With the global Outsider Art Market not being an ‘other’ but a ‘subset’ of the ‘Insider Art Market’, subversion is today the object of subsidy and support by museums and galleries.
The Ur-Brut and the Proto-Surrealist
Of H. Rousseau: there is above all “War (terrifying, she passes . . . ).” With legs outstretched, the horror-struck steed stretches its neck with its dancer’s head, black leaves inhabit the mauve clouds, and bits of debris fall like pine cones among the translucent corpses of axolotls attacked by bright-beaked crows.
—Alfred Jarry, “Minutes d’art,” 1894
Axolotls are amphibious salamanders with translucent reptilian bodies. They are kinda the same tone used on the very mammalian corpses here, by the ‘non-professional’ self-taught artist Henri Rousseau. He was “Le Douanier” (the customs officer) by profession.
This painting is by one of the earliest ‘Art Brut’ artists (although the name ‘Art Brut’ has to wait for five more decades to be born via Jean Dubuffet and its anglophone synonym ‘Outsider Art’ for two decades more still, via Roger Cardinal). It being championed by one of the proto-Surrealists, Alfred Jarry, is not an odd art-historical moment. Surrealism had a deep originary function in creating the conceptual category of ‘Art Brut’ / ‘Outsider Art’.
This painting, neither a commentary on any ongoing war nor a deliberate act of political subversion, is a generic depiction of war’s horrors. Painted by an artist entirely self-taught, it was much ridiculed when displayed at ‘Salon des Indépendants’ — an alternative art exhibition space for the avant-garde.
The lack of illusionism and draughtsmanship is evident — the wild-haired goddess of war looks rather like a little girl with a toy sword, the horse with splayed legs like a clumsy breed of hound dog, the fiery clouds rather like candy floss and dead bodies with a sheen that is not quite mammalian.
But it is nevertheless displayed as ‘art’ at par with others and critiqued as ‘art’. Perhaps the angry ridicule is at this gall! Does there lie its subversion? In overturning aesthetic standards of ‘good’ art or even good ‘avant-garde’ art?
What has madness got to do with Outsider Art?
Stadshof Collection of Outsider Art
It has been a long way from the self-taught art of Rousseau to Art Brut to Outsider Art to whatever-you-call-it now. Marion Scherr summarises: ‘The term ‘Outsider Art’ was initially conceptualised as a translation of the French ‘Art Brut’, coined by artist and collector Jean Dubuffet in 1948, to classify work produced by “clinically insane” artists, who he understood as being “untouched” by culture and thus supposedly engaging in a “chemically pure artistic operation”.
When art historian Roger Cardinal introduced the term ‘Outsider Art’ to the British art world in 1972, he abandoned the strict qualification criteria of its French predecessor. He embraced all art of “authentically untutored, original, and extra-cultural nature,” while still emphasising the proposed Otherness of this art form. The label ‘Outsider Art’ and its many synonyms have been used ever since to designate a vastly heterogeneous group of artists who often have nothing more in common than their experience of marginalisation.
Subversive or not, it can hardly be denied that the viewers uninitiated in the ways of Contemporary Art connect immediately with Outsider Art. Simultaneously, it is undeniable that the global Outsider Art Market is not an ‘other’ but a ‘subset’ of the ‘Insider Art Market’, aka Contemporary Art Market. Rainer Rochlitz despairs about the commodification of subversion in the contemporary art world by writing: “Art today is in deep crisis. Criticism seems to have abandoned any notion of evaluation, the public has been denied the possibility of understanding, and aesthetics have lost all legitimacy.
At the most basic level, ‘Outsider Art’ is defined as art produced by artists “typically unconnected to the conventional art world” … this group may include hospice patients, people with disabilities or mental illnesses, ethnic minorities, refugees, prison inmates, the homeless, children, psychic mediums, ‘reclusive misfits’, or anyone else self-taught displaying ‘eccentricities’ and/or diverging from societal norms. (…) Their supposed antagonism towards cultural norms and their presumed disinterest in the art world render attempts to define the genre unsatisfactory and blurry.
