A Very Interesting Chat: Outsider Art

So yesterday evening I went over to my friend's house for natchos - good choice - and ended up looking at her dissertation on Outsider Art (Art Brut).

Outsider art is not created with the intention of ending up with a work of art, it tends to be done by people with mental problems who just draw or create work which could then be seen as art. One "artist" who is particularly famous is Adolf Wölfli (1864 - 1930). Wölfli suffered from psychosis which gave him intense hallucinations.

"Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else. He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimetres long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night. A Christmas the house gives him a box of coloured pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most."

Other artists she had studied included one who made his own camera and was obsessed with taking and developing photos of women and another who sought to find truth but when using paper for example would often bore holes right the way through because the paper was a barrier to discovering truth (at least that's how I interpreted it!).

It is a really interesting topic and can lead to some interesting philosophical discussions!