Cultural Policy on Outsider Art Research Paper

1. Introduction

1.1 Construction Of The Outsider Art Genre

(a) The term ‘outsider art’ has been used to signify the art of the ‘insane’ or more generally the creations of certain kinds of untrained artists. Its main components, noted from the late nineteenth century on, consist of works by mental patients, children, and ‘primitive’ peoples from cultures outside of Western civilization. Recently, the genre has been enlarged by the cultural creations of what are usually thought of as self-taught creators considered marginal to or marginalized by their society: naıve artists, folk craftsmen or women, urban or rural isolates, hobbyists, the home-less, prison inmates, institutionalized elderly (Zolberg and Cherbo 1997).

(b) In the last quarter of the twentieth century, outsider works began to gain fame, to the monetary and symbolic benefit of their owners. Works are exhibited in museums, featured in art magazines, and analyzed in books that detail and assess their quality. In the process, a ‘tradition’ of outsider art has emerged centered upon certain canonic works that sell for extraordinary prices. In contrast to what are classified as professional artists, outsider artists are generally believed to be unaware of their artistry, not promoting their own career, but spontaneously following their creative impulse (Becker 1982). They become known largely through the discovery and marketing practices of art dealers, gallery owners, art critics, scholars, museums, and government agencies (Ardery 1997).

(c) At one extreme, their creators inhabit a world of isolated naıves, whose works take shape as the result of personal visions (Becker 1982). At the opposite, as inmates of total institutions (Goffman 1961), they gain access to the possibility of creation when it is offered by their keepers. It is the latter who select what merits public display. A third class of canonical outsider art is ‘primitive’ art, a form whose meanings derive from completely different societal and cultural traditions. It was through convenient misunderstandings of their origin and significance that primitive art was lumped together with the works of the ‘insane,’ adult naıves, and children (Zolberg 1997, 53–72).

1.2 State And Market In The Making Of The Genre

(a) Outsider art flourishes or languishes depending upon the political regime and the art market in which it comes to light. The complexity both of art and of its context makes it necessary to clarify the nature of their interactions by tracing the genre’s institutional and structural foundations. The institutions and policies of governments play a part, but government policies, vital as they are for fostering or inhibiting culture, can seldom determine cultural outcomes. Their importance lies in the fact that they set the conditions under which their creation and dissemination may take place. In liberal states where commercial processes are permitted and fostered, the power of the art market is at least as decisive as is governmental policy per se in providing gatekeepers, agencies of reward, recognition and legitimation.

(b) The principal question is whether, how, and with what consequences the public sector came to enter into the domain of outsider art. Equally important is the role of art market structures and processes. Although this combination of domains has not been directly drawn together into a unified analysis, it appears that together these gatekeeper agencies and groups are engaged in the discovery as well as construction of new forms of outsider art.

2. The Social Construction Of Outsider Art

2.1 An Aesthetic Response To Modernization

(a) Interest in outsider art is an aspect of attempts by observers and scholars to grasp the meaning and impact of modernizing trends in society. Theorists who laid the groundwork for understanding the phenomenon came at it from various perspectives and disciplines, though, with the exceptions of Max Weber (Gerth and Wright 1946) and Georg Simmel (Wolff 1950), they generally did not refer explicitly to the arts. One of the most influential formulations was that of Ferdinand Toennies, whose analysis of the growing dominance of modern society over what he perceived as a declining communitarian rural life world, summarizes a widespread unease prevalent among many nineteenth-century intellectuals (Toennies 1963). Cultural opinion leaders such as William Morris and his followers tried to overcome what they saw as the cold ugliness of industrialization and its products by reverting to medieval inspiration for design, and work organization based on handcraft. Forms and genres that they associated with folk culture appealed to their romantic sensibilities and, for some, their socialist ideas.

(b) An imagined peasantry and its way of life was not the only victim to the seemingly inexorable march of modernization. Integral to much nineteenth-century longing was a search for ‘authenticity’ in contrast to the ‘artificiality’ of urban civilization. Seemingly embodied in artistic creations of children and of asylum inmates, authenticity was sought by therapeutically oriented scholars of the 1920s. Hans Prinzhorn, for example, a leading proponent of the artistry of the mentally ill (Prinzhorn 1972) was not alone in his appreciation of their gifts. Walter Morgenthaler, a physician in a Swiss institution, publicized the achievements of one of the first major outsider artists to be ‘discovered,’ his patient, Adolph Wolfli (Morgenthaler 1992).

