outsider art

Outsider art

The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut (French: [aʁ bʁyt], "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.^[1]
While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "outsider art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.
Outsider art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1993). The term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art created by people outside the mainstream "art world," regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work.

Art of the insane

Main article: Creativity and mental illness

Interest in the art of insane asylum inmates had begun to grow in the 1920s. In 1921 Dr. Walter Morgenthaler published his book Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist) on Adolf Wölfli, a psychotic mental patient in his care. Wölfli had spontaneously taken up drawing, and this activity seemed to calm him. His most outstanding work is an illustrated epic of 45 volumes in which he narrates his own imaginary life story. With 25,000 pages, 1,600 illustrations, and 1,500 collages, it is a monumental work. He also produced a large number of smaller works, some of which were sold or given as gifts. His work is on display at the Adolf Wölfli Foundation in the Museum of Fine Art, Bern. A defining moment was the publication of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the mentally ill) in 1922, by Dr Hans Prinzhorn.
People with some artistic training and well-established artists are not immune from mental illness and may also be institutionalised. For example, William Kurelek, later awarded the Order of Canada for his artistic life work, as a young man was admitted to the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital where he was treated for schizophrenia.^[2] In hospital he painted, producing "The Maze", a dark depiction of his tortured youth.^[3] This 1953 work was used as the cover of the 1981 Van Halen rock album Fair Warning. His experience in the hospital was documented in the LIFE Science Library book The Mind, published in 1965.

 Jean Dubuffet and art brut

French artist Jean Dubuffet was particularly struck by Bildnerei der Geisteskranken and began his own collection of such art, which he called art brut or raw art. In 1948 he formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut along with other artists, including André Breton. The collection he established became known as the Collection de l'art brut. It contains thousands of works and is now permanently housed in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Dubuffet characterized art brut as:

"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 precious 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." - Jean Dubuffet. Place à l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 - February 1988). p.36 Dubuffet's writing on art brut was the subject of a noted program at the Art Club of Chicago in the early 1950s.

Dubuffet argued that 'culture', that is mainstream culture, managed to assimilate every new development in art, and by doing so took away whatever power it might have had. The result was to asphyxiate genuine expression. Art brut was his solution to this problem – only art brut was immune to the influences of culture, immune to being absorbed and assimilated, because the artists themselves were not willing or able to be assimilated.

 The cultural context of the outsider art category

The interest in "outsider" practices among twentieth century artists and critics can be seen as part of a larger emphasis on the rejection of established values within the modernist art milieu. The early part of the 20th Century gave rise to cubism and the Dada, Constructivist and Futurist movements in art, all of which involved a dramatic movement away from cultural forms of the past. Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, for example, abandoned "painterly" technique to allow chance operations a role in determining the form of his works, or simply to re-contextualize existing "readymade" objects as art. Mid-century artists, including Pablo Picasso, looked "outside" the traditions of high culture for inspiration, drawing from the artifacts of "primitive" societies, the unschooled artwork of children, and vulgar advertising graphics. Dubuffet's championing of the art brut – of the insane and others at the margins of society – is yet another example of avant-garde art challenging established cultural values.

Vocabulary

Two images of Joe Minter's African Village in America, a half-acre visionary art environment in Birmingham, Alabama. Scenes include African warriors watching their descendants’ struggles in Alabama, tributes to black scientists and military leaders, recreations of the epic civil rights confrontations in Alabama, and biblical scenes.

A number of terms are used to describe art that is loosely understood as "outside" of official culture. Definitions of these terms vary, and there are areas of overlap between them. The editors of Raw Vision, a leading journal in the field, suggest that "Whatever views we have about the value of controversy itself, it is important to sustain creative discussion by way of an agreed vocabulary". Consequently they lament the use of "outsider artist" to refer to almost any untrained artist. "It is not enough to be untrained, clumsy or naïve. Outsider Art is virtually synonymous with Art Brut in both spirit and meaning, to that rarity of art produced by those who do not know its name."

