'Loser Wins'

ELSEVIER Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

'Loser wins"

Outsider art and the salvaging of disinterestedness *

Julia S. Ardery*

Appalachian Center, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0347, USA

Abstract

This paper describes the emergence of a new field within the U.S. visual art world - twen-

tieth century folk and outsider art - and endeavors to explain the more ideological features of

its legitimation. The study argues that twentieth century folk art provided a generation of aca-

demically trained artists with two promising means of 'position-taking'. First, through their

advocacy of eccentric amateurs, artists newly trained or employed at universities in the

provincial U.S. could propose a non-New York model of credibility. Secondly, in champi-

oning outsider artists, striving newcomers might pursue their artistic ambitions while simul-

taneously proffering themselves as retainers of an embattled art world principle - the ethos of

disinterestedness. The study considers several indicators - museum membership and acquisi-

tions, new specialty galleries, and increasing numbers of exhibitions - to suggest the field's

expansion through the 1970s. Using Bourdieu's conceptualization of disinterestedness as 'the

inversion of ordinary economies', this paper examines how folk and outsider artists came to

represent disinterestedness in a period of normalization and careerism. It also contends that,

in accord with this principle's demands, the development of this cultural field has required of

artists ever more stringent demonstrations of social ostracism and personal frailty.

I. Introduction

In his work on the formation of literary and artistic fields, Pierre Bourdieu has set

forward a wholly relational model of culture. Like other sociologists, as well as sev-

eral earlier aesthetic philosophers, Bourdieu rejects a conception of art grounded in

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sociology of Culture Section's session 'New

Trends in the Sociology of the Arts', American Sociological Association, Annual Meeting, 19 August,

1995, Washington, D.C. Thanks to Richard Peterson for bringing the paper to the editor's attention and

to the reviewers for their remarks. This paper developed from a more comprehensive study of twentieth

century folk art's legitimation, Ardery, 1995. The extended work examines, in addition to the ideologi-

cal matters discussed here, several structural forces that contributed to folk art's popular success -

including the foundation of federal and state arts agencies, demographic changes in U.S. higher educa-

tion, and the 1970s' corporate evironment - see Chapters III, IV.

* E-mail: bbja@ix.netcom.com

0378-2166/97/$17.00 © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

PH S0304-422X(96)00015-0

330 J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

originality, craftsmanship, or creative genius. Altematively, he has presented art as

an enduring definitional question, one in which battles over value and prestige are

joined often with less determination or effect by authors than by their authorizers.

'What is a great painting?'. For Bourdieu, the more critical questions are always

'What social differences are enacted in the choosing? Whose verdict prevails?'.

Thus, do artistic fields constitute 'the product and prize of a permanent conflict'

among all those engaged and recognized for their engagement in struggles to bestow

art's honorific name (1993a: 34).

Particularly in his discussions of artistic change, Bourdieu has examined how

shifts in the larger social world - altering constraints, opportunities, allegiances, and

antagonisms - jostle cultural relations, ever opening alternative positions in the con-

test that is culture. Bourdieu takes special note of how newcomers in all cultural

fields avail themselves of changing possibilities in order to assert and improve their

standing. One dimension of this struggle typically involves overturning existing

standards in favor of the newcomers' own (for example, the Impressionists' rejection

of history painting and dedication to the 'low' subjects of landscape and still life

instead); another usually concomitant strategy mounts a kind of imminent critique,

turning fundamental cultural principles to one's own advantage (for example, the

English Pre-Raphaelite painters' professed endeavor to 'purify' art through a 'return

to sources') (1993e: 82-86; 1993d: 183). At certain historical junctures, these

paired strategies, whether adopted consciously or not, enable newcomers on the

scene both to establish discrete identities in a cultural field and to brandish its signal

values.

Informed by Bourdieu's work, this paper examines such a juncture - the U.S.

visual arts of the 1970s - and the ascendancy of twentieth century folk art in those

years as the result, in part, of expedient position-taking by art world newcomers.

Grounded in art history of the period and with reference to interviews gathered from

collectors, artists and art dealers active at this time, this study purports to describe

twentieth century folk and outsider art's popularization and to explain the more ide-

ological features of its legitimation as a cultural field. Because cultural boundaries

are highly permeable, fixed definitions, as Bourdieu has argued, typically constitute

little more than 'prejudices or presuppositions' in an arena that warring definitions

themselves establish and maintain (1993a: 42--43); thus, this study of cultural legit-

imation does not purport to operationalize 'twentieth century folk art' but rather to

illuminate a state in the struggles to define it. This paper takes as 'twentieth century

folk art' - a category that might conceivably include objects as diverse as painted

napkin rings, graffiti, and snapshots - that changing group of objects that have been

traded, displayed, and discussed as such in 'major group exhibitions that helped to

define (contemporary folk art) and in definitive publications on (twentieth century

folk art)' (Crane, 1987: 145-148).

It will be argued that twentieth century folk art provided newcomers to the visual

arts, notably a generation of academically trained artists, with two promising means

of 'position-taking'. First, through their advocacy of self-taught, eccentric amateurs,

artists newly trained or employed at universities in the provincial U.S. could propose

a non-New York model of artistic credibility and success. Secondly, in championing

J.S. Ardel S / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346 331

folk and outsider artists, these striving newcomers might pursue their artistic ambi-

tions while simultaneously proffering themselves as,retainers and protectors of an

embattled art world principle - the ethos of disinterestedness. As well, it will be con-

tended that via this ethos, folk art's popular success and institutionalization through-

out the 1970s and 1980s have continually depended upon barring folk artists them-

selves from substantial gain, and on locating and nominating to folk artist status

creators ever more socially disadvantaged and personally frail.

