by David Byrne
The term outsider, as it is used in the art world, means “we are not sure this belongs in here, the artist is untrained, and maybe naive, but have a look.” It also sometimes implies self-taught and probably insane or not socially functioning in the accepted sense. (That could include a lot of us.)
On a nearby wall there are a series of black-and-white photos of the Creative Growth artists. Some of these photos I find disturbing. Not having seen what the artists look like previously, just having been moved deeply by their work, I mentally place and rank them alongside the best contemporary artists practicing today. Qualitatively, objectively, I don’t see any difference between their work and that of mainstream fine artists—except for the fact that there is no work here that deals with the hermetic and convoluted dramas of the art world itself. This, for me, is no great loss; in fact it’s more or less a plus—though some self-reflexive art is indeed funny. Anyway, I half expect them to look “normal,” or at least like other artists I know.
However, seeing the picture of Judith Scott, who has Down syndrome, makes me realize that many of these folks could never function in the gallery/museum system.
There, then, is what relegates them as outsiders. These artists may not have the perspective on their work that we expect a professional artist to have—not that most professional artists can talk lucidly about their own work either, but professionals at least have a sense of how their work fits into the world at large, or into the art market, and can fake the talk pretty well. We presume that the work of a professional artist is slightly separate from the artist as a person—you don’t have to know about Picasso’s mistresses and his psychological hang-ups and obsessions to like his paintings. With the Creative Growth artists and some other outsiders, however, it seems that for many people, personal information about the artist is considered essential to judging, evaluating, and understanding her work. The fact that they are self-taught, “crazy,” grew up in a swamp, or worked during the day as a janitor is somehow considered relevant. Jackson Pollock worked as a janitor at an elementary school in New York, and probably stole some paint from there too, but wall plaques in museums don’t describe him as a former janitor. While professional artists distance themselves and their lives somewhat from their work, Judith obviously has an intimate relationship with hers that I imagine many professionals might envy and wish they could have.
Though some professionals claim they’d like to eliminate the gap, and work in the territory between art and life as Bob Rauschenberg once claimed, these folks have never even left that gap—for them it’s not a gap but a deep chasm.
Comparisons between these artists and art professionals begs the question: what is sanity, and does being dysfunctional sometimes make you a better artist? I don’t think it does, though the Van Gogh myth of the crazy (genius) artist remains alive and well. I think those questions, that dichotomy between intention and result, might be irrelevant. For me, a stain on the sidewalk or a blob of construction insulation may have an aesthetic value equal to some works by Franz West, for example. One just happens to be on a stand in a museum and the other is usually found discarded in a vacant lot. My definition of what is good art is, I’m afraid, pretty wide, and it isn’t determined by the biography of its creator. Sometimes, for me, art doesn’t even need an author. I don’t care who or what made it. For me the art happens between the thing—any thing—and the viewer’s eye (or mind). Who or what made it is irrelevant. I don’t need to see their CV to like it. But I have to admit that sometimes the artist’s story, if I am informed of it, adds to and affects what I see.
If you obsessively scribble on bits of paper, as hugely successful artist Louise Bourgeois does some of the time (to pick an obvious example), is your work better than some very similar work by one of the folks at Creative Growth because you have more objectivity about your own work? Is scribbling better art when it has a conscious intention? Is it better work when you’re aware that you’re scribbling and could do other kinds of drawing if you really wanted to? I don’t think there is any way one could objectively say that of the two works one is better or worse than the other. Louise Bourgeois certainly does other kinds of work too, which might make some kind of difference, at least to some people, but the biggest difference I can come up with is that presumably she decided to make her obsessive scribbles consciously, and deliberately, and, we assume (big assumption here), wasn’t simply driven to make the marks by some unconscious impulse. This is really a big assumption, especially in her case, because she makes a big deal about her fucked-up childhood, so maybe she needs to scribble just as much as the Creative Growth folks.
And the real question is, would it make any difference if she does?
Social functionality, to me, is the key word in the inside/ outside dichotomy, not sanity. Many “sophisticated” and successful gallery artists are quite mad, lost in their own worlds, and often they are emotional wrecks—but they do know how to navigate the shoals and reefs of the art world. Well, a bit. They can compose themselves and posture sufficiently to get by, to talk the talk and walk the walk, though some of the successful ones might also be drooling drug addicts and conversational incompetents.
For the folks at Creative Growth making art is therapeutic. I would argue that it is equally therapeutic for the professional artist. I can personally testify that making music and performing have kept me more or less sane and allowed me a measure of social contact I might otherwise never have had. (Viewing art, however, is not therapeutic, nor does collecting art have any morally uplifting value—but that’s another topic. But the act of making it is.)
