"Anyone can do anything with a million dollars--look at Disney. But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing..."- Grandma Prisbrey

The desire to transform is universal. Transforming litter into artistic expression is not as common. The creations of individuals who work with junk to create fantastic visionary environments are tributes to human resourcefulness and imagination. They are ordinary "folk" working in complete anonymity, making extraordinary things that elicit powerful reactions. Within folklore study there is no agreement on what to call this group or their artistic expressions. By honoring the common rather than the organization, the informal rather than institutional approach, and by transmitting outsider-oriented aesthetic and ideological expressions of belief through unconventional means they have often been called outsider artists. What makes them a subculture? What is their basis in tradition? Who participates? What need does it fulfill? And why does it cause such strong and varied reactions?

WHY THE LABEL OUTSIDERS?

"It is dominant society that creates outsiders." - S. Cohen, Urban Studies

Starting broadly with the view that culture is stratified into subcultures, these outsiders develop distinct life patterns different from the dominant group and give unique expressive form to their life experiences. Simon Rodia, an uneducated immigrant working single-handedly nights and weekends for 33 years, without benefit of machine equipment, scaffolding, bolts, rivets, or drawing board designs, and without permits, inspections, or approval, created nine towering sculptures, the tallest of which was 99 feet. His creation is encrusted with a sparkling mosaic of what had once been trash. When asked why he built them he replied, "A man has to be good good or bad bad to be remembered."

Tressa Prisbrey built a village of thirteen houses and nine other minor structures on a 45- by 275-foot lot all by herself, finishing the heaviest structural work at age seventy-one. Her building materials were industrial refuse, personal discards, and thousands of bottles. It seemed as though everyone with whom she had close contact died. Six brothers and sisters, four sons, two daughters, a fiancee, and two husbands. Grieving and creating; she didn't want to be alone.

Eighty-eight year old Joshua Samual still lives in the farm house where he was born the son of a slave. His ongoing creation is a garden of metallic and commercial colors that sparkle on a sunny day. Presently about 1/10th of a mile long and 400 yards at its widest point, it is a city of discarded quart oil cans collected from gas stations, truck stops, and from donations within his community. As a result of a personal spiritual revelation in 1942 he has been a man with a spectacular social cause; he wanted to help the poor and needy. These are not isolated incidents. They are just three examples of the many who create in anonymity. Although there is no school or formal links between each independent artist, there are a few indices of participation that seem to be recurrent.

ART BASED IN TRADITION

The outsider tradition assumes different avatars in each generation. Like the Dadaists who took delight in obfuscation, and the Surrealists who inferred mystery from everyday life by their haphazard juxtaposition of unrelated and insignificant things and events, the outsiders share this distant and unconscious genealogy with the hegemonic art world.

Presently no one can agree on what to call this group. Titles like folkartist, outsider, brute, raw, or naive are bantered about, each one carrying with it positive and negative connotations. Of course the media plays a role by defining our experience of this group and then providing the easiest available category for classification. It is by the media that most of our ideas of art are formed, reinforced and sanctioned through institutions such as museums, art history classes, critics, and collectors. Yet outside this mainstream of academic circles, popular press, and communications industries fringe subcultures flourish, indifferent to middle-class taste and aesthetics. When a fringe subculture is noticed by the media, response fluctuates between fascination, outrage, and amusement. If it is marketable it is quickly examined, explained and absorbed.

Since aesthetics of style are essentially subjective, varying from generation to generation and from person to person, documenting and exhibiting art is inescapable. Like the constant evolution of a living language, the larger culture must absorb marginal insights by bringing them to the attention of a much wider audience. With the Parallel Visions exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1992, and Howard Finster's fame as an album cover designer for the rock bands Talking Heads and REM, it is clear that outsider art is fast becoming an acceptable part of modern culture. Since labeling is inevitable, it might help to provide a couple definitions against unavoidable designations such as folk art or naive art. Folk art was traditionally something received from ancestors and passed down to descendants with only slight individual creativity permitted. During the process of transfer, focus was on function and transmission. This process neglected problem solving or individual initiative, the two strongest traits of the outsider. Fashionable waves of sentimental nostalgia have since lumped factory made hunting decoys and Pennsylvania Dutch kitsch together with outsider art.

