(Author’s note: like a lot of what has been appearing on my Substack, this is an excerpt / condensation of a larger chapter from my forthcoming book critiquing the idea of authenticity in the arts.)
The more that the information age becomes defined by distrust in any form of mediated experience, the greater the value that is placed upon the authentic incapability of acting in un-eccentric ways, or of adopting habits that are psychologically dependent on established structures and codes. Whether the individuals who embody this quality are named as “outsiders,” “eccentrics,” or “naïfs”, their perceived inability to self-censor (and, therefore, to self-deceive) is an indispensable ingredient in the stew of the modern discourse around authenticity, with its insistence on certain realities being more real than others. Though this talent for incomparably honest expression is often rooted in mental disorders or extreme privation, with singular artistry often being the trade-off for enduring hellish circumstances, this has not at all prevented a romantic longing for the supposed freedom and purity of intent that the “Outsider Artist” possesses. In fact, this romantic assessment of their value has led to plenty of discussion among established artists that there is really no such thing as an artist who is not an outsider: see for example Don DeLillo’s bold proclamation that “the writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence...”[i]
As an art-historical term, Outsider Art begins more or less with critic Roger Cardinal in 1972, or with its predecessor Art Brut in 1945, by way of Jean Dubuffet – as an accepted category of art to be exhibited, it would take until the late-20th century boom in authenticity-seeking for it to come into its own (even by the somewhat more benign name of “folk art,” Julia Ardery reports that, prior to the 1970s, “there were no contemporary folk art galleries […] and very few writings on the subject, nor had such work appeared at public auction.”[ii] Outsider Art has been a (justly, in my humble opinion) contested term ever since. The unease over the terminology derives from the fact that it is rarely “outsiders” choosing that designation for themselves or in many cases even deciding to go public with their creations. The ones who come to our attention have generally been borne on the shoulders of a dedicated support network, which has always included its share of die-hard authenticists. There should be little doubt that these supporters – be they active in the realms of journalism, curatorial work, or some other form of taste-making – have often used the unwitting “outsiders” as surrogates for a wide range of beliefs that are very much their own. Much of the controversy over the exploitation of the outsider artist can be boiled down to this deployment of them as stand-in ambassadors for the idealistically “authentic” postures of their sponsors, and much of the truly interesting insight that these artists have to share is obscured behind a wall of conjecture about the intentions of their champions.
This “director’s commentary” presentation of the so-called Outsider is a particularly uncomfortable manifestation of a tendency I am documenting more regularly these days; namely the quest to help others find their own authentic self which is, more likely, a quest to transform the tastes and lifestyle choices of an audience (and in this case, of the artists themselves) into those of the cultural critic or social influencer. Again, this activity is not suspect simply because it allows various members of the support network to become the voice of the presumably voiceless (not a disrespectable act in its own right), or because it demands that artists take up lifestyle choices that the boosters would be unwilling to follow through themselves, but because it permits them to become the gatekeepers of an idealized state of being. Like many things that we assume to be the residue of a uniquely damaged present, the justification for this behavior has arisen from deeper philosophical roots, as Renato Poggioli describes:
…in modern culture […] there has little by little developed an aesthetic pathology which is, so to speak, positive. That is, it considers the disease as a source of, or motive for, creation because it believes that philosophic or artistic genius resides naturally in a sick body or even in a sick mind […] The example of Dostoevsky, who projected his own epilepsy into the creatures of his own fantasy, renewed among the moderns the ancient belief in prophetic or sacred malady. Perhaps it was on an analogous base that Nietzsche founded one of his most dangerous and suggestive doctrines, that the call to culture itself is the fruit of a diseased state.[iii]
We’ll return to this “positive pathology” in a moment, but for the time being it is unwise to continue much further with the assumption that everyone has experienced something like a “canonical” Outsider Art piece. Again, the term is eternally contested in terms of exactly what cultural output it does and does not apply to, but the Collection de L’Art Brut in Lausanne offers perhaps one of the most immediately comprehensible, even visceral, summaries. Here we can find a globally dispersed population of extra-institutional artists, with the “homegrown” talent of Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) and Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964) testifying to Switzerland’s pioneering efforts in making this type of art an object of serious study. Though it shouldn’t be a surprise that the pieces on display vary wildly in their appearance, accounting as they do for the 19th-21st centuries as well as the numerous geographic points of origin already mentioned, this variety nevertheless surpasses that of many collections curated within the bounds of the “proper” art world.
Here we can see work of painstaking detail, such as Algerian Paul Amar’s (1919-2017) explosively colorful shell sculptures (he was noted to be a voracious eater of shellfish in order to keep plenty of “raw material” on hand), in close proximity to the austere, raw ceramic totems of Koumei Bekki, whose methods previously included “[making] objects using dirt, which he mixed [with] plants and threads that he had placed in his mouth”. The same space occupied by the lusty / campy drawings of Giovanni Galli (buxom dominatrices appearing alongside formidable military hardware) makes room for the raw schizoid terrors of Robert Gie.; imagery of bodies being entangled in labyrinths of cable that is eerily prescient of the “information age” anxiety stoked by Industrial musicians decades later. Everywhere one looks for a consistency of attitude or technical approach, a contradicting example leaps up to remind of the uniqueness of the respective artists’ mental lives.
