“There is in
every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened
people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that
life had prepared for him.”
Antonin
Artaud
“The
Romantic artist, if defined in terms of behaviour, is in fact, timeless. As far
back as the Renaissance Vasari was writing about artistic temperaments and the
supposed link between madness and genius, citing Michelangelo’s anti-social
behaviour, fighting in the streets, never changing his trousers; or the queer
ways of Portormo, a recluse who lived on boiled eggs and refused to answer the
door. Practically every surviving anecdote about Apelles, first painter of
Ancient Greece, has him using his draughtsmanship as a defensive weapon and storming
the streets in a massive sulk. In the seventeenth century, the Italian Baroque
painter Pietro Testa, friend of Poussin and former pupil of Annibale Carracci,
himself afflicted by depression, seems to have succumbed to melancholy and
killed himself. His first biographer wants to describe it as an accidental
death brought about by his habit of ‘depicting night scenes and changes in the
atmosphere of the sky’ but it was not night when he drowned himself in the
Tiber, and Testa’s contemporary Salvator Rosa might be said to have
single-handedly invented the Romantic sensibility even before that.”
Laura
Cumming, A Face To The World, HarperPress, 2009, P186.
Salvador Dalí
famously exclaimed: “The only difference
between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” In fact Dalí might not have
been clinically mad but he was highly eccentric, neurotic, narcissistic and a
shameful exhibitionist. Remember Sigmund Freud famously told Dalí: “in the paintings of the Old Masters one
immediately tends to look for the unconscious whereas, when one looks at a
Surrealist painting, one immediately has the urge to look for the conscious.”
In fact, for all their apparent lunacy – Dalí’s paintings were highly
intellectual, contrived and steeped in Western art.
Well the only
difference between me - and a madman - is I take my medication! Yet, as a
sufferer from a Borderline Personality Disorder, I am neither sane nor fully
insane - I painfully straddle both worlds. I have
reached a point in my life - where I have come to accept my madness and I am
tired of trying to be normal. While I am not nearly as mad as I was in my youth
– it still lurks in the shadows and snares me every few weeks. But I have
developed good coping strategies, which help - along with the love of my
girlfriend and family. Writing has both helped me understand my life and become
aware of my failings, yet it has also taken somewhat from my art – reducing my
passion for painting and my autocratic spontaneity.
I am an
anti-social savage at my core – the one formed by my chaotic childhood. As a
youth, I found it hard to care about the lives or art of others and I did not
believe in the myths of family, friendship, society or God. My adolescent
ambition was monstrous in its intensity and my contempt and blindness to the
art of others was almost total and I viewed my fellow artists as enemies. When
dragged along to mass by well meaning family or foster parents - I thought the
whole thing a ludicrous charade. In school, I loathed the systematic elimination
of independent thought and grooming for the work place. In art classes - I
could not stand the mediocrity and technical incompetence of others. I viewed
culture as part of a grand conspiracy - to avoid the truth of existence. Like
Holden Caulfield I viewed everyone else as phonies – but could not see the
phoniness of my own delusions.
Time and again, I have
read art critics and cultural commentators say that they find madness
inexplicable. I find the reverse true. I find reason impossible to comprehend.
To me madness has a savage logic to it where as reasonable life has a baffling
hypocrisy and idiocy I cannot fathom. I paint, because I have no other option.
It is my only hope at bettering my life, my best therapy and the only thing I
do with some gift. Art like religion and philosophy has no purpose and it is
impossible to prove or disprove. It is entirely based upon persuasion. In art,
like religion, one has cult leaders, tribes, insiders and outsiders – but
ultimately there is nothing to discover behind the facade except the ego of the
creators.
It perplexes me how many
on earth earn their living hitting balls about, running nowhere, writing books
or making films that are just a rewording of a handful of core stories, etc. It
confuses me to see how badly the sane and good act, while a madman of mild
manners can be shunned for asking awkward questions. Life is a game - I do not
know how to play. In fact, it is a game I only wish to overthrow in order to
point to the human condition and death.
I maintain that the
causes of madness are the self same tragedies of life that many suffer and move
on from but which mentally break weaker souls. There are two different worlds,
the social world, in which we are obliged to act with consideration for others
and the private world in which we face our own weakness and mortality. In the
social world, we are actors playing a role accepted by others and if we act
badly we are punished or ostracized. In our private world of sorrows and
unregulated desires we are free to be ourselves yet condemned to solitude and
denied the rewards of public life.
Growing up I thought it
was the norm for people to be committed to a mental hospital under Garda
escort. It is only now that I realize my mother and I were exceptions. Growing
up suffocated by madness – I had less fear of it or prejudice towards it than
the average man on the street. Apart from my mother, most of the girls I was
closest to were eccentric, depressive or manic. Added to that - many of my
friends were also depressives, alcoholics, drug users, struggling artists,
homosexuals, lesbians and other oddballs.
As a
teenager, I was fascinated by the phenomena of ‘the-wolf-boy’ and I thought
that I too could be a modern day wolf-boy.
It stroked my vanity to think of psychologists spending years trying to
decipher my personality and biography! But I wasn’t going to make it easy on
them! I hoped however, that one day they would have been able to tell me what
it all meant.
