Communication Gallery Focuses on Artists Inside the Outsider Tradition

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Piece by Art Paul Schlosser in exhibit titled “Considering Outsider Art” at Madison's Communication Gallery

When one is born, one’s relationship to language is firm and crystalline, and it thaws and turns fluid as the years pass. We all eventually come to understand the natural instability of the words we originally took for granted. When I was very young, words like “album,” “film” and “TV show” seemed concrete and eternal, but they survive today only because “a series of related digital songs” or “a 48-minute scripted drama on Netflix” aren’t reasonable alternatives. The medium in such cases conceived the name of the art form, and, as time passed and technology evolved, we were stuck using confused terminological orphans.

A more complex version of this conundrum is encapsulated in an exhibition at Madison’s Communication Gallery called “Considering Outsider Art” (through March 30), the implications of which reach deep into our local art world and far beyond. Like “film” and “album,” the term “outsider art” is a remnant from a time when the world was very different. A time when one could make something that was beyond the reach of “official culture,” the distinction preferred by the show’s curators to define the boundaries of “outsiderness”.

The show “considers” by exhibiting works by artists who practice in the outsider tradition. The gallery itself cuts a fairly humble profile in a storefront off highway 151 east of Madison. It’s “outside” in the way the work is: off the metaphorical Main Street but not off the grid. The show unfolds in a back gallery behind a DIY shop in front, and it features work that is at times naïve, cleverly referential and even sophisticated by insider standards. Becca Kacanda’s glass, button and bottle cap encrusted mini-altars stand out as sculptural gems helping to confirm the show’s mission. Her work draws inspiration from the grottos of Iowa outsider Catherine Bastian but might also make locals think of Fred Smith’s roadside masterpiece in Phillips, Wis. Kacanda’s constructions don’t elicit the supernatural shiver that came over me when experiencing Smith’s Concrete Park alone in a light snow, at dusk, in midwinter. Still, they faithfully draw on a kind of creative abandon and material omnivorousness that unites Smith, Bastian and many other outsiders.

Adjacent to Kacanda’s work on the wall are a number of equally beguiling concrete mask-like reliefs embedded with cutlery, keys, watches, glass and other items by Josh Howard. They succeed at furthering the cause by being completely bizarre and almost beyond category, unclear whether they were made in a sanitarium or a senior sculpture studio.

Tim Brenner, a Madison-based artist who has shown in Milwaukee on a number of occasions, offers a staider series of patterned acrylic abstractions on boards, sitting upright neatly on two homemade shelves painted with cartoony wood graining. It’s a little Dr. Seuss-y, but its overall elegance might mistake it for something less naïve: a Carol Bove, Haim Steinbach or something from the pages of Lucy Lippard’s Six Years. But, if you’re familiar with his work, you know he’s a master of the unmasterful, a virtuoso of unvirtuosity. So, his inclusion makes sense even as it begs for further clarification of the term “outsider.”

It would be simple to dismiss a show of “outsiderness” on the grounds that the enterprise is inherently contradictory and possibly fetishistic. There are plenty of detractors hurling these very claims throughout the art world at the moment, but they are outnumbered by the growing fanbase of “outsider,” “self-taught” and “folk” art. The Outsider Art Fair concluded last week in New York and was attended by many thousands of visitors, 67 international galleries and hundreds of works both by true naïfs, many of them deceased, and hundreds more by living artists with art degrees and dedicated studio practices. Outsider art even includes the work of the actor Jim Carrey, who now makes political cartoons (He must have taught himself). One of Milwaukee’s best-loved galleries exhibited work there by several living local practitioners who, as far as I can tell, are totally inside the cultural fold. Clearly precise distinctions about what constitutes an outsider, it seems, don’t matter as much as does their look-and-feel. So, should we care about this dissonance any more than we care that we still use the term “book” to describe a story on Audible?

Maybe it’s like punk rock, as we know who the pioneers were: Sid, Joe, Joey. Their spirit lives on through new music, even if the Queen’s no longer offended. We know real punk when we see it. Like Potter Stuart knew smut. Perhaps it’s the same for art; the possibility of being outside of anything in 2019 is lost, true, but can the essence persist in spite of that? That’s a question that hovers heavily over Wisconsin in particular, with its proud history of true outsiders: Tom Every; Herman Rusch; Paul and Matilda Wegner.

“Considering Outsider Art” offers a look at the post-punk equivalents who keep the naïve dream alive. LaNia Sproles, Barb Priem, Art Paul Schlosser and others reflect the defining characteristic of the regional art scene: fearlessly intuitive art work that scoffs at learned tastes. One wonders how long such an anti-intellectual spirit, which is ultimately what unites true outsider and outsider-derived art, can persist. And how long can we afford to be proudly innocent in a world of increasing cynicism and sophistication? Indefinitely, I hope, but I’m not counting on it.