If there is a commonality here shared among the artists, it is not of the sensory impressions they evoke, but a sort of shared investment in tragedy. Heinrich Anton Müller (1865-1930), one of the most widely recognized artists in the Lausanne collection and the canon of Outsider Art itself, was driven to madness and institutionalized after the failure to properly patent his invention for pruning vines allowed others to greatly benefit in his place. The toll of large-scale rather than private tragedies is also easily visible in much Outsider Art: war veterans from multiple historical conflicts are well represented, as well as refugees from pogroms such as Michel Nedjar, whose fetish dolls radiate a singular, abject terror whether or not this was the artist’s intent. Not all of the artworks to be found in the Lausanne collection evince mental disturbances of the type that could be clinically diagnosed and reasoned by medical professionals as posing harm to the artists themselves and to others: the ebullient Eijiro Miyama, a sort of eccentric living sculpture based in Yokohama, seems “afflicted” by little more than a temperament that does not mesh perfectly with a rigid and insular larger society. Nevertheless, an impression remains that all of these artists’ unifying feature is their tragic inability to moderate their impulses and their reactions to lived experiences (be those events themselves painful or no).
A secondary tragedy often arises from how the champions of the Outsider either downplay the full effect of these tragedies, or, more commonly, make either implicit or explicit arguments that their inimitable creative flourishes may be “worth” the psychic tolls taken in order to create them. As Susan Sontag memorably warned in her overview of the ex-Surrealist Antonin Artaud, “The Surrealists heralded the benefits that would accrue from unlocking the gates of reason, and ignored the abominations.”[iv] Indeed, vocal contributors to that movement remain, to this day, some of the most outspoken believers in the idea that all life is interpreted as a creative process for those stigmatized as insane or mentally ill. The legacy of the Surrealist movement, in spite of the aforementioned internal combat and absurd “excommunications” that it would become known for, to this day provides one of the clearest and most unabashed examples of reversing established social hierarchies so that the Outsider can enjoy a high status. Statements like the following from Paul Eluard are proof positive of this fact:
We who love them realize that the insane refuse to be cured. We know well, that it is we who are locked up when the insane asylum door is shut: the prison is outside of the asylum, liberty is to be found in the inside.
The Surrealist leadership seemed more or less united in this assessment, a fact that cannot easily be dismissed as an ephemeral quirk within the larger course of art history: we have to remember that the “magus of Surrealism” André Breton could, in the late 1920s, be called “the leading avant-garde intellectual power broker in France, and probably the world,”[v] and so his engagements with the psychic world of the Outsider were of no little consequence. For better or worse, many of his fundamental attitudes on this subject remain virtually unchanged by the idealists of authenticity a century later.
Breton’s saga cannot be honestly told, though, without reference to how he did in fact champion the artistic output of the mentally afflicted without considering the degree to which that affliction was causing genuine suffering. One doesn’t have to look much farther for this than Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja, the account of his relationship with a mentally troubled woman who he would eventually encourage to communicate via a unique series of symbolic drawings (these were made exclusively for Breton, as it turns out). Though Breton’s account of their relationship is a revealing one, it reveals as much about the mania for achieving distinction through authenticity-seeking as it does the nature of intimate, interpersonal relationships with the mentally afflicted. On that account, the story does indicate that the titular heroine was in love with her chronicler, and this makes Breton’s eventual indifference towards her more biting in its poignancy: Nadja’s revelation of the personal details of her quotidian life alienates the narrator from his idealized vision of her being a conduit for more exceptional forces, and leads him to a protracted musing on the greater inspirational quality of her absence. It is difficult to read it as anything other than a call to separate ideal qualities from the inconvenient fact that they require actual living beings to embody them.
The Surrealist postures themselves owed much to the previous Romanticist attitude which dictated that the more an act was driven by emotion and feeling, the closer it was to having some purchase on the truth of the self or of humanity. Their defiance of a corrupted conventional society based supposedly on pure reason came to at least one full flowering in the person of Gérard de Nerval, a Surrealist forebear who was indeed institutionalized and essentially forced at this time to recant his genius in order to be declared sane. Though a far more accomplished author than most will ever hope to be (Nerval completed a translation of Goethe’s Faust while still in his teens, later compiling anthologies of German and French poets and joining the rabble-rousing Petit-Cénacle group whose membership played a starring role in perhaps the first “art riot” in defense of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani), Nerval is nonetheless remembered also for a host of “eccentric” behaviors.