I knew that I
was not a true ‘wolf-boy’ even I had too many social contacts! Though I lived
with my mum – she was insane and I never spoke to her. Yes, I went to school –
but I had stopped talking to everyone. True I had a television – but that if
anything made things even more interesting. If the question was asked, what can
you learn about people and society just from television? My life’s example
would have given the conclusive answer – only facts and spectacle nothing real!
Only life – mixing with people, trying to get along with them, resolving
conflicts, understanding their feelings, learning how to flirt, learning how to
seduce, and learning how to debate without anger – can teach you how to be a
successful human being. Incidentally artists like van Gogh, Hans Bellmer,
Antonin Artaud and the writers Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet also explored the
nature of confinement, isolation and the inner worlds of the artists’ Psyche
and their works have striking affinities with Outsider Art.
Alienated from society, I
lacked any understanding or empathy for other people. My vision of art was
primitive and eccentric – raw and self-taught. My art conducted a private,
solipsistic form of self therapy in which I tried to battle my demons in paint.
It was Expressionism without an audience. While better socialized artists who
had grown up around artist parents prided themselves on their sophistication,
irony and sarcasm – I was an adolescent zealot who believed he was a new master
while producing work of a raw brutishness that hinted at little cultivation or
socialization. Convinced of my genius, I believed every scrawl I made had epic
significance to future students of my art.
An amateur schoolboy
painter, turned adolescent Expressionist, I thought I had nothing to prove to
the art world except my agonized intensity. Since I none of my teachers had
been worthy of me, since I had no peers, since I had no audience – my art grew
in the echo chamber of my own subjective crucible. I understood and valued my
art in terms incomprehensible to most people, so when I finally began showing
my work to others their bemused adoration or disgust perplexed me.
Still, though my heart
was broken, I was painfully shy and lonely and suicidal in those dark days,
there is part of me that envies my youthful self-belief and self-reliance. Life
for me back then was brutally black and white - today it is an endless
variation of greys. Today, I constantly try to compromise and learn from
others, I may technically paint, draw and write better now than back then, I
may know more know, I may be a better person, I may be happier and have
experienced more - yet I have lost the single-minded focus I had as a young
artist. My messianic belief in my anti-social art may have been deluded and
doomed to failure – but at least I had my faith to sooth my solitude. While I
am proud of my early years - I am also now shamefully aware of what an art brut
I am and how I am thus doomed to never be accepted in the conventional art
world who will always consider me a deluded primitive.
I still to this
day remember flicking through a small book on artist’s self-portraits in my
local library in 1986 - and coming across the 1919 screaming self-portrait of
Franz Pohl (Franz Karl Buhler) – his crude but heartfelt drawing captured the
inner anguish I was feeling at the time perfectly. I had no idea at the time
what Outsider Art was - but I felt an instant connection with this kind of
work.
Sometimes I
pine wistfully for my mad, bad, days of 1991-1993 – I forget just how
agonizingly suicidal, depressed and self-hating I was. I forget the intense
mental pain I felt. Instead I remember my messianic faith in my art, my
absolute conviction that the day I walked into a New York art gallery with my
work – they would sign me on the spot and I would be famous the world over! I
believed that artists and art critics and collectors would be in awe of my raw,
recklessly honest, truthful and courageous art. I thought they would pat me on
the back and say: “At last a painter who is honest about his sexuality and his life!”
That is the tragedy and hilarity of my self-delusions and utter incomprehension
of the real world and the common person. I had absolutely no idea how
repulsive, ugly and hateful my work would look to most ordinary art lovers. Yet despite my conviction that I was the
greatest artist in the world (living in a three bedroom terrace house with my
mother and foreign students - whom I cowardly hid from in my bedroom) I never
actually even put a portfolio together, never mind approach a gallery – until
cajoled into it by the art critic Mic Moroney in mid-1994. I thought about it –
but time and time again I felt I wasn’t ready. Perhaps I was unwilling to leave
the protective bubble of my inner world and face the judgment of the real
world.
For years, I
was cold-shouldered
or merely tolerated - but never understood or accepted. I was seen as an
oddball to say the least. I was a solitary because of the intensity of my
thoughts, which drove me to live a hermit’s life. I
was never a true Outsider artist in the classic definition. I had far too much
technical self-teaching, knowledge of art history, craft and respect for the
Western Canon. I am more like an Outcast artist. However, there were some
uncanny similarities between my work and that of typical Outsiders; the
unhinged psyche, the depersonalization, the manic degradation, the overwrought
sexuality and the aggressive protest. Moreover, there was also no sense that my
work was planned or verbalized before execution or created with any defined sense
of audience. They were completely unself-conscious. In my work, I unburdened
myself of all the fears, desires and ambitions most people bury inside and
reveal only after a long night on the drink.
