“Mom, can I be in a Coca-Cola commercial?” begs the caption beneath her photo. She wears a red and white bow, the iconic colors of the can she poses next to. Her eyes are sympathetic and clean, her head lowered in the same crimped way child models from old publications I’d see parodied in Mad magazine pose—wincing with cuteness, bowed as if to nudge your hand to their cheeks for a pinch. She’s one of my favorite models, and her mother is my favorite photographer. She’s Adorable_Little_Lady, a black-and-white Abyssinian guinea pig on Instagram.
Lately, I’ve started to wonder if Adorable_Little_Lady’s my favorite artist, or at least art project. And it’s hard to know the difference.
Maybe the real question is one about “outsider art.”
I’ve been following Adorable_Little_Lady for a few months, and I like all of her pictures. I get the same irrevocably intimate feelings from observing the bizarre photos of a bow-wearing guinea pig matched up with pop-cultural ephemera that I do from my interest in outsider art—probably the hardest form (genre?) of art to define.
So I asked on Facebook: “Who are your favorite outsider artists, and what constitutes ‘outsider art?’” The responses were varied, and the most interesting ones came from some friends in Iowa City:
Gage Wente said, “It’s definitely a difficult concept, especially when an outsider artist rises in popularity. [Outsider art] seems to be defined by a combination of hermeticism, eccentricity and the accompanying mysticism of those traits in individuals. So, an outsider artist loses his status as such as soon as he or she makes an effort to be understood, or embraces any of the scene’s attention, which seems dumb. [‘Outsider art’] kinda acts as a label of ‘we don’t understand this person and we don’t want to try—we just find their minds entertaining.’”
Kristin Owens, a performance artist I’ve seen a few times, said, “One possibility: Outsider art is art being made that has some social relevance (not the lady in Nebraska scrapbooking for her weekly scrapbooking club) that the public hasn’t been aware of, but becomes ‘outsider art’ once the public is made aware of it.”
Generally, some of my favorite outsider artists—from musicians to writers to painters—exhibit two key traits: They create their art either for an unintended audience or for themselves alone, and they are mentally ill to some degree. For example, The Shaggs—the battering, clattering, out-of-tune ‘60s sister outfit that Frank Zappa called “better than The Beatles”—were all hermits and purportedly suffered from varying forms of dementia. Henry Darger became one of the most famous “outsider artists”—albeit posthumously—on the back of the vast, complex world of drawings and watercolors captured in his Vivian Girls series. Darger, who worked as a custodian in Chicago, spent much of his isolated life struggling with severe depression. A few Darger scholars suspect he was also Aspergian or had some other high-functioning form of autism.
Defining outsider art, then, seems to be about intention (or rather a lack of it), and being an outsider artist entails creating art for oneself beyond the traditional intentions of art. Perhaps outsider artists are often pegged as mentally ill or unstable because they come from non-traditional pathways into art and don’t often have careers or formal schooling. We presume that these artists’ minds function in a way that isn’t irony-tinged, but of another dimension, and that their art is some kind of clear window into the abstract; we see them as a kind of refreshing form of authenticity.
But when I ask about outsider artists’ eccentricities, former Iowa City denizen and artist Jesse Albrecht reminds me that many “normal” artists exhibit mental illness and instability as well. But there’s a problem with this belief, and the problem is that we live in a world of so much continuous contact, content and access—sweet access—that we can all, by those standards, function as outsider artists. Aren’t we all a little mentally ill or unstable, exhibiting varying and amazing degrees of mania, depression, oversharing and hiding? In short, aren’t we all a little abnormal? If so, then what kind of template is there for human beings and their creative minds? We are all outsider artists taking backroads to subversively capture the attentions of unsuspecting audiences, from grandmothers who don’t know how to use Facebook to embarrassing Tumblrs to Deviantart accounts.
So, if we’re all outsider artists, does that mean outsider art ceases to exist?
The answer is no.
Outsider art denotes new levels of subversion, non-intention and decontextualized reframing; in other words, it goes to the animals—those who, with their total lack of base context for what we palate as art, have fascinatingly seized the mantle to make room for the unintended, mentally-different art that we once associated with people on the fringe.
Animals are outsider artists whose owners present their work and translate for them. This work is immersive, painstakingly honest, bereft of irony and it eschews divisiveness. Animals like Adorable_Little_Lady. Or the animals that people dress up on YouTube: from Sharky, a pitbull attacked by a cat riding a Roomba, to Tongo, a parrot that jumbles song lyrics with commonplace phrases and shrieks them out in wide-eyed gusto. It is the owners’ search for artfulness through their animals’ domesticated wildness that formulates this new forefront of unintended avant-garde, but since the animals are alive and carry it out, they need artistic credit as well. It’s a beautiful collaboration.
As our human fringe dissipates with expanding access to human thought and conversation, the art world turns thankfully to the frontier inhabited by wild and exotic animals. But we tend to put such animals and their outsider art on display like gallery objects. Just as local pet stores do. Think of Petland in Iowa City as the hands-on, peppy local gallery that lets you play with and pet the art. Petco in Coralville is the omnipresent small city downtown gallery filled with stuffy, expensive work. But you’re not supposed to pet the “animals” at these establishments; if you absolutely insist on doing so, however, disinterested (or friendly and willing to bury their employer) staff will let you, provided you don’t tell anyone working and you do it quickly.
Of course, a huge part of appreciating outsider art is in the response and the intention of the audience. Do we hate the animals (art/ists) we see, like some patrons who are dragged along to museums? Instead of taking trips to galleries (pet stores) in town, make a connection with the animals at the pet store (galleries) who have been genetically and artfully harvested to entertain us, to communicate with us or as Emily Dickenson said, to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
It is the subjective whim of expressive humanity’s burden to apply artfulness, and it is our brave and unsuspecting animals’ job to shoulder that burden.
Russell Jaffe is a weirdman doing weirdthings.
