Raw Creation: Outsider Art & Beyond

Review:

Primitive, folk, naive, self-taught, outsider--branding art made outside of the conventional art world has become a tender task. What defines it? Who are its creators? No matter what you call it, there's no denying the visceral appeal of raw creativity unbound by rules, class, or education. Long-overdue attention is finally being awarded to self-taught artists--so often marginalized by race, economics, and social structure--allowing them to carve a solid place for themselves and their work in the world of high art. Maizel's book examines the history, study, and appreciation of this century's self-taught art, from the maniacal drawings of asylum inmates to found-object sculptures made by street people to homes surrounded by monoliths or covered in mosaic. The book bills itself as an introduction to the topic, but it is in fact quite a comprehensive study. It is divided into three sections: part one explores early studies of the work of the insane, Dubuffet and Art Brut; part two chronicles folk art and self-taught artists around the world; and part three delves into the world of visionary environments. The contemporary busyness of the design-small type, footnotes printed perpendicular to text, and seemingly random increases in font size can be frustrating, but plow through--the content is informative and inspirational.

From the Back Cover:

The art of visionaries, folk creators, spiritualists, recluses, the 'mad' and the socially marginalized is no longer scorned and cannot be ignored. Among the first to value and collect such work was the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-85). For those he judged to represent the 'purest form of creation' he coined the term Art Brut, literally 'raw art' - raw because it was 'uncooked' by culture, raw because it came directly from the psyche, art touched by a raw nerve. In Raw Creation John Maizels traces the history of the recognition and study of this art and examines the different theories and definitions that have grown up around it. He provides detailed expositions of the work of individual artists ranging from such Art Brut masters as Adolf Wolfli and Aloise Corbaz to such gifted American folk artists as Bill Traylor and Mose Tolliver. Devoting several chapters to large-scale visionary environments, he takes a broad international view embracing Rodia's towers in Watts, Los Angeles, the Palais Ideal in the south of France, and Nek Chand's sculpture garden in north India.

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