As a misanthropic
atheist, my vision of humanity was bestial and nihilistic. While I admired the
painterly skills of the old masters, I viewed their papal, monarchist or
nationalistic vision of humanity as nothing but elitist propaganda for the
status quo – a kind of supreme mirage. I was too honest, too irrational, too
anti-social and too nihilistic to partake in such grand fabrications. For me
the greatest triumph was to fight for my own solitary vision outside of society
even if I was dooming myself to marginalization, poverty, a crippling of the scope
of my work, failure and damnation. A lost son of art, my work was never fully
insane and out of this world, nor fully part of it, never fully Art Brut or
fully High Art. It existed in an agonized nether world. At times, I tried to
develop the quality of my line or the sophistication of paint in a desperate
attempt to be accepted by the art world, yet at others I tried to be
deliberately provocative and crude in a tantrum against the snobs who had
denied me. I simultaneously worshiped the skills of the old and modern masters
and admired the visionary weirdness and wildness of outsiders.
My view of existence was
thus extreme in its view that madness, depravity, corruption and animalist were
as much a part of human existence as the comfortable, civilized and bourgeois
conceit paraded a thousand times more often in conventional art. I wanted to
reveal all those experiences deemed too intense, private and difficult to be
acknowledged by middle class society. I had long noted the schizophrenic nature
of human behaviour as different literally as between day and night - sober
rectitude and drunken debauchery. For me, the moments of human crisis, private
perversion, addiction and angst were more revealing of human nature than the
social charades of civilized life. Thus in compensation in my own art, I dwelt
disproportionately on my own faults and thought the expression of my virtues a
bore. Born into wealth and privilege that was then tragically lost and sullied,
I became a wild child rebelling against the ruthless cruelty of the legal
system, the heartlessness of the psychiatric services, the indifference of the
social workers and teachers and the hypocrisy of a society that claimed to be a
caring Catholic Republic. I strove to burn myself alive with a confessional art
that would demand first and foremost to be honest. The decorum, social positioning
and ruthless attainment of status meant nothing to me though I did seek express
my own vision of the world as an alternative.
* * *
Every day
billions of art works are created around the world. A small fraction of them
are made by trained-artists. Even less than that are made by artists whose work
sells or has critical respect. The vast majority of these art works are made
by; little kids, schoolchildren, art students, Sunday painters, eccentrics,
spiritualists, prisoners and the mentally ill. The fact is that most of these
works will be binned soon after they are made - as for the rest, they will
never have anything but EBay, car-boot, fridge-door or family gift value.
Before the late nineteenth century to anyone interested in art – these artworks
were important only as a negative presence – to the positive presence of the
accepted Grand Western Canon. But by the twentieth century they had became
central to the formation of modernist art. Expressionist, Surrealist and COBRA
artists in particular intensely studied the art of Africa, the insane and
children in order to give their work a similar raw power and imaginative leap
into the unknown of the subconscious.
Art like religion acts as
a safety valve for all those unanswerable pleas for personal expression, sexual
honesty, social justice, utopia and communion with God that have no place in
technocratic and bureaucratic world. Yet in religion, there is a profound
difference between the faith of the disenfranchised and the faith of the
institution of the church and in art too there is a gulf between art made by
outsiders and art made by insiders.
In life, Christ’s words
of compassion and lack of concern for worldly goods may give solace to the
marginal, poor and disenfranchised yet ironically they are nowhere rendered
more absurd than in the Vatican City. Likewise in the contemporary church of
art, platitudes of creative freedom may be uttered – but the whole system is
designed to filter out anything too personal. Many professional artists may
have started in their dim and distant past with visions similar to Outsider
artists - yet like the bureaucratic
Bishops of the Church they soon learned the error of their ways and
became more cunning manipulators of myth.
Understanding the limited
and alienated nature of the Outsider artist, one also has to understand the way
successful professional artists represent their antithesis. The Outsider is a
person feared, pitied or made fun of but rarely respected in society - while
the professional artist is often disliked but frequently respected. The
Outsider is handicapped by an inability to interact, do business or cooperate
with his peers, where as the professional artist is as much a businessman and
operator as creator of aesthetic objects. Anyone can drop out of society, yet
it takes a life time to build up a reputation of respect in society - and it
can all be destroyed in one fell swoop by a scandal. Likewise, the Outsider
artist can ignore all the rules of art, the opinion of his fellow man and
create an alternate reality of his own but it rarely has any significance
beyond his own imagination. The professional artist must deny these instincts at
every turn and make his art a dialogue with society and his peers, aware that
one aesthetic misstep and his hard-won audience and patrons could lose faith
and evaporate into thin air.
As such the outsider and
professional artists are as different as a self-destructive homeless man and a
competitive billionaire city trader. The Outsider art work is thus a homeless
aesthetic object of talismanic power to the disposed creator but irrelevant in
the larger world unless taken pity on by the art worlds masters of the universe
– who often pillage its forms while still denying it cultural capital. Those
who have come through the training systems of art colleges, learn as much about
what is no longer permissible in art as they are directed towards what is. The
Outsider artist creating for their own personal satisfaction, often creates
without the moral compass or aesthetic sophistication of the professional
artist. The nature of their expression also lacks the normal rhetorical devices
and awareness of an audience that plagues the conscious of a professional
artist. Thus the charm and power of Outsider art comes from its unselfconscious
freedom of expression.
Ask the
average person, to name a mad artist they will probably say Vincent van Gogh.
