| |
The
good thing about being an outsider artist is the freedom to go
your own way. The bad thing can be the sense of isolation that
tends to go with the territory. Not that there's much choice about
whether one is or isn't an outsider artist at heart: You're most
likely to exist outside (or on the margins of) the conventional
art world because "you are what you is," pure and simple. You
do what you do because that's what you want to make visible, necessity
being the mother of invention. Your art expresses your life-force,
spirit, el duende--you have to do it to be fully who and
what you are, irrespective of how non-comprehending others may
be of your work.
I am
not using 'outsider artist' necessarily to imply 'social outsider,'
though the former term originated with, and obviously overlaps with,
the latter. To the extent that you regard the art world as a separate
society in itself, then outsider artists can be perceived as 'socially'
excluded from that. However it would be foolish to make sweeping
generalisations about the social status of outsider artists, and
that is not my intention.
It can
take guts to identify yourself openly as an outsider, as for many
in the art world such an admission is tantamount to a credibility
cop-out. A degree of cynicism is perhaps understandable when cutting-edge
art has 'colonised' outsider regions repeatedly during the past
century. And it's not unheard of for ostensibly mainstream artists
to claim outsider status, further blurring the distinction between
'outsider' and 'insider.' Some would define outsider artists out
of existence from a pluralistic, all-inclusive stance. So on what
basis can you still purport to be one?
As a
self-perceived outsider artist myself, my view is that you are one
if you feel like one. The kind I have particularly in mind (like
myself, not surprisingly) is the 'primitivist' outsider: one who
draws inspiration from the raw, untrained, primitivist aesthetic,
whose art looks like it belongs in that 'tradition.' (It is ironic
that outsider art, with its preference for painting, graphic art
and sculpture, appears more 'traditional' than critically respectable
contemporary art forms that have abandoned those media, while compared
with popular representational art it can look anti-traditional,
irreverent and iconoclastic.)
Though
the term 'primitivist artist' is sometimes automatically associated
with 'outsider artist,' the two are distinct categories that only
partially intersect, in an infinitely diverse set of wider permutations
and possibilities. Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee were primitivist
in orientation for much of their careers, emulating 'primitive'
tribal art (post-Gauguin in the South Seas) and attempting to create
spontaneously like children. Clearly they were anything but outsiders.
Klee's aesthetic interest in the art of mental patients was elaborated
on by Hans Prinzhorn's Die Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (1922),
the first book to consider seriously the art of the insane and/or
institutionalised (e.g., Adolf Wölfli) as 'art.' On the other hand,
Henri Rousseau, Gaston Chaissac, Scottie Wilson, et al., were outsider
artists who were neither insane nor consciously primitivist.
Jean
Dubuffet, a primitivist artist himself and an intellectually-sophisticated
outsider, coined the term Art Brut around 1945 to encapsulate the
art of genuine outsiders and untrained artists. But he went much
further than Prinzhorn by asserting that Art Brut is not only legitimate
as art, but also is the only truly authentic and valuable art of
its time. His radically polemical attack on conventional artistic
value was echoed by the post-WWII CoBrA artists, who cultivated
spontaneous primitivist imagery deriving from the collective unconscious
and from Nordic and other folk mythologies. The CoBrAs' emphasis
on collective creativity bolstered the group against the greater
social alienation they would probably have had to endure as isolated
individuals.
In more
recent years artists whose work has distinct affinities with primitivist
outsider art have been elevated to stardom, notably so-called graffiti
artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat (sadly, prematurely,
both dead). Do artists like these suddenly become 'insiders' for
having achieved such remarkable art world success? I doubt it. Once
an outsider, always an outsider, is the way I see it. It remains
an integral part of your identity, whatever worldly successes may
be achieved along the way, however confusingly complex the picture
gets.
In Australia
the primitivist outsider painter David Larwill has achieved a more
modest but more solid and enduring renown, still being alive to
enjoy it. Inspired like myself by CoBrA, Dubuffet, Art Brut, children's
art, and so on, his one simple maxim is: "It must be from the heart"
(quoted in "David Larwill: the goblin force" by Ashley Crawford,
Art & Australia, vol. 38 no. 2, 2000, p. 266-273).
