Journal of Contemporary Painting - 1-2: Minor Painting: Outsiders and Outliers, Oct 2022

The editorial surveys the current terrain of contemporary self-taught and outsider art. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s Towards a Minor Literature to suggest a specific category of minor painting, the text discusses how museological discourse on outsider art that developed over the twentieth century has been transformed over the past decade by large museum exhibitions and smaller community organizations’ activities. These include key examples such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington’s exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art curated by Lynne Cooke, and White Columns’s exemplary programme that supports visionary and self-taught artists in New York City. The text outlines how these examples alongside curatorial activism and reappraisal have attempted to recalibrate art history and provides an analysis of the inclusion of outsider and self-taught art in biennales such as Venice, quinquennials such as Documenta and small publicly funded spaces with a desire for equality and inclusion.

My paintings offer glimpses into detailed, private narratives – a world outside of everyday existence with a logic all its own. They are at once sincere and absurd. ‘Damozels’ in mountainous gowns, inquiring dogs and readers of tiny books, all perform their secret rituals. I use cartoonish imagery – thought bubbles, flowers, question marks, Sleep-Zs, popping eyes – as simple signifiers in a space which is constantly dissolving/morphing/ complicating into something else.

This interview considers Matthew Higgs’s role in programming work by self-taught artists and those with developmental disabilities within the context of White Columns, a non-profit artist-run space located in Chelsea, New York City. The conversation describes the active support of work before any critical or institutional consensus emerges around it and explores how painting by self-taught artists and those with developmental disabilities can provide a productive counterpoint to self-reflexive work or art more critical of the narrative of painting as a medium. The term ‘outsider’ is also scrutinized as a useful generalization for painting that operates outside of conventional forms of education and existing foundational narratives in culture. Also discussed is the impact of exemplary historical curators and dealers in the United States and Germany who serve to act as model ‘maverick iconoclasts’.

This article discusses the idea of ‘peasant-painting’ as minor painting, playing with the contrast between ‘paintings-of-peasants’ and ‘paintings-by-peasants’. I argue that the appearance of the figure of the peasant as a genre of Western European painting is inextricably linked with the rise of capitalism and the construction of the modern individualized self, separate from nature. Through ‘naturalistic’ images of peasants in landscapes this in turn enabled the bourgeois gaze to naturalize unequal capitalistic relations. I shall then contrast these paintings-of-peasants, with paintings-by-peasants in the Southwest of Sweden. By examining the conditions of their emergence and circulation, and their use and meaning, we can see that these peasants had an alternative conception of the self and a peasant cosmopolitics which did not separate humans from non-humans. I argue that their practice was a minor painting which formed a communal resistance to the modernizing project in the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries.

Review of: Lonnie Holley: Tangled Up in de Kooning’s Fence, Curated by Alison M. Gingeras

South Etna Montauk Foundation, New York, 1 May–1 August 2021

Lonnie Holley at the Elaine de Kooning House: Everything That Wasn’t White

Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, 24 April–6 September 2021