the practical side...

I've been struggling to see how I would synthesise my written work and observations into a practical body of work because

• it's  tricky / boring to make art about art. Hard to not be incredibly derivative, or just make some not so interesting satire out of it
• I'm studying outsider artists, as someone who is in arts education (in a way, the complete opposite of how they practice)

I started to think about why I first started looking at outsider art. 

Aesthetically:

• Outsider Art can't so much be defined in terms of aesthetic because it's less of a grouping based on stylistic choices or even moral/ ethical ones, but the identity of the artists themselves. BUT, because of the way a lot of these artists work they share some similarities in that they are often "unconventional". This is why I started looking at them.

Howard Finster

Connected in a more theoretical / thematic way to my practice:

• in my own practice I've been thinking about making in ways that are intuitive or challenging to prettier / traditional aesthetics, and outsider art generally reflects this as it is work  created without the pressures of institutions / training
• in the journals I am reading there is a lot of questioning of authenticity, in particularly in regards to Howard Finster's mass produced 25000+ paintings, and how when he became popular people became, maybe, less interested... it's a concept that caught me
• how outsider artists are often recording the environment around them...

From this I am thinking, in very broad terms of working practically for this project

• Challenging in my own practice / in illustration how far you can push things to look *bad*
• How do *bad* images become good
• How many time can you do a good thing before it becomes bad
• But! How can this really be strung along, without a smaller thematic concept to push it forward
• (This isn't how I definitely want to go, but is a point I'm thinking of at this point)

(The Bad, The Bad and The Ugly)

Project types I am interested in:

• Publication?
• Series of paintings? Series of prints?

more notes

(I have quotes saved elsewhere but these are the gist of what I got from the following articles)

What happens when an artist who spends all of his life as an outsider is absorbed into the commercial art system? by Oliver Basciano (2013)

• Article doesn’t really reflect on Outsider Art as expected, and I’m not sure if Artur Barrio is even considered as an outsider in the way that I had been looking at. Regardless, his identity as an outsider, in some way, had an influence on his work. 
• The article doesn’t really explain what really changed for him when taken into a commercial art setting. 

The Appropriation of Marginal Arts in the 1980s by Donald Kuspit (1991)

• Artists take on marginal art because it gives them a fresh feel but also distinguishes them from the decadent. To make them relatable? (P.132)
• Cubism and Expressionism are except to this idea because they looked at marginal art before it was popular (P.132) (paraphrased)
• To put it in fun terms, marginal art is the “manic pixie dream girl” of the galleries. Fine art uses it to survive but marginal or outsider art works on its own terms and does not rely on it. It is not an institution that needs to be constantly challenging itself. (P.134)
• Marginal artists that go to the rewards of the mainstream may damage their work in the process, and lose that popularity as such. (P.134)
• On P.135 he talks about how the concept of the artist interferes with how it is perceived
• “marginal art exists in an underground limbo, for it has no stylistic credibility” [but post-modernist artists do not necessarily have a coherent stylistic identity either] p.135
• [describes marginal art as the “ultimate novelty” of post-modernism] P.136

Howard Finster by Norman Girardot and Ricardo Viera (1994)

• Finster does not personally care for labels, he doesn’t describe it as limiting but does appear to suggest that it does make for some inequality. (P.48)
• He describes the difficulty of being so prolific with age, I wonder if he faced outside pressures (rather than from his relationship with God) to make so many paintings. At the time of this interview he was almost up to 25000 paintings. (P.50)

Approaching the Real and the Fake: Living Life in the Fifth World  by Kristin G Congdon and Doug Blandy (2001)

• The author suggests that Finster’s later paintings were not his, but only mentions this notion as made by unnamed “critics”. The essay discusses the value of fakes, were Finster’s supposed fakes valuable? Does this have anything to do with his identity as an outsider artist? P.268         

The  Reverend Howard Finster: The Last Red Light Before The Apocalypse by Liza Kirwin (2002) 

• There isn’t much here about Finster’s practice, but speaks of him as full of energy and as a visionary- the impulse and the intuitiveness of his painting.

Outsider Art, Vernacular Traditions Trauma and Creativity by Daniel Wojcik (2008)

• The point of this essay is to write about outsider artists in a different context to how they are usually examined, to look at them as artists rather than their personal lives overcoming the perception of their art.
• Also believes that labelling as Outsider is detrimental to the artist/ perception of the art
• It’s not just the label, but how people go on to write about their personal lives than the art itself
• He does examine some artists by way of their lives, but hopes and does so in a non-exploitative way.
• To paraphrase, by studying outsider artists we examine the universality of the creative impulse. 

                                        

Howard Finster and Robyn Beverland

Howard Finster is definitely an artist I would like to research more into for this project.

• There is a lot of information about him out there, and his popularity as an outsider artist is something interesting to look at - whether the cross-over into the mainstream affected him as an artist, or importantly, how he was perceived
• In Gary Alan Fine's essay he mentions how people perceived Finster's work as lesser once he became famous
• Also I don't know how common this is for sought after art but I found a lot of Finster's originals on eBay

Robyn Beverland, or a similar artist would be good to research into. Less well known that Finster, so maybe harder to get hold of information, but it was interesting to read Fine's thoughts on how he believed that a lot of artists' disabilities and problems were utilised by collectors as ways to sell their art. 

