Eoin McHugh At The Douglas Hyde Gallery

On Monday 19^th August 2013, Carol and I went into town so I could get some art supplies. Having not had much new to read for a while - I felt the need to buy some new art books. So I had a look around the National Gallery bookshop and then Hodges Figgis and bought books on Modigliani and Egon Schiele’s landscapes. Then we walked through St. Stephens Green and up to Kennedy’s art shop where I bought 12 sticks of Schmincke soft pastels (my favourite chalk pastels) and a six tube box of Winsor & Newton Alkyd paints. On our way back we had Mochas, sandwiches and cakes in Starbucks.                 

Before heading home we dropped into the Douglas Hyde gallery. I stomach clenched as we approached the entrance, expecting yet another pretentious exhibition appealing only to those with PHD’s in philosophy or conceptual art. So often exhibitions in the Douglas Hyde were like cynical brain teasers designed to make you look like an idiot and the artist an unfathomable genius, and I had grown sick and tired of such dances of the seven veils. However, I was delighted to discover the work of Eoin McHugh (who I had never heard of) was masterful, bewitching and engagingly conceptual. The first work on the first floor was a pond lined with branches and populated by a beakless duck, another with a motorboat for a body and a clutch of chicks. It was superbly made and very convincing and its craftsmanship and surreal play reminded me of the Chapman brothers. I could not remember the last time I had seen work of this quality and broad appeal in the Douglas Hyde. Born in 1977, McHugh was an ex pupil of NCAD and exhibited with the Kerlin gallery - the premier commercial Dublin art gallery. McHugh was a skilled painter in oils and watercolour, a surreal sculptor of real talent and a conceptual collector of objects that he really made speak to the viewer. There were obviously many layers to McHugh’s work and the overall technical quality of the work made me want to unravel some of them. McHugh’s images at first glance appeared normal even illustrative, however one was quickly made uneasy by the sight of birds without eyes or frightening melanges of bird’s wings than reminded me of things I had seen during bad acid trips. His sculptures took this biomorphic distortion further, so that parts of his sculptures reminded me of human torsos, other parts bones, animal limbs and yet others branches and yet others insect legs. Yet the overall execution was so seamless that all these elements flowed freely between each other. Also interspersed in the exhibition were found objects; a wooden model destroyer covered in barnacles, a wooden tall ship with its sail burnt, a book with parts of it cut out to hold bones, a headless hedgehog and many other evocative things that actually did rhyme with the forms and ideas in the paintings, watercolours and sculptures in a genuinely interesting way. Carol said McHugh was depressingly brilliant, and I knew she meant it as a compliment. However, though he was six years younger than me, I did not find McHugh’s talent depressing or anger inducing like mediocre art so often was – I found his work inspiring. It was clear from the number of visitors to the exhibition, the time they spent looking at the art works and their giddy buzz that we were not alone in rating McHugh’s work.              

Also in the Douglas Hyde was a small exhibition of oil on paper and cardboard paintings by the folk artist Frank Walter whose work could hardly be more different from McHugh’s but was just as good in its own way. Walter’s work had a naïve simplicity, directness and unintentional humour that was refreshing. Walter’s drawing was naïve and he seemed to have a simple technique for different visual phenomena - like sponging for the effect of leaves on a tree or use of a scrapper for the effect of waves. Some of his work - like an image of a man being swallowed by a whale - made me laugh in a good hearted way with its childlike conception. When I read that Walter had written a 25,000 page autobiography, I joked to Carol that I had better get writing! I thanked Carol for suggesting we visit the Douglas Hyde!  


In the days, and months that passed, I thought again and again about Eoin McHugh and Frank Walter’s exhibitions. While I could still vividly recall many of Walter’s paintings on paper, McHugh’s work left only a vague impression. I recalled something similar had happened when I had seen many of the nineteenth century academic Salon painters in the Met in New York. While I had marvelled at the labour and skill that had gone into the likes of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings – they had left no lasting impression on me. With Salon painting like Gérôme’s you spend more time being impressed by the technical skill and labour put into the work - than actually feeling anything about what is being conveyed. It’s the kind of skill that never lets you forget it is skilful - to such an extent you feel nothing. This left me musing about that certain something which we call soul or spirit or character in art that is essential to a true masterpiece - no matter how much work and dazzling skill was deployed. Conversely, often works of little apparent skill or labour like Frank Walter’s can sweep us off our feet through their intensity, soulfulness or visual catchiness.

Panic Art – In Praise of Madness

“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.