Similarly, the term naive or brute art is inappropriate. In 1951 Jean Dubuffet gave an important lecture entitled "Anticultural Positions" wherein he promoted his belief that the most sincere and compelling art came from the genesis of the deep and often disturbing world of elemental feeling exemplified by the art of psychotics, children and the criminally insane. Recently it became fashionable for artists interested in locating a justification for their own work to exploit such institutionally insane antisocial misfits for personal inspiration. However, many mental patients are often prescribed drugs which, while controlling psychological extremes, also numb creativity. Institutionalized art therapy (by channelling spontaneity into standardized crafts and busywork) sacrifices potential creativity in its search for clues to pathology. Ultimately it is an error to perceive outsider artists as eccentrics who act in supposed isolation. Many use their wondrous art in order to create a link with society. And to say they are unskilled and naive misses the point. Most may be self-taught but rely on skills picked up from others. Their art is neither psychotic nor accidental. It is simply inspired. As Howard Finster is fond of saying, "all ideas are visions."

Although I use outsider here for the sake of convenience, the latest term, Nameless art, coined by Tom Patterson, best reflects for me the aesthetic and the philosophy of the art it represents. Many of its creators are the nameless neighborhood visionaries we stumble over while driving from point A to B. People who hold down jobs, raise families and go to church, who have suffered loss, illness, or isolation yet can find a way to eloquently answer common pain with art, providing an extension of themselves into the world around them using their innate talent and energy.

HOW FOLKLORE STUDIES DETERMINE A SUBCULTURE

Style: Although they work independently, divided by geography and technique, these creators form an intrinsically linked non-cohesive group. Roger Cardinal, in his book Outside Art, offers a rough socio-psychological outline of members of this group. He believes many identify "with a private domain set against what surrounds it... indifferent to the `frozen' values of organized culture. [Offering] a reappraisal of what society has designated as obsolescent."

Since the creative process is often a solitary one, all art dedicated to personal expression will have problems maintaining group style. However, there is most commonly evident a high degree of inventiveness that centers on an unsolemn, deliberately weird, mutative mischief applied to vernacular sources. Works are often busy and employ distinctive and complex personal imagery which draw not only upon the interior life of feeling and emotion, but the objective character of American material culture as well.

Importantly, there is more sculpture than two dimensional work due to a reliance on found, or at least very inexpensive materials. Blank paper, fine art paints, and canvases are rarer than roadside litter and cast off construction materials. There is frequent use of cement since it is cheap, available and easy to work using rudimentary skills and without special tools. It is permanent, suitable for outdoors and any form can be made of it or embedded into it. The use of these types of materials coincide with a rural economy and artists having backgrounds of predominantly manual work.

Values: Traditional values and aesthetics of the community are transferred onto idiosyncratic objects made of recycled materials. Such transformation of the ambiguous commercial symbols of popular culture displays intentional nonconformity. Simon Rodia had "never been a man who conformed to what was expected of him," yet he held very traditional "old world" values; displaying elaborate courtesy to visitors, complaining about the degeneration of family life since World War II, and bemoaning the constant political and economic changes in the United States.

The term homology, or the symbolic fit between lifestyle and value of a group, was first coined by anthopologist Levi-Strauss and seems appropriate. I use Rodia to illustrate homology in the same way Jean Genet has been used as a basic frame of reference in folkloric studies on style. Outsiders are of a society but not in it. They are people whose lives reflect creativity as an ongoing process of daily life. They scrutinize differences between and among objects, they manipulate and conceptualize end results, and rather than being limited to a brief spark of insight or creativity, their prodigious works transcend the mundane. Thus, whether intentional or unintentional, their art produces an analysis of that popular culture of which they are not an accepted part.

Core values of national culture are refracted differentially in this outsider subculture. They are replaced by, or converge with, a manipulation of symbols that focus on a culture of conspicuous consumption. Obviously these items are often used out of expediency since their availability and cost coincide with the economic status of the artists. Yet each artist's system of communication, expression, and representation employs a fantastic and surprising variety of material products of everyday American life and culture.

But they should not be interpreted as simple expressive acts "dissing" popular culture. Most often these forms of expression originate from major life changes such as retirement, poverty, illness or injury and reflect the obvious inability of society to meet the most personal needs of the individual.

Behavior: Outsider art is not an expression of a highly structured, tightly bonded group identity. It is not intended to communicate social resistance. Ideas and artifacts of twentieth century popular culture play significant roles in outsider creations but they do not serve as icons of group experience. Nor do they function as parodies of the collapse of traditional forms of meaning. The closest Outsiders come to deviance is in the use of their "magical" system of expression. A new context is created by rearranging objects and their meanings and thus intentionally or unconsciously undermine traditional and/or commercial symbol systems.

Rather than defiant, Outsider expressions mirror the hope and desire required to lift the human spirit. "Far from being a celebration of easy nostalgia, outsider art is a cry in the dark, an attempt to deal with the shadows of culture and the mysteries of life." It is poignant synchronicity that Simon Rodia should die in 1965, the year of the first Watts riots which marked the neighborhood in the mind of the nation as a place of poverty and despair.

