In appreciating “fine art”--insider art--we face the canvas and focus on the work before us. How could it be otherwise? However, in contrast, outsider art often--and some critics suggest too often--asks us to view the artist standing alongside the art. We are surely amazed by the work, but see the work as the miraculous production of a traumatized maker: miraculous because of the trauma. The identity of the artist may overshadow the remarkable creation. This perspective has been integral to the field’s history and to its present. If outsider art has come in out of the cold, as the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith suggested in 2013 (the year in which outsider art was displayed at the Venice Biennale), the artists are treated as a wintry force of nature.
For better and for worse, this perspective that centers trauma in the art is integral to Daniel Wojcik’s Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma. In assaying the field’s terminological battles, Wojcik’s heart--and his title--is with “outsider.” While he properly insists that these artists are never isolated from their communities, he emphasizes the life histories that have led these men and women to create their remarkable works.
Wojcik’s volume presents a compelling overview of the accepted tropes of outsider art, and for this tour we must be grateful. He is a fluent writer with a broad and confident knowledge of the field, a knowledge that is informed by folkloristic scholarship. We must be grateful, too, for the excellent, extensive images that allow this book to be equally at home on the coffee table and in the study. The body of work discussed ranges from stacks of paintings (Henry Darger’s “Vivian Girls”) to entire environments (Grandma Prisbrey, builder of the remarkable Simi Valley Bottle Village).
Much of the volume presents mini-biographies of recognized outsider artists whose works are crucial to the history of the field. While I wish that more attention was paid to aesthetic issues, Wojcik is balanced in his presentation of how these artists had their works shaped through the communities in which they were supported and the devastating traumas that they suffered.
Trauma is such a common theme that I came to wonder whether one can be an outsider artist without a searing and horrific past. Does a moral crisis transform an “everyday person” to an “everyday genius”? Social movement activists sometimes warn of establishing a Trauma Olympics, judging whose life was toughest and whose story is most powerful. In reading these accounts of difficult lives, one wonders whether a happy life can produce outsider art--or even self-taught or folk art. Hard lives seem to be the yeast to produce great art, at least for those outside careerist lines. For professionals, traumas are only to be footnoted. Perhaps the emphasis on the traumatic should make us consider our own traumas, and how--and whether--they shaped our doings. Siblings die, parents abuse, and lovers spat. Yet, for the professional these are scars that are kept well-hidden, apart from an understanding of the work.
Perhaps trauma comes with the outsider territory. It is not, of course, that we should deny the grievous pain suffered by some of the greatest of the outsider artists--the ill, the brutalized, and the sad--yet, in treating these personal troubles as the font of aesthetic grandeur, we may neglect the joy that these men and women gain from creation.
Personal pain is a repeated trope, but what gives Wojcik’s work particular resonance for the folklorist is his insistence that the work does not only emerge from the personal, but also from a community. Idiosyncrasy cannot exist without communal guiderails. The great and greatly troubled Adolf Wölfli was not simply a unique sociopath, but was one shaped by late-nineteenth-century German visual culture and institutional demands. Martín Ramírez, as Victor Espinosa has impeccably demonstrated, was not merely a schizophrenic migrant, but one whose Mexican upbringing shaped the forms that he drew so magnificently. Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, aestheticizing Detroit’s decay, must be understood in light of how African American men were treated in urban America in the late twentieth century. Perhaps most startlingly, Wojcik demonstrates the influences on Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers from Midwestern Catholic grottoes and the large towers displayed at festivals in honor of St. Paulinus at the Festa dei Gigli, near his birthplace. The recognition of these influences is Wojcik’s greatest contribution.
Some of these artists are spiritual and others are political, but these choices do not simply happen. They arise from the shaping of a community. Put simply, if these creators are outsiders, they are also folk. Some are visionary and some are traumatized, but they are artists and fine artists at that.
--------
[Review length: 777 words • Review posted on July 11, 2018]