Colin Rhodes
Author of Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives
About the Author
Colin Rhodes is currently Reader in Art History and Theory at Loughborough University.
Works by Colin Rhodes
Nick Blinko 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1950
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- England
- Organizations
- Kingston School of Art River House
Members
Reviews
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 5
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 230
- Popularity
- #97,994
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 3
- ISBNs
- 9
- Languages
- 3
This is an example of what is now known as ‘outsider art’. Although that term was coined in the 1970s (as the title of a book by the English author Roger Cardinal) its origins lie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when a few resident psychiatrists working in lunatic asylums in central Europe began to take an interest in their patients’ drawings, rather than just routinely throwing them out. The likes of Picasso and Klee explored these outer fringes too, in their search for new ways of doing art; the Surrealists were inspired by it; from the 1940s onwards it was championed (as ‘l'art brut’) by Jean Dubuffet. Today it’s gaining a much wider audience.
Outsider art is art from outside the artistic mainstream, art still not even recognised as art by many. It is art produced by the inmates of lunatic asylums/psychiatric institutions; by the inmates of ordinary prisons; by spiritualist ‘mediums’; by people with unusual (often religious) beliefs; by the socially isolated; by artistically untrained creative obsessives; by eccentrics. It is produced by people living on the margins of society, excluded not just from mainstream art but from society itself by dysfunctional personalities, grinding poverty, class or lack of education. It can include paintings and drawings, writings, photographs, music, sculptures, weird machines, even architecture; from simple pages covered with scribbles, to meticulously executed architectural blueprints. Some (for instance the Watts Towers in Los Angeles) have become famous. These works are, in Colin Rhodes’s words, ‘spontaneous expressive outpourings from the well-springs of creativity, unmuddied by artistic training or received knowledge’; and this book is a good general introduction to the subject.
As more comes to light about the lives of the artists themselves, this art is becoming more comprehensible too. Take Henry Darger for instance: at four his mother died; then his younger sister was given away for adoption; at twelve, though perfectly intelligent, he was sent to an Asylum for Feebleminded Children where he was beaten routinely and from which he escaped aged seventeen. He lived the majority of the rest of his life alone, and The Vivian Girls was only discovered (by accident by his landlord) not long before his death in 1973. Darger collected newspaper clippings about lost, kidnapped and murdered children, and incorporated these children into his story: it’s as if he was trying—by adopting them almost—to transfer them from our horrible world into his own universe where they’d be safe.… (more)