invitations.
Is he or she a freak? Someone to be ogled at by a bored and prurient
art world? Is he or she easy prey for unscrupulous dealers, collectors
and curators - a maker of art works that but for the apparatus of the
art world would be essentially worthless. Or is he or she a pure light
in a crass world of fatally compromised art? Personally I like to
think that Outsider art gives us some kind of insight into the
workings of the subconscious and the place of the individual,
isolated, creator in the universe. But the real reason I like it is
its aesthetics. To me the compulsively worked drawings of outsider
artists are like nothing else in art. At their best they have a
psychic intensity comparable with the most tormented or animated
religious work of Gruenwald or Tintoretto. That is not to say that
their art is as good or even comparable with such work. You might as
well try and compare a Sung dynasty scroll painting with a Russian
Icon - they might come from similar periods in art history - but they
occupy different worlds they can be good or bad but never better or
worse. Some might say that their work is not a patch on the centuries
old tradition of Western painters like Michelangelo or Rembrandt - but
Outsiders wouldn't want it any other way. They know only one way to
draw or paint - their own.
That is the trouble with Outsider artists - they can be patronized or
ridiculed but never understood. Theirs is an unknowable universe of
private codes, myths, fantasies and delusions. Even those with a
similar mental illness cannot claim to fully understand them - because
mental illness is just a small part of the Outsiders unique
intellectual, imaginative, and emotional world. Each Outsider artist
presents the world with a unique set of riddles - and half formed
communications. I say half formed because the nature of art is its
dialog between the artist and his or her audience. He or she must know
themselves, their tradition, their place in the art world and the
views of those around them. They must then make an art object which
conforms to their ambition and is in knowing social and aesthetic
discourse with its public, its society and its laws. But none of these
considerations are on the minds of the outsider. He or she is
incapable of realistically understanding common knowledge never mind
the place of their art in relation to what has been done before. They
are commuinting - but on an autocratic and autistic level. It is a
monologue not a dialog. But that is what makes it such fascinating art
and that is why I celebrate it. It is art at its rawest and most
direct.
Most old Outsider artists were self-taught people, often with no
knowledge of art history or the workings of the art world. Some though
did have some art experience and many must have had at least a passing
knowledge of the famous art of their day. But even if Outsider artists
were uninterested in 'Art' - distinguished Modern artists like Klee,
Kokoscka, Ernst, Dali, Dubuffet, Appel, Rainer and Baselitz were
intensely intrested in them and their example. Picasso said: "All
children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he
grows up." He also said: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael,
but a lifetime to paint like a child." It was something of an
exaggeration (he was never as good as Raphael as a kid) but both
quotes are fully in line with the beliefs of many Modern artists.
Jean Dubuffet did more than any other twentieth century artist to
promote the work of Outsiders. His work although clearly influenced by
Art Brut was rendered with such panache and painterly knowing that it
was clearly the work of a trained artist. In fact in his twenties he
had been quite a good figurative and Cubist painter. But the school
of painters who really took the work of children and the insane to
heart were the Cobra artists (so called because they were from
Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam). Their paintings are big and bold
and childlike in their simplicity. But yet again they are made by
trained painters with delusions that they could return to the Paradise
Lost of childhood. They could not. No matter how energetic, colourful
and crudely drawn their paintings were - there was always something of
a pose about their work. Their work was a study in primitivsim not an
expression of it. These and many other Modernist artists sought an art
that was free of the cant, dogma and compromises of academic art. They
thought that the tribal art of Africa, the joyful paintings of
children and the symbolic and raw art of the insane - could give their
art power and authenticity. In most cases however their work never
came anywhere near the fundamental creations of Tribal sculptors,
Outsiders or children. As art their work was often far more pleasing
and substantial but as psychic creations they were merely a pose These
trained artists had too much to unlearn.
Besides the whole idea of an 'innocent eye' was proved nonsense in
'Art and Illusion' (1960) by Ernst Gombich. We are born into a
particular culture and it imprints itself upon us in many different
ways. There maybe very few artistic references in Outsider Art - but
there were plenty of references to; newspaper photographs of adverts,
sports, powerful people, or pop-culture references, architectural
drawing, glamour photographs, illustrations from children's books, the
kitsch pious or tormented iconography of Christianity and heroic or
savage military subjects - the stuff of everyday life that we are all
surrounded by.
Many outsider art works are filled with a volcanic energy and
obsessive detail. They use irrational means to understand and ward off
an irrational world. Many of their works have a heartbreaking and
hopeless pathos that can never be redeemed or rescued. But some of
their work is very funny perhaps not intentionally, but funny none the
less. However I do not laugh at these artists I laugh with them at the
absurdity of existence. I don't believe that the art of madmen is
closer to the truth of existence - but I do believe they offer a
unique gift to all men interested in psychology, the origins of art
and the nature of the extreme creative mind.
