The contemporary art world loves to establish a boundary, if only to demarcate the terms of its own transgression. This is particularly evident with regards to the notion of ‘outsider art’. Originated by Roger Cardinal in a 1972 text, the phrase is today used in reference to a vast array of practices, including naïve art and that of self-taught artists. As the process of historicization and commodification has sought to incorporate works of this nature into the market and the canon, the value of outsider art has been primarily located in its manifestation of difference. For individual artists, this occurs through emphasis on personal experience and the externalisation of interiority. Encompassing these individual outliers is a broader category delineated by a collective condition of social marginalisation or artistic isolation due to factors including illness, disability, class, gender, race or religion. The result is that, when contemporary scholarship addresses art that exists in this extremely broad, heterogenous field, the unifying feature becomes difference as it distinguishes artists from each other, from society at large, and from the art world’s centre.
In her introduction to a 2011 issue of Third Text, Joan Kee grapples with the concept of difference in relation to the construction of Southeast Asian Art as a discrete category in contemporary art that is paradoxically ‘made impossible by the overwhelming diversity it encompasses’.1 Kee identifies the difficulty posed by a definition that is given (in this case by geopolitical circumstance), rather than constructed by or arising from cultural specificities that have never necessarily aligned with national or regional boundaries. Rather than settle to frame the practices encompassed therein primarily in terms of the condition of dissimilarity, Kee proposes a model that seeks similitude:
[...] if one of the unique challenges implicit in the idea of contemporaneity is the need to identify one’s contemporaries so as to intervene in the process of historicisation, now might be the right time to consider similitude, rather than difference, as our epistemological point of departure. Thinking of the world in terms of similitude leads us to consider the world as a concrete form as opposed to a rhetorical abstraction.2
For outsider art, the capacity to identify this similitude is inhibited by the fact that its defining feature is difference. Often, this emphasis has been reductively constructed by romanticising the artists’ social or mental isolation, citing ‘a lack of intentions’ regarding their desire to reference or connect with institutions of the art world as the source of both novelty and a kind of ‘highly personal’ purity in the work produced under such conditions.3
More recent framings of ‘outsider’ practices have sought to emphasise plurality rather than exoticizing eccentricity and seclusion. The 2023 publication Variations: A More Diverse Picture of Contemporary Art, aimed to ‘steer away from deficit approaches ('marginal', 'outsider') in favour of radically positive, affirmative accounts emphasising multiplicity.’4 Significantly, the text includes Indigenous artists, artists working through supported studios, Muslim artists, and artists from refugee backgrounds giving accounts of their own work and practice. But the framework of ‘variation’ raises the question of what the work being considered as such is a variation of or from? The artworks demonstrate a variation on what has until recently has been considered the contemporary art world standard. In such a construction, the art world’s orthodoxy remains the measure in a manner that, though more inclusive in tone, is ultimately not dissimilar to the ‘outside’/‘inside’ binary. Another means of framing this would be as practice that arises out of varied experiences of marginalisation. But, again, the foundational cause determining this state eludes the framework of variation because the framing necessarily puts positive emphasis on difference while relegating particular throughlines of similitude to a state of deficit. If the ultimate goal is to dismantle the basis on which the expression and agency of these artists has historically been withheld, at a certain point variation must give way to something more radical.
So we return to the concrete potential of Kee’s points of similitude, but then the question arises; What is the immense array of practices and marginalised art-world positionalities for which ‘outsider art’ is a catch-all similar to? And is every possible means of connection equally valid?
Resonances have frequently been sought between ‘mainstream’ contemporary art practice and work by ‘outsiders’ to varying levels of success. In 2013 Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale somewhat controversially positioned outsider artworks ‘elbow to elbow with Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel and Jack Whitten’.5 In contrast to this blurring or breaking down of divides between self-taught and formally trained practitioners, are the collections and institutions that specialise in and preserve these practices as a field-in-itself within the art world, such as The Outsider Art Fair. Increasingly, a mediating factor between these two approaches are studio models providing collaboration and professionalisation opportunities for artists. Earlier this year A rising in the east brought together work by artists from Japanese organisations and Perth’s DADAA (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts, Australia) Gallery, highlighting points of comparison between international practices emerging out of ‘artist-driven and studio production-based’ spaces for artists with disabilities.6 These diverse means of integrating socially or artistically marginalised artists into the art world each come with their own set of critiques and positive outcomes that orbit the question of whether reforms are capable of radically reconfiguring historically exclusionary institutions and ideas.
