Snapped Shots
Photography out of bounds
If “Create and Be Recognized” wasn’t mandated to set a precedent, there’s a lot more of this kind of work that might have been included. Catalog essayist Roger Cardinal (who originally coined the “Outsider” designation) cites numerous missing examples, from mediumistic spirit photography of the Victorian era to French neuropsychiatrist and fabric fetishist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, who took some 40,000 photos of drapery before his death in 1934. The mainstream art world isn’t far behind: New York’s Metropolitan Museum recently mounted “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.” And as I reported in an earlier column, the blurry deadpan snapshots adorning reclusive Outsider musician Jandek’s album covers were featured at Gagosian’s during December’s Berlin Art Fair.
Quibbles aside, this is a beautiful, moving and eye-opening show well worth the trek to the Inland Empire. The lure of the in-the-flesh Wölflis and Dargers should be more than enough to draw you out — especially from one of the few major metropolitan centers virtually devoid of a community devoted to this kind of work. More importantly, the show succeeds in making an argument for the recognition of Outsider photography as a cutting-edge genre demanding further study — and more narrowly focused and in-depth curatorial exploration. Because in tomorrow’s Outsider art world it may not be enough to be a paranoid-schizophrenic pedophile designing palaces for the aliens in the hollow earth. You’ll need to bring along a camera.
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CREATE AND BE RECOGNIZED: PHOTOGRAPHY ON THE EDGE| California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside | Through April 15
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