I’m not sure I know anyone, anyone at all, who is completely sane. Sure, I know plenty of people who play the sanity game with skill and daring. Their masks of having it together are well secured, and they don’t spit out profanities or stare googly-eyed into space. Above all they have learned to function well enough socially to be accepted as “normal.” My friends are not an exclusively eccentric arty crowd either—most are what would be referred to as normal.
The poor outsiders never learned or mastered those social skills. Even a would-be self-marketer like the Reverend Howard Finster of Somerville, Georgia, never quite got that part right. Either his preaching and ranting got in the way—fire and brimstone don’t mix well with white wine and cheese—or he didn’t realize that in the art world, one simply can’t be seen as blatantly hawking one’s wares, which Howard didn’t mind doing because he saw his work as serving a greater glory. He was proselytizing; he wasn’t really pushing “himself.”
There’s an elaborate song and dance involved in passing for a professional artist. One needs to veil the sales pitch, for starters, and that protocol, those dance steps, must be mastered, as is true in any profession. But one can be mad and self-obsessed, can believe in other worlds and the influence of supernatural forces, and still be regarded as a respected, “sane” artist—no problem.
Sophisticated artists who can draw well—Klee, Basquiat, Twombly, Dubuffet—often intentionally draw in a more “primitive” manner. They are seen, partly due to the rough nature of their mark making, as tapping into something deep and profound. The crude lines imply that one is in touch with unconscious forces that won’t submit to the urgings and smoothing tendencies of craft and skill. It’s not an unreasonable or completely untrue idea, either; funky drawing does push some elemental buttons, and maybe the work of these artists does come from a deep and profound place that won’t submit to polishing. I’m not saying they’re fakers. I’m simply noting what their kind of gestures connote.
The generally accepted idea is that if it’s rough, it must be more real, more authentic. Yet the poor outsiders, whose marks are very often every bit as unpolished, can’t help how they draw—they couldn’t make a clean line if they had to. So they are left out of the art “club.” They are doing the very best they can but because their lack of exhibited drafting skill is, we believe, not their choice, they are often viewed as lesser artists. The
y can’t help drawing crazy shit, while the sophisticated artists could, at least so we imagine, draw a nice puppy if they had to. It would seem to be all about intention. And yet, these outsider artists most certainly have intention. They know when a line is right or when it’s “untrue” according to their personal standards. They have definite intentions to achieve a very specific visual look and effect—at least one would assume so given that they often labor mightily to re-create that look again and again.
This aesthetic segregation seems perverse. I enjoy much of the work of the four very successful professional artists mentioned above, but probably what moves me is when their work touches something deep that we all have in common. It is the same something that the outsiders sometimes tickle and activate in the very same way—proof that these charged marks and images can resonate with nearly anyone. They touch those same deep, dark parts of themselves and ourselves. The difference is the poor loonies can’t remove themselves from the experience of communicating with extremes of dark or light and step back and away from it. To distance oneself, to feign objectivity, this, then, is the mark of a “civilized” person. It’s a useful, possibly essential, social skill to have, but it’s not, in my opinion, a criterion by which to judge creative work.
The great works of antiquity, the classics, could have been made by nameless (to us) skilled obsessive nutters—many of their personal stories are certainly lost to history. So maybe they could have been complete misfits too—but who cares?
On the next page is a painting made by a migraine sufferer. It depicts—so we are told—not a metaphorical interpretation of the headache but a realistic depiction of what the sufferer sees when the migraine strikes.
It makes one wonder if Braque and other cubists suffered from migraines and were painting what they actually saw. Would that make a difference? Would we think less of them as artists if that were the case?
The crossover between inside and out is not just confined to the visual arts. Beckett, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein produced obsessive and inscrutable works—but they managed to function and even won prizes for work that many still call mad. Whether something is made by a sophisticate or by a person who is functionally challenged, in recent decades it often comes out the same. And, as time passes, traditional skill and craft become less desirable qualities, and expression, truth, and emotion are deemed more important. Artists and writers are encouraged to dive into their inner depths, so it shouldn’t be surprising at all if some of the same strange fish are caught. The creatures from the deep can be pretty disturbing and wacky, but we all recognize some part of ourselves in them, no matter who dragged them up.
As my friend C points out, it’s fairly common for someone to attempt to denigrate someone else’s creative work by claiming, “They’re not a nice person.” It’s as if the fact that someone has a lousy personality, is a bad father, engages in phone sex, or is obsessed with little boys or little girls implies that their work is therefore less good. Does it? Surely no one cares if an artist is merely a little stingy or is gay or not anymore. Most people would say that those bits of information are often irrelevant and have no bearing on whether they like the work or not, or whether it should be taken seriously or not.
But doesn’t the fact that Ezra Pound made radio broadcasts in support of the Fascists or that Neil Young was a Ronald Reagan supporter or that some composers and artists apologized for Stalin—or even for Hitler—make their work suspect, even worthless in some cases for many of us? At what point does the extra-creative activity of the person begin to make a difference in how we perceive their work? This question presumes that those political sympathies or sexual perversions actually show up in the work—and I’m not even talking about work that is blatantly propagandistic. If we opt to denigrate Speer’s monumental architecture then there are a whole lot of other architects who, judging by the way their work looks, are equally “Fascist,” and many of them are working today.