However, if you read most current studies on van Gogh you will find the writers
play down van Gogh’s madness – claiming that it was an incidental aspect to his
great art. So what is the truth? Well it is a bit of both. Van Gogh worked far
too hard to acquire the traditional skills of a figurative artist to be merely
an Outsider artist. There is far too much realism, cultural awareness,
technical mastery, intelligence and humanity in his art to be just the work of
a madman. But in certain respects it had affinities with Outsider art.
Vincent’s need to convert the whole canvas or sheet of paper into a field of
energetic lines is similar to the Outsider’s need to fill up every square inch
of their work with detail – a fear of what they call the horror-vacui. However, the fact remains that van Gogh spent his life fighting off madness – at those
times when he succumbed – he was unable to create. When lucid he was able to
mix his mad energy with Impressionist grammar – to create art works of
undisputed greatness - which communicated deeply with all of humanity and not
just a few specialists in the human mind.
Real Outsider
or Art Brut is work made by schizophrenics, primitives, visionaries,
obsessive’s or mediums. If we term art training, as four to seven years in an
Art College – then most of these artists were self-taught. They might have had
some experience of art in school – but that is usually as far as their training
went. Outsider artists are different from naïve painters like Henri Rousseau or
L.S. Lowry because their similar unworldliness, lack of training and
eccentricity was compounded by sever, debilitating, mental illness. While the
work of naïve artists can look fanciful or odd – they rarely look demented.
Moreover, naïve artists crave desperately to be taken seriously as painters –
but Outsider artists have no such fascination with the art elite – they are
lost in their own private world. Some of the characteristics you can see in
their artworks are all-over treatment of the page, eccentric colour
combinations, obsessive detail, symbolic imagery, crude drawing and often the
mixing of drawn elements, collage and handwritten prose. The materials they use
are often the cheapest and most degraded – no fancy French handmade papers or
Sennelier pastels – instead cheep wrapping paper and some children’s crayons.
Because many of their works were made in secret – they are typically on a very
small scale. Finally, most Outsider artists seemed to arrive at their own wild
compulsive style very quickly - and never deviate from it for the rest of their
lives (though the same could be said for many of today's art world stars.)
Since the
early 1900s psychiatrists like Dr Hans Prinzhorn had been fascinated by the
outpourings of the mentally ill. Dr Prinzhorn established the first collection
of Outsider art (some of them his own patients) and later published a very
important book on the subject. Prinzhorn and artists like Klee who read his
book were seeking insights into the workings of the subconscious and the origins
of creativity. As the twentieth century progressed other artists used the raw
coal of Outsider art to fuel their own work. But commercially – neither
Outsiders nor their families benefited much from this exchange – or creative
robbery depending on your viewpoint. One
artist who did seem to give back was Jean Dubuffet who avidly collected ‘Art
Brut’ as he termed it, and his collection was later established as a public
museum in Lausanne in Switzerland in 1976. So by the turn of the millennium the
oeuvres of dead artists like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger had become blue-chip
investments and countless other living reclusive artists were courted.
Outsider art
became so popular in the art world of the 1990s because it was enthusiastically
adopted by many art lovers tired of the slick, commercial and academic nature
of art in the 1980s-1990s. After a decade of pompous, vain and media savvy
artists like Schnabel, Salle and Koons there was something of a backlash
against the art-world star-system that had reduced art to crass commerce,
media-celebrity, factory-like production of paintings or sculptures and
insincere pastiche's of modernism. Outsider art in contrast offered obsessive
handmade art by forgotten or anonymous artists who made art with a painful
sincerity and lack of concern for art history, public recognition or common
sense. Yet despite this faddish popularity, as the critic Peter Schjeldahl
pointed out, even at the turn of the millennium the work of outsider art
remained patronized, ““Outsider” artists,
such as Darger, are folk cultures of one, oblivious of professional or communal
standards and the existence of peers. The terms “folk” and “outsider” – never
mind the spineless euphemism “self-taught” – are hard to use without
condescension, affirming a superior knowingness in the speaker. The
stereotypical folk-art fancier is conservative and patronizing. Folk art can be
to art as pets are to the animal kingdom.” (Peter Schjeldahl, Let’s See, London: Thames & Hudson,
2008, P. 113.) Elsewhere Schjeldahl noted that, “… the wildwood of creativity of asocial and eccentric – perhaps mad-
loners, which is sentimentalized by some art people and shunned by most.”
(Peter Schjeldahl, Let’s See, London:
Thames & Hudson, 2008, P. 219.)
A cynic might
suggest that the bottom line in the art world is money - and in the early 1990s
dealers caught on to the cheep and easily exploited world of outsider art.
Personally, I turned in part to Outsider art in 1995 - as a relief from the
diet of smart-arsed conceptual art, prefabricated sculptures and pretentious
videos that were on offer in every gallery I visited. Whenever I saw outsider
art works in the same museum as contemporary academic conceptualists (as I did
in IMMA many times) – I was struck by how the compulsive Outsider Art blew away
the pretentious and lifeless work of artists with a Masters in Fine Art.
Moreover, as I read about the lives and art of these tormented artists – I
profoundly identified with them and their obsessive productions.