2. The institutionalization of folk and outsider art, 1970-1985

Prior to the 1970s one finds no trace of U.S. twentieth century folk art as a cul-

tural field. The Museum of American Folk Art was founded in 1963 but for its early

supporters, most of them old guard and wealthy collectors from the northeast, 'the

possibility of genuine contemporary expression was of negligible interest' (Hartigan,

1991 : 29). There were no contemporary folk art galleries in 1970 and very few writ-

ings on the subject, nor had such work appeared at public auction. Antiques dealers

and even the large auction houses had handled the odd twentieth century piece,

nearly always by an anonymous hand, but in general objects made after 1900 were

assumed to have been influenced by machine-made articles or modeled on elite or

popular sources, and thus not properly 'folk art' at all. Moreover, since folk art's

pricing was derived from the antiques trade, twentieth century objects lacked the

cachet of years and so were typically passed over.

While the parameters of the twentieth century folk art world continue to be sub-

ject to debate, an examination of three indicators - membership in the Museum of

American Folk Art, numbers of twentieth century folk art exhibitions, and numbers

of galleries specializing in this type of art - suggest the field's expansion through the

1970s. Additionally, museum acquisitions, regular public auction sales, and univer-

sity course offerings in folk art suggest its growing legitimation. Data from art peri-

odicals, archival records, auction house catalogues, exhibition catalogues, encyclo-

pedias, and several folk art histories taken in sum illustrate the inception, extension,

and autonomization of a new artistic subfield.

The Museum of American Folk Art's membership dramatically increased during

the decade of the 1970s. The museum had 207 members in 1964, 450 members in

1969, 1000 members in 1974, 3000 in 1979, and 4100 in 1981 (Hoffman, 1989:

36-63). The museum's closing in the early 1980s effected a decrease in membership,

to 3100 in 1987, while now membership stands at slightly more than 5000 (Bergin,

1996).

The 1970s and '80s also witnessed a tremendous increase in twentieth century

folk art exhibitions. Herbert W. Hemphill, Jr.'s personal collection of American folk

The following sources have supplied the most abundant records of activity in the field: Curry (1987),

Hartigan (1990), Hemphill, 'Catalogues and Exhibitions'; Rosenak (1990), Rumford (1980), Sellen

(1993), and three specialty periodicals, Folk Art Finder, The Clarion (after 1992, published as Folk Art),

and The Folk Art Messenger.

332 J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

art, heavily weighted toward contemporary works, began a fifteen-year tour in the

mid-1970s, traveling to twenty-three different venues between 1973 and 1988 (Har-

tigan, 1991 : 89-80). This exposure, when U.S. folk art was still an uncertain artistic

category, served to alert many thousands of viewers to American folk art and to rat-

ify twentieth century pieces. With repeated display of Hemphill's collection and

other shows that emulated his taste, works made by a core group of contemporary

poor, elderly, rural, and non-academic artists gained widespread national acclaim

(Hartigan, 1989: 29ff.). These diverse makers, unknown to one another, were con-

stituted as a group of 'twentieth century folk artists' through repeated group exhibi-

tions and several published art anthologies of the 1970s (White and White, 1993:

98-99).

An increasing number of contemporary folk art exhibitions, especially throughout

the 1970s, suggests the establishment of an identifiable artistic field. From 1965 until

1969, 16 exhibitions of twentieth century folk art were presented in the entire U.S.,

usually under the rubric 'naive painting' (these include one person and group shows

held primarily at museums and university art galleries). Between 1970, the year

Hemphill mounted the first twentieth century folk art exhibition at the Museum of

American Folk Art, and 1974, when his survey book on the subject was published,

30 U.S. exhibitions of twentieth century folk art can be documented. In the next five

years, 1975 through 1979, exhibitions more than doubled, to 64. 2 Between 1980 and

1984, the number of contemporary folk art exhibitions increased to 80, with the Cor-

coran Gallery of Art's touring show of twentieth century African American folk art

spurring enormous interest, especially in self-taught artists of the South. From 1985

through 1989, 125 exhibitions can be documented.

These exhibition records do not take full account of the enormous increase in pri-

vate, commercial folk art galleries, whose numbers and activities swelled during the

1970s and '80s, evidence of a growing market. Chicago gallery owner Phyllis Kind

arranged her premier group show of contemporary folk art in March 1972. Janet

Fleisher Gallery (Philadelphia) followed in 1975, after the publication of Hemphill's

and Weissman's Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists. From 1970 until

1982 twenty-one commercial galleries offered contemporary folk or self-taught art

(Ardery, 1995: 304n.). The number of U.S. galleries specializing in this material had

by 1993 increased to more than 135, with new outlets opening every season (Sellen,

1993: 3-65).

Folk art also found a place at the prestigious New York public auction houses, the

most highly visible of all sales venues, in the 1970s. While Sotheby's had offered

folk art intermittently since 1944, this division, according to its director, Nancy

Druckman,

2 These numbers represent only those exhibitions that emphasized twentieth century folk art pieces and

artists. Showings of the Hemphill collection are included, though his collection includes earlier works

also. During the mid-1970s, in addition to the work of art student 'discoverers', two events fired popu-

lar interest in U.S. folk art: the Whitney Museum's 1974 exhibition 'The Flowering of American Folk

Art', which while concentrating on pre-twentieth century works presented folk art in New York's pre-

eminent contemporary art museum venue, and the 1976 U.S. bicentennial, focussing interest on the

nation's many regional arts traditions.

J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346 333

'never really took shape or took an identity and took form until the early '70s, when the Garbisches

started to sell. Then quite coincidentally the Whitney Museum mounted "The Flowering of American

Folk Art," ... an assemblage of the most incredibly wonderful and irresistible folk art objects. It kind of

provided the venue in which large numbers of people could really see this material as a separate and dis-

tinct kind of collecting category.'

