i

New School for Social Research, United States

zolberg v@ newschool.edul

Vera L. Zolbergi

OUTSIDER ART: FROM THE MARGINS

TO THE CENTER?

sociologia&antropologia | rio de janeiro, v.05.02: 501514, august, 2015

INTRODUCTION
When I attended the Venice Biennale two years ago, I knew little more than the
fact that it took place in a lovely park and that it was bound to be crowded. I
had visited Venice a number of times previously, but only once during the summer of a Biennale. Already by this time, its success had inspired a proliferation
of similar events in many other major cities aspiring to global prominence.
So Paulo was among the first in the immediate post-World War II era.Regular major art events, usually referred to as Biennales (even if they meet less
frequently as, for example, Dokumenta in Kassel) have burgeoned. In many
ways, these events have joined the worlds most prominent art museums in
providing the frame that legitimizes contemporary art works and the artists
responsible for making them. Unlike purely commercial art fairs, which are
simply marketplaces for art dealers, the Biennale phenomenon has a more
serious aim, intellectually attractive and adventurous, even displaying works
that are virtually impossible to collect because their existence is so tenuous.
Almost from the outset, the Venice Biennale acquired a reputation as
one of the most important venues for the contemporary arts, exhibiting a
broad range of forms and genres. Among these, the genre that has become
known as outsider art is of particular interest because of its divergence from

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conventional patterns of art works. It was a total surprise for me, therefore,
to enter what has become the most important venue of the 2013 Biennale, the
Arsenale, only to discover that virtually everything on display was apparently
outsider art of one kind or another! How could that be? Outsider Art is the
last genre one would associate with an institution that has come to represent
what is now a global phenomenon of aesthetic legitimacy. This is the puzzle
at the center of my paper.
A brief history
The Venice Biennale was first launched by Venices mayor and city officials,
with the support of prominent residents, in the late nineteenth century. Its
opening exhibition was held in 1895 in the presence of Italys King Umberto I
and Queen Margherita of Savoy.The event foregrounded contemporary Italian
artists but the organizers soon decided to invite a number of other nations to
participate. While the first and most imposing pavilion to be constructed was
Italys, over the years other nations built structures to display their own national art. From the quarter of a million people who visited the opening event,
the Venice Biennale has continued to draw well over 300,000 visitors every two
years, a sequence broken only during times of war, or periods of political and
civil disorder. The themes and art styles featured at each Biennale event have
varied according to artistic trends, and sometimes political pressures, with attention focusing on contemporary artists. Thus the first large exposition in the
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early years was a retrospective of the works of Austrian Secessionist Gustave

Klimt. By the end of the Second World War, works by European and American
abstractionists had also gained entry.
While the Biennale was supported largely by the city of Venice and
its residents, it also came to depend on the approval and support of the Italian State, a relatively new entity at the time. In its first hundred years, the
art Biennale was joined by many other aesthetic attractions, including music,
cinema, architecture, dance and drama. Under pressure from artists and antibourgeois political movements, the painting and sculpture that predominated
in the early years of the Venice Biennale gave way to other forms, while the
space expanding from the Giardini to the ancient Arsenale that was no longer
used for industrial arms production. Over time, an aperto section was launched
to house works by young artists. By now, the Biennale had spilled out of its
designated sites to encompass almost the entire city of Venice, whose many
public buildings, and some private residences, became employed as venues
for displaying art works.
Within the broad framework of public policy, government support of
culture varies from one nation to another. In authoritarian or, especially, totalitarian regimes culture is usually a tightly controlled instrument of ideol-