Of course,
there is much suspicion amongst the public, that many of these Outsiders are
lucky opportunists lauded by a gullible art world. In one of my favorite
Simpsons episodes Homer Simpson was trying to build a doghouse - yet again his
attempts at DIY ended in disaster! In frustration he threw all his tools, the
wonky kennel and wet cement into a wheel-barrow and flung it down a hill where
it crashed and was spotted by a female art dealer passing in her car. She loved
the work! It was the anguished cry of the suburban man! All her Euro-Trash
friends liked the work too and a show was arranged. Homer’s wife Marge was
peeved that her dumb husband who had no training in art was given an exhibition
– while she had never had any similar offer – despite spending her life trying
to master the craft of painting. Homer worked tirelessly creating more and more
elaborate ‘outsider’ works. Then the work was unveiled – and the art public
sighed in boredom. It was all too contrived and passé! After the disappointment
of his show – Homer flooded Springfield in homage to Turner’s watercolours of
Venice and Christo’s urban interventions – the art dealer loved it!
This story
perfectly illustrates the difficulty of the Outsider in the Art world – even
those who are genuine and are picked up by galleries - can find themselves just
as quickly dropped once the novelty of their work wears off. The whole idea
Outsider art is antithetical to the ethos of the art world. Outsider art is
made beyond the realm of the professional, social and public world. It is not
commissioned, it is often not for sale, and it may never have been intended to
be seen by anyone except its creator. But the art world is about creating money
and to do that it means creating reputations, connections and understanding.
Outsiders are very good at making art – but very bad at making or maintaining
friendships – and that is what counts in the art world.
So what kind
of exchange is really going on between the public and the Outsider artist? Is
the outsider artist a privileged exotic – forgiven sins that would have most
people written off dinner party invitations? Is he or she a freak? Someone to
be ogled at by a bored and prurient art world? Is he or she easy prey for
unscrupulous dealers, collectors and curators – a maker of art works that but
for the apparatus of the art world would be essentially worthless. Or is he or
she a pure light in a crass world of fatally compromised art? Personally, I
like to think that Outsider art gives us some kind of insight into the workings
of the subconscious and the place of the individual, isolated, creator in the
universe. But the real reason I like it is its aesthetics. To me the
compulsively worked drawings of outsider artists are like nothing else in art.
At their best, they have a psychic intensity comparable with the most tormented
or animated religious work of Grünewald or Tintoretto. Some might say that their work is not a patch on the centuries old
tradition of Western painters like Michelangelo or Rembrandt – but Outsiders
would not want it any other way. They know only one way to draw or
paint – their own.
That is the
trouble with Outsider artists - they can be patronized or ridiculed but never
understood. Theirs is an unknowable universe of private codes, myths, fantasies
and delusions. Even those with a similar mental illness cannot claim to fully
understand them – because mental illness is just a small part of the Outsider’s
unique intellectual, imaginative, and emotional world. Each Outsider artist
presents the world with a unique set of riddles – and half formed
communications. I say half formed because the nature of art - is its dialogue -
between the artist and his or her audience. He or she must know themselves,
their tradition, their place in the art world and the views of those around
them. They must then make an art object - which conforms to their ambition and
is in knowing social and aesthetic discourse with its public, it’s society and
it’s laws. But none of these considerations are on the minds of the Outsider.
He or she is incapable of living sensibly never mind understanding the place of
their art in relation to what has gone before. They are communicating – but on
an autocratic and autistic level. It is a monologue not a dialog. That is what
makes it such fascinating art and that is why I celebrate it. It is art at its
rawest and most direct.
Most old
Outsider artists were self-taught people, often with no knowledge of art
history or the workings of the art world. Some though did have some art
experience and many must have had at least a passing knowledge of the famous
art of their day. But even if Outsider artists were uninterested in ‘Art’ –
distinguished Modern artists like Klee, Kokoschka, Ernst, Dalí, Dubuffet,
Appel, Rainer and Baselitz were intensely interested in them and their example.
Looking around an exhibition of children’s drawings Picasso said, “When I was their age I could draw like
Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to draw like them.” (Ronald Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, P. 307.) It was something of an exaggeration -
Picasso was never as good as Raphael as a kid.
Jean Dubuffet
did more than any other twentieth century artist to promote the work of
Outsiders. His work although clearly influenced by Art Brut was rendered with
such panache and painterly knowing that it was clearly the work of a trained
artist. In fact, in his twenties he had been quite a good figurative and Cubist
painter. The school of painters who really took the work of children and the
insane to heart - were the COBRA artists (so called because they were from
Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.) Their paintings are big, bold and
childlike in their simplicity. However, they were made by trained painters with
delusions that they could return to the Paradise Lost of childhood. They could
not. No matter how energetic, colourful and crudely drawn their paintings were
– there was always something of a pose about their work. Their work was a study
in primitivism not an expression of it. These and many other modernist artists
sought an art that was free of the cant, dogma and compromises of academic art.