Instead, what unites this incohesive group of artists is the declared assumption that they are fundamentally different in social and psychological terms. To facilitate the argument, a particular set of marketable myths has been employed and characteristics ascribed to the artists, with roots in Western European socio-evolutionistic, modernist-primitive and romantic ideas of the 19th century.’
Human individuals who are by profession not artists have been making ‘art’ since always, but why were they accepted as art (without quotations but with qualifications) in France at the Surrealist turn of the 19th Century?
André Breton, the self-proclaimed ‘pope’ and patriarch of Surrealism (and a significant collector of outsider art), who defined it as ‘pure psychic automatism’ (‘Surrealist Manifesto’, 1924), used the comparative aid of ‘outsider art’ to explain Surrealism as a ‘conscious receptivity, a willed passivity’ to channel the Freud-defined subconscious. This withholding of rational reason, of course, has to be acquired by the sane Surrealist but comes ‘naturally’ to the outsider artist, the more certifiably clinically insane he/she is, the better.
Hence, the great obsession of appreciating art in the asylums began. As Katharine Conley notes: “The mediating terms used by Breton to describe automatic experience between 1922 and 1965 — honesty, naivete, truth, freedom, authenticity, and the notion of the primitive — all refer back to the purity he seeks from psychic automatism.
They recall Dubuffet’s notion that outsider artists are unscathed by culture, as well as Breton’s desire, articulated in the Manifesto, to rediscover the sense of wonder linked to childhood. Through surrealism, he advocates relocating “a sentiment of being unintegrated” into civilised culture, a return to the “real life” to which one is closest in childhood before “having gone astray”. He evidently seeks terms for automatism that convey its virtue of being as unmediated by Western high culture.”
Subversion and Perfidy (Perhaps Subsidy?)
Is the madness in question here in ‘radical eccentricity’ equally present in — ‘Folk Art, Naive Art and Outsider Art (Art brut) …Psychotic Art; Mediumistic Art; Child Art (in so far as it remains relatively free of cultural imprinting and is not channelled towards educational ends); the art of those persons labouring under such clumsy designations as ‘disabled’, ‘handicapped’ or ‘intellectually back-ward’; Prison Art, Fairground Art, Tramp Art, Trench Art, Tattoo Art; and the art of those who fashion such things as ships in bottles, matchstick cathedrals, love spoons, scrimshaw carvings, samplers and whirligigs; as well as that of graffitists, dabblers and doodlers of each and every stripe’ ( as itemised by Colin Rhodes )? Sounds like much of a stretch.
Isn’t it precisely the bigger ‘OTHER’ of ‘Art’ – ‘overt artistic activities which our culture sponsors and which generate such support-systems as arts councils, museums, galleries, auction-houses, critical debates, catalogues, monographs and dissertations – in short, which figure in the artistic mega-discourse common to the major urban centres’ (also summarised by Colin Rhodes)?
For example, consider the obsessive mark-making in the two paintings above, which might seem comparable formally. Can it be compared on the register of ‘radical eccentricity’? What makes it even harder is that K Ramanujam was not an Indian outsider artist but a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic who was trained formally, while Ody Saban, a celebrated French Outsider Artist, has no medically diagnosed psychological ailments.
Most contemporary experts and scholars of Outsider Art have to agree that other than the artmaker’s personal biography (being far from any artistic profession) and lack of formal art education, there is no other possible distinctive artistic marker (style, skill, medium, scale, genre, etc.) which can distinguish ‘Insider Art’ from ‘Outsider Art’. But if outsider art is not really mad, fundamentally different or anti-establishment in its subversion, perhaps the outsider artist is?
Outsider Artist: The Authentic and Disinterested Beast
Colin Rhodes summarises the stereotype: “‘Outsider Artists’ are raw, pure, uninfluenced, innocent, uncorrupted, honest, real, spontaneous, unintentional and unaware. Reinforcing the idea that these attributes designate the natural essence and true being of the artist, the socially constructedness and ideological implications of these ascriptions often remain disguised. Instead, the individuals labelled ‘Outsiders’ tend to be imagined as authentic; unphased by conventions and resistant to cultural conditioning.”
