Inside and Outside: The Transcendent, Boundaries, and the Trouble with Spaces

Abstract

“Outsider art” is a term that was developed within gallery spaces during the 1970s. Outsider art as a category has often been plagued by the issue of balancing the work of artists, who often belong to vulnerable demographics like the mentally ill, and the dissemination of respectful thought surrounding their work. In this paper I compare and contrast the works of the two outsider artists, Oswald Tschirtner and Annie Hooper, and their subject matter, methods of creation, and interaction with the formal art world. In “Inside and Outside: The Transcendent, Boundaries, and the Trouble with Spaces”, I base my understanding of mental illness on Michel Foucault’s work “Madness and Civilization” [1961]. These theories show how mental illness interacts with art in both the sense of adding therapeutic value to the creators and how it adds monetary or social value for galleries. I analyze the way these gallery spaces can help or harm our understanding of art based on the dynamics of display practices. The goal of this paper aims to reexamine practices of how to utilize gallery spaces without fetishizing the artist.