Beginning in 1990, with the sale of Museum of American Folk Art director Robert

Bishop's collection, Sotheby's has annually offered contemporary folk and outsider

art at its January auction. New York's Outsider Art Fair, begun in January 1993 as a

highly speculative venture, is now another established event of the city's winter arts

season. In 1996, the Outsider Art Fair drew 5000 paying customers to the booths of

thirty-five folk and outsider art galleries.

While the designation of 'authentic' contemporary folk artists continues to be con-

tested, a 1984 survey of contemporary folk and outsider artists in the U.S. yielded

some 550 such creators but estimated 'there may be as many as 1000 such self-

taught artists in the USA and Canada who have been recognized by exhibitions and

publications' (Laffal and Laffal, 1984). Authors of the Museum of American Folk

Art's 1990 encyclopedia, acknowledging the extent of the field and this book's func-

tion 'only as an introduction', included 257 artists (Rosenak, 1990: 20). A 1993 ref-

erence work published short biographies of 876 twentieth century folk artists of the

U.S. (Sellen, 1993: 315--437).

By 1984 twenty-five U.S. universities offered courses in folk art (MacDowell,

1984: 30). Collectors have formed their own organizations and support several spe-

cialty publications (Ardery, 1991). In 1987, the Museum of American Folk Art orga-

nized the first of many 'Explorers' Club' tours, transporting folk art enthusiasts to

visit artists, collections, folk art environments. Furthermore, increasing numbers of

fine art museums are mounting folk art shows and purchasing non-academic art

work (Sellen, 1993: 69-97). Perhaps the strongest indicator of folk and outsider art's

legitimation is that two large collections now belong to major art museums. In 1986

Hemphill's collection was acquired through a gift/purchase agreement by the

National Museum of American Art; the Michael and Julie Hall Collection was

acquired similarly for $2.3 million by the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1989. Illustrat-

ing the extent of folk art's institutionalization - and perhaps its concomitant fall

from autonomous 'grace' - a 1994 art periodical featured on the cover a photograph

of Edgar Tolson's Barring of the Gates of Paradise, a stiff, simple woodcarving in

which the angel drives out Adam and Eve, the boundary of Paradise marked with a

fence of Popsicle sticks. The magazine's headline reads: 'The End of Innocence?

Folk Art Enters the Canon' (New Art Examiner, 1994).

3. Disinterestedness and the inverted economy of art

The legitimation of twentieth-century folk art, from which such canonical status

derives, has its ideological roots in the principle of 'disinterestedness', an aesthetic

criterion codified some two hundred years earlier by Immanuel Kant. In his 1790

Critique of Pure Judgment, elaborating upon treatises of earlier English and German

334 J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

authors, Kant systematically developed a new artistic conception, shifting emphasis

from the realms of skill and creative decision-making to contemplation and percep-

tion (Abrams, 1986:11-14). Kant located art's defining moment not in an artisan's

achievement but in a perceiver's imaginative response, his Analytics of the Beauti-

ful and the Sublime thoroughly and persuasively setting down the terms that, one

hundred years later, became known as 'modernism'.

Kant contended that only a disinterested state of mind could render aesthetic judg-

ments reliably. He specified that economic, emotional, intellectual, social, utilitarian,

and even sensuous matters, while tangential to artistic experience, must not impinge

upon aesthetic judgment, that questions of artistic merit must be settled without ref-

erence to any other concern. Only then might the imagination contemplate form

alone, a free, spontaneous play exercised in conformity with reason's ineffable laws.

Taste, Kant wrote, is 'the faculty of judging an object or a mode of representing it

by a wholly disinterested pleasure or displeasure' (1963: 12).

The premise of disinterestedness, along with most of the modernist legacy, has

been challenged from many quarters in the past thirty years. Most trenchantly, Pierre

Bourdieu's own 1984 opus Distinction, 'a social critique of the Judgment of Taste',

combined factor analysis, in-depth interviews and commentary to allege that 'taste'

rather than 'disinterested', the gift of nature Kant proposed, is determined relation-

ally, as all contend for the best possible return upon the 'cultural capital' they accrue

through education and birth. While he has refuted disinterestedness as an innate

human capacity (and, through the examples of Manet and Flaubert, analyzed the his-

torical conditions that made such an idea viable), Bourdieu has also alleged that dis-

interestedness, as a principle, continues to undergird 'the production of belief' that

constitutes cultural life. Struggles over cultural worth, he has written, 'almost always

involve recognition of the ultimate values of disinterestedness' (1993e: 79).

Further developing this point, Bourdieu has argued that within the most

autonomous cultural fields,

'The economy of practices is based, as in a generalized game of "loser wins," on a systematic inversion

of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies: that of business

(it excludes the pursuit of profit

and does not guarantee any sort of correspondence between investments and monetary gains), that of

power (it condemns honors and temporal greatness), and even that of institutionalized cultural authority

(the absence of any academic training or consecration may be considered a virtue).' (1993a: 39)

Such inversions do not threaten the larger economy (though this cultural position

taking does point to more general struggles for economic and political power); instead

these inversions function to stake out discrete cultural fields, distinguished by norms

and behaviors of their own. Inasmuch as it inverts the rules of the ordinary economy,

a cultural field, Bourdieu writes, functions 'in accordance with its particular laws',

and gives rise to 'a particular form of capital'. It is in these particularities that a liter-

ary or artistic field displays its degree of autonomy and 'functions somewhat like a

prism which refracts every extemal determination' (1993b: 164). The emergent field

of contemporary folk art, as will be seen, clearly possesses such refractory power,

most radically evident in its revaluation of folk artists, who become 'symbolically

desired for the very reasons they are socially reviled' (Metcalf, 1994: 225).