It can sometimes be hard to see actual Outsider art in museums, but
thankfully Dublin has one of the best collections of Outsider art in
the world. It includes work by artist like Henry Darger, Aloise,
Johann Hauser, Sava Sekulic, August Walla, Carlo and William Marklin
Van Genk. The collection was donated by The Musgrave Kinely Outsider
Art Collection to The Irish Museum of Modern Art. Over the years
I.M.M.A have staged many exhibitions of outsider art alongside that of
modernist artist - making telling comparisons and links.
The history of art before the nineteenth century is surprisingly
limited in terms of examples of great mad artists. There is the
strange case of the Gothic artist Van Der Goes who after suffering
from depression went into a monastery. He subsequently suffered a
complete mental breakdown and died the following year. There is only
one known painting by him the Portinari Altarpiece - a masterpiece of
pious Gothic religion and northern realism. But there is not a hint of
madness in it.
The paintings of the Northern European master of the macabre and
surreal Hieronymus Bosch - may appear to the layman to be the work a
madman. However Bosch was a rich, successful, rigorously trained
professional painter who was an upstanding pillar of his community.
His work was not merely a record of his own inner demons and fantasies
- but also an intelligent transcription of the rituals, myths, fairy-
tales and superstitions of his homeland of Holland.
Then there is Goya - who was often later accused of being mad - but
his art was too intelligent, too skillful and too serious to ever be
so laughably written off. But some continue to do so. I remember how
in 2004 when I was in the Prado museum in Madrid - making sketchbook
coloured pencil drawings from his late great 'Black
Paintings' (1821-1823) - I overheard a tour guide say: "He had gone
completely mad when he painted these!" I could understand her use of a
verbal shorthand but I was shocked by her classification of such
fundamental artistic work as the product of a mad man - especially
since there was no evidence that Goya ever had any clinical mental
problems. Of course the 'Black-Paintings' can appear mad and deranged
- but in fact they were the summation of a life spent analyzing the
myths and folklore of Spain and critiquing its superstitions. But
they were also cries of pain from an intellectual who had seen his
country ravaged by war and all the myths of Liberalism, Reason and
Liberty amount to nothing but bloodshed and atrocity. By the way
earlier in his career Goya had made a few oil paintings of the inmates
in a madhouse - when I first saw them a few years ago I was blown away
and traumatized by them - they seemed so true to my own worst
nightmares of incarceration.
Around the same time that Goya was isolated and alone in his house in
Bordeaux painting his 'Black-Paintings' on the walls of his house -
Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) the precocious genius who had painted
'The Raft of The Medusa' (1819) was also painting - a series of ten
portraits in oil paint of psychiatric patients under the care of his
friend Dr Etienne-Jean Georget. Only five of these stunning canvases
remain - but those that do are compelling in their psychological
insights and humanity. Dr Georget believed in the new concept of
'Monomania' in which the patient was thought to suffer from one
specific type of delusion or compulsion. So each one of Gericalut's
canvases are know by the Monomanic illness the patient was thought to
suffer from. So there is one of a child molester, one of a compulsive
gambler, one of a kleptomaniac, one of an obsessively envious person,
and someone convinced he was a great military commander. Such
'illness' might raise an eyebrow today! But the fact that a stunningly
talented painter who trained under Ingres would devote his energies to
recording the faces of mentally disturbed no-bodies in French society
makes them unique paintings in a Western portrait tradition that
usually only records the pious, noble, rich, beautiful, famous,
learned, and successful. Incidentally in Ireland recently (1993-1994)
Brian Maguire a socially conscious Neo-Expressionistic painter made a
memorable series of charcoal and acrylic drawings and paintings of
inmates in a Gransha Hospital in Derry. They document the pain and
humanity of these Irish people but they are also rather voyeuristic. I
can forgive Gericault and Dr Georget's social and political naivety -
but there is a part of me (as an ex-psychiatric patient in Dublin)
that balks at human portraits being reduced to social categories - no
matter how hard the painter tries to empathize with his sitters. These
suspicions are not helped by the crudeness of McGuire's drawing and
insensitivity towards his sitters.
None of these professional artists I have just mentioned were
clinically insane so their art might have illustrated madness - but it
did not embody it. But there are some interesting cases of highly
trained, professional artists - who later suffered from extreme
madness. One early professional artist who went mad was Franz X.