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503

ogy. In liberal democracies the expenditure of public funds are justified on

other, supposedly non-ideological grounds: for example, the role of culture
in strengthening civil society. One of the watershed moments in the history of
state support for art took place in France when Louis XIV, at the initiative of a
dozen or so art practitioners, agreed to the inauguration of the Royal Academy
of Painting and Sculpture in 1648. Before this time, these art forms had been
deemed socially and culturally beneath the liberal arts, i.e. those embedded
in the university: grammar, dialectic and rhetoric (the trivium) and arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium).It was the status of academician that elevated painters and sculptors out of the manual crafts and the
guild system to the symbolic heights associated with the nations rulers and
most renowned university intellectuals. No longer was their creative practice
assimilated to the mechanical arts or manual trades (Heinich, 1991: 7 ss).This
was just the beginning of what was to become one of the most centralized
states in Europe.
As successful as the Sun King was in establishing the higher institutions
for art and imposing his taste whether in painting, sculpture, music, theater,
dance or furniture on his courtiers and on the nation as a whole, subsequent regimes would introduce their own tastes. After the Great Revolution
in particular, many of the old regimes institutions were transformed, or even
discarded, at least for a time.The Academy of Fine Arts and its related salon
system, which had been introduced to provide a snapshot of artistic creativity, either annually or in the form of biennial exhibitions, likewise underwent
sweeping changes.The numerous changes in government regime throughout
the nineteenth century meant that new institutions were created in line with
the profound political transformations taking place.With the middle class rapidly expanding, a potential clientele of art collectors also began to grow.Until
well into the middle of the nineteenth century, as the art market with its
art dealers and regular publications of art criticism emerged and grew, so
better opportunities opened up for artists.The new salons provided venues
that continued to be among the most prestigious settings for gaining official commissions and meeting prominent private clients.It might be thought
that innovativeness would have been welcomed in this expanding sphere of
opportunities.However innovative artists found access to the official salons
blocked, forcing them to seek other outlets to market their works. Whether or
not theyrejected the styles associated with the academic system, what had
become a highly regarded profession attracted many more aspirants to the
highest honors that the system had to offer.As the field became overcrowded,
many artists turned instead to the newly emergent commercial gallery-dealer
system (White & White, 1965).
The public institutions created by Frances rulers became models for
many other nations striving to garner a high symbolic cultural status.Ad-

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504

mired court painters and artists cooperated with these institutions for their
own benefit.The academic system established the hierarchy of genres, rules
that guided how subjects should be depicted and enforced these rules by rewarding the most talented artists those who accepted the rules of art based
on hierarchies in artistic status.They constituted the artistic profession that
Howard Becker (1982) conceptualized as integrated professionals. Exclusivist
and narrow in their definition of art, academic establishments were eventually
shaken by challenges from successive stylistic waves. Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism and other variants exploring the boundaries of what constituted
realism along with styles that deliberately rejected academic teachings, some
of them avant-garde art movements (Poggioli, 1971), were deliberately adopted
to confirm the individualism of creative artists along lines that deliberately
opposed the academic dogmas in which these painters had been schooled.
In this sense, they behaved like the mavericks categorized and described by
Howard Becker. It is, indeed, as though they were striving to be un-integrated
professionals. But why, then, are they not outsiders?
Construction of the Outsider Art Genre
Before the term outsider art emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century, carers working with asylum patients in some countries had observed that
their charges responded well to materials provided to them to encourage their
engagement in craft work.Some patients used them to draw on paper, producsociologia&antropologia | rio de janeiro, v.05.02: 501514, august, 2015

ing fascinating imagery, texts, and sometimes musical notations.Eventually,

these early practices led to the development of a form of therapy.When this
work came to the attention of art professionals, it gave rise to the notion of the
art of the insane (though the term insane is now viewed as misleading).The
forms of imagery varied, but the strangeness of the content, and the inability
or unwillingness of some of the creators to explain what they meant, intrigued
these professionals. Drawings like these were later found beyond the asylum,
produced by various relatively isolated individuals engaging in creative activities.The works of those discovered by chance after their death struck their
discoverers as having parallels or similarities to the works of some modern
artists (Bowler, 1997).
But as in the case of some avant-gardist art works, sometimes these
images were compared to the work of children, who were believed to create
without the burden of social norms that modernists considered impediments
to freedom of expression.This idea was also applied to the creations of primitive peoples from cultures outside western civilization, echoing Romantic notions of the nobility of native peoples in the Americas, and the peasantries of
less developed parts of Europe. Recently the genre has been enlarged by the
cultural creations of what are usually thought of as self-taught creators consid-

