 Thank you all for being here. I'm Catherine Morris. I'm the Sacra Family Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sacra Center for Feminist Art. And I'm pleased to welcome you all here tonight. The exhibition, Judas Scott, Band and Unbound, was co-curated by myself and Matthew Pigs. And it has been a delight and a pleasure to live with the exhibition over the last few months. One of the things that I often say about being the curator for the Sacra Center for Feminist Art is that my priority is not necessarily to convince anybody that they should be a feminist, but rather to have a discussion about the fact that looking at visual culture in 2014 is something that is inevitably influenced by feminism. It's influenced by one of the most important art historical movements certainly of the latter 20th century and has an impact on the way that we look at almost any visual culture, including an artist like Judas Scott. I would never mention Judas Scott being a feminist artist. I would, however, argue that because of feminism and other civil rights movements, including the disability rights movement, Judas Scott had the opportunity to become an artist. And part of the reason that we are able to look at what Judas Scott made and understand it as art is also because of the impact of theoretical thinking, including feminism. Before I turn the server to Matthew, who will introduce tonight's participants, I'd just like to thank a few people. First and foremost, I'd like to thank Elizabeth Sackler for making everything we do possible and for being a continuing supporter of all that we do. I'd also like to thank Arnold Lehmann, the director of the Brooklyn Museum. I'm particularly grateful to the Council for Feminist Art and Marilyn Greenberg, who contributed. I'd also like to thank Jesse Wilcox, our program's coordinator, who makes everything we do look effortless, so we appreciate that. Matthew Higgs is a curator, writer, and artist. As director and chief curator of Y Combs since 2004, he has organized more than 150 individual exhibitions and projects, showcasing the work of more than 500 international artists of all generations. Over the past 15 years, he has organized more than 250 exhibitions and projects in Europe and North America. His writings have appeared in more than 50 books, catalogs, and periodicals, including Art Form and Freeze. Also a teacher, Matthew has been a lecturer at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art London. More recently, he was co-chair of the MFA program at the California College of Arts in San Francisco. Higgs has also lectured internationally and has sat on many panels and juries, including the 2006 Turner Prize in Tate, Britain. Higgs has shown his own work internationally since 1992 and is represented in New York by Murray Guy. Thank you. Welcome to the Brooklyn Museum, everyone. Thanks for coming out on a wintry night. On behalf of myself and tonight's panelists, we'd like to thank everyone at the Brooklyn Museum and the Sackless Center for Feminism for organizing and hosting tonight's event. It's a great pleasure to moderate tonight's conversation. The Catherine Center is being held in conjunction with the current exhibition, Judith Scott Bound and Unbound, curated by myself and Catherine. It remains on view until March the 29th, if you haven't already had a chance to see it, and I think the galleries are open until 10 p.m. tonight. It's a great pleasure to introduce tonight's guests and I'll just give you a little brief of the background on my far-right Massimiliano Gioni. He's the Artistic Director of the New Museum in New York and the Artistic Director of the Nicolò Trasadi Foundation in Milan. Massimiliano has curated many international exhibitions and biennials, including the 55th Venice Biennial, which he directed in 2013, the 8th Growing Drew Biennial in 2010, and the 4th Berlin Biennial in 2006 that he co-curated with Maurizio Catalan and Ali Savotnik, among many others. During his 70s and 10s year at the New Museum, Massimiliano has curated solo exhibitions of work by Clara Leiden, Karsten Hohler, Paul Chan, Urs Fischer, and most recently, it was just closed, the Chrysophilia Exhibition, amongst others. Throughout his curatorial practice, Massimiliano has included the work of both self-towards and so-called outside-artists, establishing ongoing curatorial narrative that received wider attention in his 2013 Venice Curated Exhibition, the Encyclopedia Palis. To my immediate right is Lynn Cook. Lynn is the Senior Curator for Special Projects in Modellat at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Between 2008 and 2012, she was the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid, Spain. Between 1990 and 2008, she was the curator of the D.R.R. Foundation in New York. Cook has organized many monographic exhibitions, including the 2012 survey of Rosemary Trockel's work at Cosmos, presented in New York at the New Museum. The juxtaposed Trockel's work with that of a number of also so-called outside-artists, including Judith Scots. She organized the 2011 Judith Castle retrospective at the Charlotte Store of the Reina Sophia, Madrid, and also Francis of ESA's 2008 exhibition, Fabiola, the Dia Center of the Hispanic Society of the Americas. Among many others. She recently contributed an essay, Authodoxies Under Mind, for the catalog for the 2013 exhibition, Great and