Mason Williams and I spoke the other day and he ran to get an article from the NY Times to read it to me over the phone. It was about outsider art called, "Creating Artworks without a Net," by Karen Rosenberg from the Jan. 28th Arts section reviewing the Outsider Art Fair that opened recently. A few choice sentences from the article:

Let's all agree that "outsider artist" is a term of convenience, encompassing the self-taught, the visionary, the geographically isolated, the mentally ill or developmentally disabled, and (in one memorable episode) Homor Simpson.

~ The thread linking the fair's 36 booths is a personal compulsion to make art, without a rulebook, and with whatever materials happen to be at hand. =================================================================================================================================================== ~

At the Museum of Everything, and at the fair as a whole, enthusiasm for unorthodox creative expression meets disdain for the old-fashioned term that commonly describes it. As the Museum's website proclaims, "Death to outsider art! Long live the outsiders!"

Tin-foil animals by Dean Millien at the LAND Gallery's booth. (You know which animal I wish he'd make for me!)

I haven't ever thought of myself as an outsider artist, but the more I think about it, the more SOME of the above fits with the spirit of the projects I undertake. Most, but not all of what I do, fits outside of the gallery walls and have a structure that is not recognizable or definable, which I am fond of, obviously. And this project certainly has a bit of an obsessive compulsive atmospheric quality that many of the outsider artists possess. Henry Darger, Adolf Wölfli, Martín Ramírez, Bill Traylor, Joseph Yoakum, all have been a huge inspiration to me. I used to visit Howard Finster when he was still alive at his architectural and landscaped feat of god-animated imagination: his garden, house and and church in Georgia. He would preach to my boyfriend and I while moving great big piles of dirt, filling one hole and then digging another, that was only when he wasn't making mosaics, paintings, bottle effigies or tin structures, all magically erected without a rulebook to say the least.

It is also quite encouraging, and though I am not a confusion seeker, I still like the message of her focus, to read about Eugenia Joo's intent for the 2nd part of The New Museum's Triennial, called, The Ungovernables.

The show, The Ungovernables, stolidly denies any ability to define a generation’s artistic output. Curated by the museum’s own Eungie Joo, “The Ungovernables” embraces the shifting political currents that are the only stable hallmarks of our contemporary moment, showing work by artists and collectives who leave ideology behind and seek out confusion and hybridity.

~ArtInfo.com by Kyle Chayka, Tom Chen

February 10th