Where does one draw the line? Should we only judge by what is in front of us?
A History of PowerPoint
I do a talk about the computer presentation program PowerPoint at the University of California in Berkeley for an audience of IT legends and academics. I have, over a couple of years, made little “films” in this program normally used by businesspeople or academics for slide shows and presentations. In my pieces I made the graphic arrows and the corny backgrounds dissolve and change without anyone having to click on the next slide. These content-less “presentations” run by themselves. I also attached music files—sound tracks—so the pieces are like little abstract art films that play off the familiar (to some people) style of this program. I removed, or rather never included, what is usually considered “content,” and what is left is the medium that delivers that content. In a situation like this one here in Berkeley one is usually asked to talk about one’s work, but rather than do that I have decided to tell the history of the computer program itself. I tell who invented it and who refined it and I offer some subjective views on the program—my own and those of its critics and supporters.
I am terrified. Many of the guys that originally turned PowerPoint into a software program are present. What are they going to think of what I did with their invention? Well, couldn’t they just get up to talk about it? They could call me out and denounce me!
Luckily, I’m not talking about the details of the programming but about the ubiquity of the software and how, because of what it does and how it does it, it limits what can be presented—and therefore what is discussed. All media do this to some extent—they do certain things well and leave other things out altogether. This is not news, but by bringing this up, reminding everyone, I hope to help dispel the myth of neutrality that surrounds many software programs.
I also propose that a slide talk, the context in which this software is used, is a form of contemporary theater—a kind of ritual theater that has developed in boardrooms and academia rather than on the Broadway stage. No one can deny that a talk is a performance, but again there is a pervasive myth of objectivity and neutrality to deal with. There is an unspoken prejudice at work in those corporate and academic “performance spaces”—that performing is acting and therefore it’s not “real.” Acknowledging a talk as a performance is therefore anathema. I want to dispel this myth of authenticity somewhat, in an entertaining and gentle way.
The talk goes fine. I can relax, they’re laughing. Bob Gaskins, Dennis Austin, and Peter Norvig are all here. Bob Gaskins was one of the guys who refined the original program and realized its potential. Bob declined to be introduced, so I stick with a picture of a concertina when I mention his name. (He’s retired and buys and sells antique concertinas now.) That gets a laugh. He tells me afterward that he likes the PowerPoint-as-theater idea, which is a relief. I mean, there is a lot of hatred for this program out there, and a lot of people laugh at the mere mention of bullet points, so he must feel kind of vulnerable.
In working on these pieces, and others, I have become aware that there is a pyramid of control and influence that exists between text, image, and sound. I note that today we give text a preferential position: a label under an image “defines” that image even if it contradicts what we can see. I wonder, in a time before text became ubiquitous, was image (a symbol, a gesture, a sign) the most influential medium? Did sound—singing, chanting, rhythm—come in second, and text, limited as it might have been thousands of years ago, come in third? Was text once a handmaiden to image and sound and then gradually managed to usurp their places and take control? Did the pyramid of communicative power at some point become inverted?
Wittgenstein famously said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” I am a prisoner of my language.
This presupposes that conscious thought cannot happen without verbal or written language. I disagree. I sense a lot of communication goes on nonverbally—and I don’t mean winks and nods. I mean images get ahold of us, as do sounds. They
grab and hold us emotionally. Smells too. They can grip in a way that is hard to elucidate verbally. But maybe for Ludwig it just wasn’t happening. Or maybe because he couldn’t express what sounds, smells, and images do in words he chose to ignore them, to deny that they were communicating.
Let’s Open a Club!
I hail a cab and fold my bike, throw it in the trunk, and head back to San Francisco. The cabdriver would be perfect cast as Ignatius from the novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He’s a large man wearing big shades, with a shaved head and, on this unusually hot day for San Francisco, a rolled-up, wooly winter hat. He recognizes me and tells me he knows that the lead guitarist from Talking Heads lives in Marin (he means Jerry Harrison). He also knows where Dana Carvey lives, so he proceeds to try to convince me to get together with Dana and start a club. “Nice tables, some drinks, some comedy, and good, wholesome music: how could we lose?”
Then he moves on to discuss the “negro infection,” by which I think he means the lewd and violent lyrics of gangsta rap. His own musical favorite is Huey Lewis, whom he thinks needs to be played on the radio more. He suggests that maybe Huey and I could both play at the club, yeah!
At the airport, my flight is delayed, and I can hear the businessman behind me saying, “Isn’t that the worst slide you’ve ever seen?” as he holds up a printout of a PowerPoint slide—a triangle with words on it.