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505

ered marginal to or marginalized by their society: nave artists, folk craftsmen, or

women, urban or rural isolates, hobbyists, the homeless, prison inmates, institutionalized elderly (Zolberg & Cherbo, 1997).It has even been applied to certain
forms of vanguard art, such as Pop Art (Cherbo, 1997).
Superficially, the works of mental patients, social isolates or eccentrics
may resemble the work of folk artists.But just as Becker is careful to distinguish between works created by integrated professionals and mavericks, he
also distinguishes between the creations made by nafs and folk artists. For
Becker, folk artists are just as embedded in their social and communal worlds
as integrated professional artists are in their institutionalized art worlds. Folk
artists learn their craft (note: not their art) from the traditions of their community, from their parents, sometimes as apprentices. But the nafs are separate
from such social worlds; they exemplify spontaneity and freedom.Though
Becker does not develop the connections further, the word nave itself (commonly used in France and many other parts of the world) retains the notion
of the unsocialized child. In Paris, there are museums of lart naf, just like the
one I visited in Rio about twenty years ago.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century outsider art began to grow
in fame to the monetary and symbolic benefit of their collectors.Many of
these works were exhibited in museums, featured in art magazines, and analyzed in books that detailed and assessedtheir quality, just as though they
had been made by conventional artists.But in contrast to what are classified
as professional artists, outsider artists are generally believed to be unaware of
their artistry, not promoting their own career, but spontaneously following
their creative impulse (Becker, 1982).They became known largely through the
discovery and marketing practices of art dealers, gallery owners, art critics,
scholars, museums and government agencies (Ardery, 1997).It is their carers,
however, who select which of their creations merit public display, and which
are merely discarded.
Aside from the nave and the insane, a third class of canonical outsider
art comprises what used to be called primitive art, a form whose meanings derive from completely different societal and cultural traditions.It was
through convenient misunderstandings of their origin and significance that
primitive art was lumped together with the works of the insane, adult nafs
and child artists (Zolberg, 1997).
The Social Construction of Outsider Art
Interest in outsider art, I wish to argue, is an aspect of attempts by observers
and scholars to grasp the meaning and impact of modernizing trends in society. Theorists who laid the groundwork for understanding the phenomenon
approached it from various perspectives and disciplines, although with the

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exceptions of Max Weber (Gerth & Mills, 1946) and Georg Simmel (Wolff, 1990)
they generally did not refer explicitly to the arts. One of the most influential
formulations was that of Ferdinand Toennies, whose analysis of the growing
dominance of modern society over what he perceived as a declining communitarian rural life world summarizes a widespread unease prevalent among
many nineteenth century intellectuals (Toennies, 1957).Cultural opinion leaders such as William Morris and his followers tried to overcome what they
saw as the cold ugliness of industrialization and its products by reverting to
medieval inspiration for design and to the organization of work around handicraft. Forms and genres that they associated with folk culture appealed to their
Romantic sensibilities and, in some cases, their socialist ideas.
An imagined noble savage and peasantry were not the only victims of
nineteenth-century modernity.There was a longing expressed in a search for
authenticity in contrast to the artificiality of urban civilization. Seemingly embodied in the artistic creations of children and asylum inmates alike, authenticity was sought by therapeutically oriented art scholars of the 1920s.Hans
Prinzhorn, for example, a leading proponent of the artistry of the mentally
ill (Prinzhorn, 1972), was not alone in his appreciation of their gifts.Walter
Morgenthaler, a physician in a Swiss institution, publicized the achievements
of one of the first major outsider artists to be discovered, his patient Adolph
Wlfli (Morgenthaler, 1992).
The form known as the primitive involves works made principally by
non-western peoples, and has a very different source and trajectory.It entered
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European consciousness through nineteenth and twentieth-century colonialist

