Ken Johnson’s review
of the Outsider Art Fair in New York demonstrated the remarkable: Once
the category shed the unfortunate nomenclature of primitive and naive,
it has remained static. Johnson’s review could have been written ten,
twenty or even thirty years ago with almost no changes. Within that
consistency is slippage. No definition of it includes even a majority of
practitioners, but few in the audience fail to spot it when it’s in
front of them.
Photo, Michael Falco, New York Times,
featuring Bill Traylor.
Outside is the place
for the driven end of folk art. It has its stars, but they remain as
isolated from the mainstream as they are from casual whittlers and
house-proud quilters. Mainstream artists account for their time and
place. Outsiders don’t have to. For them, the action is inside their
heads. (Maybe it should be called Insider art.) Bill
Traylor’s paintings would have been equally at home and not at home
in any time in the last 1,000 years. That’s a freedom no other kind of
art achieves.
Sorry Regina, but I happen to believe that Primitive and Naive are words to be coveted and they are at their most worthwhile goodness when they emanate as the vapors of life. It would make me nervous to consider that there might be a university engaged in the churning of the student body into bona fide outsider artists. Being part of the mainstream can be problematic when an artist’s offerings are ensconced within the framework of the next great idea. Soon I’ll have my own website where i’ll be discussing Foundational Ignorance in art and how being uninformed might be a saving grace and a relevance.