Messerschmidt who was born in 1736. He trained in the academic Neo-
Classical modeling style that was popular in his day and by the age of
twenty-four he was an official Court sculptor. Messerschmidt moulded
his portrait busts of royalty in clay - which he later cast in bronze
- the same ancestral technique he was later to use to express his
mental wilderness. Suddenly in 1770 he began to exhibit signs of
mental distress and breakdown. That was when he began work on a series
of 'character-heads' - a series of sculptures of Messerschmidt's own
head contorted - in various vulgar, psychotic, aggressive and facial
grimaces. They are terrifying works - full of psychic energy. But what
makes them so odd is to see such psychotic faces - rendered with all
the skill of a sculpting master. Messerschmidt was later to influence
Modern artists like Arnulf Rainer and later even myself.
Other case of artist gone mad - was Richard Dadd also known as 'Mad
Dadd.' He was a Victorian genre and orientalist painter who went
insane, killed his father and then tried to kill another man - before
he was caught and locked up in Bethlam Hospital in London. While there
Dadd began to paint - compulsive meticulously detailed images of
fairies and sprites. They are eccentric paintings - but technically
quite conventional for the time - made by a trained realist painter
who had not forgotten or forsworn his craft.
Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911) was also an interesting case. His early
canvases were in the vain of Barbizon painters like Camille Corot. His
oil paintings have a freshness and beauty quite unlike his later crude
and compulsive outpourings of delusion and pain - but both are very
interesting to those interested in the degeneration of madness. Hill
desperately craved public success but by the age of twenty-nine he had
still not sold a single canvas and his work had been rejected by many
galleries - his mind snapped. He began painting in nothing but Paris
Blue and Cadmium Yellow as his persecution mania increased. He was
eventually hospitalized and in the asylum his work became darker and
more messianic. After over a year in a psychiatric hospital - he was
released to the care of his sister who looked after him for the rest
of his life. Hill's work was later to be a big influence on the German
Neo-Expressionist - Georg Baselitz.
Adolf Wolfli is said by many to be the greatest schizophrenic artist
of all time and he was astoundingly prolific. He his vast auto-
biographical project started in 1908 and continued obsessively for the
next twenty-two years came to forty-five volumes and was 25,000 pages
long and full of 1,460 illustrations and 1,500 collaged elements. It
is crazed mix of fact, fantasy and wish-full thinking. He was born in
1864 in Switzerland and died in 1930 in Bern. The youngest of seven
children - Wolfli was orphaned at the age of ten when he was moved
into a series of grotty and cruel foster homes. As a teenager he
worked as a farm hand for a while. When his tyrannical father refused
him permission to court a girl he loved - he joined the army. In 1890
he was sentenced to two years in prison for attempting to molest two
young girls. Then in 1895 after a third incident he was committed for
the rest of his life to Waldau Psychiatric Clinic in Bern. It is a
distasteful crime to have committed but perhaps his up bring and
mental illness had rotted his sense of decency. Wolfli's drawings and
collages are crammed with architectural drawings, musical notation (he
composed his own music - which has subsequently been preformed by
avant guard musicians) collaged adverts from magazines of his day
(usually featuring some winsome looking beauty) numbers, lettering and
his handwriting. They are works of great complexity and neurotic order
a hind of paranoid-schizophrenic Gesamtkunstwerk (German for a "total
artwork").
On of the great female Outsiders was the Swiss artist Aloise (Aloise
Corbaz). She was born in Laussane Switzerland in 1886. Her mother
died when she was six - leaving Aloise and her five sibling under the
care of her brutal father. In 1911 she went to Germany to work as a
private teacher for the three daughters of Kaiser Wilhelm's pastor. It
was while there that she became infatuated with the Kaiser. She had to
leave Germany in 1913 as war loomed. But once back in Switzerland her
behavior became more and more bizarre. Finally in 1918 she was
commited to a psychiatric hospital - she would spend the rest of her
life in an asylum. At first secretly but then later with the
encouragement of her doctors - Aloise began to draw. It is no surprise
that a stridently assertive, attractive, redhead drew these wonderful
drawings - they are full of such colour, power and inner strenght. In
her drawings, Aloise compared her love for the Kaiser with the great
loves of history. The bright deep colours of her drawings seem to
blush, bloom and throb. She depicts women as big beautiful bird like
creatures with large breasts and the eyes of these women are often
just all blue ovals. She mixes up imagery of women, flowers, birds,
insects and abstract biomorphic shapes - on the same page. In fact
there is a wonderful joy to some of her work - even if it did come
from a place of mad love and loneliness.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a poet, playwright, actor, theorist and
artist. From the age of nineteen he suffered from depression - leading
to progressively worse and more traumatic nervous and mental
disorders. In the mid 1920's he aligned himself with the Surrealists.
In 1933 he established 'The Theater of Cruelty'. He sought to shock
the public out of their complacency with wild gestures, dramatic
lighting and visceral prose. The Theater of Cruelty did not last long.