imperialism, when very few of these objects were recognized as art: rather, they
were seen as superstitious fetishes or symptomatic of the innate childishness
of primitive peoples.These interpretations provided additional justification
for European domination, since they intersected with conventional stereotypes, rationalizing the claim that colonialism would elevate these peoples to
a civilized state.The primitive as artistry was discovered largely in the early
twentieth century when, spearheaded by avant-garde artists (Cubists, Fauvists
and Expressionists), these works were reinterpreted in appropriate aesthetic
terms (Vogel, 1991). It was not long before other artists, art historians and critics turned their attention to this blossoming genre (Zolberg, 1997).
The English critic Roger Cardinal (1972), the French avant-garde artist
Jean Dubuffet (1986), the art historian and museum curator Robert Goldwater
(1986), historians and critics such as John MacGregor (1989), Michel Thvoz
(1976), and many more have provided multi-faceted scholarship on these works.
Anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists have added their own understandings: Howard Becker (1982), Sander Gilman (1985), James Clifford (1988), Anne
Bowler (1997), Vera Zolberg (1997) and Julia Ardery (1997), for example.Several
of them have noted affinities between outsider art and the genres and works

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of maverick artists (Becker, 1982) found in the turn of the century avant-garde
movements (Bowler, 1997; Tuchman & Eliel, 1992; Hall & Metcalf, 1994).
State and Market in the Making of the Genre
This overview reveals that outsider art flourishes or languishes depending on
the political regime and the art market in which it emerges.The complexity of
both art and its context makes it necessary to clarify the nature of their intersections by tracing the genres institutional and structural foundations.State
institutions and policies play a part, but government policies, vital as they are
to fostering or inhibiting culture, can seldom determine cultural outcomes
beyond their own regime.Their importance lies in the fact that they set the
conditions under which the public creation and dissemination of art can take
place.In liberal states where commercial processes are permitted and indeed
fostered, the power of the art market is at least as decisive as governmental
policy in providing gatekeepers, agencies responsible for determining reward,
recognition and legitimation.
The principal question is whether, how, and with what consequences
the public sector entered the domain of outsider art. Even though government is
responsible for establishing the framework in which markets behave, how participants behave within these art market structures and processes is equally
important.Although this combination of domains has not been directly drawn
together into a unified analysis, it appears that these gatekeeper agencies and
groups are engaged together in discovering and constructing new forms of
outsider art. In complex modern states, not only do markets play a role, they
also shape the ways in which certain professions develop.
The professions that gave rise to various forms of psychotherapy converged with the rise of avant-garde art movements.The resulting imagery was
interpreted as the spontaneous expressions of outsiders who were seeking a
visionary experience.Added to these unschooled and apparently spontaneous
creations by institutionalized mental patients and children were the tribal
arts of Africa. As the insider art worlds of academies and dealer systems
became increasingly open to stylistic and genre innovations during the twentieth century, official and conventional art categories underwent transformation.This was also true of unconventional avant-garde artists, whose claim
to be the arbiters of fine art was challenged by even more unconventional
expressions that rejected pure aestheticism and linked their creative output
to other domains.Barriers between high and low art, art and politics, art and
religious rite, art and emotional expression, art and life itself repeatedly became breached.Art historians, aestheticians, social scientists and policy makers now face complex challenges when they try to delineate what Art is, what
it includes or excludes, whether and how it should be evaluated, and the

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relative importance to be assigned to different genres (DiMaggio, 1987).These

uncertainties are directly implicated in controversies over how and whether
governments should provide official support for recent kinds of artistic creation, and their dissemination to larger audiences.
Public Policy and the Arts
While most liberal national governments recognize and support some art
forms, rarely is the institutional support structure as centralized as it is under authoritarian or despotic regimes.Nazi Germany suppressed the principal
forms of outsider art - as well as their creators!Under the sway of their leaders racist beliefs, based on an eugenicist pseudo-science, the states agencies
used the apparent kinship with the stylistic and philosophical orientations of
avant-garde forms (Expressionism) to justify official suppression of both (Barron, 1991). Labeling the art of vanguard artists and the art of the mentally ill,
the nave, and African works as degenerate, the Nazi regime persecuted and
frequently murdered artists, sold their works abroad to gain funding for their
policies, or to line their own pockets, or simply destroyed them.
In most other societies, outsider arts relationship to contemporary political agendas is more benign. Mussolinis Fascist regime displayedconsiderable appreciation of certain Italian vanguard artists work, especially the
Futurists ultra-nationalism.But once he had allied the country with Hitlers
Germany, his subordinates made every effort to promote art works that consociologia&antropologia | rio de janeiro, v.05.02: 501514, august, 2015

