Defining the indefinable: getting inside outsider art

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Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught and Outsider Artists

By Charles Russell

How do you title a book, much less write one, about an aspect of material culture when it seems impossible for anyone even to agree on what to call it? A sticky situation, but one that Charles Russell tackles head-on and with provocative insight in his new book, which is geared towards readers with more than a casual interest in artists whose practice falls outside of the academically trained mainstream. Which is to say the realm of raw or outsider or vernacular or folk or self-taught or whatever-you-call them artists who produce what Jean Dubuffet called l’art brut.

Russell is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Self-Taught and Outsider Art. Perhaps taking his cue from that publication, he uses the terms  ‘self-taught ‘ and  ‘outsider ‘ to identify his book’s subject matter, even as he finds himself arguing against such easy definitions.

This fretting about categories may sound dull, but is fascinating because it sheds much-needed light on the ways in which the self-proclaimed art world defines art in general. Russell asks penetrating questions about this hegemony throughout his book, but the introduction and his concluding chapter are especially eloquent. Nonetheless, challenging presumptions about what constitutes art is not his primary focus. His real interest is in the 12 individuals he chooses to write about at length: Nek Chand, Aloise Corbaz, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Howard Finster, Madge Gill, Morris Hirshfield, Michel Nedjar, Martín Ramírez, Bill Traylor, August Walla and Adolf Wolfli. It is always easy to question who is included in and excluded from such lists, and this book is no exception. But Russell’s authority as Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, is sufficient for his book to be accepted as the landmark treatise that it is.

Each of the 12 artists that Russell treats is addressed through known biographical information, how each came to make art and how he or she can be perceived as an outsider. At the end of each chapter, he includes information on a handful or other artists he considers similar, whether in their form of isolation or the nature of their work. For example, the chapter on Wolfli also refers to works by Barbara Suckfull, August Natterer and Emma Hauck, all of whom were institutionalized for mental illness.

Like Wolfli, Ramirez is identified as being isolated within his mind. Had Darger exhibited overt symptoms of dysfunction, he would probably also have been institutionalized. As it is, Russell classifies Darger as scarcely known by his neighbours, while his strange drawings were not known at all until after his death. Traylor was isolated by race, culture and social class, as is Dial. In-depth descriptions of work, as well as ways in which the work came to broader attention and reception, also are provided. The essays on Traylor and Dial are especially useful, as each is interwoven with salient comments on how outsider art has been accepted and/or rejected by the art mainstream.

Dial, for example, stirred considerable controversy when he broke into the mainstream in the early 2000s, with inclusion in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and major museum exhibitions in Houston and Indianapolis. Nonetheless – and here is where Russell’s incisive comments on territorial claims about the identity of art prove invaluable – Dials’ work:

 has been denied general approval of the mainstream art world, which is unable to place it within the dominant art dialogue and is suspicious of his unconventional rise independent of the institutions of the art market and its attendant critical discourses.  

This comment cuts to the heart of so many unresolved questions about institutional hegemony that the book is worth having for it, alone.

The most exceptional case is Chand. A farmer and then a civil servant in Punjab state, he created an installation that has become India’s second-most visited tourist destination, after the Taj Mahal. Beginning his project as an outsider, working on it covertly and illegally at first, Chand has become a folk hero. His artwork went from being protected from the government by the local populace to being protected by the government. Although the Watts Towers in Los Angeles and the Heidelberg Project in Detroit exist within slightly different circumstances, they are included in the Chand chapter to provide context for considering installations that move, in terms of community, from the outside or periphery to the emotional centre.

Abundant, high-quality illustrations, placed near text that comments on them, are another feature of this book. Caption information is likewise conveniently and consistently located. The bibliography is also excellent and usefully organized, according to relevant texts on each artist, as well as general resources on this elusive genre of art, and the index is concise. Graphically, Groundwaters is very easy on the eyes, notable in its legibility.

Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught and Outsider Artists by Charles Russell is published by Prestel,  2011. 240 pp., 190 colour illus. ISBN 978-3-7913-4490-4