Andrew Edlin Gallery’s current group exhibition, “Purple States” (through August 16), explores the still-controversial genre of outsider art, and stakes a claim for its practitioners that’s buoyed by the strong showing in this well curated show. Artist curator Sam Gordon envisioned it as the third iteration in a chain of “insider/outsider” conversations, following 1992’s “Parallel Visions” at LACMA and “Parallel Visions II” at New York’s Galerie St. Etienne in 2006. The programming for “Purple States” also includes poetry readings and other interdisciplinary events.
While outsider art remains fraught with sticky questions—is the genre just an excuse for collectors to champion and sell the work of mentally disabled, unsavvy, or otherwise disadvantaged creators; or worse, to mythologize their “noble” disadvantage while reinforcing the distinction between outsider artists and other artists?—Gordon approaches the subject with sensitivity. Here he pairs works by celebrated outsider artists with contemporary artworks to set up sprawling dialogues that cram the small space. The pairs are exhibited in close proximity, but picking out the matched works from the salon-style hang frequently requires recourse to the exhibition’s press release. The gallery’s owner, Andrew Edlin, has a vested interest in outsider art: His company Wide Open Arts purchased the Outsider Art Fair in 2012, and many of the works came from the gallery’s inventory.
As an essay accompanying “Parallel Visions II” observed that Americans’ relationship to outsider art is even more uneasy than that of Europeans. We like the idea of untrained artists achieving success through ingenuity and gumption. But this doesn’t exactly square with the fundamental elitism necessary to categorize an artist’s practice as outsider. The artists in this show span from folk artisans to the developmentally or mentally disabled (including several from the highly influential Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California) to self-trained painters. But the in/out dichotomy is sometimes subverted, for example, in the partnering of John Lurie, the Lounge Lizard musician and ultimate downtown insider, with the young painter Andrea Joyce Heimer, who is arguably his insider counterpart in this context.
There’s plenty of formal overlap between duos and it’s easy to see the relationship between Sabrina Gschwandtner’s textile-like Camouflage, 2012, made from repurposed 16mm film prints, and the Gee’s Bend quilt with which it’s linked. Yet by this same logic the couplings can occasionally feel superficial. (Does the creepily whimsical, deeply private outsider poster-boy Henry Darger really have much in common with the hyperarticulate, politically-driven practice of Paul Chan?) But when they work, as in the pairing of Brian Belott’s Bubbletag, 2014, interwoven socks pressed in glass, with William Copley’s joyful Super Bowl No. 2, 1969, it’s magical. The works’ cumulative exuberance makes them pop from the wall, a kinship of sensibility rather than formal or process-based similarity.
A version of this article appears in the October 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