formed to Nazi dogma.With this aim in mind, in the late 1930s the Italian
pavilion featured artistic photographs of models, male or female, who were
predominantly blond and blue-eyed, intended to emphasize the Aryanization
of Italy.In relatively liberal regimes outsider art forms have come to be associated with a more benign message: heartwarming outcomes of social work or
psychotherapy. Some works have come to be regarded as possessing an aesthetic value in their own right.In this process they have become incorporated
into the dealer-gallery system and the art market more generally.
While an air of elitism still clings to the arts, both artists and the public
they seek out have expanded to the point where earlier conceptions of exclusivity seem to many critics inneed of revision.To some extent, this trend was
driven by the new challenge of the 1960s when Abstractionism was confronted
by Postmodernism. In Andreas Huyssens analysis, Postmodernism challenged
the classic avant-garde notion of an autonomous sphere of fine art, arguing
that this had preserved traditional notions of uniqueness and originality from
the illegitimate importations of technology.By challenging this stance, various
artists launched a revolution that brought mass media techniques into the
domain of the fine arts.No longer would the quasi-sacred realm of fine art
be clearly distinguishable from commerce. Instead, art came to include every-

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day consumer goods, on the same level as the aura-laden fine art to which
Walter Benjamin had directed his attention (Benjamin, 1969).In the process,
they blurred the line the Great Divide between fine art and commercial
art(Huyssen, 1986; Cherbo, 1997).Moreover, makers of prints, color lithographs,
and photographs capable of making virtually unlimited numbers of copies
were not content to be mere adjuncts by reproducing already acknowledged
works of art.Instead, they claimed that the media of design and advertising
themselves are Art. Those artists and critics upholding the older, exclusive
avant-garde ideals became the chief detractors of postmodernism.But their
efforts were largely in vain: the day of clear-cut boundaries between Fine Art
and other (lesser) art forms had passed.
Postmodernism has another side closely connected to the make-up of
society.Although the situation varies considerably from one nation to another,
in many places the exclusion from the aesthetic core of certain art forms on
the basis of their creators membership of identity categories gender, race,
class, status, or socially defined handicaps has gained the attention of policy
makers and scholars.Since art worlds are embedded in (and encompass part
of) the social fabric, it is unsurprising that they also reveal the tensions and
demands of underrepresented groups and their art works.The forms taken by
the Postmodern turn have implications for all the arts, but outsider art may
be the most salient because it reveals the multitude of domains in which different forms of artistic excellence are now recognized.
The Triumph of the Transitory
I began this essay by speaking of my astonishment at the 2013 Venice Biennale and its display of works that had earlier been recognized as examples of
outsider art, or that matched characteristics of works of that kind.
The dynamic of modernism was centered on the very dismantling of any
guiding canon, the blurring of the boundary between a governing center, and
recurring waves of outsiders struggling to become insiders. In the tradition of
the new, art could be intended or unintended, made either by professionals
or by non-professionals (Rosenberg, 1965).Unexpectedly, however, vanguard
innovations beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, for better
or worse, did so much violence to the Renaissance and Enlightenment heritage
underlying the cultural structure of the arts that it seemed altogether reasonable to characterize their effect as constituting the shock of the new (Hughes,
1981). Startling as it was at the time, this shock did not by itself immediately
destroy the consensus surrounding the fine arts.A century later, though, the
visual and aural revolution heralded at its outset has thrown into question the
very idea of a high aesthetic realm.The range and density of artistic change
have reached their apogee in the form of a permanent revolution.

outsider art: from the margins to the center?

