What’s real and what’s sham in Outsider Art

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.

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