Artaud traveled to Mexico (were he frequently took peyote a very
powerful hallucinatory cactus - if he was not mad before it - he was
certainly mad after it) and then in 1937 - made a fateful trip to
Dublin where he tried to gain entry to a Jesuit college. They would
not let him in and he was jailed and then sent back to France. On the
boat back he threatened to harm himself and others and was put in a
straight jacket. From then on he was to be comminted to mental
hospital principally the psychiatric hospital in Rodez France. While
in hospital Artaud created some of the most blistering portraits in
the history of art. Anyone who sees madness as a 'gift' or a bit of a
lark - should look intently at these works. What they show is the
terrible mental anguish and pain of mental illness experienced by the
sufferer. Antonin Artuad's portraits of friends are quite simply some
of the most electric and heartbreakingly profound drawings in Modern
art history. There is a rawness to them so brutal and ugly that is
quite clear it's the real deal - not some fashionable pose by a Neo-
Expressionist. In his drawings Artaud mixed portraits and nudes with
chains, coffins, nails, ex-voto images, writing and he often burnt or
stained them as part of a magical process.
But my favorite outsider artist of all time is Henry J. Darger
(1892-1973) - the creator of an extraordinary universe populated by
the little Vivian girls fighting in a war against child-slavery.
Darger was born and died in Chicago Illinois. His childhood was spent
in orphanages, he was pronounced 'feeble-minded', he experienced
extreme poverty and worked as a janitor all his life. He had a
compulsive Christian faith and went to mass up to five times a day. It
was only after Darger had to be moved to an old folks home - that his
landlord (and an artist himself) Nathan Lerner discovered the amassed
collection of Darger's writings and drawings amongst his vast
collection of balls of twine and newspaper clippings. Living alone in
a small bedsit Darger had created his masterpiece "The Story of The
Vivian Girls in what is known as The Realms of the Unreal, of the
Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.'
The book ran to fifteen volumes and had around 300 watercolour
illustrations recording his fictional tale of child war. Since he had
no training in art - Darger would take children's book illustrations,
or photographs of children in the newspapers and trace their outlines
onto one of his large scrolls of wrapping paper. Sometimes he would
strip the children and draw them nude - but since he had obviously no
knowledge of female anatomy - he put a little penis on all the little
girls! To modern eyes there is the suspicion that Darger might have
been a thwarted pedophile - but there is no clear evidence to prove
what was really going on in his mind. I tend to think he was a well
meaning and harmless old man - who had been so traumatized by his own
childhood suffering that he sought some kind of moral salvation for
all other children in his work. There was a beauty in Dargers
watercolours that was quite staggering. Painted using childeren's
watercolour and poster paint sets on cheep wrapping paper - their
beauty belies their poor quality materials. His sense of colour and
composition was extraordinary - as good as in a Gaugain. In fact I
don't know any realistic or fantasy depiction of childhood that is as
profound or moving. Since his death Darger's work has been a huge
influence on art students, artists and even masters like Paula Rego.
What is the future of Outsider art? Pretty bleak if you ask me. If
anything its commercial success has destroyed its integrity. The
trouble with a lot of Outsider art or naive art is that unless you
understand the persons biography and context - you are never sure
whether the clumsy incompetence is put on or genuine. - knowing or
ignorant. I pity the art dealers today who have to pick out the real
lunatics from the sane but opportunistic and crotchety amateurs who
have jumped on the bandwagon. Besides with the advances in psychiatric
medication and treatments - the age of the psychotic paranoid-
schizophrenic given nothing but cold baths to cure their illness is
long gone. Those patients were locked up their whole lifetime,
receiving little help and stewing in the collective madness and misery
that is an asylum. Had they not been locked up - and given the
freedom of the city one wonders if they would have made art at all.
Perhaps the combination of imprisonment and madness created their
desperate need to create. I know in my case it did - even if my
imprisonment in my bedroom was self-imposed. Today it is rare for
patients to be locked up for long, medication can do wonders for their
mental health - but it can also kill their creativity, and most people
recover and live productive lives in the community. Others however
live their lives one breakdown, treatment, recovery and breakdown
after another. They come on and of medication - in and out of madness.
Which means that if they are artists (and can work at all on meds) -
their work can change quite dramatically from medication to ab stance
to medication. Add to that the increased awareness and contact that
the television and the Internet provides isolated individuals - and it
is clear that there will be fewer and fewer artists like Adolf Wolfi
or Henry Darger - at least in the developed world.
You can Check Out my Dublin Art Blog At -
http://thepanicartist.livejournal.com/
Warning My Website Contains Some Images Of A Sexually Explicit Nature
You May find Offensive. My Website Is For Over 18's Only.
Website - www.thepanicartist.com Cypher / The Panic Artist