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FAR OUT

Having announced the end of cool in our January issue, Timothy Taylor explores what it takes to be different in the post-cool world. Turns out you have to go way, way outside of the mainstream.

Text: TIMOTHY TAYLOR

1 | 2 | 3 | JUN '04

I had a friend in university who was a fashion outsider. I use the term in the post-cool sense, now lacking a term for activity at the fringes, however briefly fringes survive in our day of global fashion arbitrage. This friend, an artist then and now, simply couldn’t dress like anybody else. The first time I saw her (at a club, soundtrack Heaven 17), she had on a friend’s mother’s dress, cut down with shears, worn upside down and tied around her body with silk sashes. This being pre-Cyndi Lauper, I was impressed. And her radar for incoming co-option was amazing. This girl would abandon style ideas destined for the mainstream before the mainstream even knew they existed, which is rare.

I was thinking about my friend in New York recently, where I went to the Outsider Art Fair. We’d planned to have lunch after a few decades of being out of touch. But I was also inspired by the fair, which, quite aside from assembling the most exciting collection of art I have ever viewed, is an unrivalled case study of fringe dynamics. Held annually for 12 years at the Puck Building in SoHo, the fair gathers 30-plus dealers representing artists who share only one quality: They’re perceived as "outsiders," an elusive term.

Technically, outsider artists are self-taught, making their work an offshoot of folk art. But the central notion is that the artist is not part of the exclusive institution of contemporary art.

Outsider art is not a white room with the lights going on and off (Turner Prize, 2001) or a bisected pig in formaldehyde (Saatchi Gallery, 2003). It doesn’t celebrate the dominant tropes of the contemporary art establishment: conceptualism, irony and intellectual game play. Instead, it’s work by unschooled, non-academic artists, who, one strongly suspects, would be disinclined to use the word "trope." Outsider art embraces people with mental illness and other disabilities, artists who are homeless or in prison, even those who create in transcendental or mystical states. The art is personal, passionate, often a bit weird.

And the public loves it. Various magazines now cater to the field (Folk Art, Raw Vision). Museums cultivate it. The Outsider Art Fair itself turns away as many interested dealers and galleries as it lets in. And all of this naturally leads to the central question: How can something this popular remain "outside"? When it’s well known enough for jokes to be made about it on The Simpsons (Homer is misidentified as an outsider artist when he mangles the assembly of a barbecue), isn’t the form poised to consume itself in the jaws of its own success?

The answer should be "Maybe," given the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Public Taste and Perception: The more precisely the position of a trend is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known. But by anointing and gathering the artists that it does, the selection committee of the Outsider Art Fair inadvertently creates something like an esthetic quantum view finder. Which is how I discovered that there were really three different kinds of artists under the heading "outsider" and that from the collision of these, I could discern ghostly trace images of an exploding cultural atom.

The first and rarest is the Posthumously Discovered Obsessive. Henry Darger is the granddaddy here. The apartment of this Chicago janitor was opened in 1972 and found to contain hundreds of drawings illustrating a two-part novel of 23,000 densely handwritten pages. A.G. Rizzoli is another example. An architectural draftsman from San Francisco, he worked for almost 50 years on the plans for a utopian world’s fair, incorporating dozens of beautifully planned and rendered buildings. In both cases, the work is staggering in scope and was unknown until after the artists were dead.

1 | 2 | 3 | JUN '04