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Steppin' Out: Insights of an Outsider ArtistMax Podstolski
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' to necessarily 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 openly identify yourself 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 in any case, 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 which 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 which 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 seriously consider 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 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 the ongoing realisation of a creative vision which 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 70's 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 a 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. This article originally appeared in *spark-online, issue 16.0,
January 2001, at: |