Marginal Art: What It Is And What Characteristics It Has
Maybe you have heard of “marginal art,” but you don’t know exactly what it is It may sound like the definition of minority art, or the artistic expression of groups excluded from society.
marginal art or Art Brut It’s a little bit of all that. Strictly speaking, the artist who develops this type of art is outside “official art” and does not follow the guidelines it stipulates. He does not necessarily have to belong to an “excluded” group, although it is true that his artistic manifestations are not “conventional.” Thus, we find marginal art in groups such as psychiatric patients, the elderly or children, whose artistic expression has traditionally been considered something secondary.
In this article we are going to see what this type of art is and what its characteristics are.
What is outsider art and what are its characteristics?
The concept of “marginal art” emerged in the 1970s, by the art critic Roger Cardinal (1940-2019). The Spanish word is the translation of its outsider artwhose bases he collected in his famous book Outsider Art (1972).
However, long before Cardinal presented the aesthetics of this new art to the world, a group of artists had coined a similar term, the Art Brutwhose characteristics Cardinal took up in 1972. Thus, marginal art or outsider art It is basically a translation of Art Brut from the middle of the 20th century.
He Art Brut or the art of the “marginalized”
To understand what outsider art consists of, we must go back to the 1940s, when the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) inserted the term Art Brut (raw art) to describe the artistic production of those groups that were on the margins of society and whose works could not be included in official art standards
When determining the existence of Art Brut, Dubuffet was greatly influenced by Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), a German psychiatrist and art historian, who, in 1922, had published what would be his most famous (and pompously titled) work. ): Plastic activity of mentally ill people. A contribution to the psychology and psychopathology of formal configuration. The work gave Dubuffet an idea when it came to “cataloguing” that art made by marginal groups in society.
So, At first, the Art Brutthe prelude to marginal art, featured especially psychiatric patients, a group traditionally misunderstood and excluded from social circles. Until then, no one had shown interest in the artistic production of these people, so Prinzhorn’s work (and, later, the efforts of Dubuffet and his colleagues) were truly innovative, not to say that they changed the idea forever. Of art. Artistic creation would never again be measured by the same standard.
The value of the “other” artistic expression
As expected, André Breton and his fellow surrealists embraced the concept with enthusiasm It could not be otherwise. Breton had served during the First World War in a French psychiatric sanatorium, and there he had had the opportunity to observe the creativity of the mentally ill. While the center’s psychiatrists considered the parliament of these patients mere “meaningless speculations,” Breton immediately learned of the artistic value they entailed. Because the patients’ monologues came directly from their minds and flowed freely, without any moral or rational hindrance.
Breton’s stay in the Saint-Dizier sanatorium gave rise to automatic writing and free association of ideas, a writing procedure that refused to correct what arose from the mind and dumped it as is on paper. This was one of the bases of surrealism founded by Breton, but that is another story.
What is really essential to understand this sudden appreciation of marginal art or Art Brut among artistic communities is its meaning of “pure” art, uncontaminated. Breton and the other artists who supported this art did so with the sincere conviction that social and moral norms strangled artistic expression and distanced it from what was genuine to turn it into something prostituted and corrupted. In other words; The official artist sells himself to society for recognition and money, but the “true” artist expresses himself without hesitation or convention of any kind
The appreciation of this “different” art can be traced back to the end of the 19th century, when Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) went to the southern seas trying to find indigenous purity, or even earlier, when the romantic Eugène Delacroix (1798 -1863) made a series of trips to the East to seek inspiration in its most “primitive” exoticism. On the other hand, naïve art (from the French word “naïve”) encompassed paintings made by non-professional artists, whose “clumsy” and “childish” work was criticized by many.
In summary; he Art Brut tried to recover a spontaneous and vital art, like the one done by children when they still do not know the rules or the art of the mentally ill, who live outside of them. These were the values that Dubuffet and the group of artists who followed him wanted to rescue.
The first exhibitions
The first major public manifestation of marginal art or Art Brut that is known to have been carried out in 1900, at Bethlm Hospital in London. The exhibition featured works of so-called “psychotic art”, that is, creations by psychiatric patients who, on the other hand, in those years had more scientific than artistic interest. The exhibition was successful and was repeated in 1913.
A little later, the German Expressionists of The Blue Reiter, led by Vasili Kandisnky and Franz Marc, “officialize” marginal art by exhibiting, along with their works, some made by mentally ill people; a clear manifestation of intentions that seemed to say: art made by the “marginalized” has the same value as movements led by artists.
And already in the middle of the 20th century, and after coining the term Art BrutJean Dubuffet, together with André Breton, Michel Tapié and other fellow artists create the Compagnie d’Art Bruta collection of works of outsider art that are currently preserved and can be seen at the Chatêau de Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland.
To properly value this type of artistic manifestation, it is essential to distance our minds from the official artistic conventions and norms that, although we do not know it, continue to influence us when judging a work of art.
According to Dubuffet, one of the greatest instigators of this type of expression, art is always found where it is not expected, and only there it flourishes as it should; that is, away from the corset of creative norms that society imposes. Authentic art, according to this statement, would be found in the hands of groups that no one thinks of when they think of art.
Only from this perspective can we understand what the concept of outsider art means. The creator becomes, in this way, an absolutely autonomous entity, with an inner world that is completely self-sufficient and that, therefore, expresses what this world, which is only his, asks of him. We could say that marginal art takes the idea of the solitary artist to the extreme who follows only his own instincts and desires, an idea that, by the way, already began to be drawn in Romanticism. However, outsider art takes this concept to the limit, definitively separating the creator and the environment from him. Because, while the romantics lived in a constant frustration derived from the dichotomy between the artist and the world, marginal art ignores this, since the creators are not even aware that these norms exist.
