Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

The Subversive Art of Forgetting
by Beth Elaine Wilson Photo by Marlis Momber

I met outsider artist Warren Schmahl a couple years ago. He was introduced to me by Jean, his caseworker, an artist acquaintance of mine. He was balding, with a scruffy fringe of white hair around the sides of his head, a white beard, and deep furrows lining his face, although still not fully reflecting his 72 years. He reminded me a bit of one of my old college professors. It was a brief introduction, and nothing much seemed to come of it, as Warren was a very quiet person—he almost seemed a bit intimidated to be out in public, even though he obviously enjoyed it as well.

I’d see Schmahl (along with his friend John) out at art show openings every month or so, trailing along behind Jean. If you said "hello," he’d maybe smile and nod a bit, but otherwise he did little socializing. I’d wind up talking to Jean about this or that, as Warren and John faded into the background.

A few months ago, I found myself buttonholed by Michael—a burly, intense, and very direct artist—at the ask Gallery in Kingston. "Do you know about Warren?" he demanded, and I had to admit that I didn’t. "You know, the guy who comes around with Jean all the time?" At that point, I pulled up a vague recollection, although given the lack of social interaction, he’d admittedly faded into the mists of memory. "He’s an artist—a really good artist!" Michael insisted, pressing his imposing frame close to emphasize his point, "and he’s having a show here in June. You really ought to write about it." "Okay, okay," I promised."I’ll call Jean to find out more."

This quiet, nondescript man, it turns out, spends his days endlessly making things. Drawings, three-dimensional buildings, vehicles, dolls, furniture for the houses—you name it, and if it’s part of the real world, Schmahl's fabricated a version of it in his. Jean says he tends to use part of his food allowance to buy art supplies, which limits him to what’s available at the grocery store: Crayola crayons, Elmer’s glue, staples, construction paper. These meager materials are supplemented by his voracious recycling of virtually every scrap of paper or cardboard he can lay his hands on, from cereal boxes to magazines. The bases of the 3-D pieces are formed by securely fastened grids of cardboard, displaying an abstract knowledge of structure belied by the cognitive disability that has rendered him unable to read, write, drive, or do math. The flattened, conventionalized drawings of people are usually enlivened with a photographic face cut out from a magazine, creating an unwittingly witty contrast of means. How can something be so simple yet so complex at the same time?

Schmahl’s creations seem to fit into the category of "outsider art". Ever since French artist Jean Dubuffet lionized the productions of children, the insane, Pentecostal visionaries, and others who’d escaped the closed circuit of artworld discourse in the 1940s, there’d been some minor recognition of the value of this sort of work, but since the 1980s there’s been a sizable segment of the market specializing in finding and selling it. (And of course a number of scandalous situations arose as unscrupulous art dealers took advantage of "outsiders" who were naïve to the ways of the larger world.) I’ve been a bit turned off from the stuff since this commodification got into high gear, but never really stopped to think too deeply about it.

"The problem with outsider art is its suspicious aesthetic." My e-mail correspondence with artist John Lippert, showing at tsl in Hudson this month, had started off on something of a bad foot when he initially responded to my description of Schmahl and his work. Lippert admits to having had too many bad afternoons at the Outsider Art Fair in New York, although he appreciates that at least it’s often made by people living on the fringes of society, "instead of by white, middle-aged professionals, who wind up co-opting a lot of the aesthetic." Even so, Lippert and his wife (painter Gabrielle Brown), both trained artists themselves, seek to create "an imagined world, just beyond the remembered world. It’s like forgetting what a tree looked like, and trying to remember the idea of a tree, all the time fumbling with a brush, or pen, or piece of clay in your hand," he explained. Sounds to me like their work follows a path similar to Schmahl’s, except that perhaps Schmahl doesn’t have to work so hard to "forget" in the first place. Lippert’s sculptures will include cast plastic resin flowers scattered on the floor, alongside Brown’s brightly colored, psychically charged abstractions that tread a tightrope between the naïve and the elegant.

But what’s the appeal of this apparently untutored aesthetic in the first place? It almost seems as though the very market success of outsider work is an admission of the inadequacy, the bankruptcy, of contemporary art discourse, as Dubuffet himself would have enthusiastically pointed out. Over the past decade or so—and some would no doubt say for much longer—"art" has become more and more synthetic, a plasticized, overprocessed, overtheorized expression of individual vanity. (Just think of the current Matthew Barney spectacle/exhibition at the Guggenheim, centered on his seven and-a-half hour art-filmic ode to the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles, his "Cremaster Cycle.") My pet theory is that the outsider stuff can seem more "authentic" because it helps to reinforce the mythic status of The Artist as the ultimate unalienated producer of culture. Instead of turning out widgets on an assembly line, He (and less often, She) has been ceded a direct line on being, saying, and making objects that express his/her real self. (This is also a reason that artists, and those working in the arts, are so often exploited economically—we’re in it "for the love of it.")

What’s interesting—and at something of cross purposes to the above theory—is the fact that both Schmahl and Lippert depend, to a certain extent, on found images and icons from popular culture, products of the entertainment industry. Yet this "raw" material is transformed, recontextualized, and ultimately recuperated into a very different system of meaning in both of these exhibitions: watching slickly packaged commodities unraveled into so many alternative, contradictory trains of thought alone makes them worth experiencing. Staying to delve more deeply into the detailed warp and weft of these creations provides their intrinsic reward.