Key words for dissertation narrowing down at this point:

• Identity (politics)
• Labelling
• Exploiting 

in / of Outsider Art

Supported Studio Network (Australia) + labels

This is a little way out of Outsider Art but I read the essay SUPPORTED STUDIOS AND THE FALSE ECONOMY OF OUTSIDER ART: THE SCAFFOLDED ARTIST: PROFESSIONALISATION IN THE SUPPORTED STUDIO on the Supported Studio Network website. Supported artists are something to look at in conjunction to outsider artists, and it's making me think about all these different terms that are inter-used and argued about. I'm reading a lot about labels / why labelling is bad so that could be a point for the dissertation.  This is also bringing ties towards Art House Meath.

Labels that are frequently coming up:

• Outsider artists
• Supported artists
• Art Brut
• Folk Art
• ""Psychotic Art"" (this seems instinctually like a bad term to use but I'll see what people have to say about it. At the very least it just seems horribly dated)

There are also a lot of points about the health of outsider artists. Not all outsider artists are disabled, but some of the time it is their disabilities that marginalise them / make the *art world* inaccessible. Some do not engage in traditional art roles for other reasons (class/ education etc) and others may just choose not to. Outsider Art is a much more charged label than any other movement or grouping and it must be handled in a careful way - and this is probably one of the reasons people do not enjoy that label so much. 

The quote

“such artists [outsider or supported] are often seen as practicing within a psychological or health framework — art therapy — in which art making is a method rather than a cultural form”

Stood out to me a lot

notes

At this point I am finding it useful and interesting (and not nearly as bad as I thought) to look through articles and take notes from them about what sort of ideas they're provoking and how I agree/ disagree with them. I still haven't properly narrowed down what I am doing but I think researching can help me. Otherwise I'm looking from nothing.

I have lots of quotes saved on a document for potential use in my essay but it doesn't make so much sense to post it all here.

FOLK ART AND OUTSIDER ART: ACKNOWLEDGING SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES IN ART EDUCATION by Simone Alter Muri

• The differing definitions / outlooks towards O.A. and also touches on why/ how it is made (from feeling) (from intuition)
• How can we describe the aesethetics of O.A. when it’s such a broad thing and not limited by style but substance
• The inclusion of outsider art (in education) (but maybe in society) as part of the post modernist life style / ethos / pedagogy
• Outsider art as inspiration to the disenfranchised / minorities
• This article goes on to talk in depth about how O.A. is useful as something to educate children about, I don’t think that’s so much linked to what I want to write about but may come in useful, so here is a note that this is covered in this article! Cool notion about how O.A. can inspire children who feel like “failed realists” that art doesn’t have to be realistic.

SUPPORTED STUDIOS AND THE FALSE ECONOMY OF OUTSIDER ART: THE SCAFFOLDED ARTIST: PROFESSIONALISATION IN THE SUPPORTED STUDIO by Hugh Nichols 

• Believes that Outsider Art is an outdated and restrictive term that marginalises artists 
• Discusses supported artists and how being called outsider artists is damaging to their practices –“such artists are often seen as practicing within a psychological or health framework — art therapy — in which art making is a method rather than a cultural form” 
• Discusses how we think of artists as professionals and what they must do to be deemed such a way, such as being able to engage with the art world in a critical way. Discusses how this often marginalizes supported artists and so they are thought of as lesser/ not professional even when working in a *pro* context

CRAFTING AUTHETICITY: THE VALIDATION OF IDENTITY IN SELF-TAUGHT ART by Gary Alan Fine

• A really long essay dealing with the idea and fetishisation of authenticity. Very useful I think to go back to, many interviews and case` studies 
• There is a sweet interview at the beginning of this text between Professor Willem Volkersz and Hans Jorgensen (artist) about how education affected his work. “Yeah well if went to school I wouldn’t a done this, would I? … I wouldn’t a done it. No. This is oddball stuff. They ain’t nobody else that’d build anything like this. You don’t do what majority does, then you’re wrong”. 
• Professor Willem Volkersz believed wanted to persuade the elderly folk artists that he visited that their work should be taken seriously. I love this sincerity in this art work!! 
• Fine in this essay is on a search to find out “how authenticity is given value” and “how the identity of the self-taught artist affects the appreciation of their creative expressions” 
• Fine questions whether the self taught/ outsider artist is actually given more praise for being an outsider “identities as authentic in the production of objects, unburdened by assumptions of strategic careerism or lofty intellectualising” He describes peoples’ obsessions with the so-called unmediated authenticity in outsider art as part of “cultural tourism” 
• All of this talk of identity could be linked back to good old Roland Barthe’s Death Of The Author 
• Describes self-taught/ outsider artists as “Identity Artists” because they do not share location or aesthetic but a facet of their artistic and personal identity 
• Talks about how they are defined by the attributes they are lacking rather than qualities they do have 
• Look up Michael Thompson and “rubbish theory”, the suggestion that objects are durable or transient (categorised by those in power, not just whether they are physically durable or transient) 
• Potentially good references and quotes from other people in this essay 
• Describes people having an emotional connection to folk art, that these artists make from their unconscious and that’s what makes it appealing. Notions of purity. 
• P.165 talks about art dealers and collectors making up stories to make the artist seem more interesting. There’s a lot of interviews with dealers in this which would be good to go back to. 
• Talks about Howard Finster P.166 which may be interesting as I think he is an artist who would be good to talk about 
• Discussion of Robyn Beverland and how his identity as a disabled man may have been used to sell his work