They thought that the visceral tribal art of Africa, the joyful paintings of
children and the symbolic and raw art of the insane – could give their art
power and authenticity. In most cases however their work never came anywhere
near the fundamental creations of Tribal sculptors, Outsiders or children. As
art their work was often far more pleasing and substantial but as psychic
creations they were faked. These trained artists had too much to unlearn from
life as much as art.
Besides the
whole idea of an ‘innocent eye’ was proved nonsense in ‘Art and Illusion’ (1960) by Ernst Gombrich. We are born into a
particular culture and it imprints itself upon us in many different ways. There
may be very few Artistic references in Outsider Art – but there are plenty of
references to; newspaper photographs of adverts, sports, powerful people, or
pop-culture references, architectural drawing, glamour photographs,
illustrations from children's books, the kitsch pious or tormented iconography
of Christianity and heroic or savage military subjects – the stuff of everyday
life that we are all surrounded by.
Many Outsider
art works are filled with a volcanic energy and obsessive detail. They use
irrational means to understand and ward off an irrational world. Many of their
works have a heartbreaking and hopeless pathos that can never be redeemed or
rescued. Yet, some of their work is very funny, perhaps not intentionally - but
funny none-the-less. However, I do not laugh at these artists I laugh with them
at the absurdity of existence. I do not believe that the art of madmen is
closer to the truth of existence – but I do believe they offer a unique gift to
all men interested in psychology, the origins of art and the nature of the
extreme creative mind.
It can
sometimes be hard to see actual Outsider art in museums, but thankfully Dublin
has one of the best collections of Outsider art in the world. It includes work
by artist like Henry Darger, Aloïse, Johann Hauser, Sava Sekulic, August Walla,
Carlo and William Marklin Van Genk. The collection was donated - by The
Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection to The Irish Museum of Modern Art. Over
the years I.M.M.A have staged many exhibitions of outsider art alongside that
of modernist artist – making telling comparisons and links.
The history
of art before the nineteenth century is surprisingly limited in terms of
examples of great mad artists. There is the strange case of the Gothic artist
Van der Goes who after suffering from depression went into a monastery. He
subsequently suffered a complete mental breakdown and died the following year.
There is only one known painting by him the Portinari
Altarpiece – a masterpiece of pious Gothic religion and northern realism.
Yet while there is a dark piety and sorrow to his work, it is technically
strong and ambitious.
The paintings
of the Northern European master of the macabre and surreal Hieronymus Bosch -
may appear to the layman to be the work a madman. However Bosch was a rich,
successful, rigorously trained professional painter who was an upstanding
pillar of his community. His work was not merely a record of his own inner
demons and fantasies – it was an intelligent transcription of the rituals,
myths, fairy-tales and superstitions of his homeland of The Netherlands.
Then there is
Goya – who was often later accused of being mad – but his art was too
intelligent, too skillful and too serious to ever be so laughably written off.
But some continue to do so. I remember how in 2004 when I was in the Prado
museum in Madrid - making sketchbook coloured pencil drawings from his late
great ‘Black Paintings’ (1821-1823) -
I overheard a tour guide say: “He had gone completely mad when he painted
these!” I could understand her use of verbal shorthand but I was shocked by her
classification of such fundamental artistic works as the product of a mad man -
especially since there was no evidence that Goya ever had any clinical mental
problems. Of course the ‘Black-Paintings’ can appear mad and deranged – but in
fact they were the summation of a life spent analyzing the myths and folklore
of Spain and critiquing its superstitions. They were also cries of pain from an
intellectual who had seen his country ravaged by war and all the myths of
Liberalism, Reason and Liberty amount to nothing but bloodshed and atrocity. By
the way earlier in his career Goya had made a few oil paintings of the inmates
in a madhouse – when I first saw them a few years ago I was blown away and
traumatized by them – they seemed so true to my own worst nightmares of
incarceration.
Around the
same time that Goya was isolated and alone in his house in Bordeaux painting
his ‘Black-Paintings’ on the walls of his house, Thèodore Géricault (1791-1824)
the precocious genius who had painted ‘The
Raft of The Medusa’ (1819) was also painting - a series of ten portraits in
oil paint of psychiatric patients - under the care of his friend Dr
Etienne-Jean Georget. Only five of these stunning canvases remain – but those
that do are compelling in their psychological insights and humanity. Dr Georget
believed in the new concept of ‘Monomania’
in which the patient was thought to suffer from one specific type of delusion
or compulsion. So each one of Géricault’s canvases are known by the Monomaniac
illness the patient was thought to suffer from. So there is one of a child
molester, one of a compulsive gambler, one of a kleptomaniac, one of an
obsessively envious person, and someone convinced he was a great military
commander. Such ‘illness’ might raise an eyebrow today! But the fact that a
stunningly talented painter who trained under Ingres would devote his energies
to recording the faces of mentally disturbed no-bodies in French asylums makes them
unique paintings in a Western portrait tradition that usually only recorded the
pious, noble, rich, beautiful, famous, learned, and successful. Incidentally,
in Ireland recently (1993-1994) Brian Maguire a socially conscious
Neo-Expressionistic painter made a memorable series of charcoal and acrylic
drawings and paintings of inmates in a Gransha Hospital in Derry. They document
the pain and humanity of these Irish people but they are also rather
voyeuristic. I can forgive Géricault and Dr Georget’s social and political
naivety – but there is a part of me (as an ex-psychiatric patient in Dublin)
that balks at human portraits being reduced to social categories – no matter
how hard the painter tries to empathize with his sitters. These suspicions are
not helped by the crudeness of Maguire’s drawing and insensitivity towards his
sitters.
