A decade ago, a Japanese designer named Ichiwo Sugino decided to change his appearance. Nearing retirement, he let his hair grow out, imitating the look of an entertainer he admired. His friends encouraged him to take his self-transformation to a greater extreme, so he picked up a roll of tape and rearranged his face. Posting the result on Instagram, he found a new vocation.
Since then, Sugino has impersonated thousands of people, from Albert Einstein to Alfred Hitchcock to Che Guevara. Complemented by inky main points such as facial hair and wrinkles, the skin-distortion effect of the ribbon spread over the cheeks and neck is strangely evocative while still being unconvincing: similar to a clever and cool animated film, the exaggeration of facial features makes Sugino and Guevara’s versions of Einstein and Hitchcock more easily identifiable than the subjects themselves. And yet, the cool animated film doesn’t do justice to Sugino’s artistic achievement. Like many so-called outsider artists featured in a stimulating exhibition at the Centrale d’art contemporain in Brussels, Sugino subverts the convenience of categorization by following the regulations he himself established.
Part of a series of exhibitions displaying the extensive collection of Bruno Decharme, Photo Brut is focused on photography and photocollage by artists decidedly outside the mainstream. Most of the artists lack formal training, and some are mentally disabled, criteria that have frequently been used by the art establishment to select for special consideration work that would have been rejected based on establishment standards. These artists don’t require such backhanded validation. On the contrary, this work shows why the standards of the establishment are inadequate.
Photo Brut includes works by some of the most prominent artists of the 20th century, such as Henry Darger and Adolf Wölfli. In other countries and contexts, a combination of media, from drawing to collage to writing, have constructed realities of choice so detailed that, by comparison, everyday lifestyles are impoverished. The authority of his fiction was reinforced through photography. Wölfli, for example, appropriated photographs from newspapers and advertisements to illustrate an epic 25,000-page biography, radically recontextualizing popular imagery to illustrate imaginary episodes of a life lived outdoors in the Swiss asylum in which he was confined for his entire adult life.
Because Wölfli’s artistic achievement was recognized in his lifetime, his own biography is meticulously recorded, providing grounds to appreciate his artistry without diminishing the truth value of his work as an authentic representation of his beliefs. Darger’s situation is slightly different because he created his imaginary historical epics in secret while holding a job as a janitor in Chicago.
Other Photo Brut artists are presented in a much smaller context, thus giving the viewer a different experience. One of the most alluring is completely anonymous, known only from a collection of 950 type 42 Polaroids discovered in New York in 2012. Most of the photographs, dating from the 1960s, are portraits of prominent actresses. None were taken in person. Instead, the artist photographed a television screen. Did the artist create a private series of film photographs? Was the subject of the photographs the character, the actress or television itself? Regardless of the photographer’s intentions, we practice the act of looking. , that is, a person about popular entertainment, without being loaded with biographical information. It’s a delight that couldn’t plausibly have been proposed by a mainstream artist running on the traditional gallery formula that relies so heavily on its non-public brand.
There is a temptation to romanticize the outsider, to construe him or her as more genuine or pure than the professional with an established career. The work in Photo Brut calls for a more nuanced response, one that does not set up outsiders in contrast to insiders but rather enlarges the definition of contemporary art such that the distinction disappears. The full richness of art depends upon the equal co-existence of MFAs and janitors. The world is made richer by the vastly different acts of biographical fictionalization by Adolf Wölfli and Lynn Hershman Leeson, or by the vastly different acts of self-transformation by Ichiwo Sugino and Cindy Sherman.
Including outside art in the museum is a smart start. The next step will have to be to integrate it with the rest of the canon.
A community. Many voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts.
Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.
To do this, please comply with the posting regulations in our site’s terms of use. We summarize some of those key regulations below. In short, civilized.
Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:
User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:
So how can you be a user?
Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site’s Terms of Service.