• Art Brut: literally translated from French means "raw art"; 'Raw' in that it has not been through the 'cooking' process: the art world of art schools, galleries, museums. Originally art by psychotic individuals who existed almost completely outside culture and society. Strictly speaking it refers only to the Collection de l'art brut.
• Folk art: Folk art originally suggested crafts and decorative skills associated with peasant communities in Europe – though presumably it could equally apply to any indigenous culture. It has broadened to include any product of practical craftsmanship and decorative skill – everything from chain-saw animals to hub-cap buildings. A key distinction between folk and outsider art is that folk art typically embodies traditional forms and social values, where outsider art stands in some marginal relationship to society's mainstream.
• Intuitive art / Visionary art: Raw Vision Magazine's preferred general terms for outsider art. It describes them as deliberate umbrella terms. However, Visionary Art unlike other definitions here can often refer to the subject matter of the works, which includes images of a spiritual or religious nature. Intuitive art is probably the most general term available. Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art based in Chicago operates a museum dedicated to the study and exhibition of intuitive and outsider art. The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is dedicated to the collection and display of visionary art.
• Marginal art/Art singulier: Essentially the same as Neue Invention; refers to artists on the margins of the art world.
• Naïve art: Another term commonly applied to untrained artists who aspire to "normal" artistic status, i.e. they have a much more conscious interaction with the mainstream art world than do outsider artists.
• Neuve Invention: Used to describe artists who, although marginal, have some interaction with mainstream culture. They may be doing art part-time for instance. The expression was coined by Dubuffet too; strictly speaking it refers only to a special part of the Collection de l'art brut.
• Visionary environments: Buildings and sculpture parks built by visionary artists - range from decorated houses, to large areas incorporating a large number of individual sculptures with a tightly associated theme. Examples include Watts Towers by Simon Rodia, Buddha Park and Sala Keoku by Bunleua Sulilat, and The Palais Ideal by Ferdinand Cheval.

compitional grid

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~ecdfourq/composition/CAE2008Abstract.html

need to check this out

this is the grid that i will be using for my own composition and hopefull i can created the stucture with in my own work and then have the chaos in it bcuz it is how i work :) i just hope that this works 

and the 'Assumption of the Virgin' by Titain

 oo kk this that the angles that the 3 split up ward and i is related to my work quite alot

time to whittle

 ok well i started to whittle and that is the piece of wood i had  plus the saftie glove

 the knife i use to start to whittle

the end product and it was a dick but i did find out that it took the stress away and it was very relaxsing and then started to look into where whittleing came from and way people did it and i found out that it started up in the war the soilders would do it to carm their nerves

 hand of didck or something like that lol no but really it is another piece of wood i whittled and i did that with it it lookd quite cool

 i just thought that lok really cool and it is just dried paint in a bucket

 woman doin chores and kid in back ground very sterio tipical picture i dont like it

 but she has got a engeners overall on soo it has this kind of voice that is say i dont wont to do this shit i wont to do something better

 elivated dick on the floor abit like politics or footbal i just wonted to change the context of the same kind of piece

 ity does look like it is looking at me or crawling toward me creepy

it is like the bush of it haha yh

 man :) umm yh it was on of the few i started using colour i like it and it does have a present within the room

close up  butr it does look a lot like David Keffords work with the figer look about it
 

 it does look very male bcuz of how i hav put it 2geather with all joinery found objects

kid calling out that is quite a good name for it. and i need to work out what to call my pieces just to help out people

well ask you can see its a boy well done yh lol i liker the humore that i have in my work

 i ended up painting him and abit less litrial  soo you have blue for boy but when it was a girls colour and a joinery piece implying that there is sexi time that or something along those lines

just a close up of the blue to make sure in was all level and intechaly put there

this one creep the hell out oif me bcuz it looks like she is following my no matter where i go :) yh this is the girl of my work soo if u put them all togeather you get boy, girl, sex and kid hmmm kowinsedence  i think not :)

Reflection note on research:

Reflection note on research:

·         Ok well let me see i started to look  in to dada and Duchamp and mark Scott wood with David kefford of starting points because they work with collarge

