Overview

Who decides who is an artist? Usually, it’s art schools and museums. Outsider Art is the art of the people who didn’t get the memo. It is made by psychiatric patients, prisoners, recluses, and visionaries who create not for fame or money, but because they have a burning compulsion to create. It is raw, unfiltered, and often obsessive.

Core Idea

The core idea is Art Brut (“Raw Art”). Jean Dubuffet coined this term to describe art that is “uncooked” by culture. He believed that professional art was fake and stifled by rules. True creativity, he argued, is found in the margins, where the “savage mind” operates freely.

Formal Definition

Art produced by non-professionals who are not aware of art history or trends. It often features obsessive repetition, horror vacui (fear of empty space), and private symbolic systems.

Intuition

Imagine a man who spends 30 years building a palace out of broken glass and pebbles in his backyard, telling no one. He isn’t trying to be the next Picasso. He is building a world for himself. That is Outsider Art. It is pure expression.

Examples

  • Henry Darger: A janitor in Chicago. When he died, his landlord found a 15,000-page illustrated novel in his room called The Story of the Vivian Girls. It is a bizarre, violent, and beautiful epic about child slaves fighting a war. He is now considered a genius.
  • Adolf Wölfli: A schizophrenic patient in a Swiss asylum. He created incredibly intricate, geometric drawings and musical compositions on scraps of paper. He believed he was the Emperor of the Universe.
  • The Watts Towers (Simon Rodia): An Italian immigrant who spent 33 years building giant steel and mosaic towers in Los Angeles using just hand tools and trash.

Common Misconceptions

  • It’s “crazy art”: While many outsider artists had mental illnesses, the art is not a symptom; it is a triumph over the symptom. It is how they ordered their chaotic world.
  • It’s Folk Art: Folk art follows a tradition (like quilting patterns passed down). Outsider art is idiosyncratic—it invents its own rules.
  • Naïve Art: Art by untrained artists that is simple and childlike (like Grandma Moses), but usually happy and conventional. Outsider art is usually darker and stranger.
  • Visionary Art: Art that claims to be based on spiritual visions or hallucinations.
  • Mainstreaming: In recent years, the art world has embraced Outsider Art (the Venice Biennale included it). This is ironic: by putting it in a museum, does it stop being “Outsider”?

Applications

  • Art Therapy: The study of Outsider Art helped validate art therapy as a way to understand the human mind.
  • Inspiration: Professional artists (like Basquiat and Klee) constantly look to Outsider Art to learn how to be more spontaneous and free.

Criticism / Limitations

  • Exploitation: There is an ethical danger in dealers making millions off the work of people who may not have been mentally competent to consent to the sale.
  • Fetishizing Madness: We shouldn’t romanticize mental illness. The suffering was real, even if the art is beautiful.

Further Reading

  • Cardinal, Roger. Outsider Art. 1972.
  • MacGregor, John. The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. 1989.
  • Peiry, Lucienne. Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art. 2001.