J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346 335

The stricture of disinterestedness, marked by these inversions, is applied to audi-

ences in their exercise of taste, but also to art dealers, and to artists themselves, who

face the most rigorous tests of all. Bourdieu contends that art dealers, 'merchants in

the temple', make their living 'by tricking the artist or writer into taking the conse-

quences of his or her statutory professions of disinterestedness' (1993a: 40). Caught

in a stifling bind, artists 'cannot even denounce the exploitation they suffer without

confessing their self-interested motives' (1993e: 79) and in so doing, endangering

their cultural credentials. Yet if convincing claims of artistic merit must be predi-

cated on some evidence of disinterestedness, who can be coaxed into 'taking the

consequences' of such a position? To establish and preserve art's autonomy, who's

willing or even able to play the 'loser'?

4. The 1970s: The normalization of U.S. art

Within the U.S. visual arts, meeting the litmus test of disinterestedness grew espe-

cially tricky in the 1970s, a period of unprecedented expansion and 'winning' on

several fronts. Crucially, the shape of higher education, beginning in the late 1960s,

cultivated a more pervasive admiration for art in general. The demographic bulge of

postwar children had reached college age, increasing the nation's collegiate popula-

tion to an all time high ('Baby boomers', born between 1946 and 1953, were gradu-

ating from U.S. colleges between 1968 and 1975). Percentages of 18- to 24-year-

olds enrolled in higher education had also risen steeply, from 12.5% in 1946 to 32%

in 1970, making this generation the largest and best educated in American history

(Crane, 1987: 160). DiMaggio and Useem in their study of arts audiences found

'Educational attainment appears to be the individual characteristic most closely

related to attendance at museums and live performing arts events' (1977: 30). Thus,

the years from 1968 to 1975, when baby boomers collected their college diplomas,

produced mote potential art museum visitors than any period on U.S. history.

During the same period new university studio art programs, terminating in the

Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree, proliferated throughout the country. Between

1965 and 1974, 53 MFA degree programs in studio art were inaugurated in the U.S.,

nearly doubling the number of schools offering this degree (previously 55) (College

Art Association, 1987). This dramatic rise in the number of university-trained artists,

all vying for national recognition, glutted the extant system of artistic repute so that

'by the early seventies, it was no longer possible for New York art institutions to

assess and display effectively a valid selection of the artwork that was being pro-

duced in the United States' (Crane, 1987: 130). While their academic credential in

studio art thus began to shrink in value, MFA holders, especially those trained in the

newest university programs, outside New York City, strove to imagine and enact

alternative claims to distinction. In this effort, contemporary folk art would become

a rallying point.

Diane Crane's study The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art

Worm 1940-1985, tracing structural changes that shaped the visual arts during these

years, portrays an expanding cultural environment characterized by greater public

336 J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

interest, institutionalization, government and corporate patronage, and access to arts

education. All these influences, she concludes, transformed the role of the artist in

the United States. Students from middle and upper-class families who entered the

many new Master of Fine Arts programs created after 1965 approached art as a

career and were drawn to secure professions in the academy themselves (Ardery,

1989: 28). In sum, Crane writes, 'the artistic role ceased to be that of an avant-garde

with its concomitant overtones of alienation from popular culture and middle-class

values'. Instead, U.S. artists 'tended to identif(y) with the middle class in terms of

career goals and life-style' (Crane, 1987:10-11,140). Rather than contented 'losers'

in an inverted economy, enacting the disinterested role art's system of belief

requires, U.S. artists, especially from the 1970s forward, sought academic degrees,

corporate commissions, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the very

sorts of 'consecration' and 'honors' that, according to Bourdieu, must be shunned.

Normalization of the artistic role, as increasing numbers of trained artists pursued

standard careers, created a dearth of convincing 'losers', those whose claims to dis-

interestedness could be credible. While, of course, only a minority of the Master of

Fine Arts graduates of the 1970s went on to find livelihoods as artists (whether based

on university salaries, stipends, or the successful marketing of their own works),

merely by having these goals and pursuing them according to conventional careerist

strategies (resum6 building, grant applications, etc.), they were marked by the kind

of self-seeking that compromised their claims to disinterestedness, hence to auton-

omy and worth. Unbelievable as losers, they could hardly win.

The 1970s and '80s also witnessed a healthy and highly speculative art market.

General affluence in the U.S. following World War II, coupled with greater access

to art education and expanded coverage of the arts as news broadened the nation's

buying audience for painting and sculpture as early as the 1960s (Truco, 1981).

Fledgling museums and a growing number of collectors sent prices for old master

works soaring, so that dealers encountered a novel problem: 'not selling art but find-

ing enough of it to sell' (Muchnic, 1989: 6).

In such a bullish marketplace, contemporary art became increasingly desirable,

appealing to the many institutional and private collectors seeking original pieces but

unable to afford a Rembrandt or Pollock. High prices brought at auction by Abstract

Expressionist works, paintings only twenty or thirty years old, also suggested that

recent art could be a wise investment. Sotheby Parke Bemet's 1973 sale of the Skull

collection was a watershed event: 'Although the works sold for old master prices,

they were quite recent: 39 dated from the 1960s, and about half were less than ten

years old' (Truco, 1981 : 80). A Jasper Johns painting brought $240,000, the highest

price ever paid for a work by a living U.S. artist, and pieces by contemporaries

Warhol, Rauschenberg, Wesselmann, and Stella all broke previous records.

This very public evidence of escalating values - what the auction houses term

'strength' - both fostered confidence in contemporary art and inculcated the more

businesslike attitude toward art that characterized the 1970s and '80s. ARTnews

reported in 1981, 'With inflation continuing to beset the economy, the new collec-

tors are not purchasing paintings on a purely (a)esthetic basis - investment is play-

ing a considerable role' (Truco, 1981: 90). When art prices held during economic

J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346 337

slumps in the late 1960s and mid-1970s, collectors took note, giving rise to what one

market commentator called an 'orthodoxy ... that works of art go up in proportion as

capital values, profits, and dividends decline, that as substitutes for money, works of

art are not liable to the same erosions as money itself' (Reitlinger, 1970: 13). Fur-

ther in this spirit of expansion, the large auction houses multiplied their offerings of

various new collectibles: paperweights, porcelain birds, and many other 'objets

d'art'.