Artists have also sought connections that circumvent inclusion and instead double down on their outsider status. For example, ‘Australia’s greatest Outsider Artist’7 Anthony Mannix drew inspiration from New Guinean art he encountered through the 1978 essay Outsider Art in the Third World.8 Charting the outcomes of this influence, Anthony White writes, ‘Mannix’s use of intense visual profusion was a means of identifying himself and his work with these very same qualities in the work of artists…whose connections to existing structures and traditions of art had been attenuated or ruptured by migration, colonisation, and the experience of urban society.’9 In this way Mannix’s adoption of particular aspects of the visual language used by the New Guinean ‘outsiders’ is intertwined with the artists’ marginalised status, and the reproduction of this style serves to preserve and establish a visual grammar anchored to and expressive of this shared positionality. This is a means of expressing difference through solidarity, locating political and artistic potential in methods that at once recall and confront conditions of marginality. Here similitude is not a deficit but a strength.
This is not to say that ‘outsider art’ should necessarily be considered in a closed loop dialogue with itself. To frame it thus is to simply substitute collective experience for isolation along the same lines of logic that present outsider art as a series of individualised ‘highly personal visionary world[s]’.10 Whether emphasising inclusion in markets, collections and canons, or advocating for absolute exceptionalism, the point of similitude that is lost is that connection which outsider art shares with the mass experience of art outside of the art world. To consider this point is to encourage divestment from the idea that the art world, that is the industry through which art is commodified, is at once the median, mode and mean of artistic experience. Lynne Cooke argues that ‘being at variance with the norm can be a position of strength: a place negotiated and sought out rather than predetermined and fixed.’11 This may be true in some instances, as Mannix’s referential practice exemplifies. But the aspect of this that should be problematised is not to what degree ‘outsiders’ diverge from the ‘predetermined and fixed’ centre by their own admission or otherwise. It is how, and to what ends, this blinkered, elitist system is constructed so as to be considered the ‘norm’ in the first place.
For the majority of people, the ‘normative’ experience of making and engaging with art does not originate in or bear much resemblance to the ‘inside’ that is structured according to the practices of curators, collectors and agents. An unimaginable amount of art is created every day. Some of these artworks are what we might term ‘visionary’, or ‘naïve’, or a form of ‘folk art’. Others are created by children, on the internet, for spiritual or religious purposes, or through therapy programs. Much of it falls under the classification of ‘popular art’. Few are produced within the stratifications of the ‘inside’ that scholarship on ‘outsider art’ is inclined to define the outside against. The determining feature then of where a work stands in this manufactured paradigm is as much about quantity as it is about quality.
This is why the problematic relationship between ‘outsider art’ and the contemporary art world and canon cannot be resolved by promoting greater inclusivity alone. Though commodification’s reach may seem limitless, there is a limit within the art-industrial-complex. The market is sustained by measures of value that, though qualitative, are necessarily tied to the quantity of goods produced. That many of these artists are prolific to an astonishing degree (Mannix, for example, has produced 72 artists books totalling over 4000 pages of writings and artworks) means that their work poses a material and economic problem for those wanting to archive it or circulate it on the market.12 But the additional problem it poses is one of potential. For every maverick genius that the art world ‘discovers’ and positions as an outlier, there is the latent potential that perhaps there could be, or in fact are, many more masters of equivalent talent working in seclusion, incarcerated in institutions, selling their art at regional community fetes or trying to find means of expression amidst warzones.