Klee
was thinking along similar lines when he wrote: "Art does not reproduce
the visible, but makes visible." In Klee's view, that is, art's
real value lies in making visible what only the artist can see from
the inside, what is accessible only to "the heart"--which in itself
creates the artist. To extrapolate: It is not just the presence
but also the ongoing realisation of a creative vision that sets
the visionaries apart as authentic artists, as 'outsiders' from
the majority of humankind. In the CoBrA movement's somewhat naïve
and idealistic optimism, everyone would be able to become artists
in a better society, following their primitivist example. Larwill,
myself, and others found that example inspiring, a point of reference
from which to begin, or begin anew.
Instrumental
in forming Roar Studios, a collective of like-minded artists with
an especial love for CoBrA, Larwill sees authentic art as a lifetime's
journey, "coming from somewhere and going somewhere else." That's
exactly the way I see it: You come into the world with an identity
that's thrust upon you, and somehow, over time, you try to discover
who you really are.
My background,
history, predisposition, and attitude to the art world position
me squarely in outsider territory. I have just about always gone
my own way as an artist, despite having to do frequent battle with
self-doubt and despair in my earlier years. To put it another way,
the outsider within me obstinately refused to aspire to the conventional
idea of what an artist is or should be. That view is that artists
can't claim to be 'serious' or 'good' unless they have sufficient
skills to justify competency. Even being 'self-taught' implies that
an artist has acquired these skills, or an approximation of them,
by self-tutelage rather than art school training. Good artists should
be able to depict anything convincingly if they wish to or have
to, even if their usual approach is non-representational (such as
conceptual or abstract.) But the fact that outsider artists might
lack conventional skills doesn't mean they don't have any
skills, just that they only care about using the skills they possess
to express their particular vision.
And
the world would be greatly impoverished in spirit without them:
I can't even begin to imagine 20th century art without the influence
of primitivists and outsiders. It would be like trying to imagine
the world without birds.
In the
late '70s I exhibited a painting called "The Doubting Self Remains
Outside." The title is double-edged, signifying that doubt can be
bad or good, or bad in some circumstances and good in others. On
the one hand, self-doubt can cause you to remain an outsider to
yourself, to your life, to the world, and its consequences can be
self-destructive. On the other hand, doubt is an essential component
of the human condition, because it gives you a sense of critical
detachment, of remaining 'outside' the things that could otherwise
engulf you.
Being
an outsider in this broader sense is ultimately what everyone is,
and awareness of that is the sine qua non of self-realisation. I
see my paintings as coming from that realisation, as creating a
different sort of space from the day-to-day reality we take for
granted. I'm not trying to depict what everyone knows by sight,
but to provide a means of 'steppin' out' from the commonplace.
Whether
or not I succeed depends not on these intellectualisations, but
on the individual viewer's visual and intuitive response to the
artwork itself. The paintings are made to be looked at and enjoyed,
not to be theorised about. I regard them as invitations to viewers
to make them their own, through creating personal meanings and significances.
This requires a visceral empathy to exist between the viewer's aesthetic
expectations and the aesthetic embodied in the artwork. The viewer's
response too must come from the heart, establishing an empathetic
connection with the artist via the artwork, thus implicating the
viewer in its creation.
For
my part, I'm an eternal optimist. I believe that because I do what
I love, and love what I do, there will be others out there in the
world who love it too. Even if there are only a few such people,
that's more than enough. The ability to love what you create, and
to keep creating, is almost reward enough in itself. After more
than a quarter century of painting, my outsider artist vision remains
undiminished.
Copyright
© 2000 Max Podstolski. All Rights Reserved.
"Max Podstolski strips," an exhibition of paintings on paper
in strip-format, is to open on June 1, 2001, at the Gadfly Gallery
in Perth, Western Australia.
comment?
discuss this article on our discussion
board
|
