Getting in the Door

John Haber
in New York City

Outsider Art and Breaking Through

History Refuses to Die: The Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Where can you find an outsider artist? Why, at Sotheby's, of course. Daniel Swanigan Snow was there, on an evening in April, carrying on like the cult film actor he once was before he turned to art. So were the director of the Outsider Art Fair, a younger dealer, a critic and curator, and an arts lawyer—all to address "the market and legal challenges facing outsider art."

So, in spirit, were countless others who have passed through the storied auction house on their way to sales. As the lawyer, Richard Lehun, put it, art like this depends on "dedicated people." And the panel, "Break on Through (from the Outside)," thrived on its dedication. It also displayed a surprising ambivalence about breaking through. For further ambivalence and further evidence, for once the Met steps out of its comfort zone. With "History Refuses to Die," it also adds one more piece to the puzzle of outsider art.

A dedication to outsiders

Has outsider art already broken through? The signs were impossible to overlook, and so was the panel's reluctance to enter. Speakers could point to "Outliers and American Vanguard Art" at the National Gallery in Washington. They could point, too, to a survey of outsider art alone coming up at the Met. They could quote such critics as Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, in support of this art as just one part, an essential part, of the new normal. Since acquiring the Outsider Art Fair, Andrew Edlin has seen it grow "exponentially"—and its expansion to Paris, where it has now had six editions on top of the twenty-seven in New York.

And the speakers were at Sotheby's, but with an added twist. Lehun has now participated in several panels at Sotheby's Institute of Art, hosted by a faculty member, Judith Prowda. The annual series has focused before on challenges, but always scary ones for artists and dealers. It has addressed the financial pressures from art fairs and art advisors. It has testified to the many "brick-and-mortar" galleries that have had to close—giving way at best to a "hybrid model" of private dealing, pop-ups, and fairs. So how did things suddenly become so cheerful?

Put it down in part to the artists, but also to markets. The art world has exploded, and so has competition to find the next big thing. That can mean the emerging artists in "Greater New York," in "Fictions" this year at the Studio Museum, and in ever so many biennials and triennials. It can mean recovering Latin American art, African American art, Pueblo pottery, women in art, gendered art, and older artists. It can mean accepting craft as art. As for Joseph E. Yoakum in a retirement home, a celebration of folk art and sheer madness seems only natural.

Put it down, too, to that extraordinary dedication and enthusiasm. You may know Edlin instead for his gallery, which opened in 1995, has exhibited James Castle, Martin Ramírez, and Marcel Storr and formerly represented the estate of Henry Darger. He spoke of the thrill of encounters like these. He called them the "Homers and Miltons of our time." Scott Ogden, the director of Shrine on the Lower East Side, could not stop reeling off slides of his artists—much to the detriment of his topic (the challenges) and the time left for others on the panel. As the remaining speaker, Edward M. Gómez put it, call this art naïf if you like, but just who are you calling naive?

They are also dedicated to the uniqueness of outsider art. Critics like Smith may see a blurring of the lines, with insiders and outsiders as a continuum, but they beg to disagree. Edlin spoke of his love for "unselfconscious" art and Ogden of its "raw, pure" vision, although in practice his tiny gallery has a rather broad idea of outsider art. He seeks out art in strange places rather than accept walk-ins, he says, because "if you're aware of the field, you're not a part of the field." Snow recalled the root of amateur, in love. He insisted on his uniqueness, too, just by playing the part of himself, so that Lehun had to press him repeatedly to speak about (entirely new to me) his work.

Not that they are content with peaceful coexistence. The exhibition in Washington paired outsider artists with others, like Judith Scott with Jessica Stockholder, with the implication, Gómez argued, that Modernism still knows better or that outsider art cannot stand alone. He called that "patronizing." For him, this art "does not need to be validated by anything other than itself." Attention to outsider art's influence on the mainstream makes the latter a reference point. Yet influence is rarely a one-way street—perhaps, one might speculate, that of Jean Dubuffet in organizing Art Brut.

When outside is in

So which is it, in dialogue with the mainstream or apart—when Keiran Brennan Hinton in residence at the home of James Castle could mean either or both? Talk of the raw and unselfconscious should set off alarms, big time. It recalls Cubism's turn to African art for the purity of "the primitive." Just to speak, like Saltz, of art's "exotic blooms," diminishes its necessity. It sounds like condescension and colonialism all over again. When it comes down to it, Gómez made that criticism his point.

If this art, then, can neither remain outside nor be assimilated, where does that leave it? When Lehun urged outsider artists to seek out dedicated curators, dealers, and collectors with a shared vision, he asked for a world apart. Yet he could have said the same to any artist hoping to break out or to break through. Much of the rest of his advice could apply to almost anyone as well. He spoke again of a dealer's "fiduciary responsibility" as the artist's agent, just as in past years, and he outlined two sources of income, in selling the work and in the "intangible rights" of copyright. Any artist, he must know, is in for what he called "a marathon, not a sprint."

The puzzle of inside and outside came up again and again, starting with the success of "Break on Through"—which, of course, quotes something else between popular and cult status, the Doors. The house was packed. It came up, too, in the status of the panelists. Edlin started as a musician and Ogden as an artist, much as Snow began as an actor in B movies. And here they are as professionals now. Gómez is both senior editor of Raw Vision and an expert in Japanese modern art.