Mighty Things Outside Iraq from the Jill and Sheldon Bonowitz Collection, which was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And she also contributed to the catalog for the current Judith Scots exhibition. And in the center is Lawrence Rinder, Larry Rinder, who's the Director of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum of the Pacific Film Archive. He's held positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he was the Chief Curator of the 2002 Whitney Biennale. Among the many exhibitions Rinder has organized include In the Different Light, curated with Neon Blake at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1995, and Create, which he organized, co-curated with myself, an exhibition of work produced in three Bay Area Art Centers that support artists with disabilities, Creativity Explored, Creative Growth, and the National Institute for Art Disabilities. Create subsequently travel nationally under the auspices of independent curators international. Larry was the Founding Director of the Wallace Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in Oakland, where he also served as Dean. Art Life, a collection of his essays, was published in 2005, and the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive will reopen in January of 2016 in a new home in downtown Berkeley, designed by Dillisk for you and Renfort. Finally, and myself, as Captain said, I'm currently the Director of Chief Curator of Wacombs. I'm the Co-Curator of the Current and Due to the Scott Exhibition here, and over the past 12 years I've presented the work of many artists associated with centers such as Creative Growth, the National Institute of Art Disabilities, and New York's Healing Arts Initiative amongst others in both solo group exhibitions at Wacombs and in venues nationally and internationally. Tonight's discussion, the title of tonight's discussion, Insider Art, Re-Securatorial Approaches to Self-Tour Art, simply reflects the unprecedented interest from both artists, curated contemporary art, and institutions in the work of self-tour, and so-called outsider artists over the past decade. And it also acknowledges the significant number of exhibitions and curatorial initiatives in the past decade that have so to contextualize the work of self-tour and outsider artists alongside other forms of contemporary art. Tonight's panelists have all engaged critically with this expansive and expanding field in their own research and curatorial projects for many years, seeking to establish new narratives between the work of self-tour artists and other forms of contemporary art. We've invited each of the guests to initially make a short introductory presentation to give a sense of their ongoing research and personal engagement with this increasingly expansive field, after which time I'll propose a series of questions to the panel before we open up the conversation to include tonight's audience. And this event is being live-streamed, so when we come to questions from the audience, please wait for the microphone to appear. So I'd like to invite First Lynn and Larry and Tanya Messing in the honor to briefly introduce themselves, so welcome. Matthew asked us to bring five images and to speak for five minutes, so I thought I would start with a quick accounting of key ideas in the Rosemary Trockel show that, as Matthew said, was at the New Museum two years ago, I think. And it was called Cosmos. The idea was this would somehow conjure Rosemary Trockel's imagining, things that were of key interest to her and that could be linked to ongoing preoccupations, whether they had to do with feminist practices or to do with natural histories or with creative expression of various kinds. And we worked by selecting things in discussion and they range very widely. And you can see here three cases on one of the floors that include, in the near-case summer, Rosemary Trockel's work and work by James Castle with those on the shelves and the kind of shooter scullery line-up. In the second between, there's work like with the bathroom, the ballerina and photographs again, just opposed with Rosemary's work. And then upstairs, there was a whole section devoted to works with wool. Rosemary probably made her name internationally for a series of industrially knitted paintings. But these are later works in which wool has been stretched across the surface of canvases and staples to make monochromes with the kind of drawn surface. And as we were developing the show, I had shown her reproductions of work by Jim Scott and she was very keen to bring her work in juxtaposition with Judith Scott's and there are many reasons for this and a lot of them have to do with attitudes to craft, to the hierarchies in the academy between fine art and craft, to the association of craft-based activities, particularly working with textiles to do with women and domesticity and a certain kind of play with the idea of drawing and drawing within both painting and sculpture. And so you can see that we'll put in juxtaposition in the way that one would in any normal group exhibition without extended labels, without any kind of special biographical notation for Scott or for the natural history objects or for some of the scientific models. Everything was simply treated with the standard conventions of contemporary art exhibition. When Matthew and Catherine invited me to contribute to the