None of these
professional artists I have just mentioned were clinically insane so their art
might have illustrated madness – but it did not embody it. But there are some interesting
cases of highly trained, professional artists - who later suffered from extreme
madness. One early professional artist who went mad was Franz Xaver
Messerschmidt who was born in 1736. He trained in the academic Neo-Classical
modeling style that was popular in his day and by the age of twenty-four he was
an official Court sculptor. Messerschmidt molded his portrait busts of royalty
in clay – which he later cast in bronze – the same ancestral technique he was
later to use to express his mental wilderness. Suddenly in 1770, he began to
exhibit signs of mental distress and breakdown. That was when he began work on
a series of ‘character-heads’ – a series of sculptures of Messerschmidt’s own
head contorted - in various vulgar, psychotic, and aggressive facial grimaces.
They are terrifying works – full of psychic energy. But what makes them so odd
is to see such psychotic faces – rendered with all the skill of a sculpting
master. Sadly, after his death nearly 40 of these heads ended up in a circus
freak show. However, by the nineteenth century his reputation began to be
reestablished. Messerschmidt was later to influence Modern artists like Arnulf
Rainer and later even myself.
Another case
of an artist gone mad - was Richard Dadd also known as ‘Mad Dadd.’ He was a
Victorian genre and orientalist painter who went insane, killed his father and
then tried to kill another man - before he was caught and locked up in Bethlam
Hospital in London. While there, Dadd began to paint meticulously detailed
images of fairies and sprites. They are eccentric paintings – but technically
quite conventional for the time - made by a trained realist painter who had not
forgotten or forsworn his craft.
Carl Fredrik
Hill (1849-1911) was also an interesting case. His early canvases were in the
vein of Barbizon painters like Camille Corot. His oil paintings have a
freshness and beauty quite unlike his later crude and compulsive outpourings of
delusion and pain – but both are very interesting to those interested in the
degeneration of madness. Hill desperately craved public success but by the age
of twenty-nine he had still not sold a single canvas and his work had been
rejected by many galleries - his mind snapped. He began painting in nothing but
Paris Blue and Cadmium Yellow as his persecution mania increased. He was
eventually hospitalized, and in the asylum, his work became darker and more
messianic. After over a year in a psychiatric hospital, he was released to the
care of his sister, who looked after him for the rest of his life. Hill’s work
was later to be a big influence on the German Neo-Expressionist – Georg
Baselitz.
Adolf Wölfli
is said by many to be the greatest schizophrenic artist of all time and he was
astoundingly prolific. He his vast autobiographical project which he started in
1908 and continued obsessively for the next twenty-two years, came to
forty-five volumes and was 25,000 pages long and full of 1,460 illustrations
and 1,500 collaged elements. It is crazed mix of fact, fiction, fantasy and
wish-full thinking. He was born in 1864 in Switzerland and died in 1930 in
Bern. The youngest of seven children – Wölfli was orphaned at the age of ten
when he was moved into a series of grotty and cruel foster homes. As a
teenager, he worked as a farm hand for a while. When his tyrannical father
refused him permission to court a girl he loved - he joined the army. In 1890,
he was sentenced to two years in prison for attempting to molest two young
girls. Then in 1895 after a third incident, he was committed for the rest of
his life to Waldau Psychiatric Clinic in Bern. It is a distasteful crime to
have committed but perhaps his up bring and mental illness had rotted his sense
of decency. Wölfli’s drawings and collages are crammed with; architectural
drawings, musical notation (he composed his own music – which has subsequently
been performed by avant-garde musicians) collaged adverts from magazines of his
day (usually featuring some winsome looking beauty) numbers, lettering and his
handwriting. They are works of great complexity and psychotic order a hind of
paranoid-schizophrenic Gesamtkunstwerk.
One of the
great female Outsiders was the Swiss artist Aloïse (Aloïse Corbaz.) She was
born in Lausanne Switzerland in 1886.
Her mother died when she was six - leaving Aloïse and her five sibling
under the care of her brutal father. In 1911, she went to Germany to work as a
private teacher for the three daughters of Kaiser Wilhelm’s pastor. It was
while there that she became infatuated with the Kaiser. She had to leave
Germany in 1913 as war loomed. But once back in Switzerland her behavior became
more and more bizarre. Finally, in 1918 she was committed to a psychiatric
hospital - she would spend the rest of her life in an asylum. At first
secretly, but then later with the encouragement of her doctors – Aloïse began
to draw. It is no surprise that a stridently assertive, attractive, redhead
drew these wonderful drawings. They are full of such colour, power and inner
strength. In her drawings, Aloïse compared her love for the Kaiser with the
great loves of history. The bright deep colours of her drawings seem to blush,
bloom and throb. She depicts women as big beautiful sphinx or bird like
creatures with large breasts and the eyes of these women are often just all blue
ovals. She mixes up imagery of women,
flowers, birds, insects and abstract biomorphic shapes – on the same page. In
fact, there is a wonderful joy to some of her work – even if it did come from a
place of mad love and loneliness.
