| Every artist is an outsider until they are discovered- especially by a gallery. The recent smatterings of “Outsider Art” shows and fairs that invaded New York during dull February served to declare that even dwarfs started small. Some of my favorite gallery folk, Ricco/Maresca, Andrew Edlin, Galerie St. Etienne, and Phyllis Kind and a worldwide network of houses displayed with a healthy mix of risk management and quiet pleasure a variety of work of the tormented. |
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Doris and Martin’s Vagina Monologues by Tony Zaza
Every artist is an outsider until they are discovered- especially by a gallery. The recent smatterings of “Outsider Art” shows and fairs that invaded New York during dull February served to declare that even dwarfs started small. Some of my favorite gallery folk, Ricco/Maresca, Andrew Edlin, Galerie St. Etienne, and Phyllis Kind and a worldwide network of houses displayed with a healthy mix of risk management and quiet pleasure a variety of work of the tormented.
The so called outsiders have been given the appellations “visionary”, and “self-taught” (as if there are few artists who are not). They have also been called primitive and raw. Well is anyone more primitive than Matisse I ask? I’m more comfortable defining these genera as artists with small lives and big hearts. They lacked, whether by sins of nature or nurture, a breakout from whatever imprisoned them.
Anyone who is not brain-damaged and who visits Chelsea after a good bowl of chicken soup at the Moonstruck Diner will conclude that raw contemporary art is an unmitigated crapshoot. Everything gets hung up for at least a moment. So called outsider art is hardly a risk, so when someone like Martin Ramirez gets released from obscurity, the art market waters get quite shark-infested. Nothing ventured, everything gained for the discoverers. Let the market dictate. If it sells, it’s a masterpiece. If it doesn’t, it’s “outsider”. The American Folk Art Museum curator goes as far to say that Ramirez is one of the greatest artists ever!
Ramirez’s story is quite sad. He is further proof of Tchaikovsky’s dictum that within great limitations (aleatoric musical scales) there is the possibility of great variety. A victim of circumstances and language barriers, Martin lost his love, his country, and his family and was relegated to a life of incarceration. His work is, therefore, infused with the symbols of what he had been denied expressed in infinite variety but single-minded, nevertheless. His vagina dream maps seem to inspire rather overtly academic misinterpretation as evidence in the equally dreamlike curatorial notes. There is certainly an immense, talented, and obsessive exploration of his own personal Idaho, but now, ceasing to be the output of an outsider, Ramirez’s work faces absorption as commodity.
Doris Wishman spent a lifetime making movies. Her desire was to make money. She is, in that regard, spiritually connected to every sleazy movie mogul who ever lived. Doris, however, never made money, lived past ninety and made her last movie at the age of eighty-nine. Each Time I Kill, featured at this year’s Underground Film Festival held at Anthology Film Archives, is another “outsider” success story. While her body of work remains virtually unseen, (twenty-two features are available from Something Weird Video in Seattle), it is nevertheless a quiet, stunning accomplishment. No woman writer/director comes close in productivity or integrity. Doris did her own thing. Her stuff is unshakeable trashy B movie soap, blood, and body parts, curvy women, and brash, nutty men. If she had any budget at all, she would have been mainline. Fraught mostly with varieties of teen and mid-life angst, spiritism, freakish sadism and moronic humor, Doris’ essential cinema is an on-going exploration of the seven deadly sins, but especially vanity. Her home spun actors have the credibility of awkward, stumbling reality and her unpolished productions are designed to achieve a certain textural dysfunction that becomes part of the fun.