With such rapid developments throughout the 1970s, it became increasingly diffi-

cult for any museum, critic, auction house, or dealer to wield the same centering

influence as, for example, dealer Leo Castelli and critic Clement Greenberg had

exerted in the era immediately preceding. The U.S. art world under the weight of

many moneyed and diverse interests began to splinter along several lines: minimal-

ism, conceptualism, pattern painting, body art, performance, neo-expressionism,

'femmage', photorealism. A new conception of art history emerged, one no longer

framed by a canon of masterworks. Instead, a pluralist (some would say post-mod-

ernist) understanding of American art emerged, a conviction that rather than branch-

ing from a single continuum, American art consisted of several contemporaneous

approaches, historically and stylistically intertwined perhaps, but decidedly different

both in intention and appeal. Echoing Jean-Franqois Lyotard, philosopher Arthur

Danto wrote, 'Art was no longer possible in terms of a progressive historical narra-

tive. The narrative had come to an end .... It really did mean that anything could be

art' (Danto, 1992: 9). Simultaneously, commodification and popularity threatened

the autonomy of the visual arts field. Rather than principally an inverted economy,

art appeared to have compromised, caved in to the mundane temptations of money,

prestige and power; in so doing U.S. art risked losing its autonomy and cultural

clout, its power to produce 'belief'.

5. Disinterestedness regained: The discovery of contemporary folk art

In the fall of 1968, painter Gregg Blasdel published a curious and signal piece of

arts journalism. Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Whitney

Museum, Blasdel had traveled throughout the midwest and documented works of

venacular architecture, such eccentric sites as S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden in

Lucas, Kansas, a backyard Biblical theme park infused with the philosophy and

imagery of Populism. Gathering fifteen spectacular examples, Blasdel's article

argued that the rural art environment was not just an isolated outburst of creativity;

instead, there appeared to be a kind of vernacular genius alive throughout the nation,

one that had realized its peculiar designs throughout the twentieth century, without

the sanction from art's traditional commissars.

For the purposes of the present study, more influential than the eccentric buildings

themselves was Blasdel's enterprise, combining tourism, photography, and arts jour-

nalism as 'position taking'. Undertaken by a young Kansas painter facing an over-

crowded art scene, in a period of artistic normalization - encountering an inauspi-

cious 'space of possibles' - Blasdel's project turned blatantly away from New York

338 J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

(though with funding from the Whitney Museum and support in the mainstream art

press) toward a photographic pilgrimage westward, and home. Blasdel's endeavor

at one affirmed his own cultural prowess - as a seeker and ratifier of 'disinterested'

art - and suggested the persistence of a redemptive and autonomous artistic role,

free from the taints of commerce and academicism. The 'grassroots artist', Blasdel

wrote, 'has not been patronized by an art-oriented society. He is unaware that he is

an artist .... The grassroots artist is reclusive, by choice, circumstance, or castiga-

tion' (1969: 24). Blasdel's photographic essay represented the sort of 'emancipa-

tory endeavor' and his remarks the 'prophetic denunciation' which, as Bourdieu has

noted, intellectuals and artists have duly performed since Zola's J'accuse (1993a:

62-63).

Other student and faculty artists working outside New York in the late 1960s were

likewise drawn to unschooled creators and the potential such artistic discoveries held

in their own struggles for position. Painter Roger Brown, then enrolled at the Art

Institute of Chicago, described encountering the dreamlike drawings of Joseph

Yoakum, a retired circus roustabout. Brown, other Chicago art students and their

professors championed Yoakum's work and in so doing, declared themselves as the

true scions of modernism.

'All of us by that time had become familiar with (Henri) Rousseau and the interests that those European

mainstream artists had in Rousseau and other kinds of primitive and folk art. So when we discovered

Yoakum in 1968 it was sort of like discovering in a way on a parallel to what the artists that we had been

reading about, the European mainstream artists, what they had done in discovering Rousseau. We sort of

felt that we were doing the same kinds of things. Here we were starting off as artists and we discovered

this great primitive working among us. It was real inspirational.'

Sculptor Michael Hall, who had retreated from a New York art career after meet-

ing with only modest success, similarly described his association with Kentucky art

students and with woodcarver Edgar Tolson: 'I was sort of forming around me a

usable and believable community of peers that was accessible, a community that was

here and now', said Hall of his years as a young professor at University of Kentucky.

'And as its inspirational head, there was Edgar Tolson. He was the non-New York

model. He was a guy who could make good art out there somewhere, not in the

Soho. And the fact that he was able to do that was inspirational for me in particular'.

Hall's students in turn fanned across the south and midwest seeking 'discoveries' of

their own. 3 Farther north, a school of young painters known as the Chicago Imagists,

among them Roger Brown, embarked on similar expeditions, meanwhile interesting

their own dealer, Phyllis Kind, in the works of Yoakum and other now notable self-

taught artists: Martin Ramirez, Drossos Skyllas, and Henry Darger (Bowman, 1992).

Bourdieu's sociological analysis of 'middle ground arts' like 'cinema, jazz, and

even more strip cartoons, science fiction' suggests also why folk art gained strong

3 Lester van Winkle befriended carver Miles Carpenter in Waverly, Virginia, in 1972; Mike Sweeney

met barber/woodcarver Elijah Pierce in Columbus, OH; Lewis Alquist encountered Florida artist Peter

Minchell, interesting the Halls in his drawings; and in 1972 Ken Fadeley met cane maker Denzil Good-

paster and brought to public attention the works of Virginia assemblage artist Steve Ashby.

