Liminal Voices: Beyond the Myth of Outsider Art

Photo by Kai Oberhäuser on Unsplash

It’s almost a cliché, the starving, struggling artist whose ideas are so outside the mainstream that she won’t be appreciated in her lifetime. There’s an idea that because art critiques society, the artist must necessarily be an outsider, alienated from society. But it’s almost impossible for someone to be entirely outside of society: we all grow up inside society and internalise its memes and morals before we can come to our artistic sensibilities. Instead, artists are like immigrants: required to assimilate but would never be considered local.

A healthy society needs artists who critique it. It’s the unofficial branch of the American idea of “checks and balances”. Even before the West embraced democracy, the court always had a jester whose job was to offer critique in the guise of fiction or comedy. In the Jewish Passover text, the Haggadah, there is a story about four sons who ask questions, along with instructions for parents on how to answer them. One of the sons is “The Wicked One”, who excludes himself from the religious work and is considered sacrilegious (and is ostracised as punishment). Like the jester, the wicked son exists in a continuous conflict with mainstream society: we need them for critique, but we keep them outside of society, ostensibly for perspective but probably because we’re not entirely comfortable with their critique.

As an immigrant, I walk this tightrope all the time. I’m not really a local—I never will be. I haven’t grown up here, haven’t read the same books as a teen, haven’t watched the same TV shows. But I make an effort: I read books and listen to podcasts that give me glimpses into British society. Ideally, I would have also watched the popular TV shows, but I often can’t understand what the fuss is all about. I don’t find Michael McIntyre funny most of the time, with the exception of Silent Letter Day. I notice the same tension with my home culture: I haven’t lived in Israel for over twenty years and am not quite as immersed in the culture as I used to be. But the distance gave me perspective. This perspective enabled me to write a book about the most painful point in Israeli-Palestinian society: the displacement of Palestinians by the Israeli state.

However, this tension is not always authentic. Dan Sinykin points out that even writers who were considered heretical critics of society, such as Gore Vidal or Chuck Palahniuk, were steeped in the traditional publishing world. They attended the same parties and were part of the clique of the big editors and publishers. I’m sure this is true for any artistic medium out there. If you’re an insider, you get published or opportunities to exhibit or a coffee with that big-shot producer. If you’re a true outsider, your work will likely go unnoticed, even if you self-publish. Very few artists we’ve heard of were true outsiders, and these usually become renowned after their death—a good example is Van Gogh.

This creates a true Catch-22: if I’m steeped enough in the culture to understand it and have my voice heard, I can’t be a true outsider; if I’m a true outsider, I may not be part of the culture enough to understand and critique it. Good artists work in the liminal space between social critique and publicity. They walk a tightrope, navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. I think this is part of the reason artists’ early works are usually the most innovative. It’s not about getting older, it’s about becoming an insider.

While it looks like the “democratisation” of art in the last decade might solve this tension, it actually masquerades it even further. Between AI and cuts to funding for the arts, even now, artists who can afford to work in obscurity for years often come from a specific socioeconomic status. That means that social critique based on the lived experiences of most of humanity will likely never be heard. And, as Jesse Prinz points out, the very term “outsider art”—our romanticisation of the struggling, outsider artist—creates incentives to keep marginalised artists on the outside.

Is there anything we can do about this? I’m not sure. The important thing would be, I would think, to preserve that liminal space for artists to work in. At least for me, the liminal space is where my art comes from. But I’m privileged, and I can preserve my own liminal space. Artists who don’t have that privilege need our support, now more than ever. Moreover, our support is what gives artists the agency to decide for themselves whether they want to be insiders or stay outsiders. If you know an artist whose voice you appreciate, listen to them. Every artist needs different things: some will ask you to sign up for their newsletter, while others will ask you to subscribe to their Patreon.