outsider art fair: an intelligent review

I promised myself I’d pass on Manhattan’s Outsider Art Fair this year. After all, there was little more the venue could offer me, and my internal debate on the nature of art was getting old.  Apparently my feet disagreed, and as I left Penn Station I found myself once again transported to this affair of outsiders.

The 2009 fair was held at a new location:  7 West 34th Street, near the intersection of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, opposite the Empire State Building. A far distance from SoHo’s Puck Building, the fair’s location for the past 16 years, in more than just geography. I missed the informal “Puck-ishness” of the Puck building, what Roberta Smith terms its “outsiderish rusticity.” The Puck Building exhibition space, cramped and ostensibly half-finished, the street outside lined with itinerant and wanna-be outsider artists, seemed just the thing.

The new location, just a few blocks from Penn Station, is on the 11th floor, past a service desk with uniformed staff pointing the way to the elevator. The exhibition space is carpeted, well lit, with roomy and hard-walled exhibition booths. The outsiders moving on up in the world.

Upon entering, a sign encourages visitors to check their coats, bags and satchels, all subject to inspection.  Explicit warnings forbid bringing “outside” art into the fair, that is to say unsanctioned outside art. There will be no works sold without dealer approval.  There are no artists lining the curb, selling their works in a gloriously informal trunk sale. Ross Brodar’s 24-foot rental truck, loaded up with paintings, is missing.  Now Brodar is found in Booth 27, Olof Art Gallery.

Outsider artist Ross Brodar

Where is outsider art positioned in today’s art world?  Does the new fair location imply that outsider artists are now insider artists, having entered the “circle of art,” and come in from the cold?

Art is a circle, You’re either in or out.  –Edouard Manet

Three years after my first visit to the fair I’m still debating the answers to these and other questions: What is the meaning and import of outsider art? What can be learned from the works of untrained artists?

Fortunately I was able to join up with Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator ofThe Contemporary Center of the American Folk Art Museum, as she led a small group of visitors on a tour through the fair, speaking knowingly and passionately onHenry Darger, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Martin Ramirez, all artists represented in the Museum’s permanent collection. First on the agenda: to define “outsider art.” Apparently the terminology itself has evolved over the past 60 years.  What was once called raw, visionary, intuitive, naive, marginal or outsider art, is now simply labeled “art created by untrained and self-taught artists”.

Beyond the issue of definition, Anderson painted a picture of outsider art that is very much part of the contemporary art world, art that shares many of the attributes of insider or mainstream art.  The value of outsider art is not derived from any inherent aesthetic value, to be valued for its workmanship or material.  Rather value can be attributed to a variety of non-aesthetic factors.  Foremost is the story or narrative that accompanies the artist.  Ramirez’s immigrant story includes residence in a mental institution.  Von Bruenchenhein’s dietary history includes consumption of buckets of fast food chicken. These stories add value to their creations.

Untitled Bone Chair (Pink and Green) by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. Chicken bone, paint. 6 ½ x 4 x 4 inches. Hammer Gallery.

Evidently the artistic medium and technology used do have some value. In an interesting aside, Anderson spoke admiringly of the skilled technique of artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, whose sculptures constructed out of painted chicken bones where held together not by wire, screw or glue, but by the paint itself. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was any virtue left in Von Bruenchenhein’s chicken & turkey bones that could be brought out with a liberal application of boiling water and vegetables.

More and more, art’s real value, whether insider or outsider, is in its ideas, its ability to convey originality of concept, and other undefinable qualities.  Or so the art world would have us believe.  To these factors I would add two more:

1. The affirmations of art world aficionados, the dealers, collectors, gallery owners and curators, that this is good art, and
2. The marketability and sale of the artwork.

Anderson moved with fluidity and easy familiarity through the fair, greeting with a smile and by name dealers and gallery owners, part of an intimate community of art world denizens brought together by the idea that outsider art is good art, that is has value to society. These cultural gatekeepers define value, controlling access to the market, granting success to artists like Brodar and failure to others through the application of measures of quality that are consensual even if often undefinable.

One measure of value is easily quantifiable: The marketability and sale of the artwork.  Consumers of outsider art, whether collectors, dealers, or museum curators, are willing to vote with their dollars that outsider art is indeed good art.

“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” –Andy Warhol

I’d like to believe that outsider art is not fashion art, the flavor of the moment, the current fad, championed by cynical producers and consumers to create a profit, to be discarded once the market fails.  But I’m not sure I can.  Von Bruenchenhein’s throne of bones is not in the same league as the art of Monet and Van Gogh, of Manship and Saint-Gaudens.  But it is art.  One must respect the creative energy the artist put into his work.  It just isn’t great art.  And that may have to be enough.

Article Source:  http://madsilence.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/still-searching/