The Politics of Outsider art

All art can be said to be ‘outsider’ art in the same spirit of pronouncement that caused Stevens to say that all poetry is, ‘experimental poetry.’ The outside artist is the plein air thinker of his or her time, without thinking there is anything to be outside of. One can’t help thinking of Van Gogh, and then jump ahead to the proto-French outsider Duchamp who made it quite clear that there was a whole system to be escaped from. A system, other than the system of self-belief which places all responsibility on the individual, is alien to the outsider. It is possible now, as in the case of a now-famous outsider Japanese artist, to operate within the confines of an mental institution by choice, the institution being a quiet place to work, with three meals provided daily and a bed in which to sleep at night.

There are no outsider artists anymore in the manner of James Castle or Bill Taylor or the ladies of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The context has been removed, the context being isolation, naivety, freedom from institutional thinking and the speed of social media. The context now reflects the “atrophy of experience” as Walter Benjamin put it when writing about the purpose of mass communication in the 1930s. The outside artist has become an impossibility, just as the notion of political leadership is now an impossibility. The most interesting places in the world keep moving around, constantly it appears, from Belarus to Hong Kong, from Istanbul to Lebanon, from Washington D.C. to Wuhan, China, with either too much leadership or not enough. Part of the problem is that no one seems to remember that the Chinese discovered the compass, a small part of the problem but significant in light of recent events.