New perspectives on Outsider art

Most attempts to define Outsider art are careful to acknowledge the elasticity of borders and the impact of evolving societal and cultural attitudes, but in general, the term is used to describe anything outside the mainstream art world and its institutions, produced by people with limited or no artistic education. 

The distinction between insider and outsider art is increasingly acknowledged as redundant, however, and in a world marked by cultural pluralism, many question the validity of the category.

While acknowledging the problematic status of so-called Outsider art, an exhibition currently on show at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne doesn’t seek to resolve ambiguities but looks beyond to examine one of the key assumptions underlying interpretations of contemporary art within the genre.

While there is little consensus about the use of the term (demonstrated also by its many synonyms including self-taught, vernacular, autodidact art, visionary art), its antecedent is widely acknowledged as art brut – a similarly fluid classification of art that was conceived and brought to popular attention in the mid-1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85). 

Dubuffet was drawn to what he considered the raw and unmediated nature of art made by the institutionalised mentally ill, which he perceived as arising directly from the inner self of the artist unaffected by cultural or societal influences. 

Dubuffet’s interests followed that of the European Romantics and the Surrealists in looking to forms of creativity outside the academy, such as primitive art and the art of children, in the search for a primal form of creativity – the modernist grail of ‘pure vision’. 

Like them, he was guided by the mode of Expressionism, which romanticised the idea of the ‘artist loner’ and privileged turning inward upon the self and away from the outside world.

Art brut reinforced the links between exceptional creativity, marginality and mental illness, and remains a powerful legacy that underlies interpretations of contemporary Outsider art.

Everyday imagining: new perspectives on Outsider art presents the work of seven Australian and New Zealand artists whose work convincingly argues against the idea that interiority defines their practice.

The exhibition challenges this view by highlighting artists’ active engagement with the external world through their investigations of day-to-day experience. 

The work of Andrew Blythe, Kellie Greaves, Julian Martin, Jack Napthine, Lisa Reid, Martin Thompson and Terry Williams represented in the exhibition demonstrates their interest in the here and now. Ordinary objects such as clocks, hand-held tools, light fittings, book illustrations and common symbols are used as important touchstones and emblems for the day-to-day reality of lived experience. For these artists, it is the external world and their relationship to it, which provides ample exploratory ground. There is value and meaning in the everyday. 

Terry Williams’s (b. 1952) soft sculptures of fridges, telephones, cameras and clocks convey his keen observation of the world and an impulse to replicate what is meaningful through either familiarity or fascination. Williams’s playful sculptures constructed from scraps of fabric pieced together and bound with wool and cotton stitching form a cast of animated characters. Often anthropomorphic to the point of displaying human attributes such as genitalia, Williams’s sculptures have extraordinary pathos – perhaps due to the artist’s instinctive approach to construction and their lumpy, bulging appearance. Commonplace objects like the telephone above are transformed into enigmatic, hard-to-ignore forms. 

Kellie Greaves’ (b. 1972) practice similarly engages in a process of translation and interpretation, as she often looks to pre-existing designs or photographs, such as book illustrations, to form the basis for her works.

Choosing colours largely from the secondary and tertiary palettes, Greaves’s ability to combine unusual colours to form harmonious compositions is striking and her sensibility with colour gives her simple compositions a deeper complexity. 

The discipline of life-drawing provides Lisa Reid (b. 1975) with a structure to pursue her interest in recording the human figure. Her pen and ink drawings are carefully observed yet intuitive renderings, and provide further insight into the practice of an artist who is known for her meticulously faithful and densely coloured depictions of family and celebrities. 

Jack Napthine (b. 1975) produces drawn recollections of his past and present daily life in the manner of a visual diary. Light fittings from remembered environments feature prominently as do multiple and varied locks. Napthine’s drawings have a bold economy; he uses thick texta-pen to depict simplified linear designs usually accompanied by text recording the names of friends and family. 

Julian Martin (b. 1969) has been experimenting with the pastel medium for over 20 years. His practice inhabits the zone between abstraction and representation, and ranges from bold self-portraits to quasi-cubist depictions through to pure abstraction. The works on show illustrate Martin’s consistent reinterpretation of everyday objects like candleholders and tools which transcend their everyday context to become elemental and magical.

The works of Martin Thompson (b. 1956) and Andrew Blythe (b. 1962) display a similarly indexical approach. Both artists produce detailed repetitive patterns that indicate intense efforts of concentration, perhaps as a counter to the multiple stimuli of daily life (certainly when viewing the works one experiences a meditative state). For over 35 years, Thompson has produced meticulously executed ink-based drawings on graph paper that are constructed using mathematical formulae. In recent years these have become progressively ambitious and elaborate. 

The artists in Everyday imagining implicitly challenge dominant paradigms and existing value systems, however what is of perhaps more significance is that their work triggers a consideration of the bias with which we view the genre of Outsider art and those within, alongside or tangential to it. 

www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au