The walkaround of this year’s Outsider Art Fair in the Metropolitan Pavilion on East 18th Street was as energizing as ever, filled from aisle to aisle with eye-popping work. [...]
Outsider art was first so-called because the artists came from outside the art system, were unschooled, self-taught. In the 1940s Jean Dubuffet, the French artist, introduced another concept, Art Brut, raw art, which included the work of children, individuals in jail and those with mental problems, who he would seek out in asylums and hospitals. He built up a collection of Art Brut and applied the term to his own work.
The pictorial intensity of such work earned it a growing following and in 1993 Sanford L. Smith, who had launched a number of fairs, opened the first Outsider Art Fair in New York. In 2103 it was bought by Andrew Edlin, a dealer who specialized in the field. This year I went on each of the fair’s four days, speaking with several artists and finding that the forces that make for outsiderdom remain constant. [...]
Humor, an extreme rarity in New York art, does sometimes bubble in Outsider art, where even the hard-edged abstractions can look gleeful. It was with all such matters in mind I sat down with Andrew Edlin in his gallery where he had just opened a show of the striking work of a newly surfaced Outsider, Abraham Lincoln Walker.
Edlin though was not fearful that the swelling wave of media artworld info would infect his world of loners, feeling that they were protected by their own obsessions. “Your idiosyncrasy is in itself an isolating factor, “ he said “It’s not the physical isolation, it’s making art that is not in dialog with academic art and art history. That’s what makes the work feel so liberated. because if you go to Basel or Frieze you know all the artists being shown were exposed to more or less the same canon, the same array of techniques, the culture of the art world, the art schools. And they are very much consciously in dialog with one another. Their work is a combination of this influence with that influence, their own commentary on this movement or that movement. With the Outsider Art Fair or field is that’s not really part of the equation.”
Some galleries in the fair also show upon other genres of art, such as Van der Plas who mostly focus upon Street art, graffiti, but Andrew Edlin, who I first met when he was working on a show of the terrific hyperrealist, Joe Coleman, is a militant supporter of not just Outsider art but outsiderish behavior.
“Like so many other aspects of American life and culture the art world has become hyper commercialized,” Edlin says. “Most people just want to talk about money. How much did this sell for, how much did that sell for. Certainly we exist by selling work but none of this work was made with the market in mind. These artists were not making work to get dealers or critics or a curator.”
Or, he observes, even to get attention, Outsider artists not being given to the Here’s my slides, all my slides! routines with which anyone who frequents the artworld will be familiar.
“In the case of almost all these artists their work has been brought to the attention of the market or the public by a third party who deems the work valuable or interesting and is compelled to get it out there” he said. “ Because the artists themselves, that is not why they were making the work.” [...]
And so too, Abraham Lincoln Walker, whose work is now up in the Andrew Edlin Gallery. “In the case of Abraham Lincoln Walker it was his son,” Edlin says. “The works were in a tractor trailer for thirty years. Finally he nearly died of covid and he worried that the work would never get any attention.”
- Anthony Haden-Guest