Contemporary art romanticises this proposition, while rarely acknowledging its structural implications. As Chris McAuliffe writes, ‘Outsider art offers the promise of an elsewhere that goads contemporary art to penetrate the horizon of expectation.’13 This is indicative of the recurring positioning of outsider art as being ‘beyond’, as being a plurality of ‘elsewheres’, when the reality is that one of its defining features is that it does not perform this act of distancing; that it is itself deeply engaged with and expressive of the network of relationships, power dynamics and experiences from which it emerges, even — and particularly— when this experience is that of extreme alienation. That act of actively withdrawing, the fortification of exceptionalism, and the deferral of a fictive ‘elsewhere’, is the domain of the contemporary art world; forever positioning itself as the mirror or microcosm, feigning a degree or two of separation, an outlier status from the wider world, while at the same time necessarily perpetuating and being beholden to all its limitations and biases.
The value of outsider status thus cannot be attributed to individuality or exceptionality in itself, because to be outside the art world on such terms is to be of and among the masses. In 1975 Michel Thévoz wrote;
It may be that artistic creation, with all that it calls for in the way of free inventiveness, takes place at a higher pitch of tension in the nameless crowd of ordinary people, because practiced without applause or profit, for the maker’s own delight; and that the over-publicised activity of professionals produces merely a specious form of art, all too often watered down and doctored. If this were so, it is rather cultural art that should be described as marginal.14
The sustained resonance of outsider art lies in its suggestion — levelled through form or content —that there is infinitely more potential for creativity in the world than the conditions of capitalism will allow us to express, identify with, or fully experience. It is this potentiality that the contemporary art world covets and seeks to moderate, and yet, in its immensity, such a quality ultimately defies containment.
- [1] Joan Kee, ‘Introduction Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: The Right Kind of Trouble', Third Text, 25, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2011.587681.
- [2] Ibid
- [3] Scott Indrisek, ‘Why ‘Outsider Art’ Is a Problematic but Helpful Label’, artsy.net, October 2019, www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-outsider-art-problematic-helpful-label; John Maizels, Outsider Art Sourcebook: International Guide to Art Brut and Outsider Art, 3rd ed., Raw Vision, 2016, np.
- [4] Tristen Harwood, Grace McQuilten, Anthony White, ‘Introduction’, in Variations: A More Diverse Picture of Contemporary Art, (Monash University Publishing, 2023), p. 3.
- [5] Holland Cotter, 'Beyond the ‘Palace,’ an International Tour in One City', The New York Times, June 2013, https://nytimes.com/2013/06/06/arts/design/venice-biennale-in-its-55th-edition.html
- [6] Barnaby Smith, 'A rising in the east explores Japanese arts and disability', Art Guide Australia, April 2024, https://artguide.com.au/a-rising-in-the-east-explores-japanese-arts-and-disability/.
- [7] ‘About’, The Atomic Book, https://theatomicbook.com/about.
- [8] Anthony White, ‘Anthony Mannix: Secessions from Systems Index’, Index Journal, Issue 4, December 2022, https://index-journal.org/issues/secession/anthony-mannix-secessions-from-systems.
- [9] Ibid.
- [10] John Maizels, Outsider Art Sourcebook: International Guide to Art Brut and Outsider Art, 3rd ed., Raw Vision, 2016, np.
- [11] Lynne Cooke quoted in Charles Green, Grace McQuilten, Anna Parlane, Anthony White, ‘Outsider Art in Australia: Artists’ Voices versus Art-world Mythologies’, Art + Australia, Issue 6, 56.1: Outside, December 2019, p. 91, www.artandaustralia.com/online/outsider-art-australia-artists%E2%80%99-voices-versus-art-world-mythologies.html.
- [12] Gareth Sion Jenkins, Anthony Mannix: ‘The Atomic Book’, University of Wollongong, 2008, np, https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/89/.
- [13] Chris McAuliffe, ‘Outsider art and the desire of contemporary art’, October 2014, https://chrismcauliffe.com.au/outsider-art-and-the-desire-of-contemporary-art-october-2014/.
- [14] Michel Thévoz, ‘Excerpt from 'Art Brut [1975]’, Outsider Art Sourcebook: International Guide to Art Brut and Outsider Art, 3rd ed. Raw Vision, 2016, p. 11.