The National CollegeArt and Society: Inside and Out
Who is The Outsider? An Examination of the Art of Niki de Saint Phalle and the Art of Outsiders
Eimear McNally
This Article introduces the phenomenon of outsider art and discusses its changing relationship with 'insider' or cultural art. Niki de Saint Phalle is an artist who could be seen to represent both sides of the divide. Critics have often labelled Saint Phalle as an Outsider and she herself has admitted to feeling an affinity with the artists who fall into this category. When it was discovered or categorised at the beginning of the last century, outsider art was a potent force, a powerful rejection of standards and ideals in art. The cultural hegemony, which then provided the opposition, does not exist today. Contemporary art is awash with the voices of the marginalised sectors of society. Has outsider art lost its potency? Is it not, in fact, already inside?
The term outsider art is used to gather together strands of creative activity, which do not fit into any established category of art. Like loose threads at the edge of the woven rug, outsider artists are usually associated with the margins of society.
'They are all kinds of dwellers on the fringes of society. Working outside the fine art system these people have produced from the depths of their own personalities and for themselves and no one else works of outstanding originality in concept, subject and techniques' (Rawvision magazine, 2nd September 2000).
Traditionally, they have been viewed as social misfits, unable to operate within established society, but it is not necessary to be isolated to produce art worthy of this classification. The art of the insane or psychotic art represents a large portion of what is known as outsider art, since it is where the study of such creative activity arose. Psychiatric institutions exemplify that location on the fringes of society. They provide their occupants with isolation from demands, expectations, limits standards, labels, definitions and, most importantly, 'the sinful fruits of art-world knowledge' (Cubbs, 1994, p. 89). It was not until the 1920's that the art world became interested in psychiatry. In 1922, Hans Prinzhorn, a trained art historian as well as a psychiatrist, published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), discussing the origin and nature of human creativity. Prinzhorn amassed a large and important collection of psychotic art as research for the book, which became an invaluable source of influence for future artists.
At this time the formerly cohesive western art world had become modernist and fractious. Various movements burgeoned, each searching for a truly new and original visual language, an anti-style, and a voice free from the clutter of history and tradition. As contemporary western culture was seen to perpetuate traditional modes of expression, the search for a new voice was directed outwards. Perhaps an extension of its territorial instincts, Western thought began to colonise the Primitive; African and Iberian woodcarving, the art of the exotic and tribal communities of Oceania and the art of the naïve, in a neurotic scramble for the anima it feared civilisation had extinguished forever.
The world of the crazy self-taught artist was an exotic destination, the furthest reaches of the human psyche, the untrodden terrain of the new land of the unconscious, recently discovered by Sigmund Freud. Freud's teachings had already inspired the Surrealist movement before the discovery of the art of the insane. The artist Jean Dubuffet was instrumental in bringing Outsider art to the attention of the art world. From the early nineteen twenties, he began to form his own collection which emerged in 1947 as l'Art Brut - 'raw' art. Dubuffet opposed vehemently the influence of cultural art. He aligned himself with Surrealists, Dadaists and other movements, which sought to overturn conventions in art. In l'Art Brut he envisioned a pure art in its most natural form, untainted by self-consciousness or knowledge. It is an art torn from the viscera of the artist's imagination, flung down while the artist's breath still charges through its pores. It is direct, uncompromising and challenging, even a little disturbing at times, but it is always genuine.
Niki de Saint Phalle was born in 1930 in France but, apart from summer excursions, grew up and was educated in New York. At the age of eighteen she eloped with a young marine named Harry Matthews and the young couple moved to France. In 1953 she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised for a short period. It was during this time that she discovered her artistic voice. She began to paint and draw as a way of sorting through the emotional turbulence. On recovery, it occurred to Saint Phalle that art offered more than a way out of her problems and she devoted herself to the evolution of her talents.
From the beginning of her career, Saint Phalle struggled to overcome the categorising tendencies of the fine art world. She was considered a naïve, an outsider. A number of factors contributed to this perception; she was self-taught, she was a woman - furthermore a wife and mother - and she began her creative activity while being treated for mental illness. Her early paintings and drawings display a naïve or unskilled approach.
Saint-Phalle can be seen to share superficial characteristics with the stereotypical outsider artist. However, in her willingness to embrace established art culture and her ambition to be accepted as an artist of merit by her contemporaries she is at odds with the stereotype. Furthermore, the naïve style belies a deep cultural awareness and an understanding of art history and the visual languages of contemporary art. She acknowledges that her emergence from the margins certainly informed her artistic mentality; 'I too felt like an outsider among my fellow artists… I feel these people are my teachers and my masters and I feel much closer to them than my contemporaries' (quoted in Tuchman, 1992, p. 205). Unlike the insular circle of creativity conducted by the outsider artist, Saint Phalle wished to communicate with people through her art.
By the 1960's Saint Phalle had succeeded in her ambition to be taken seriously as an artist. She joined an avant-garde group of artists known as the New Realists whose members included Pierre Restany, Yves Klein and Daniel Spoerri. They were proponents of assemblage using found objects, happenings and performance and they claimed the ancestry of Dada - their initial manifesto was entitled 40 Degrees Above Dada.
What qualities can we identify with outsider art that do not deal with context and circumstance? How do these circumstances exhibit themselves? One factor that is shared is the compulsive nature of the activity. This is implied in the obsessional tendency of the artist to focus on one particular theme or object, which is repeatedly depicted, using related motifs, patterns, compositional techniques and colourings. This can involve 'a dense intertwining of textures and forms in which no single element is privileged or there may be such a competition between different elements and signs that nothing can be foregrounded' (McLagen, 1997, p. 15). The outsider artist develops a personal artistic apparatus with which to convey the subject, an apparatus totally unrelated to that of the professional artist who utilises intellect, reason and order. Conventional techniques of image making are abandoned in the artist's quest to trap in the real world the substance of the interior; 'An orphic journey to the depths of the human psyche' (Musgrave, 1979, p. 9).