·         Then i email Mark and David Kefford and i i go some very usefull feedback from them and this then help me to look in to more artist and movement such as Dada and fluxes  and in to some of the artist like Sarah Lucas and like folk art and outside art

·         I then started to look in to the idea of whittling and how i can show that with in my work and i look in to some art that involed it and i also found out that in the war soldiers would whittle because it kept them of thinking about the fight ahead soo it was used to carm the nerves

·         I was thinkin about sexi time at this point and made a dick out of the wood and that got me thinking about Sarah Lucas’s work and what she does then i lookin in to David Kefford and i saw more similarity and i was really fun to chat with him though email. 

·         i don’t know what to say just that i get an idea and then i research in to artist that relate to my work and that led me in to doing more research on other thing and different thing plus the way i work is i i do the research to strengthen my idea but it just end up me goin in a different direction and then ending up in a similar direction that i was in to begin with after going thought 3 or 4 ideas and it still end u bing good i hope

·         But yh without my research i would not of got to where i am right now and this is very helpful so has the reflective practise and also lookin in to different art movements such as Dada and Folk Art and Outsider art where i found them where from Mark Scott Wood emails to me

·         So it has all been very useful and just doing this is helping me out with the way i will structure my work and organise it so people can come in to my space a kinda understand it but i hope that when people do look at it that they walk though it and walk out whiles thinkin about the different meaning that is could be/ mean

·         And my work defiantly depend on how i am feelin at that time so if i am feelin happy there will be happiness within it but if i am sad then there want  be happiness in it or if it is there then it be fake soo a difference kind of meaning but i want it all to have that kinda of joke of sexi time and rudeness just because it will be very funny  to me

sarah lucas

Sarah Lucas (born Holloway, London, 1962) is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour, and include photography, collage and found objects.

Education
Lucas left school at 16; she studied art at The Working Men's College (1982–3), London College of Printing (1983–4), and Goldsmith's College (1984–7), graduating with a degree in Fine Art in 1987.^[1]

Work

Lucas was included in the 1988 group exhibition Freeze along with contemporaries including Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, and Gary Hume.^[2] In 1990, Lucas co-organized the East Country Yard Show with Henry Bond, in which she also exhibited. Her first two solo exhibitions in 1992 were titled The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board. It was in in the early 1990s when Lucas began using furniture as a substitute for the human body, usually with crude genital punning.^[3] Created for a show organised by fellow artist Georg Herold at Portikus, Au Naturel (1994) is an assemblage of objects—a mattress, a bucket, a pair of melons, oranges and a cucumber—that suggest male and female body parts.^[4] For six months in 1993, Lucas and fellow artist Tracey Emin rented a retail space in east London, The Shop, where they made artworks, ranging from printed mugs to T-shirts with slogans, and put them on sale. In works such as Bitch (table, t-shirt, melons, and vacuum-packed smoked fish, 1995), she merges tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made. In earlier work, she had displayed enlarged pages from the Sunday Sport newspaper. Through her career, Lucas has continued to appropriate everyday materials (including, for example, freshly made fried eggs) to make works that use humour, visual puns and sexual metaphors of sex, death, Englishness and gender.

Sarah Lucas. Self-Portraits 1990 – 1998 (1999)

Sarah Lucas is also known for her self-portraits, such as Human Toilet Revisited, 1998, a colour photograph in which she sits on a toilet smoking a cigarette. In her solo exhibition The Fag Show at Sadie Coles in 2000, she used cigarettes as a material, as in Self-portrait with Cigarettes (2000).
Writing in the The Guardian, in 2011, Aida Edemariam said that "Lucas was the wildest of the Young British Artists, partying hard and making art that was provocative and at times genuinely shocking."^[5] In 1996, she was the subject of a BBC documentary, Two Melons and a Stinking Fish.

