Although I'm commited to the high, I've always loved the
people's art and try to catch this big show staged every
year in the fine old Victorian pile built to house the
satirical review Puck ("The Outsider Art Fair: Self-
Taught, Visionary and Outsider Art" at the Puck
Building, Jan. 24-26, 1997). In the teeth of the
language models that govern art criticism, outsider and
folk art demonstrates that illiterates can produce
compelling art. Even intelligence is not required--one
featured artist has Downs Syndrome. Here at the Puck is
proof: Art is about something that reason, be it
"instrumental" or "post-modern," does not own.
Of course this is a market, one that's booming, and this
fair is a cashing-in. It's frenetically commercial, and
going to it is always a trial. After leaving, I had to
drop into a few local antique shops--straightforward
stores where things bear only price tags--just to wash
out the bad taste of rampant commodification.
Year to year this fair tracks the canonical artists in
the folk/outsider world and shows us more of their work;
it's like an ongoing group show. Right in the door, Jon
Serl's blue Pan (1977), depicting the young god with a
goat, is a marvelous painting (at the booth of Luise
Ross; $17K; sold). The facture is flat, the color rich
but thin, as if scraped and built up. It's knowingly
painted, a thoroughly entrancing classical subject with
the lithe rubber limbs and wry expressions that mark
Serl's work. Its appeal resonates with Matisse, as well
as with Corot's mythological subjects, many gauchely
rendered, recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum.
And why not? Perhaps only here, in this art world of
visionaries and religiously inspired naifs, may we find
a naturalized unselfconscious reference to classical
mythology--it may be the Playboy version, but it's still
as real as it gets.
Behind the people's art lie these persisting vital
strains largely excluded from high art: untrammeled
subjectivity; religious painting, art that reflects
spiritual truth; genre and history painting from the
working class; and African-American folk tradition.
Underlying all is the message that everyone is an
artist, or could be. So many great ones--like Bill
Traylor and Jon Serl--started old, it's also clear that
it's never too late to start making art. When people see
that some old geezer, biddy or weirdo may be a
potentially marketable or famous outsider artist, it
spreads art and art ideas throughout the culture.
Success broadens the audience for art in terms that
everyone can understand.
That this is often a lowbrow art world with many venal
pinheads hard at work within it does not mitigate its
power as a cultural phenomenon. This art world does not
habitually reflect upon itself, it just grows. This boom
reminds me of the East Village/neo-expressionist art of
the 1980s, with the return of old-fashioned painting and
sculpture, and a high tide of overblown art speculation.
But this time it's a non-professional, national and
international vernacular phenomenon. Curiously the
outsider/folk boom reflects the historical shift
underway in media culture from univocal to interactive
modes--from mere choice of broadcast channels to each
user with their own web site. Thus urban recluse Malcolm
McKesson (whose book Matriarchy: Freedom in Bondage was
premiered here), has much in common with today's cyber-
bewitched--his book promo calls it his "inner mythology
created in ecstatic seclusion," certainly a description
of many of today's cyber-artists.
Except for those in folklore and material culture
studies, art historians and critics haven't really yet
gotten their grubby hands on this thing. It's still the
proprietary creature of dealers, collectors, and other
"managers" of their "discoveries." They continuously
identify new artists then seek to share and sell them--
to have them authenticated by the critical, historical
and institutional apparatus that is rather more than
less controlled by those same people: dealers and
collectors. This means less "seeking" critical approval
than engineering it--that is, simply telling the story
of the artist. An interesting biography is vital to
their authentication (it helps to be dead, or very old,
so that your frame of reference or visual culture is
nostalgia to today's audience). Discourse in
outsider/folk art is biographically driven, and these
particulars tend to drive out principles. Still,
paradoxically, the voice of the artist is rarely heard.
In this process of market-building, a particular simple
model of the artist is continuously reinscribed--the
artist is a social isolate who resides within a realm of
uncomplicated making, mediating experiences, memories,
"visions" or "obsessions" through work that is formally
and contextually unselfconscious. The outcome of this
"ecstatic seclusion" in the field of cultural production
is an artist who is entirely unresistant to
commodification.
Just to look at the show, my overall impression is that
the artists are getting wise as to what's required, and
the styles of canonical artists are being copied. This
we would expect of "taught" artists, yet in the fair at
the Puck this assumption is disallowed. Of course, this
apparent commonality could be mostly an artifact of the
process of selection. The oceans of vernacular
production are vast--just imagine adding to this market
exceptional graphic production by schoolchildren, for
example. Those who select, then, are as significant to
the construction of this art as the producers--whose
production the selectors, as agents of the market, may
guide.
Finally--I know it's just a fair, it's not an
exhibition--I have a problem with what I don't see. The
social context from which much of this work stems has
been entirely deleted. There are no pictures of rural
poverty, or urban SRO hotels-- no evocations of prison,
mental hospitals or old age homes. (Part of the wonder
of this art is that it flowers in bleak places, and to
acknowledge the esthetic violence of the institutional
surroundings where it is often made is, indeed, to
further valorize the art.) The homeless artists who
presented work at the fair last year are gone this year.
So the stage is cleared for the pure products: no wider
social concerns need accompany delectation. This is
profit maximizing itself, herding off undesirables and
clearing the ground all around. The insistence of this
tendency is a warning light, an indication that the
regressive aspects of this art boom are at least as
strong as its pleasures and social benefit.
ALAN MOORE is a New York critic and art historian.