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The existence of outsider art implies an insider art, one in which a

canon serves as a focus around which artistic products and their makers are
to be evaluated.But it is difficult today to identify any single canon that governs art in opposition to non-art. Without an autonomous domain of Fine Art
based on a consensus of aesthetic standards and criteria, in a world in which
anything can potentially be or become art, it is to be expected that outsider
art is no more likely to be excluded than a potentially infinite variety of other
genres.This does not imply that artistic recognition no longer exists, but that
recognition and legitimation are no longer identifiably situated in a single
institution such as an academy. Rather, they inhabit a domain composed of a
plurality of gatekeepers organizations, influential individuals, publications,
the media, popular and commercial or elite and scholarly each of which may
be local, national or international in reach.Insider/outsider distinctions have
become multidimensional; they are matters of degree rather than of kind.Recognition may be founded on the fame and glamor of stardom, commercial
success based on sales, or critical and scholarly appreciation, depending upon
the trajectory involved in the art works creation and reception.
No longer hemmed in by a single canon governing fine art, competing
groups promote forms or styles that they identify as their own.Shifting power
centers support claims to validity for a wide range of outsider activities and
mentalities (Huyssen, 1986: 218). In the process, the European autonomous
sphere of fine art has become one cultural structure among various.The artistic tradition in which both integrated professional artists and mavericks
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furthered their own creativity and success (Becker, 1982) has also enabled the
arts to become available for other purposes: for therapists using art, music
or theatrical performance for prisoners, the elderly, the ill, to improve their
sense of self-worth or to reinforce a sense of ethnic identity (Zolberg & Cherbo,
1997).On the other hand, this does not exclude the probability from an administrative perspective that the arts may be a means of social control in custodial institutions.What is clear is that the dynamic of insiders and outsiders
extends beyond the bounded art world of objects capable of being bought and
sold, and thus of gaining or losing value.The conjunction of government programs with agendas not specifically designed to construct this art genre, and
with commercial forces that capitalize on the spending power of an enlarged
clientele appreciative of authenticity and spontaneity, have equally played a
role in creating the genre.
Outsider artists present particular problems for analysis since they are
deemed to be isolated from ordinary society, with creations that illustrate an
extremely personal agenda, devoid of artistic traditions.Those who emphasize
their idiosyncrasy tend to characterize outsiders from a psychological point of
view as vulnerable and helpless compulsive visionaries.Indeed there is little
dispute about their marginality to existing art worlds.But the nature of this

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511

marginality is varied and changeable, as is their helplessness or their ability

to strategize.Rather than assume their ignorance and passivity in the face of
art world actors, it may be better to treat these characteristics as questions in
need of specification.With respect to Western art worlds, both asylum inmates
and African carvers played crucial, but relatively passive roles in the development of the twentieth century avant-garde (Goldwater, 1986).More recently,
some of these actors have become actively engaged with the art world, orienting their creativity towards institutionalized structures and aesthetics.In this
process they are encouraged by art world insiders.It would be overly facile,
however, to dismiss outsider art as no more than a case of marketing a new
genre in the anything goes art world that represents late capitalisms postmodern condition.While such a view correctly highlights the appropriation by
more powerful agents of the creative expression of socially excluded others,
stopping there would leave us with an impoverished analysis of what we can
clearly perceive as a complex phenomenon.The market has been an extremely
important factor, but it interacts on the one hand with the internal dynamic
of how art itself is conceived by art world participants, and on the other with
the public sector the State and the policies it generates.
As I have tried to show, in accord with current artistic practice, we
no longerhesitate to cross boundaries between fine art and popular art; the
political and personal; aesthetics and religion; art objects and performance;
alternative spaces and settings. Rather than assume its status as art, we see
its character to be constructed.The dynamic of insiders and outsiders is a
process that we extend beyond the bounded art world of objects that can be
bought and sold, that gain or lose value, and provide material for scholars
art historians, critics, social scientists to ponder. It may be that, as Andreas
Huyssen has optimistically suggested, the domination of the worlds fringes by
the West may be replaced by a healthy resistance of the dominated, generating
a productive tension between the political and the aesthetic (Huyssen, 1986:
221).I believe that the contribution of outsiders to the nourishing of this current aesthetic realm, for better or worse, supports this position.
Received on 03/30/2015 | Approved on 08/03/2015

Vera L. Zolberg is Professor Emerita of Sociology at The New

School for Social Research, NY. PhD in Sociology, Chicago
University. Constructing a Sociology of the Arts (1990) and Outsider
art: contesting boundaries in contemporary culture (1997), edited
with Joni Cherbo, are among her books.

outsider art: from the margins to the center?

512

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