Outside in

However, if you look at the transhistorical culture of the world and not merely at products of the last few centuries of the museum churchstate, you'll see that it's really the other way around: a small group of categorically advantaged people, insider artists, make insider art. Insider artists have usually taken part in some kind of expensive training ritual; they may be classified as Insiders by their demonstrable obsession with rank, sales, Western history, and - here's their connection to the larger group - immortality, with the encasement of spirit (too often, their spirit) through the fashioning of an object.

In art reality, the border between insider and outsider art is permeable, stretched at one end by the concept, always dicey, of an artist's intention, and on the other by the art's reception, usually reception in the market. Every so often an attempt is made to readjust this border and serve up outsider art on a new Dubuffet. New York's annual Outsider Art Fair, a recent effort to attract collectors and consolidate the value both of particular artists and the whole category, seems to have established itself; on the other hand, the New Museum of Contemporary Art's current show, "A Labor of Love," sets out to challenge "traditional definitions of fine art, folk art, outsider art, and craft" through a tactic of curatorial assemblage - a tactic of resemblance that sometimes backfires, fixing boundaries it seeks to erase.

The most significant revaluation of outsider art has taken the form of a building in Baltimore: the American Visionary Art Museum, which opened in November. Inspired institutionally by Lausanne's Musee de l'Art Brut, AVAM was founded almost literally by one person, Rebecca Hoffberger, who claims to have baptized the $7 million venue debt-free. Architects Alex Castro and Rebecca Swanson fitted a concrete and glass teardrop around the Inner Harbor's defunct Baltimore Copper Paint Company; the turn-of-the-century Four Roses Whiskey warehouse next door, a severe brick box, is "ruralized" as a Tall Sculpture Barn.

As design, the museum almost solves an unremarked but always noticed problem: How do you institutionalize this often rude, elaborate, jagged work without killing it with curatorial kindness? Carved walking sticks and toothpick Titanics (both in the present show) turn dusty and anthropological if vitrined within the still typical progression of rectangular-room galleries. Although not actually heart-shaped, the three-story AVAM Could be said to pull the corpuscular viewer through walkway vessels into curved-wall chambers. An off-center spiral-staircase volume gives the space its core and a good deal of its appeal, at least partly because of artist David Hess' sinuous and emotive stairway, made of S-curve iron struts interwoven with bronze castings of tree branches, paper cups, and any other flotsam the turbulent daily world throws out.

The museum has a collection of almost 4,000 works, but its first show, "The Tree of Life," borrows greatly from collectors and a few dealers. The staff-light museum has made the choice, at least for now, of using guest curators and mounting one theme show every six months. Writer-photographer Roger Manley selected the nearly 400 works in the inaugural exhibition, but the only thing they have in common is that they are made of, or picture, wood or other tree-derived products.

No presentation of objects can be neutral, but the "theme" show, especially when the theme is the medium, propagates cliches of craft exhibition and indulges in the worst curatorial habits of the "omnibus." The wish to popularize is apparent too in the splashy "hand carved" wall graphics that identify each gallery, although the smaller wall texts are plain and serious, relatively dense with information. Could this need to colorize already thrillingly accessible work, in order to attract an imagined wood-headed public, be a result of the museum's proximity to the Rouse Co.'s Harborplace commercial fantasia? Perhaps, but it also partakes of the general museum strategy, in this age of government withdrawal, to Barnumize everything in sight.

Outsider or visionary art, on the whole, survives any attempt to gift-shop it: most of it is, in some definitional way, about survival. And the founding of this museum will probably accomplish what look to be mutually exclusive tasks: the solidification of the outsider category and the inclusive pulverizing of the textbook definition of fine art.

Jeff Weinstein is a frequent contributor to Artforum.

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