EVERYDAY GENIUS: SELF-TAUGHT ART AND THE CULTURE OF AUTHENTICITY
By Gary Alan Fine
University of Chicago, $30, 328 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY ERIC GIBSON
In 1976, the Whitney Museum’s contribution to the nation’s bicentennial celebration was “200 Years of American Sculpture.” It was a pretty sizable exhibition, but one work in particular stood out and has remained with me ever since. Called “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly,” it was made over the course of about 15 years beginning around 1950 by one James Hampton.
This room scale work consists of a central throne flanked and surrounded by smaller altars and tabernacles, the whole complex richly formed and glittering in gold and silver. To stand in front of it is to be transfixed by one of the great visionary creations in all of American art. “The Hampton Throne,” as it is known, is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and in the years since the bicentennial, whenever I’ve had business there, I’ve made a point of seeking it out.
But here’s the rub: Hampton (who was born in 1909 and died in 1964) wasn’t a sculptor artist. Unlike Augustus St. Gaudens, David Smith and the other artists in the Whitney’s show, he had no formal art training. Nor did he pursue a career as an artist or have any involvement with the coterie of dealers, curators and collectors that makes up what is known as “the art world.”
Rather, he earned his living as a janitor for the General Services Administration and worked on his throne during his spare time in a rented garage, assembling it from discarded junk such as burned out light bulbs, cardboard and tin foil. He kept his work a secret, and as a result the throne was discovered almost by accident shortly after Hampton’s death. In other words, he was what today we would call an Outsider Artist.
In the nearly 30 years since the bicentennial, Outsider Art, then barely a blip on the art world’s radar screen (assuming it registered at all) has become big business. There are dealers who specialize in it, collectors who buy nothing else, entire museums devoted to it and annual trade fairs .
Yet in spite of its burgeoning success, the world of Outsider Art has always remained somewhat obscure, as subcultures often do. While there have been innumerable monographs on individual Outsider Artists (although not one on Hampton, unfortunately) and celebratory texts on Outsider Art in general, there has so far been no book that attempts to get beyond the clich of the “idiot savant,” creating undiscovered masterpieces in some back woods hovel, and explore this world in depth and breadth.
Happily,that deficit has now been remedied with Gary Alan Fine’s “Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity.” He examines the inner logic of the Outsider Art world — what constitutes an Outsider Artist, how value is assigned to their work and what criteria of judgment are applied. Mr. Fine —who, interestingly, is not an art historian but a professor of sociology (and Outsider Art collector) — has written a book that is indispensable for an understanding of this world and its workings.
As his subtitle suggests, Mr. Fine argues that the idea of “authenticity” is the key ingredient of Outsider Art. When we speak of authenticity in the context of a mainstream work of art, we mean one of two things: First, that the art object itself is genuine, that it was actually made by the person whose signature is on it, and second, that it “rings true,” that, whether representational or abstract, it is was so masterfully realized as to create a fully credible imaginative world into which we have no trouble entering completely.
As Mr. Fine points out, the word means something totally different when applied to Outsider Art, where it means the confidence that a particular object was absolutely, positively made by someone “outside” the mainstream. What is the source of that confidence? The artist’s biography. “Even if we admit that the content of the work matters,” he writes, “it is interpreted and situated within the context of the life experiences of the artist. The biography of the artist establishes the authenticity of the work. The lack of training of the artists is trumped by their experiences and the legitimating qualities of those experiences. These artists’ experiences, in conjunction with their creative talents, establish the value of the work.”
What he is saying is that Outsider Art turns conventional criteria of judgment on their head. Whereas a mainstream work of art is judged in terms of aesthetic criteria, when it comes to Outsider Art extra-aesthetic criteria rule. Or to put it another way, the mainstream art world judges Van Gogh an important painter because of the color, expression and emotional power of his canvases. Were he an Outsider Artist, however, his mastery would be thought to reside in the fact that he cut off his ear and, later, committed suicide.
Mr. Fine’s book is nowhere more fascinating than when it explores the implications of this attitude. To his credit, he does not spare himself when limning some of its absurdities, describing the thrill of visiting an Outsider Artist and thereby demonstrating how easy it is to be caught up in the romanticized world of the artistic innocent.
“The home — nearly a shack — was badly in need of repair,” he writes, “and had a musty, pungent odor … . It was located in what might be called the backwoods … . The artist, gaunt, nearly toothless sometimes incomprehensible, commented how nice it was to have visitors … her friends having long ago died. The artist’s overweight daughter padded around. This was real! I had arrived! I was able to peel off several crisp hundred-dollar bills to pay for the work I desired before driving off in my late-model car.”
Such is the obsession with biography, Mr. Fine tells us, that Outsider Art has produced its own version of niche collecting: Some collectors, he writes, specialize in the work of particular pathologies, such as work by schizophrenics, autistics and others. Outsider Art Porn, any one? But there are distinct hazards to the biography-is-all aesthetic. For if biography is content, and therefore value, it is just as unstable as any other form of “currency” — subject to manipulation as well as in need of occasional defense.
Mr. Fine talks of his experience with a dealer who sought to pump up the value of an artist’s works by listing all the tragedies that had recently befallen the artist. “I sensed that the dealer was attempting to increase her ’biographical value’ … . The artist’s bad fortune was good fortune for her dealer.”
Then there is the intriguing case of “Clyde Angel,” who had the correct pedigree for an Outsider Artist — a backwoods recluse who had been hospitalized for schizophrenia. His work is delivered to a Chicago gallery by his “authorized agent.” The trouble is, nobody’s ever met Clyde Angel, and efforts by an enterprising journalist to track him down failed. There’s speculation, says Mr. Fine, that Clyde Angel may not exist, that his “Outsider” work is really being produced by a trained artist in hiding. If that ever turned out to be true, a lucrative market would collapse overnight.
Finally, Mr. Fine talks about the “’biographical entrepreneurs,’ individuals who see it as in their interest to shape another’s standing” for maximum marketability. He cites the case of Henry Darger, whose work consists of paintings of highly sexualized nude underage girls being slaughtered. “Darger’s reputation needed to be cleansed,” writes Mr. Fine. So for the catalog of a Darger exhibition, the content and interpretation of his art was played down while the artist was described as a kind of artist-knight.
“’His public behavior appears to be without blemish. A saintly man who frequently attended mass, Darger saw himself as the ardent protector of children. He could therefore, in his words and images, subject his creatures to terrible trials from which it was in his power to rescue them.’”
Without such biographical air brushing, it’s likely Darger would be too hot to handle, an artistic liability rather than the toast of the town he became when a retrospective toured the country a decade or so ago. Mr. Fine’s book is not an attack on the Outsider Art phenomenon. But it is masterful in its anatomization of some of its contradictions, conflicts, pressures and absurdities.
The Hampton Throne was included in the Whitney’s exhibition because it is a great work of art, the measure of which is that it held its own handily amongst canonical masterpieces and other works from the mainstream art world, as it continues to do in the permanent collection of the SAAM. In other words, it is recognized for its aesthetic significance, not because of Hampton’s unusual “personal story.” The lesson of that work, and of Mr. Fine’s book, is that aesthetics remains the only sure standard of quality in judging art. Anything else is a fraud.
Eric Gibson is the Leisure & Arts Features Editor of The Wall Street Journal.
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