J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346 339

support among college artists and their professors. These 'middle ground arts' he

wrote, are

~predisposed to attract the investments either of those who have entirely succeeded in converting their

cultural capital into educational capital or those who, not having acquired legitimate culture in the legit-

imate manner (i.e., through early familiarization), maintain an uneasy relationship with it, subjectively

or

objectively, or both. These arts, not yet fully legitimate, which are disdained and neglected by the big

holders of educational capital, offer a refuge and a revenge to those who, by appropriating them, secure

the best return on their cultural capital (especially if it is not fully recognized scholastically)

while at the

same time taking credit for contesting the established hierarchy of legitimacies and profits.' (1984: 87)

Thus might ambitious young artists working in unfashionable locations strike an

avant-gardist pose and take their 'revenge' on the art capital, New York.

Conversely, to establish contemporary folk art as a field required such advocacy.

Unlike the woodcarvers and backyard sculptors whom they championed, these

young studio artists understood 'the universe of problems, references, intellectual

benchmarks ... all that one must have in the back of one's mind in order to be in the

game' (Bourdieu, 1993d: 176). Like all newcomers, 'who have most interest in the

disavowal of self-interest' (Bourdieu, 1993e: 82), they laid claim to the principle of

disinterestedness, but at one remove - via the folk artists whose cause they so pub-

licly voiced. In so doing, they captured the cultural high ground without 'taking its

consequences'. Consecrating the field of twentieth century folk art as a preserve of

core modernist values, they might then 'create its creators': Tolson, Yoakum, Evans

.... (See Bourdieu, 1993a: 60-61; 1993d: 176.)

In 1968 Michael Hall and his wife Julie befriended Herbert W. Hemphill, Jr., an

eclectic collector as well as a founding trustee and curator of the Museum of Amer-

ican Folk Art. Promptly, they introduced him to Edgar Tolson's austere woodcarv-

ings. With the Halls' help, Hemphill mounted a survey show of twentieth century

folk art at the museum in the fall of 1970, despite objections from those on the

museum board who could not countenance contemporary objects as 'folk'. To works

of such famous U.S. 'naives' as William Edmonson and Grandma Moses, Hemphill

added many lesser known painters and woodcarvers. Lumped under the rubric 'folk

artists', these makers were in most cases idiosyncratic creators rather than traditional

craftspeople; consequently, other terms, notably 'self-taught' and 'outsider', now

prevail in labeling them (Cardinal, 1974; Borum, 1993). Some of these artists, dis-

abled from work, retired, or widowed, filled newly vacant hours with artmaking. Tol-

son, for example, had suffered a stroke at age 55 and resumed his childhood hobby

of woodcarving to pass time and strengthen his crippled hands. Jack Savitsky took up

painting after the coal mine where he worked was closed. Others, like street preacher

Gertrude Morgan of New Orleans, had found the visual means to proselytize.

Stimulated by the works of artists in this exhibition, and others who emerged in

the next several years, Hemphill and Julia Weissman published Twentieth Century

American Folk Art and Artists in 1974. Their effort to define this somewhat hazy

artistic category was, not surprisingly, based on contrast with other fields of Ameri-

can art: 'If there is any one characteristic that marks folk artists it is that for them the

restraints of academic theory are unimportant, and if encountered at all, meaningless

340 J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

.... There exists only the desire to create, not to compete, not necessarily to find

fame'. According to the authors, folk artists were 'everyday people out of ordinary

life .... generally unaware of and most certainly unaffected by the mainstream of

professional art - its trained artists, trends, intentions, theories, and developments'.

Nor were folk artists 'concerned with ... the need to make a living from art' (1974:

9, 14). As depicted by these and many subsequelat admirers, contemporary folk

artists epitomized 'disinterestedness'. 4

While the mainstream art world appeared rife with compromise, commercialism,

and stylistic fragmentation, folk and outsider art might offer an antidote, the requi-

site 'inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies': business,

power, institutional authority. Though it now claims a press, museum, galleries, soci-

eties of collectors, even an annual New York trade fair of its own, the cultural field

of contemporary folk and outsider art has developed over twenty-five years largely

through the continual performance and inscription of these inversions. Considered in

greater detail, they evince the lengths to which a fraction of the U.S. art world, dur-

ing an age of normalization, has gone to preserve the legitimating ideal of disinter-

estedness, and the narrow quarter given to those who, intentionally or not, find them-

selves 'taking its consequences'.

6. Folk and outsider art's inversion of ordinary economies

In the field of folk and outsider art, 'the absence of any academic training or con-

secration' constitutes not only a virtue but a defining trait, one so crucial that the

term 'self-taught' has nearly displaced 'folk artist' in the prevailing discourse

(Borum, 1993). Jan Rosenak, one of the nation's foremost collectors in this field and

co-author of an encyclopedia on the subject, defined her collecting criteria: 'First of

all you cannot have any art training and be a folk artist. That's a given'. Likewise,

Clay Morrison, who curated several early folk art exhibitions in the Chicago area,

explained the term 'outsider': I use it to mean somebody who is not connected with

an art gallery, not had formal art training'.