The fact that they are not supposed to make art but still do (which has the embedded presupposition that not everyone is supposed to make art) has no interest (more often than not) in promoting it in the art world commercially or otherwise, making them both more authentic and disinterested than the ‘real artists’.
Marion Scherr breaks down all the following myths of the stereotype in a unique book-length research study of Outsider Artists of UK: Myth #1: ‘Outsider Art’ as aesthetically different to ‘normal’ art, Myth #2: Uncontrollable expressive urges, socio-cultural disengagement and indifference, Myth #3: Unintentionality, uncorruptedness and unawareness, Myth #4: The ‘Outsider Artist’ as inherently different in socio-psychological terms. Her meticulous breakdown of the same from institutional, sociological (art worlds) and psychological (artist psyche) perspectives can be summarised in the three figures that follow. It shows the perverse and self-contradictory machinations the ‘insider art world’ has with the ‘outsider art world’, which the Outsider Artists most often fail to negotiate.
Outsider Art in India: Nek Chand Saini (1924-2015) and Shyam Thandar (1972 – )
In Sharon Irish’s summation: “Nek Chand (Saini) ’s Rock Garden (under construction since 1958, and open to the public since 1976) began as an illegal private project by one man to give form to his imagination.”
Nilay Oza elaborates: “ It is a landscape made from salvaged bits of urban detritus produced during and after the making of Chandigarh. It was conceived by its builder, Nek Chand, as a mythical kingdom, with a program that included, among other features, a hall of audience, quarters for the queen, and army barracks. Built as a clandestine project from the debris the city produced, it has grown to over 25 acres during the 30 years it has taken to build. As a Road Works Inspector with the Public Works Department, he was a minor functionary on the Chandigarh project. Nek Chand would work only at night, in the light and stench of burning tyres and in constant fear of discovery by the authorities. A vast gorge in the woods to the east of the Capitol complex (immediately behind the High Court) proved ideally suited to his project. It also supplied the rudiments for this “vast ruins of a fort”, an image he held of this kingdom well before he started.”
“In the 1950s, when Nek Chand was an engineer for the Punjabi Transportation Corporation, he would transport rocks, cement, and waste objects home on his bicycle. At that time he was living near a thickly wooded area owned by the state, intended to be a green space encircling the new city. Nek Chand secretly began to build in that overgrown buffer area; he created a world that he says was inspired by stories of lost kingdoms that his mother used to tell to him as a child.
For eighteen years he worked alone, or with a few helpers, creating vast built spaces and about 20,000 forms that echo motifs from vernacular architecture of rural northern India, recall fabrics draped over people’s bodies (dhotis, lungis, dupattas, saris) and pots carried atop heads, as well as more abstract sculptures that allow the imagination to invent its own image” writes Sharon Irish.
Minhazz Majumdar mentions: In 1973, a government survey team accidentally discovered the hidden garden and was astounded by its size and beauty. Because the garden was unauthorised and illegally occupied government land, it should have been demolished. Fortunately, many in the local administration realised the uniqueness of the garden and permitted Chand to carry on with his artistic endeavour, even providing him a salary, workmen, and a truck to transport material.”
“He has been feted the world over, with exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, London, Madrid, the United States, and Holland. In Paris, he was given the Grande Medaille de Vermeil, and in India he was awarded the prestigious Padam Shri in 1984. The Rock Garden has been featured on an Indian postage stamp. Several of his sculptures have been placed in museums and art centres around the world, including at the John Michael Kohler Arts Centre in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and the National Children’s Museum in Washington, D.C.”
Born in 1972, Shyam Thandar is a self-taught artist. He started painting out of the blue one night in October 2019 and has not stopped ever since. A fatherless child since he was eight years old, he has had all kinds of odd jobs and wanderings since his teenage years and could not finish his High School (10th standard) despite studying hard and paying his own school expenses.
