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MOVEMENT IN MINDSCAPES: OUTSIDER ART IN SOUTH AFRICA
Wilhelm van Rensburg
Senior Art Specialist & Head Curator
Strauss & Co
Discussions of Outsider Art often focus on descriptive definitions, invoking the origins of the term, and expatiating on the artists’ biographies, invariably stressing their marginalised
status in relation to the conventions of the Western art canon. The singular distinguishing characteristic of outsider artists is their being untrained, creating their work not necessarily
for renumeration or for a white cube gallery, but in response to some sort of calling or irrepressible internal motivation or hobbyish personal compulsion. ‘Outsiders’ inevitably
implies the contrasting notion of ‘Insiders’, that is, artists who have formal training, are feted in gallery and museum exhibitions and on art fairs and biennales, are selected by
specialist art writers and academics, and whose work is regularly reviewed and critiqued and monographed.
In South Africa, a handful of outsider artists (Jackson Hlungwani, Noria Mabasa, Esther Mahlangu, Helen Sebidi, and Alfred Thoba, largely due to two seminal exhibitions: Tributaries:
A View of Contemporary South Africa Art, 1985, and The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art, 1988) circumvented art conventions and are now
routinely represented in the South African art canon, but what about many other South African outsider artists? What insights to their creative cognition might one detect in their
art? One such insight is the oscillation between the dynamism and stasis of their subject matter that characterises much of their work. The aim of this article is to traverse these
two aspects in South African Outsider Art.
Outsider Art, also known as Art Brut – raw or rough art – a term coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet in 1945, frequently has a ‘disquieting strangeness,’ to use Sigmund Freud’s
term. It is created by artists who seem to have escaped cultural conditioning and social conformity, challenging the expected formal art educational training and other conventions in
art. Outsider Art has essentially become an all-encompassing descriptive term that include numerous varieties of unconventional art, such as Folk or Vernacular Art (characterised
by mainly decorative elements), Intuitive Art (as opposed to, say, intellectual, or ‘rational’ art), Visionary Art (art with a strong spiritual inspiration, such as the well-known ‘retablo’
or Votive Painting), ‘Naïve’ Art (often associated with the notion of ‘primitivism’, infantilising the art of first nations – Aboriginal, Native American and San, among others, as well as
that of children), Spontaneous Art (associated with unmediated psychological expressiveness), and Street/Graffiti Art (seen as work done by supposedly permissive hooligans and
vandals), with all of these labels inadvertently reinforcing the status of practitioners as ‘untrained amateurs’. A well-known French children’s art magazine, called DADA, in a special
edition on Outsider Art (No. 93), offers a more apt descriptor: ‘Les Singuliers de l’Art’.
Despite the previously negative labelling of Outsider Art as reflecting extreme mental states or hallucinatory fantasy worlds, or referencing the artwork done by psychiatric patients,
hermits and/or spiritualists, Outsider Art has much in common with Modernism. The well-known German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, embraced child-like forms and
colours in their art. Dada and its global exponents similarly exhibited a child-like irreverence of societal norms. The CoBrA group of the late-1940s and early-1950s, to which Ernest
Mancoba, a South African expat, and his Danish wife, Sonja Ferlov, belonged, unashamedly embraced the influence of children’s art. Artists in late-1950s Paris coined such terms
as Tachisme, Art Informel, or ‘une art autre’ (art of another kind), for art that harnesses the tactility of art material in its various forms. South African artist Christo Coetzee worked
and exhibited with many of these artists when he lived in Paris in the 50s and 60s.
Today, much of the preferred material of outsider artists – which, incidentally, has a neat intersection with the Found Object or the Ready Made preferred by Dada artists, as well as
the so-called ‘intermedia’ of the Fluxus artists of the late-1960s – has become mainstream, and they are now regularly included in publications on contemporary ceramic and clay
art, as well as contemporary textile art.
298 FOR THE LOVE OF LIGHT
FOR THE LOVE OF LIGHT 299