 Exhibitions

Lucas had her first solo exhibition in 1992 at City Racing, an artists' run gallery in south London, and her first solo show in New York at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 1995.^[6] One-person museum exhibitions at Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, at Portikus in Frankfurt, at Museum Ludwig in Cologne and at Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein am Hamburg and Tate Liverpool have accompanied exhibitions in less conventional spaces—an empty office building for The Law in 1997, a disused postal depot in Berlin for the exhibition Beautiness in 1999, and an installation at the Freud Museum called Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 2000.
Lucas’s work has been included in major surveys of new British art in the last decade including Brilliant!—New Art From London at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1995, Sensation (Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy in 1997), and Intelligence—New British Art, 2000, at Tate Britain. In 2003, Sarah Lucas participated in the 50th International Biennale of Art in Venice, Outlook: Contemporary Art in Athens, and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, a three person exhibition for Tate Britain with Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst in 2004. From October 2005 to January 2006, Tate Liverpool presented the first survey exhibition of Lucas's work.

 Personal life

In the mid-2000s, Lucas was in a relationship with fellow YBA Angus Fairhurst.^[7] Lucas now lives with her partner Julian Simmons, in the former residence of Benjamin Britten near Aldeburgh; a home which is "tucked away down a long country lane, behind a Baptist church in Suffolk."^[8]

off-color

The term off-color humor (also known as vulgar humor or crude humor) is an Americanism used to describe jokes, prose, poems, black comedy, blue comedy, insult comedy, cringe comedy and skits that deal with topics that are considered to be in poor taste or overly vulgar by the prevailing morality of a culture. Most commonly labeled as "off-color" are acts concerned with sex, a particular ethnic group, or gender. Other off-color topics include violence, particularly domestic abuse; excessive swearing or profanity; "toilet humor"; national superiority or inferiority, dead baby jokes, pedophilic content, and any other topics generally considered impolite or indecent. Generally, the point of off-color humor is to induce laughter by evoking a feeling of shock and surprise in the comedian's audience. In this way, off-color humor is related to other forms of postmodern humor, such as the anti-joke.

History
Off-color humor was used in Ancient Greek comedy, primarily by its most famous contributor and representative, Aristophanes. His work parodied some of the great tragedians of his time, especially Euripides, using sexual and excremental jokes that received great popularity among his contemporaries.
Another one for the endless sexual jokes was William Shakespeare, the 16th-century playwright and poet. Almost every one of his plays contains suggestive jokes and innuendo.
Jonathan Swift, an Irish satirist in the 17th century, used scatological humor in some of his pieces, including his famous essay A Modest Proposal and his rather crude poem "The Lady's Dressing Room," in which the speaker comments on the goings-on in a 17th-century woman's room, including her business in her chamber pot.
Dirty jokes were once considered subversive and underground, and rarely heard in public. Comedian Lenny Bruce was tried, convicted, and jailed for obscenity after a stand up performance that included off-color humor in New York City in 1964. Comedian and actor Redd Foxx was well known in nightclubs in the 1960s and 1970s for his raunchy stand-up act, but toned it down for the television shows Sanford and Son and The Redd Foxx Comedy Hour, stating in the first monologue of the latter show that the only similarity between the show and his nightclub act was that "I'm smoking".[1] American society has become increasingly tolerant of off-color humor since that time. Such forms of humor have become widely distributed and more socially acceptable, in part due to the mainstream success in the 1970s and 1980s of comedians like Dolemite, Andrew Dice Clay's "The Dice Man", and Richard Pryor.
In the 1990s and modern era, comedians such as George Carlin, Bill Hicks and Dave Chappelle use shocking content to draw attention to their criticism of social issues, especially censorship and the socioeconomic divide. The highly-praised television show South Park also popularized the use of offensive humor, for which the show has become infamous. The Aristocrats is perhaps the most famous dirty joke in the US and is certainly one of the best-known and most oft-repeated among comedians themselves.
In British humor, the genre of "sick jokes" is often used to shock by poking fun at taboo or as a reaction against political correctness. Examples include the website B3ta, the humour wiki Sickipedia and its accompanying book The Bumper B3ta Book of Sick Jokes,^[1] and the adult comic Viz.