(c) The third principal form of outsider art, works by non-Western peoples, has a very different source and trajectory. It entered European consciousness through nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialist imperialism, when much of it was rarely recognized as art, but rather as superstitious fetishes or indications of the innate childishness of primitive people. These interpretations provided additional justification for European domination, since they intersected with conventional stereotypes, and rationalized the claim that colonialism would elevate the subjects to a civilized state. Primitive artistry was ‘discovered’ largely in the early twentieth century when, spear-headed by a ant garde artists (Cubists, Fauvists, Expressionists), these works were re-interpreted in appropriate aesthetic terms (Vogel 1988). It was not long before other artists, art historians, and critics turned their attention to this blossoming genre (Zolberg 1997, 53–72).

2.2 Intellectual And Scholarly Perspectives On Outsider Art

(a) English critic Roger Cardinal (1979), French a ant garde artist Jean Dubuffet (1988), art historian and museum curator Robert Goldwater (1986), historians and critics John MacGregor (1989), Michel Thevoz (1976) and many others have provided a multi-faceted scholarship on these works. Anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists have contributed their understandings: Howard Becker (1982), Sander Gilman (1982), James Clifford (1988), Anne Bowler (1997), Vera Zolberg (1997), Julia Ardery (1997). Several of them perceive affinities between outsider art and genres and works of ‘maverick’ artists (Becker 1982) of the turn of the century a ant garde movements (Bowler 1997, Tuchman and Eliel 1992, Hall and Metcalf 1994).

(b) While interest in outsider genres parallels concerns about modernization, technology, and anxieties about ecology, free-floating concerns are insufficient to account for the burgeoning of interest in these genres. Without the creation of aesthetic institutions dedicated to state building, and their transformation with the rise of art markets, it is difficult to imagine the emergence of outsider art as an admired genre.

2.3 Structural Context For Recognition

(a) The modern system of public institutions and agencies (the academic system), which had been enacted by nation states, became the authoritative gatekeeper in establishing and maintaining artistic status hierarchies. Exclusionary and narrow in their definition, academic establishments were eventually sufficiently shaken by challenges from successive waves of a ant garde art movements (Poggioli 1971) to be obliged to open themselves to new styles. This came about largely as they faced competition from the private sector of an emergent, free-wheeling, commercial dealer system.

(b) Psychotherapy converged with the rise of avant garde art movements. Resulting imagery was interpreted as spontaneous expressions of outsiders who were seeking a visionary experience. To these un-schooled, apparently spontaneous creations of institutionalized mental patients and children, were added tribal arts of Africa, the southern Pacific (Goldwater 1986), and rustic Europe.

(c) By the latter half of the twentieth century, as the ‘insider’ art worlds of academies and of dealer systems became increasingly open to stylistic and genre innovations, official and conventional art categories were transformed. This was true as well for unconventional a ant garde artists, whose claim to standing as arbiters of fine art was challenged by even more unconventional expression that rejected pure aestheticism and linked their creation to other domains. Barriers be- tween high and low art, art and politics, and art and religious rite, art and emotional expression, art and life itself are repeatedly breached. Art historians, aestheticians, social scientists, and policy makers face complex challenges when they try to delineate what is Art, what it includes or excludes, whether and how it is to be evaluated, and the relative importance to assign to different genres (DiMaggio 1987). These uncertainties are directly implicated in controversies about how and whether governments should provide official support for more recent kinds of artistic creation, and their dissemination to larger audiences.

3. Public Policy And The Arts

3.1 Pitfalls Of Public Culture

(a) In recognizing certain forms of culture as symbolically significant, the state confers official approbation and respect. France very early established a sphere of official cultural policy for the glorification of the state (Mesnard 1974). The French example influenced much of western Europe and left a durable heritage on its former colonies. Inevitably, officially recognized cultural forms were viewed as hierarchically superior to those receiving support from other sources, whether religious, provincial, or commercial. Integration into its ranks gains artists public or private patronage rather than leaving them dependent on commercial forces.

(b) While most liberal national governments recognize and support some art forms, rarely is the institutional structure of support as centralized as in authoritarian or despotic regimes. Nazi Germany suppressed the principal forms of outsider art and their creators. Under the dominance of their leaders’ racist beliefs and eugenicist pseudoscience, the state’s agencies used their apparent kinship with the stylistic and philosophical orientations of a ant garde forms (Expressionism) to justify official suppression of both (Barron 1991). Labeling the art of vanguard artists and the art of the mentally ill, the naıve, and African works as ‘degenerate,’ the Nazi regime persecuted and frequently murdered artists, and sold their works abroad or simply destroyed it.

(c) The relationship of outsider art to contemporary political agendas in most other societies is considerably more benign. Thus, in relatively liberal regimes out-sider art forms have come to be associated with heart-warming outcomes of social work or psychotherapy; some have come to be regarded as having aesthetic value in their own right. It is in this process that they have become incorporated into the gallery system.