Consider also the titles of several folk and outsider art exhibitions: 'Naives and

Visionaries' (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 1974), 'Unschooled Talent'

(Owensboro Art Museum, Owensboro, KY, 1978), 'Artists by Nature' (New York

State Historical Association, Cooperstown, NY, 1983), 'Handmade and Heartfelt'

(Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, TX, 1986), 'Intuitive Art' (Virginia Polytech-

nical Institute, Blacksburg, VA, 1986), 'American Self-Taught' (Ricco/Maresca

Gallery, New York, NY, 1994). Lack of education has become such an identifying

badge that artists today may feel compelled, like Kevin Orth of Chicago, to pledge

4 Also during the 1970s, work by women artists, African-American artists and Hispanic artists in the

U.S. gained wider recognition; however, to the extent that these artists mobilized on their own behalf,

seeking 'honors', 'training' and 'consecration', they too 'confessed self-interested motives'. Embattled

perhaps but not disinterested, they could not be as fully appropriated nor did their artistic fields possess

the same degrees of cultural autonomy as did folk and outsider art during this period.

J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346 341

that they have 'never had any training whatsoever in art, not even a class' (Howard,

1993: 6).

As the field has matured, some collectors voice a gnawing skepticism vis-a-vis the

academic innocence of new artists they encounter. Speaking of one such painter,

Rosenak noted, 'He certainly qualifies as a folk artist. He's had no training. He

dropped out of high school. But he has our book .... He's kind of savvy although

uneducated'. She added with some dismay, 'People growing up today tend to be a

little more sophisticated'.

As works like the Rosenaks' folk art encyclopedia gain mass distribution, as folk

artists like Howard Finster and Minnie Black appear on television's Tonight Show

and pieces by Finster and R.A. Miller are reproduced on the covers of rock music

albums, the long arm of the collector has flexed ever further. Aficionados in the field

of outsider art seek increasingly stringent guarantees as they search for artists

untainted by 'sophistication'. Perversely, this systematic inversion, this endeavor to

locate artists without access to institutions of 'cultural authority', has sent collectors

rummaging through institutions of a less prestigious sort - prisons and asylums - in

search of artistic discoveries. These days it is not enough for an outsider artist to lack

a diploma or other cultural consecration; he or she is expected to evidence some sign

of social wretchedness.

Radio spots advertising the inaugural 'Outsider Art Fair', held in New York's

fashionable Soho district during January of 1993, stressed just these kinds of anti-

credentials. Promotional broadcasts hawked 'the Southern preacher who paints his

religious visions', 'the former slave who drew powerful figures on bits of card-

board', and 'the artist who was hospitalized' (Smith, 1993). John MacGregor's 1989

book The Discovery of the Art of the Insane and the English art periodical Raw

Vision, founded the same year, have likewise extolled the creations of deranged and

psychotic artists. Of the 1960s, MacGregor wrote, 'Psychotic experience was begin-

ning to be seen as positive and valuable, a source of insight and self-understanding

not only to the psychotic individual but to "normal" men and women as well'

(1989: 248). Michel Thrvoz, curator of the Collection de L'Art Brut in Lausanne,

Switzerland, has even gone so far as to lament the introduction of psychotropic drugs

for their 'fatal impact on artistic creativity' (1994: 67).

Hemphill and Weissman's book on twentieth century folk art included works by

Eddie Aming and Martin Ramirez, both confined for schizophrenia, and Frank Jones,

who died in a Texas prison, serving time for murder. Their works now command high

prices; a Ramirez pencil drawing, pieced together with the artist's saliva, was priced

at $30,000 by Janet Fleisher Gallery, Philadelphia (Ollman, 1993). Newcomers to the

field include painter Ike Morgan, remanded to a state hospital after murdering his

grandmother, and Laura Craig McNellis, resident in a home for the mentally retarded,

whose paintings sell at chic Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York. The point here is not

to discredit these artists based on their personal difficulties but to show how the world

of folk and outsider art, operating through the systematic inversion of values Bour-

dieu describes, has turned deprivation, even depravity, into an artistic qualification.

Financial disinterest, or the semblance thereof, also operates in the field of folk art

as mark of authentication. Jan Rosenak stipulates, 'One of our criteria is, initially,

342 J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

(the art) should not be for sale. You should be making it out of your own need, com-

pulsion, whatever'. Of course, jailed painters and sculptors, the mentally ill and

retarded, are not in much of a bargaining position anyway. Not by choice but by

default, they invert the principle of profit and enact disinterest in money, the 'dis-

avowal of the economy', which Bourdieu writes lies 'at the heart of the field' called

art (1993e: 79). A former Houston art dealer remarked of Ike Morgan, whom she

represents, 'Ike doesn't need a lot ot

~ money, so we've kept (his paintings) fairly

inexpensive .... It's enough to get him money for his cigarettes' (Muth, 1987). One

collector said about Kentucky folk artist Edgar Tolson, a disabled farmer with nine-

teen children, 'Now Edgar Tolson had, I think, all the money he wanted. He didn't

want to send his kids to college. I don't think he knew about it. They didn't know.

Certainly he had food. He had bourbon' (C. Rosenak, 1993).

This supposed financial disinterest on the folk artists' part has opened wide

profit margins for dealers and collectors and so stoked a market. One Chicago

fine art painter, whose dealer increasingly handles outsider art as well, noted,

'Dead artists are a lot easier to deal with than live ones. And ones that are back

off in the sticks somewhere who aren't that sophisticated about stuff' (Brown,

1993). Rather than handling outsider art on a strict commission basis (typically a

50/50 split between artist and dealer), many folk art galleries buy work outright,

from artists who are unaware if not quite 'disinterested' in the retail prices their

pieces command. One gallery owner explained, 'I buy directly from artists. I pay

them what they ask. I don't try to make deals unless I'm buying a whole lot of

things and I ask for a discount. And then I somehow get the work back to Wash-

ington, and I set about trying to determine how much I can sell it for' (Georgia

Forum, 1994: 18). 5

Finally, since as Bourdieu writes, the economy of cultural practices must invert

the principle of power ('it condemns honors and temporal greatness'), the humble

circumstances of folk and outsider artists, 'everyday people out of ordinary life', vest

the objects they make with peculiar legitimacy. Here are makers who 'do not try to

mimic other academically trained artists or seek to be accepted by museums or gal-

leries' (Scalora, 1985), people who 'were kind of embarrassed about the idea that

they would paint something ... because they didn't consider themselves in any way

artists .... They were just woodcarvers or whatever' (Brown, 1993).

