Outsiders Approach Art from the Inside

Of the nine artists in the show, Fabulous Histories: Indigenous Anomalies in American Art, on view through Nov. 19 in at the Carpenter Center, one, P.M. Wentworth, was apparently convinced that he was a medium between Earth and extra-terrestrial worlds; another, James Castle, was born unable to hear or speak and spent his entire life in rural Idaho, where he never learned to read or write; and a third, Martin Ramirez, spent thirty years incarcerated in a California state mental institution. The marginal status of these artists—their work is often dubbed “outsider” art—makes their work difficult to talk about. But we should try to talk about it anyway, both because the work is highly interesting in its own right, and because its location outside the mainstream art world can provide those of us within the establishment with a much-needed reality-check.

One of the basic appeals of this work seems to be that its makers’ isolation endows it with an unspoiled freshness and individuality perceived as lacking in much of today’s self-referential, art-history and art-world obsessed work. To put it gently, you might say that “outsider art” has an endearing quirkiness; to be more honest, but also less politically correct, you might say that it’s a little bit crazy in a very good way. Perhaps the best example of this quality is provided by the Cuban-American artist Felipe Jesus Consalvos, whose work consists of the most visually hectic but utterly stunning collages I have ever seen; in one of my favorites, “Home of the Nature Freak,” a giant bull’s head drives a purple convertible along the roof of Carnegie Hall while the queen of spades nurses a small child in the back seat.

This nonsensical pastiche—especially in its frenzied but unfocused graphic energy—feels very contemporary, very post-modern. It’s tempting, then, to compliment Consalvos’ work by calling it years ahead of its time (Consalvos worked between 1910 and 1940). But one of the major traps of dealing with “outsider” art is that in welcoming it into the mainstream (no matter how well-meaning our efforts to legitimize it may be) there is a real danger that we will lose sight of the qualities that make it special in the first place.

The most unique quality of this work is a basic level of intensity and earnestness, an underlying meaningfulness, which is apparent even if it may not be possible to tell exactly what meaning the artist intended to convey. In contrast, I would argue that much contemporary art is thematically transparent; in other words, it is relatively easy to tell what the artist “means” (this remains true even if the artist wants to thematize meaninglessness and doesn’t mean anything), but the work itself has little substance, so even after you have figured out its meaning you are left with the feeling that it is not very meaningful per se. Thus, I think it’s possible for contemporary practice to be more thematically pregnant than “outsider” art (it is easier to understand the artists intentions) but actually less meaningful (there does not seem to be much of the artist himself invested in it).

This lesson is particularly pertinent given the fact that this show is—embarrassingly enough for the Visual and Environmental Studies department—noticeably stronger than the exhibition of faculty work that immediately preceded it. Perhaps this show could teach students and teachers alike a few things about meaning.

The work of James Castle provides the superlative example of meaningful intensity. Born deaf and mute and never able to read or write, his drawings were his only form of communication with the external world. With no access to art supplies of any kind, Castle spent his life drawing on scraps of found paper—ranging from envelopes to flattened matchbooks—using pigment he created by combining oily soot from his wood burning stove with his own saliva. This is a man who needed to make art so badly that literally nothing could stop him; the sheer intensity of Castle’s drive to create is both humbling and awe-inspiring.

It is tempting to end my review here, but that would be to fall into another major trap of talking about “outsider” art: to credit the work with a mystical force and purity based solely on a fetishization of the biography of the artist. While I certainly do admire the intensity with which Castle must have been driven to make those drawings, I also think that they are some of the most beautiful and challenging works on paper I have seen in a long time. Castle’s sooty medium gives his drawings an eerie, cloudy atmosphere. The rendering of the subjects, often domestic interiors or landscapes, is surprisingly highly resolved, showing a very sophisticated use of shading and an inexplicably accurate grasp of perspective. He thus achieves an uncannily convincing suggestion of deep space that contrasts sharply with the roughness and irregularity of the paper he worked on. Here the torn edge of an envelope, there a line of writing peeking through a light gray ground, serve to continually interrupt the depicted illusion and assert a stubborn physicality. The result is a fundamental tension whereby the drawing/object seems to continually fluctuate between material and representation, object and form, refusing to take a steady place in our perception. And as far as I’m concerned, this tension alone is more than enough to sustain the work, no matter who may have created it.