Dynamic Similarity: Outsider Art and Avant-garde

Abstract

The article analyzes the emergence of the discourse of outsider art. The author reveals the connection between the discourse of outsider art and the field of avant-garde culture. The formation of outsider art was conditioned by the crisis of the rationalistic paradigm and the intention to revive European culture, which had lost its vitality, with the Dionysian principle of the art of primitives and the mentally ill. The surfaces of emergence and the authorities of delimitation of outsider art were initially marginal in relation to the field of art. Instead of traditional authorities of delimitation in art – art critics, museums, art historians, and collectors – the discourse of outsider art was formed by psychiatrists, philosophers, and avant-garde artists. The article focuses on the formation logic of the outsider art discourse and the specifics of the legitimization of this phenomenon. The change in the traditional way of legitimizing this art phenomenon was largely due, on the one hand, to the transformation of the philosophy of culture and, on the other, to the emergence of the idea of Dionysian values, the irrational in culture with the appearance of the concepts of the unconscious and the designation of its meaning in the context of personality and culture. All the above mentioned made the field of psychiatry valuable in the context of artistic culture, while psychiatrists became new authorities of delimitation in art and culture. These processes of the crisis of the European rationalistic paradigm were clearly reflected in avant-garde art; the Cubists, Expressionists, Primitivists, and Surrealists started to incorporate these strange phenomena into their artworks, thereby simultaneously assimilating them and giving them new characteristics. Thus, the article focuses on the process that was reverse in relation to the processes described earlier. Not marginal phenomena, such as naive art, primitive cultures, and the creativity of the mentally ill, influenced the field of "high art", but what had been a rightful, legitimate and rational field of European culture discursively changed and became ready to include marginalia.