The search for a redemptive figure, one disinterested in prestige and power, grew

particularly urgent through the 1970s and '80s, when as critic Donald Kuspit has

5 Two examples may indicate both the huge profits for dealers who buy outright and the escalation of

folk art prices since the early 1970s. A wooden Preacher carving by Edgar Tolson sold to Phyllis Kind

Gallery (Chicago) in 1972 for $250, Tolson receiving $150 of the purchase price. Kind sold the piece six

years later to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe for $2113, a profit of approximately

850%. Robert Bishop, for many years the director of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York,

as well as a noted collector and behind-the-scenes dealer, bought a Tolson Expulsion carving in 1971 for

$250; through Sotheby's auction house, Bishop sold the piece in 1990 for $10,450. Such wide profit

margins, while not unheard of in the rest of the contemporary art market, have been maneuvered with

regularity in the folk/outsider art field, as dealers dispense with standard split commissions and artists

typically never visit the galleries where their works sell.

J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346 343

written, 'The marginality of contemporary (fine) art dwindled by reason of its eco-

nomic and academic assimilation and consumption' (1991 : 137). Meanwhile, 'pes-

simistic conversations about the death of originality and the end of authenticity',

stimulated what Joanne Cubbs has called 'nostalgic and reactionary yearnings for a

return to the uncorrupted sources of creativity itself' (1994: 84). Phil Linhares, a

painter who curated several early exhibitions of outsider art in California, voiced

these sentiments: 'We were sick of art world strategies. Outsider art was refreshing

because it's completely ingenuous and people did it from the heart. That's what we

were aspiring to do' (Tromble, 1988: 41).

Folk and outsider art, thus, were enlisted to shore up mainstream art's eroding

credibility, to do what trained artists could only 'aspire' to do: maintain their inde-

pendence from established cultural institutions and the marketplace. 'The less artis-

tic marginality became a reality', writes Kuspit, 'the more the fantasy of it had to be

maintained' (1991: 137). And how better to maintain this fantasy than through the

works of handicapped Appalachian whittlers, black tombstone carvers, retarded

women, Mexican-American schizophrenics, and convincted murderers, those

'losers' so socially powerless, and ignorant of art world machinations, even their

best efforts at 'temporal greatness' could not brand them with self-interest.

If disinterestedness and culture in general depend, as Bourdieu alleges, on 'col-

lective misrecognition' (1993e: 81), it must be acknowledged that many folk artists

have cooperated in this 'social alchemy'. Some, like Edgar Tolson, understood pre-

cisely how the game of disinterestedness is played and enacted his part brilliantly.

Though he in many instances referred to woodcarving as a 'lost art' and spoke

authoritatively on the nature of art in general, when confronted with his own success,

Tolson always struck a self-effacing pose. He told one interviewer: 'They'll holler

some of them I'm famous. I'd say, "Hell no, I'm not. I'm just an old hillbilly"'

(Tolson, n.d.). Interviewed by a fieldworker from the national Archives of American

Art, he was asked, 'Do you think of yourself as an artist?'. 'No', Tolson responded.

'I didn't think of that. I don't want to think of that. I don't want nobody to think that I am a little dif-

ferent than anybody else, maybe a little high or something .... I want to stay down in the crowd. I think

it's a lot better .... If you stay down low and you do get lifted up, you know you're higher than you were.

It makes it a lot difference. But when you go to lift yourself up you can probably fall.' (Tolson, 1981)

Aware of the risk 'when you go to lift yourself up', Tolson articulated the art world's

rule: others must do the 'lifting' or the leavening agency of disinterestedness will

fail.

7. Conclusion

In the current infatuation with outsider art, Donald Kuspit sees reflected 'official

culture's uncertainty that its values are lasting or even truly significant' (1991: 140).

On the contrary, folk and outsider art have supplied the official culture, specifically

the U.S. art world, with the ideological means by which to steady and perpetuate a

claim to virtue and autonomy two centuries old. Increasingly, sophisticated urban

344 J.S. Ardery / Poetics 24 (1997) 329-346

artists have made their own attempts to invert the principles of business, cultural

authority and power, bidding for artistic legitimacy through public rites of humilia-

tion. Chris Burden arranged to be shot and wounded at his own gallery opening, was

nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen, and crawled in the nude over a trail of glass

shards (before a photographer, of course); Regina Frank knelt in the window of a

New York museum and for 28 days sewed pearl beads onto a silk gown; Bob Flana-

gan, who suffered from cystic fibrosis, received museum visitors from a hospital

bed. Yet these seem strained, antic gestures when compared with the lives of out-

sider and folk artists. Edgar Tolson's house trailer was not stationed on top of a

rocky hill as 'an installation', nor were Gertrude Morgan's street sermons 'perfor-

mance pieces'. Wise as many of them are to the system in which they play, the

majority of folk and outsider artists are impaled upon the categorical realities of

class, race, region, ethnicity, which serve as their artistic credentials. To use Bour-

dieu's terminology, their credibility as artists does not constitute a form of capital

that can be successfully 'reconverted' into other assets - money, prestige, or power

(1984:125, 131-32). Instead, winning favor for the work of their hands, they remain

the darling 'losers' of the art world. The Folk Art Society of America, an association

of collectors based in Richmond, Virginia, solicits new members with a remark

made by painter Hazel Kinney, of Flemingsburg, Kentucky. Kinney summed up the

folk artist's situation well when she acknowledged, 'Our work can go where we can-

not go' (Folk Art Society of America, 1996).

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