3.2 Cultural Policy US Style

(a) European nations, with their feudal and monarchical traditions, have emulated the French structures of official academic art, though rarely in as centralized a form (Corvisier 1978). Even in a nation as divergent from European traditions and, in particular, from state centralization, as the USA, France’s reputation as patron of the arts was admired by artists. This is understandable, since in contrast to France, nineteenth century US artists found themselves de-pendent upon a market for their livelihood, or at best on insufficiently appreciative patrons (Morgan 1978, p. 71). For many US politicians, however, far from being the touchstone, France was an anti-model. Not only was an official culture incompatible with the distrust of the state that pervaded US political thought (Kammen 2000), but the arts were thought of as a private pleasure in whose support the state had no right to disburse public monies (Meyer 1979).

(b) It is not surprising that cultural subsidies are a relatively new development in the USA. Prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s, it had been confined, as in other nations, to visual and aural forms of relatively routine expressions of national sovereignty: designs for currency, the official seal, military uniforms, postage stamps, architecture of government buildings and monuments, and musical compositions for military bands and a national anthem. For the most part, designs were made by civil servants in the course of their duties or, later, by commissions to artists or architects as needed. The spurt of activity generated by New Deal art programs was unprecedented. Not surprisingly, they were justified not so much on the ideal of artistic creation, but on the practical ground of generating jobs for unemployed artists.

(c) With a preference for fairly popular styles to appeal to an unsophisticated public, most New Deal artists, composers, and writers worked largely in the most recognizable fine art forms: painting (Marling 1982), and background music for documentary films. In addition, writers were commissioned to produce regional guide books, in part to enhance the appeal of distant or isolated US regions for prospective tourists. The New Deal supported scholars and serious amateurs, who collected and recorded music in rural areas among agricultural people, fishermen, small town churchgoers, and prisoners in chain gangs. Beside research in outlying areas, the New Deal employed musicians and artists to teach in schools and settlement houses, as well as adapting some art forms to therapeutic ends (McDonald 1969). The preservation of folk music, arts, and crafts echoed the search for authenticity by artists, writers, and musicians. Perhaps inadvertently, by preserving folk music, the federal government helped nurture one of the classic genres that later came to be incorporated into the domain of outsider art.

(d) Recognizing the connections between certain art forms and the groups which are their source, the Natiojnal Endowment for the Arts (NEA) seeks out originality in the relatively uncontroversial domain suitable to school curricula: ‘folk arts, storytelling, and historic preservation’ (NEA 1999). Since it is the principal federal agency charged with providing sup-port for the arts, its artistic selections are likely to lend high visibility and legitimacy to the creative activities it embraces. Its budget, originally handled on a national level, is now partially allocated among state and local arts agencies in all 50 states and possessions, for grass roots groups, and especially for educational projects.

4. Artistic Genres Multiplied: Boundary Blurring

4.1 Cultural Contradictions Or Expansion Of Civil Society?

(a) As important as official government agencies may be in recognizing new art forms, public policy alone does not account for the rise of outsider art. It is only one ingredient among others, of which the most important are art market initiatives. Although therapists played a vital part in recognizing the creations of their patients, the discovery of outsider art hinged on collectors, dealers, and scholars in the context of an expanding art world. These developments were vital to broadening the domain of the arts more generally, including the entry of new collectors. This is indicated by the growth of interest among African–American collectors in African tribal art as well as in works by African–American artists (Halle 1993). The exclusionary definition of art proposed by some of the most influential philosophical estheticians and buttressed by the academic system has ceded to one more sensitive to nuance, process, and inclusivism: not high vs. low but high and low; not insider vs. outsider but insider and outsider; not art vs. politics but art and politics. These boundary blurring innovations are seen by some as a danger, indications that much of the Western world has entered a period of ‘cultural declassification—an unraveling and weakening of ritual classifications.’ The discomfort that this may create is expressed by the sociologist Daniel Bell, who regrets this symptom of the decline of the fine arts into no more than the impermanence of fashion. He takes it as a sign of an esthetic malaise because of a ‘disjuncture of culture and social structure’ (Bell 1996). Other sociologists, such as Paul DiMaggio, see declassification from a more dispassionate standpoint, as a predictable result of the intimate relation between them. DiMaggio attributes it to a combination of factors, among which the most salient are the trans-formation of local upper classes into a US elite, anchored in organizations and less in community; an increase in the influence of commercial principles of classification as popular culture industries expand; the emergence of relatively autonomous and competitive high culture art worlds; the growth of mass higher education; and changes in the US state (DiMaggio 1987, p. 452).