Oil paintings executed between 1955 and 1958 by Saint Phalle exhibit the same obsessional tendency, a preoccupation with certain themes, a repetition of motifs and decorative patterning executed in a uniquely personal style. The subject matter - people, buildings and landscapes - is described like a dreamscape. Saint Phalle's richly developed imaginary life provided her with visual inspiration. La Fête (1954/5) describes a party scene with a giddy sense of disorder. Figures are arranged seemingly randomly and without regard for perspective or three-dimensional modelling. Flat planes of colour and pattern separate figurative groups like a patchwork quilt. The central figure, colourfully clothed and hair streaming out around her, dances with abandon. She prefigures Saint Phalle's Nanas, a long-running sculptural series of larger than life goddesses, which would not appear until 1965. The atmospheric content, the stylised figures and the striking use of colour are reminiscent of the artist Aloise Corbaz (1886-1964), an inmate at the Clinique de la Roserie in Switzerland. Unable to communicate verbally she expressed her private world, full of love beauty and romance, through her art. She invariably depicted luxuriantly beautiful women with voluptuous curves, long flowing hair and large opaque oval eyes, sometimes accompanied by ardent suitors. Like Saint Phalle she had a richly developed imagination which allowed her to sustain a fulfilling fantasy life through art.
During the late 1950's and throughout the 1960's the emotional content of Saint Phalle's work was quite visible - volatile emotions such as anger, pain or rejection. In many ways her work constituted a purging of negative feelings, consistent with the origin of her artistic activity as therapy. She confronted the traumatic experiences of the past, quite literally attacking them. The assemblages of the 1960's in particular the Tirs (shooting paintings), are the vision of that psychic battle. Saint Phalle created assemblages on canvas, carefully including tins of pigment and bottles of spray paint. She coated the assemblages in white plaster. When dry, the canvas was hung and shot at in a performance, the paint exploding over the white plaster to create the finished piece. The performance of shooting was as important as the end result.
Though critics and fellow artists found many more layers of meaning to these acts of catharsis, the principle meaning for Saint Phalle was in the act, the intuitive process of creation, which involved fervent emotion. Although the exploitation of chance was a feature of contemporary art, it was rarely carried out with such a violent passion. Saint Phalle has always been clear about her direct approach; 'I don't think when I work, I feel. I work by what I have to do […] It's my emotions. In a certain sense it is autobiographical, but in another sense it is something else - transformed into a work of art' (from the film Who is the Monster? Me or You?, Peter Schamoni, France, 1955).
The work of Henry Darger (1892-1973) can be compared to Saint Phalle's in terms of emotional explicitness. Darger created his epic masterpiece In the Realms of the Unreal over a period of forty years. It consists of fifteen volumes of text, collages and drawings charting the progress of the 'Vivian Girls' against violent oppression in the imaginary state of Glandelinia. The scale and intensity of Darger's work, over such a long period of time indicate a complete immersion in a self-made world. Darger's work is a reaction to his own dissatisfactory reality. His feelings of anger and despair are translated into the persecution of the innocent Vivian Girls. They suffer horrific acts of violence hinting at the author's own need to express his emotion. 'Certainly, Darger's world with its endless battles, its raging fires and floods, represents a visual externalisation of the psyche, flooded with internal and unconscious content. And at the heart of the darkness was rage!' (MacGregor, 1992, p. 269).
It is Darger's almost stream-of-consciousness-like prose which most embodies this element of emotional explosiveness The language is intensely visceral, often gruesome, lacking in orderly structure and spotted with mysterious words and phrases of Darger's own invention. The illustrations are carried out in a more ordered, careful approach, although some of them match the prose for grotesque detail. The fact that Darger's masterpiece might never have ended but for his death suggests that it was the act of creation that was of most importance to the artist. Like Saint Phalle, he allowed his instincts and emotions to direct the artistic output. For both this is ultimately where the satisfaction lies.
Niki de Saint Phalle shares many characteristics with outsider artists, both in terms of context and the quality of the work itself. Fifty years ago, when Saint Phalle began her career and when Jean Dubuffet was establishing l'Art Brut, the comparison would have seemed much clearer. Then there were clearer boundaries for most between good and bad art, although they were already being tested. The proof of the success of the quest of modernism - to overturn standardised modes of perception - lies in the ability of artists like Niki de Saint Phalle to exist as individuals.
Such individuals, outsiders included, constantly expose the fallibility of labels and categories. They possess a rare ability to change our ways of seeing. With their visions we see new worlds.
Bibliography
Cubbs, Joanne, 'Rebels, Mystics and Outcasts', in The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, Washington: Smithsonian Institute press, 1994, pp. 89, ff.
Zolberg, Vera L., Cherno, Joni Maya, (eds.) Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture, Cambridge/NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Hulten, Pontus, (ed.), Niki de Saint Phalle, Kunst und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; Gerd Hatje, 1992.
MacGregor, John, 'I See a World Within a World; I Dream But Am Awake', in Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art, Tuchman, Eliel (eds.), Los Angeles: LA County Museum of Art, 1992, pp. 269, ff.
McLagen, David, 'In Another World', in Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture, Zolberg, Cherbo (ed.), Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 15, ff.
Musgrave, Victor, (preface), Outsiders: An Art Without Precedent or Tradition, London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979.
Tuchman, Maurice and Eliel, Carol S. (eds.), Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art, Los Angeles : LA County Museum of Art, 1992.
RAWVISION Magazine Online, What Is Outsider Art?, http://www.rawvision.com/whatisoa.html, 2nd September 2000.