Antonin
Artaud (1896-1948) was a poet, playwright, actor, theorist and artist. From the
age of nineteen, he suffered from depression – leading to progressively worse
and more traumatic nervous and mental disorders. In the mid-1920s he aligned
himself with the Surrealists. In 1933, he established ‘The Theater of Cruelty’. He sought to shock the public out of
their complacency with wild gestures, dramatic lighting and visceral prose. ‘The Theater of Cruelty’ did not last
long. Artaud traveled to Mexico (where he frequently took peyote a very
powerful hallucinatory cactus – if he was not mad before it – he was certainly
mad after it) and then in 1937 - made a fateful trip to Dublin where he tried
to gain entry to a Jesuit college. They would not let him in and he was jailed
and then sent back to France. On the boat back, he threatened to harm himself
and others and was put in a straight jacket. From then on he was to be
committed to mental hospitals - principally the psychiatric hospital in Rodez
France. While in hospital, Artaud created some of the most blistering portraits
in the history of art. Anyone who sees madness as a ‘gift’ or a bit of a lark -
should look intently at these works. What they show is the terrible mental
anguish and pain of mental illness experienced by the sufferer. Antonin
Artuad’s portraits of friends are quite simply some of the most electric and
heartbreakingly profound drawings in Modern art history. There is brutal, ugly
rawness to them, it is quite clear they are the real deal – not some
fashionable pose by a Neo-Expressionist. In his drawings Artaud mixed portraits
and nudes with chains, coffins, nails, ex-voto images, writing and he often
burnt or stained them as part of a magical process.
But my
favorite outsider artist of all time is Henry J. Darger (1892-1973) – the
creator of an extraordinary universe populated by the little Vivian girls
fighting in a war against child-slavery. Darger was born and died in Chicago
Illinois. His childhood was spent in orphanages, he was pronounced
‘feeble-minded’, and he experienced extreme poverty and worked as a janitor all
his life. He had a compulsive Christian faith and went to mass up to five times
a day. It was only after Darger had to be moved to an old folks home - that his
landlord (and an artist himself) Nathan Lerner discovered the amassed
collection of Darger’s writings and drawings amongst his vast collection of
balls of twine and newspaper clippings. Living alone in a small bedsit Darger
had created his masterpiece “The Story of
the Vivian Girls in what is known as The Realms of the Unreal, of the
Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.’ The
book ran to fifteen volumes and had around 300 watercolour illustrations
recording his fictional tale of child war. Since he had no training in art –
Darger would take children's book illustrations or photographs of children in
the newspapers and trace their outlines onto one of his large scrolls of
wrapping paper. Sometimes he would strip the children and draw them nude – but
since he had obviously no knowledge of female anatomy – he put a little penis
on all the little girls! To modern eyes, there is the suspicion that Darger
might have been a thwarted pedophile – but there is no clear evidence to prove
what was really going on in his mind. I tend to think he was a well meaning and
harmless old man – who had been so traumatized by his own childhood suffering
that he sought some kind of moral salvation for all other children in his work.
There was a beauty in Dargers watercolours, that was quite staggering. Painted
using children’s watercolour and poster paint sets on cheep wrapping paper –
their beauty belies their poor quality materials. His sense of colour and
composition was extraordinary – as good as a Gauguin. In fact, I do not know any
realistic or fantasy depiction of childhood that is as profound or moving.
Since his death, Darger’s work has been a huge influence on art students, and
contemporary artists.
What is the
future of Outsider art? Pretty bleak if you ask me. If anything, its commercial
success has destroyed its integrity. The trouble with a lot of Outsider art or
naïve art is that unless you understand the person’s biography and context –
you are never sure whether the clumsy incompetence is put on or genuine – knowing or ignorant. I pity the art dealers today who have to pick
out the real lunatics from the sane but opportunistic and crotchety amateurs
who have jumped on the bandwagon. Besides, with the advances in psychiatric
medication and treatments – the age of the psychotic paranoid-schizophrenic
given nothing but cold baths to cure their illness is long gone. Those patients
were locked up their whole lifetime, receiving little help and stewed in the
collective madness and misery that is an asylum. Had they not been locked up - and given the
freedom of the city one wonders if they would have made art at all. Perhaps the
combination of imprisonment and madness created their desperate need to create.
I know in my case it did – even if my imprisonment in my bedroom was
self-imposed. Today it is rare for patients to be locked up for long,
medication can do wonders for their mental health – but it can also kill their
creativity, and most people recover and live productive lives in the community.
Others however live their lives one breakdown, treatment, recovery and
breakdown after another. They come on and of medication – in and out of
madness. This means that if they are artists (and can work at all on meds) –
their work can change quite dramatically from medication to abstinence to
medication. Add to that the increased awareness and contact that the television
and the Internet provides isolated individuals - and it is clear that there
will be fewer and fewer artists like Adolf Wolfi or Henry Darger – at least in
the developed world.