(b) While an air of elitism still clings to the arts, both artists and the public they seek have expanded to the point where earlier conceptions of exclusivity seem to many to be in need of revision. To some degree, this was driven by the new challenge of the 1960s when abstractionism was confronted by Postmodernism. In Andreas Huyssen’s analysis, Postmodernism challenged the a ant garde autonomous fine art sphere, which had preserved traditional strictures of uniqueness and originality from the illegitimate importations of technology. In challenging this position, certain artists launched a revolution that brought the techniques of mass media into the domain of the fine arts. No longer would the quasi-sacred realm of fine art be clearly distinguished from that of commerce. Instead, it came to include everyday consumer goods, on the same level as the aura-laden fine art to which Walter Benjamin had directed his attention (Benjamin 1969). In the process, they blurred the line—the Great Divide—between fine art and commercial art (Huyssen 1986, Cherbo 1997). Moreover, makers of prints, color lithographs, and photographs that re-produce unlimited numbers of copies were not content to be mere adjuncts for reproducing already acknowledged works of art. Instead, they claim these media of design and advertising are themselves Art. Upholders of the older, exclusive a ant garde ideals became the chief detractors of Postmodernism. Their efforts were largely in vain: the day of clearcut boundaries between fine and other art forms had passed.

(c) Postmodernism has another side that is closely connected to the make-up of societal membership. Although the situation varies considerably from one nation to another, in many the exclusion from the esthetic core of certain art forms on the basis of their creators’ categorical memberships—based on gender, race, class, status, or socially defined handicaps—have gained attention of policy makers and scholars. Since art worlds are embedded in, and encompass a part of, the social fabric, it is not surprising that the tensions and demands of under-represented groups and their art works are revealed in them. These forms of the Postmodern turn have implications for all the arts, but outsider art may be the most salient because it reveals the multitude of domains in which different forms of artistic excellence are recognized.

4.2 The Triumph Of The Transitory

(a) The dynamic of modernism was centered on the very dismantling of a guiding canon, the blurring of the boundary between a governing center; and recurring waves of outsiders struggling to become insiders. In the ‘tradition of the new’ art could be intended or unintended, made by either professionals or nonprofessionals (Rosenberg 1964). Unexpectedly, however, vanguard innovations beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, for better or worse, did so much violence to the renaissance and enlightenment heritage underlying the cultural structure of the arts, that it was altogether reasonable to characterize their effect as constituting ‘the shock of the new’ (Hughes 1981). Startling as it was at the time, that shock did not in itself immediately destroy the consensus surrounding the fine arts. A century later, however, the visual and aural revolution heralded at its outset has thrown into question the very idea of a high aesthetic realm. The range and density of artistic change have reached their apogee in the form of a permanent revolution.

(b) The existence of outsider art implies an insider art, one in which a canon serves as a focus around which artistic products and their makers are evaluated. But it is difficult today to identify a canon that governs art as opposed to non-art. Without an autonomous domain of fine art based on a consensus of aesthetic standards and criteria, in a world in which anything can potentially be art, it is to be expected that outsider art is not more likely to be excluded than a potentially infinite variety of other genres. This does not imply that artistic recognition no longer exists, but that recognition and legitimation are no longer identifiably situated in a single institution such as an academy. Rather, they inhabit a domain composed of a plurality of gatekeepers—organizations, influential individuals, publications, media, popular and commercial or elite and scholarly, each of which may be local, national, or international in reach. Insider–outsider distinctions have become multidimensional; they are matters of degree rather than of kind. Recognition may be founded on the fame and glamour of stardom, commercial success based on sales, critical or scholarly appreciation, depending upon the trajectory of creation and reception.

(c) No longer hemmed in by a single canon governing fine art, competing groups promote forms or styles that they identify as their own. Shifting power centers support claims to validity to a wide range of outsider activities and mentalities (Huyssen 1986, p. 218). In the process, the European autonomous sphere of fine art has come to exist as one cultural structure among several. The artistic tradition in which both integrated professional artists and mavericks furthered their own creativity and success (Becker 1982) has also enabled the arts to become available for other purposes: for therapists using art, music, or theatrical performance for prisoners, the elderly, the ill, to improve their sense of self-worth or to reinforce a sense of ethnic identity (Zolberg and Cherbo 1997). However, this does not exclude the probability from an administrative perspective that the arts may be a means of social control in custodial institutions. What is clear is that the dynamic of insiders and outsiders extends beyond the bounded art world of objects that may be bought and sold, that gain or lose value. The conjunction of government programs with agendas not specifically intended to construct this genre, and commercial forces that capitalize on the spending power of an enlarged clientele with empathy for authenticity and spontaneity, have played a role in creating this genre.

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