Outsider, Autism, and Art

Posted by Rvaya

"Your husband's work is what we call "outsider art." It could be by a mental patient, a hillbilly or a chimpanzee."
~ The Simpsons

So I've been toiling over what to write about for a few weeks as my husband and I have been prepping and painting the walls of our apartment. I recently found out that my nephew has been diagnosed as autistic. Its not a serious case and he is still a cute little guy so he's got lots of potential and its quite hard to tell how he will turn out but my mother asked me to look into any cases of Autistic artists. So through what I've been looking up and discovering it seemed like the perfect thing to write about and get into the swing of things again.

I think as we tackle this rather big subject it is better to find out where the works of art from people diagnosed with Autism are usually placed by the art world. Generally, these works are placed under the title of "Outsider Art". What is Outsider Art you may ask? The English term was coined in 1972 by an art critic, Roger Cardinal who said, 'I believe that a paramount factor in the critical definition of the creative Outsider is that he or she should be possessed of an expressive impulse and should then externalize that impulse in an unmonitored way which defies conventional art-historical contextualization'. The term originated in 1945 by French artist, Jean Dubuffet who started going to psychiatric hospitals and prisons collecting artwork done by patients and inmates. He started the term 'Art Brut' - raw art and defined Raw art as, 'works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part . . . These artists derive everything - subjects, choice of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, styles of writing, etc. from their own depths and not from conventions of classical or fashionable art. . . It is thus an art that manifests an unparalleled inventiveness'.