The most famous of these is the walking of his pet lobster Thibault, though other reported activities included the pitching of a tent is his private residence or electing to sleep on the floor next to his own bed. Eventually these behaviors rose to the level of a public nuisance and the authorities intervened: he was taken into a therapeutic villa and diagnosed with “acute mania” after an episode during the 1841 mardi gras celebrations, during which the poet stripped naked, held out his arms in a messianic pose and waited for his soul to be transported to the stars. Thus began an intimate relationship with psychiatric treatment that lasted, on and off, until his final mental breakdown in 1853. By this point, Nerval was wildly delusional, interpreting a rainfall as another biblical Great Flood and imagining pursuit by “ghost armies” – perhaps mistaking a café waiter for one of these spectral soldiers, he assaulted him and thus earned a stay in Charité Hospital. By 1855, he had ended his life by his own hand, though even then in a provocative and distinct fashion: Luc Sante describes Nerval’s body as being “found hanged with the belt of a woman’s apron from the grille of a cabinet maker’s stall on Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne…wearing a hat, two shirts, two vests, and no coat, and with a tetragrammaton drawn in ink on the left side of his chest.”[vi]
Again, we have to come to grips here with the understanding that for some Surrealists and latter-day champions of Outsider-hood, Nerval’s final act would be seen for its value as a performance, rather than treated as an avoidable calamity whose postponement would have meant perhaps more and greater performances. Surrealism, having staked a claim on being a superior reality (lest we forget the meaning of the prefix “Sur-”), was far too invested in making the same mistakes now made by modern-day movements and taste-makers who feel that achieving the ideal of authenticity is the most noble goal of any artistic undertaking. Surrealists had to, as Albert Camus recalls, “simultaneously [exalt] human innocence” while believing “that they could also exalt murder and suicide.”[vii] Breton’s frequent verbal sparring partner Georges Bataille, also seizing on the group’s militancy, decried their “violent verbiage asserting the necessity of a dictatorship of the spirit [italics in the original]”[viii], strongly intimating that even a dictatorship of that kind would be attended by the usual symptoms of idealism and intolerance.
Following the “to thine own self be true” ideal of authenticity, just as it would have allowed the Surrealists to place the Marquis de Sade in the same pantheon than the sainted innocents of the asylums, still allows for anyone to be seen in a heroic light as long as they act psychologically independent of some ill-defined normality: that the artwork of Daniel Johnston could be exhibited alongside that of John Wayne Gacy does not seem like much of a curatorial stretch at all, given many of the malleable philosophical and aesthetic definitions of authenticity. To be sure, more than one murderous psychopath is aware of how being one’s “true self” allows them to re-cast their violence as, say, an excess of creativity.
It is beneficial to return to Sontag’s assessment of Antonin Artaud for a way out of this conundrum. The problem with the Surrealist valuation of the Outsider artist, and anyone that took their cues from them, is that the “loser wins” inverted hierarchy they propose is a needless, all-or-nothing dichotomy of perpetual exoticism versus perpetual insider-ism. It requires for us to be permanently elsewhere in order to stay grounded in the truth, and yearns for a world of uncontested irrationality that can hamper or completely block off the likelihood of meaningful, conciliatory, collaborative action. If Artaud managed to move beyond this even in spite of his own many flaws, it was for reasons that Sontag lays out here:
Not holding a hierarchical view of the mind, Artaud overrides the superficial distinction cherished by the Surrealists, between the rational and the irrational. Artaud does not speak for the familiar view that praises passion at the expense of reason, the flesh over the mind, the mind exalted by drugs over the prosaic mind, the life of the instincts over deadly cerebration. What he advocates is an alternative relation to the mind.[ix]
The end result of the “hierarchical view” here is that the new winners of the “loser wins” game, who can now act from a position of authority accorded to them by their authenticity, have the ability to subjugate others to their vision of how the world should be. Indeed, the ideal of authenticity, in nurturing inside / outside distinctions rather than aiming for a variety of creative syntheses, makes it more likely that this cultural cycle will continue, and that deeply meaningful aspects of lived experience will be relegated to ephemeral fashions in the process. This type of zero sum game is all the more pitiable because it is unnecessary for such a competition to exist where simple collaboration will yield unexpected rewards: those who are now relegated to the cultural Outside can be active collaborators rather than ‘curated’ ciphers, and can immediately be involved in changing the accepted parameters of creativity rather than existing as inspiring case studies to be kept at a comfortable distance. Anyone who wishes to proselytize about the truth or superior reality embodied by the Outsider, without attempting to personally commune with them in an exchange of creative ideas, should be held in suspicion.
[i] Quoted in DePietro, T. (ed.) (2005). Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
[ii] Ardery, J. (1997). “Loser Wins: Outsider Art and the Salvaging of Disinterestedness”. Poetics 24, pp. 329-346.
[iii] Poggiolo, R. (1997). Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Ferald Fitzgerald. Cambridge / London, Belknap / Harvard University Press.
[iv] Susan Sontag, “Artaud,” introduction to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (1976). Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
[v] Allen Stoekl, introduction to Bataille, G. (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. And Ed. Allen Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt & Donald M. Leslie Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[vi] Sante, L. (2015). The Other Paris. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
[vii] Camus, A. (1992). The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage.
[viii] Bataille (1985).
[ix] Sontag quoted in Artaud (1976).