artbrutifactica

a submission has been sitting rarely on my mons the last few months, from a sadoo ginveda of raruraresasn, who presents a philosophy of outsider art.  after discussing the work with some of my siblings in sadooity, i, fukky, have decided in consultation to post it on our sadoo management site, as it’s more than unprobable that there may be minimally some and occasional overlaps and linkages between sadoo ginveda’s concepts of outsider art and the myriad practices of sadoos, recognizing that, as always, i, fukky, make no claim to agree with the following thoughts as i make no claim to agree with anything.

outsider art

sadoo ginveda of raruraresasn

let me begin by saying i consider all true art outsider art.  while shakespeare, to use a classic case, may have had the capacity and conditions to appeal to the masses, his craft enabled him to mock his audiences without most of them realizing it or any of them being able to prove it.  which is why he kept his head.  a more obvious case:  although van gogh now hangs in the world’s most prestigious museums and commands some of the most expensive prices in the art world, the average citizen – and the very definition of citizen is average – would, in person, find van gogh challenging, boring, and probably impossible.  he painted from the outside – or we could say, to refer to mysticism – the inside:  the inside that most insiders avoid.  this avoidance puts them in the crowded inside, as to step truly into the inside is to to leave the crowd, enter the void and then, by the insiders, be experienced as an outsider … an experience that inevitably affects and sometimes kills (artaud’s notion of van gogh being suicide by society describes this process well) the true insider.

you will say – so let’s just acknowledge it at the outset – this inside-outside insider-outsider true-false stuff is binary and so false.  admittedly, binaries are always more nuanced in life and become polynaries.  yet this is not the point.  certain creators may be sufficiently oriented to multiple worlds so as to be able to move between them (i don’t speak of the common artist whose primary orientation is recognition and money but of those who manufacture something distinctive and powerful from their horrible freedom and vision).  look at a classic and relatively unknown outsider – vivian maier - whom the insiders refuse to accept to any significant degree although her photos are far more striking and original than many of those we see at most galleries.  what i speak of is art that arises from a human being gifted with sufficient vision and distance from society that it cannot help but disturb, provoke (or more commonly be ignored, mocked, misunderstood).

what i am saying is that art always arises from a lack of concern about what concerns most – comfort, reputation, security, prestige, remuneration, possession – and rather leaps into the voids of a self-world relationship and forms from that formlessness.  a great sadoo – laurie spiegel – removed herself from the music scene in the 1970s for this reason.

the movement from void to establishment is well known.  we see it tediously and catastrophically in religion (jesus to the vatican, lao tse to a daoist priesthood, the rig veda to lululemon), but the movement in art may be no less tragic.  we’re unlikely to have any establishment built based on pessoa’s the book of disquiet – part of the brilliance of the book is its devastating ability to subvert this possibility – but we see it in minor ways with artaud, jarry, blake, acker, weil and in major ways with various other names and works. 

the establishment does not adjudicate what is art.  it adjudicates what is acceptable for its purposes.  and the terms of acceptance are the same as any guild – whether it be scholarship, postal work, or politics – compromise, force, conformity.  that art makes it into the establishment is not due to any thanks to the establishment, which accepts anything that sufficiently pays once the cost in blood has been laundered.

of course, outsider art grew from dubuffet’s idea of art brut –

those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more worthy than the productions of professionals. after a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.

what i’m advocating is what i call aesthetic mysticism or the hallucinogen arts as the root of all arts.  many sadoos have written about the former.  an academic such as philip wood has written from the scholarly voice about both.  the works of aloïse corbaz are vivid portraits of the imagination and the range of human experience – a unity of creativity, for she cured herself by ceasing to fight against her illness, by choosing to cultivate it and make use of it instead, a more powerful and effective way than those the scholarly and therapeutic industries offer.  to have a career as an artist – from formal education through the necessary grant-writing, networking and promotional verve – is antithetical to the creative spirit.  the void does not understand it.

society is tyrannical and selfish, made up with institutionalized virtue, fashioned with processed blood.  it takes the products creators have paid for, often with their lives, often with poverty, exile, and humiliation, and, laughingly, banks, sells, and buys them.  this is why the artist is the new saint – something nietzsche foreshadowed and those like pessoa, artaud and genet readily grasped and articulated. art brut of course has not only birthed the human world but is its continuous mother and society’s relentless disregard for it highlights a continued spiritual misogyny which modernity – regardless of its isms and readymade virtues – conveniently embraces in the emerging paternalistic egaliarchy.

there is no art that is not outsider art.  it only makes it to the inside – or, rather, from the inside of the inside to its outside – by transactional movements, movements many creators are unable, genetically, to make.

let us modify creators, then.  as is happening.  let us give them pills and money.  let us give them lovers and dental plans and tenure.  then art will have been purchased and god – the question – will have evolved into what may be its next necessary stage:  a networked glyph around the neck of the hip.

not just outsider art but outsider thought. not a museum without walls but museums without museums. not classrooms without walls – classrooms without classrooms. for outsider art transcends boundaries, originating without them and without them as part of the vision or process.

what i want to see is humans free to create what they want in ways they want, aside and apart from being told what is expected, tried, acceptable.  i would like to remove names from art and ensure everyone who wants to create receives a base minimum annual salary providing sufficiently for living needs and a few modest luxuries.  i want to see the art establishment crumble on its coddled ass.  i want all intermediaries removed between void and perceivers.  i want the selfish greedy tyrants of techno-capitalism to work on rice fields for five years.  i want a new species.  i want a new earth.  for i am not impressed with the one given me and see no reason i should conform to it.  it has become solid, arrogant, fixed, dogmatic, fiscal and objective.  you say it is the given, the pragmatic.  but we heard the same shit 500 years ago; its name was god.

i would live in dream.

i have sought poverty through excess as the available means of poverty did not seem to me to fit the spirits of the age.  whether i have achieved it or not – whether it is possible to achieve i don’t know – i don’t know, for in this process i also have come to doubt the difference between poverty and wealth.

i believe in a society in which all – and the all is contextually and ethically maintained at levels at which this is possible – have access to nutritious food, adequate and symbiotic shelter, playful and beneficial touch and sex, and healthy creative materials, tools, and environments, comradeship and community, all appropriate to individuals, groups, and species.