Ten years ago, a Japanese designer named Ichiwo Sugino replaced his appearance. As he approaches retirement, he lets his hair grow long, imitating the look of an artist he admires. His friends encouraged him to take his personal transformation further, so he took a roll of duct tape and rearranged his face. By publishing the result on Instagram he discovered a new vocation.
Since then, Sugino has impersonated thousands of people, from Albert Einstein to Alfred Hitchcock to Che Guevara. Complemented by inked main points like facial hair and wrinkles, the skin-distorting effect of the tape spread over the cheeks and neck is strangely evocative while remaining unconvincing: akin to a clever, 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 brilliant animated film does not do justice to Sugino’s artistic achievement. Like many so-called outsider artists presented 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 showcasing Bruno Decharme’s extensive collection, Photo Brut focuses on photography and photocollage through artists who are firmly outside the mainstream. Most artists lack formal education and some have mental disabilities, criteria that have been used throughout artistic status. quo to choose paintings that would have been rejected according to the institution’s criteria. These artists don’t want such indirect validation. On the contrary, these paintings show why the criteria of the status quo are insufficient.
Photo Brut includes pieces by some of the most famous artistic outsiders of the 20th century, such as Henry Darger and Adolf Wölfli. In different countries and contexts, using a mix of media ranging from drawing to collage to writing, both constructed alternative realities so detailed that everyday existence seems impoverished by comparison. The authority of their fictions was enhanced with photography. Wölfli, for instance, appropriated photographic imagery from newspapers and advertisements to illustrate an epic 25,000-page biography, radically recontextualizing popular imagery to illustrate imagined episodes in a life lived outside the Swiss asylum to which he was confined for his whole adult life.
Because Wölfli’s artistic achievements were identified during his lifetime, his own biography is meticulously recorded, thus offering reasons to appreciate his artistic skill without diminishing the value of his paintings as an original representation of his beliefs. Darger’s scenario is slightly different from when he created his imaginary. ancient epics in secret while working as a janitor in Chicago.
Other Photo Brut artists are presented in a less expansive context, giving the viewer a different experience. One of the most attractive is completely anonymous, known only from a collection of 950 Type 42 Polaroids discovered in New York in 2012. From the 1960s, most of the photographs are portraits of prominent actresses. None were captured in person. The artist photographed a television screen. Has the artist created a private series of film stills?Was the subject of the photographs the character, the actress or the television itself?Whatever the photographer’s intentions, we practice the act of looking, that is, a person’s attitude to popular entertainment, free of biographical information. It’s an experience that is perhaps implausible to have been presented by a mainstream artist running on the traditional gallery formula that relies heavily on their personal 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.
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