There are never any personal efforts to commercialize their work, but those who express an interest in it are always welcome. Outsider art primarily serves to satisfy the artist's personal needs; what the viewer thinks does not matter. In fact, as Roger Manely writes in Signs and Wonders,

As soon as an artist shifts from making art that satisfies his or her needs (even for money), and begins to make work simply to satisfy the demand for it, the work starts to decline in aesthetic quality because its original function is lost. Without its motivating thrust, the work serves only to incorporate the artist into a mainstream system of production and consumption. This generates more isolation, with the inevitable result that the work is neutered.

FUNCTIONS OF CREATIVE EXPRESSION

So what does this singleminded, tireless and creative compulsion serve to satisfy? First, art that is not simply made but lived with expresses many powerful and deep feelings simply because it's presence cannot be ignored. The development of a quaint garden or an "idea of neighborliness in a carefully planned front lawn" with a few flamingos is traditional; the nature of monumental dream-like sculptural manifestations is not. Massive environmental projects entirely created by one person differ from common yard bric-a-brac. However the outsider's visionary environments in fact extend the hegemonic values, "... reflect[ing] a nostalgic longing for a past perceived as less complex and more romantic than the problem-riddled world of the present. "

The creative urge of outsiders is often a response to isolation, personal loss, or trauma. Answering a physical emptiness with their own creativity, they busy themselves with activities that allow control over their lives. Outsiders usually evaluate themselves with a sense of daily accomplishment, and come from jobs in which they are able to see a tangible result to each day's labor. In turn their creativity is reinforced by new attention. This attention provides a chance to reevaluate one's sense of diminished self worth. For instance, it replaces negative images, "I am worthless and unemployed," with positive ones, "I can make this" or more simply, "I am noticed and therefore I exist." Attention also answers the needs for identity by filling the emptiness of urban isolation and the increasing secularization of daily life. Exclusion from the possibility of attaining mainstream cultural goals can also isolate. A shaking of faith in government and national ideals, a spiritual vacuum, and a questioning of one's place in history all provide creative motivation as well. And disenfranchisement caused by age, racial inequality or prison sentences are also part of the profile of outsiders. Young people with career possibilities and earning potential ahead of them rarely claim membership. To now there are fewer women than men because of the constraints society has, in the past, placed on more physical forms of female expression (i.e., it is not ladylike to shovel cement).

COMMUNITY RESPONSE TO OUTSIDERS

Society devoted to definitions and limits will naturally have a harsh response to outsider culture. In Chicago on March 7, 1992 a jury of six ruled the yard art of a "60-ish biologist" as junk. They called her an eccentric and called in a tow truck and bulldozer to dismantle her "peace park"; 44 tons of sand, car parts and "assorted debris" deposited on the grounds of her home as a protest against atomic bombs and abuse of the environment. Social policy is generally designed to assimilate and integrate peripheral groups into social participation where transmission of mainstream values occur. Even a personal relationship to one's own environment becomes orchestrated by immense bureaucracies (such as homeowner's organizations). Sculptors who want to install modest traditional pieces in public parks must go through rounds of negotiations with neighborhood interest groups and conduct public relations campaigns. Outsiders are artists willing to break the boundaries of community morality and even risk vandalism. Neighborhood children would throw rocks at Simon Rodia and call him crazy. After he disappeared his towers were attacked and the breaking of plates and tiles eventually led to the place being treated as a dump. Society will never be kind to what it does not understand. Calvin Trillin summed up this relationship in his article on Simon Rodia. A quote from architect Edward Farrell states,

One of the rules of the artist is that he takes chances, wastes his time, does things that might be absurd, so he can nudge society. The responsibility of the rest of us is to let him do this. What he does may be kooky, but let's see in a few years...The worst thing you can do is tear down what he did.

WHAT'S IN A NAMELESS ART

The nameless creators of this nameless art may not fit the traditional concept of subculture since their independent actions do not form the standard collective. But because of other shared factors these artists remain part of a unique untraditional subculture. Although this group is unique, the gap between low and high culture, between "us" and "them", is narrower than we might expect. Our shared faith in a universal human nature and a natural voyeuristic interest in all things alien will inevitably keep us closely linked. Nameless art forces observers to make new discoveries and draw new conclusions about ordinary living and themselves, thereby revealing the outsider in us all. Regardless of the debate over who actually influenced who, or of intuitively perceived divisions, it is important to keep our imaginations responsive to the outsider subculture that encircles us with its hopeful visions, visions as elemental and vital as the air we breathe.

Tori Orr copyright May 30, 1993 All Images are of the Watt's Towers, Los Angeles California Courtesy of the Los Angeles Historical Society