Everyone in art has to start somewhere else. As Snow observed, "every artist has to be on the outside before being on the inside." And that raises the biggest puzzle of all: just what is outsider art? It came up when I sought out Janet Sobel, probably the very first drip painter, at my first Outsider Art Fair or Willie Birch in New Orleans and New York today. What if, as Snow began, "these terms mean really nothing"?

Prowda opened the evening by asking Edlin for a definition. He had his answer ready, of the outsider as self-taught, with a "lack of conditioning" from the art world, but others did not make it anywhere near so easy. Ogden added the role of a disability, like blindness for Hawkins Bolden or deafness for Scott, who suffers from Down syndrome, but people have speculated for ages about links between art and alcoholism or depression. A skilled draftsman, scientist, and humanist in Tolstoy's Russia, Eugen Gabritschevsky, descended into madness. Gómez offered a brief history, tracing claims for outsider art to the discovery of Adolf Wölfli in a Swiss asylum and, later, to Dubuffet. Yet he took care to distinguish outsider art from the larger circle of the self-taught and the smaller circle of Art Brut or the greater chaos of outsider art photography.

Gómez, like Lehun, also insisted on the importance of research and cataloguing, to determine a truer history. And surely one answer is to demand rigor, knowing that the demand leaves everything an open question. If the panel is any evidence, the power of outsider art depends on its being neither inside nor outside. I may never know what to call another artist who has appeared at Edlin, Thornton Dial—an outsider, an African American, a Southern artist, an appropriation artist, or a sophisticate. But then art itself depends on unresolved tensions. As Dial titled an assemblage, We All Live Under the Same Old Flag.

Two versions of outsider art

An institution for which contemporary art is more likely to mean Leon Golub and Anselm Kiefer than the fringe, the Met exhibits three artists who have stood out on the Lower East Side in just the last two years. Dial, Ronald Lockett, and Lonnie Holley put on quite a show all by themselves. And an institution more into fashion than poverty, it exhibits Gee's Bend quilting that recycles work clothes—and not for fashion as art. They are two sides of a single exhibition (but you knew that)—and a single gift of fifty-seven works from Atlanta. It lands at the back of the twentieth-century wing just past Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock, and it comes as a sharp corrective to them and the museum. Or does it?

The display of a gift is still museum business as usual, and the Souls Grown Deep Foundation is dispersing in total twenty times as much black southern art to institutions across the United States. Besides, downtown galleries are supposed to be ahead of the curve. Lockett's The Enemy Amongst Us has all the menace of the Oklahoma City bombings and frontal planes. Although he has also exhibited at the American Folk Art Museum, he and others from Birmingham, including Dial and Holley, could literally be building on AbEx for their all-over assemblage. The Alabama quilters, in turn, anticipate the triumph of American painting with their unexpectedly makeshift color fields. For their housetop (or log-cabin) quilts, starting in 1935, the Pettway family assembled strips into concentric squares—and then the squares into whatever it took to cover a bed.

Still, the two groups are as different as their places, their materials, and their gender. Outsider art has to encompass them all. Here it can because they play off against each other. The mute blues and grays of the work clothes share a room with the sheet metal and sawdust of Dial's Powder Plant, synthetic fiber as an echo of the cotton fields, and dead birds fashioned from paint rags and old gloves as testimony to a lynching. The show's two-sided title work, again by Dial, anchors the second room, where its dark reds meet the turn to color in quilt squares.

The Met's curators, Randall R. Griffey and Amelia Peck, chose the gift and the twenty-nine works on view. It need not settle the notion of outsider art. Lynne Cooke will not have settled it either with a show of "outliers" at the National Gallery in Washington. Besides, that show somehow includes Marsden Hartley, Cindy Sherman, and Jacob Lawrence—each with a distinct claim to notions of inside and out. Here each group has an integrity all its own. Loretta Pettway, Lucy Mingo, and others adopted much the same quilt patterns. Holley molds a totem from what might be the waste of Dial's powder plant.

Two others provide an elusive bridge between generations. They bridge the political and the personal as well. Nellie Mae Rowe on paper pursues a self-image in 1981, for her eighty-first birthday. She also combines the seeming naiveté of folk art with tales of Atlanta's missing children. Purvis Young, in Miami in 1972, paints what could be the African diaspora or the apocalypse, including halos and white horses. One last artist, Joe Minter, rounds out the Birmingham group with standing tools as memories of the enslaved.

Dial, born in 1928, dominates. His gaze ranges from industry to agriculture and from slavery to current events. On paper, he responds to 9/11, a track star, and the inauguration of President Obama. Nothing, though, matches the weight and color of his assemblage, with what could pass for Lee Krasner in electric blue. He can take a shot at "mission accomplished" in Iraq or a South that offered African Americans chains along with okra. Where Holley brings together an African mask and a welder's mask, Dial makes every surface a mask—one that can never disguise a history that refuses to die.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Break on Through (from the Outside)" took place April 11, 2018. "History Refuses to Die" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 23. Related reviews look at the Outsider Art Fair, the status of outsider art, art and madness in relation to outsider artists, Art Brut, and individual artists.