Working across West Bengal and South-West India — from a wannabe circus performer (after learning gymnastics and performance), a lawyer’s clerk in Calcutta (for two years), to bus conductor (for 26 years) in a colliery town, man Friday (cook, caregiver and personal assistant, 2012 to 2014) of artist K G Subramanyan in Baroda and recently an employee in Jogen Chowdhury’s private museum in Kolkata (Kitchen Staff, Office Worker — 2018 to 2021), he has seen and lived life in very many ways. He has published and sold his works on a few occasions and is currently represented by CapitArt, an outsider art gallery in London (previously in Mumbai).
Shyam Thandar currently lives in New Delhi and Kirnahar (near Santiniketan, West Bengal). He has recently been part of EXTRAORDINARY LINE (2025-26), a group show of drawings at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, alongside notable dead and living Indian artists.
“Un musée? C’est pas ma tasse de thé.” (“A museum? That’s not my cup of tea.”) These words, spoken by Outsider Artist Arthur Vanabelle to Outsider Art Expert Ans Van Berkum (ex-director of the De Stadshof Museum of Naive and Outsider Art in Zwolle, Netherlands), were taken by her as the essence of Outsider Art Practice.
As Marion Scherr observes for the Outsider Artists in the UK, A true outsider artist is supposed to create art without any inclination and rather disinclination to be recognised as art or the artist, dedicatedly, clandestinely, and if ‘discovered’ by the art world, only reluctantly be a part of it. Any deviations therefrom becomes a double bind for an Outsider Artist, the acceptance in the ‘Insider Art World’ even ‘Outsider Art World’ comes with a fear of contamination by the mainstream art, or even worse, the latest strain of avant-garde and can lead to the undoing of the naïve, contemporary primitive and the personification of Homo Ludens (Human at Play).
Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, like Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais Idéal (Ideal Palace) or Arthur Vanabelle’s La Ferme aux Avions (The farm with the aeroplanes), does not need museums. They are museums unto themselves. But Shyam Thandar’s inaugural acceptance in the Insider Art World (with the latest exhibition) comes with a distinctive shift in the level of acceptance by European Outsider Art Galleries, compared to earlier.
What Outsider Subversion Can Be in Contemporary Art
Subversive or not, it can hardly be denied that the viewers uninitiated in the ways of Contemporary Art connect immediately with Outsider Art. Simultaneously, it is undeniable that the global Outsider Art Market is not an ‘other’ but a ‘subset’ of the ‘Insider Art Market’, aka Contemporary Art Market. Rainer Rochlitz despairs about the commodification of subversion in the contemporary art world by writing: “Art today is in deep crisis. Criticism seems to have abandoned any notion of evaluation, the public has been denied the possibility of understanding, and aesthetics have lost all legitimacy.
Formerly, artists claimed their right to decide for themselves what counted as a work of art, thanks to the subversion of the established criteria of aesthetic judgment. But that very subversion is today the object of subsidy and support by museums and galleries, anxious to display their liberalism. A new and ambiguous game of complicity and antagonism has united artists and institutions.” Perhaps Outsider Art is the only kind that, despite not being inherently mad, subversive, or antisocial, is disinterested in actively commodifying its subversion.
Bibliography
Berge, Josten, Ans Van Berkum, Julius Ten Berg, Marginalia: Perspectives on Outsider Art (2000), De Stadshof Museum
Conley, Katharine. “Surrealism and Outsider Art: From the” Automatic Message” to André Breton’s Collection.” Yale French Studies (2006): 129-143.
Irish, Sharon. “Intimacy and monumentality in Chandigarh, north India: le Corbusier’s capitol complex and Nek Chand Saini’s rock garden.” (2004): 105-115.
Majumdar, Minhazz. “Sculpting from Scrap.” Landscape Architecture 95, no. 7 (2005): 42-51.
Oza, Nilay, and T. Luke Young. “Nek Chand’s Garden: Chandigarh, India.” Thresholds 17 (1998): 52-56.
Rhodes, Colin. Outsider art: Art brut and its affinities. Thames & Hudson, (2022).
Rochlitz, Rainer. “Subversion and subsidy: contemporary art and aesthetics.” (2008).
Scherr, Marion. The Invention of› Outsider Art‹: Experiencing Practices of Othering in Contemporary Art Worlds in the UK. Vol. 212. transcript Verlag, (2022).
Profile Photo Credit: Reyazul Haque
