Inside Out – NYC’s Outsider Art Fair

27 Feb 2007 5 Comments

by madsilence in Uncategorized Tags: Art

J.J. Kromer: What Has Come To You is Coming Once More, mixed media.
Grey Carter: Objects of Art (Gallery)

It had been my ambition for a number of years to visit New York City’s annual Outsider Art Fair. The notion of outsider art has always enthralled me: Raw, untamed, uncivilized art exploding from the fiery crucible of creation, a product of humankind’s tremendous creative productivity. Produced by untrained artists, individuals often isolated, unknown, and disconnected from society and the art mainstream, outsider art offers a direct conduit to the wellspring of human intuition and inventiveness.

As the D train approached my destination at West 4th and Lafayette Streets, I experienced a frisson of excitement. Approaching the Puck Building that Sunday afternoon I navigated around the many itinerant art dealers set up at curbside to join the lengthy entry queue. Several hours later I staggered out, dazed and bewildered by purported art that was often outlandish, sometimes beautiful, occasionally offensive and always challenging. It was magnificent!

The term “outsider art” is the 20th century creation of art historians and refers, not to an artistic style or period, but to the standing of the artists. Outsider artists are those outside of the mainstream: the antithesis of insider artists.

The concept itself is not new. Artists such as Courbet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Whistler, Winslow Homer and Jackson Pollack all produced art that at one time was considered outside of the mainstream of taste, beauty and the conventional art world. The 19th century Parisian Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected) was an art exhibition dedicated to artistic works rejected by the traditional salons.

The term today presupposes on the part of the artist a high level of disassociation from the mainstream art world. Outsider artists may be untrained and unaffiliated with any artistic style, idiosyncratic and eccentric, even mentally ill, existing at the fringes of society, sometime oblivious to the art world and even unaware that they are creating “art”. What concerns me is that the outsider artist is rapidly being subsumed by art insiders. Outsider artists have been discovered by that powerful triad of collector, dealer and museum curator. Once outsider art begins to respond to the marketplace it becomes insider art. Outsider art even has its own not-for-profit advocate, Intuit, and its own international journal, RawVision.

Outsider art is valuable in that is challenges our ideas concerning artistic culture, beauty, and aesthetic taste. It teaches us that the sources for artistic expression are as diverse as is human experience itself and encourages us to question what lies behind the human urge to create. The Outsider Art Fair, as Roberta Smith of The New York Times has noted, “…gives the New York art world an annual dose of smelling salts.”

Long may it stink and greatly.
~TAB