Judith Scott catalogue, I wrote a review of an exhibition in which Judith Scott's work was juxtaposed in a group show that had to do with abstract sculpture with artists who were working contemporaneously. Franz West has got Jessica Stockholder and Rosemary Trockel. All of them were working about on the same scale and all of his work in some way looked at the domestic, domestically-scaled objects or objects as they might be part of our domestic arena. And the exhibition was about how objects become things, things that we live with, how things impact our lives, what is the nature of our ongoing relationship with things around us that we see and don't see on an ongoing basis. And the works all had, as I said, similar formal qualities, though each was singular in terms that they were recognizably the product of one maker of another. And the show had a very clear thesis and it was an exhibition where the thesis set up the relationships between the works out of an early reference back to the maker. And by the maker, I mean biography or past histories or maker's intentions, the show had a certain time of resolution within itself. I think we've heard in the last decades a great deal about the death of the author and the way in which the spectator completes the meaning or projects and finds meaning in works art but the work does not have fixed content. The content comes into play through the interaction of spectator and work. And if there's a death in an author, I think there could be a death of a curator where the curator steps back and the works set up the relationships between themselves rather than a thesis being projected on top of them. And so there is something common between the two shows that I'm describing in the way in which artists' intentions, curators' intentions are not the guiding model. And the last point I want to make is that in recent years, and particularly with Massimiliano showing Venice, we've heard a lot about getting rid of labels, classic Cajun terms like outsider, folk vernacular and so forth, and establishing an open playing field. And I think there's much to be said for this but it's not, in my opinion, simply a question of widening the goalposts, allowing more in because widening the goalposts doesn't change the central relationship of what the margins have to the center. The center remains defined in the same terms as always, it's just that periphery is more populated. And what we need, I think, is a redefinition of those relationships where margins can become in Melovox's terms, sites of resistance, where artists might choose to work from a so-called periphery as a place to contend with some of what's contended in the center. So I think that it's possible to rethink these relationships if we take it case-by-case rather than simply arguing for a dissolution of boundaries and categories, willy-nilly. Thanks, Larry. Okay, so I have ten slides but I will talk for five minutes. The show that I'm going to talk about is the one that Matthew referred to at the beginning of his introduction. It's a show called Create, which Matthew and I organized together that brought together the work of twenty artists in the studios at Creativity Explored, Creative Growth, and the National Institute for Arts and Disabilities, which are all centered in the San Francisco Bay Area. So the initial inspiration for this exhibition was the observation that there was an extraordinary amount of very strong and wonderful work coming out of these three studios. The specific artists that I've been following for a number of years, Matthew, also becoming involved specifically with Creative Growth, which is in Oakland. Creativity Explored is in San Francisco and NIAID is in Richmond, all within a few miles of each other. But these centers, all three of which have been founded by the same couple, Florence and Elias, Katz, in the 1970s and 80s, based on the same principles, had never, once they were founded, had much to do with each other. And I started to become intrigued by the question of why was there so much wonderful work coming out of these three art centers and was there something that they had in common, some kind of methodology that was bringing forth such wonderful art. And so the exhibition served two functions, at least primary functions, one to foreground the work of twenty extraordinary artists roughly divided among the three centers, and secondarily, primarily through the catalog and the public programs, to explore this history of the three centers and the methodology that was proposed by Florence and Elias Katz, which summarized very quickly, had to do with giving adult artists with developmental disabilities an opportunity to work in communal studios at hours which reflected the common work hours five days a week, nine to five, that these centers be connected to the art world, that there be a gallery connected to the studio, that there be not teachers but facilitators who would assist the artists in making their work, and that there would be a sales element. It's interesting that the first of these centers was created right almost exactly at the same moment of Roger Cardinal's famous outsider art definition about outsider artists being cut off from the world, that these centers were radically connected to the world. So, I'll just run very quickly through the work of several of the artists who were involved, Evelyn Reyes, who is with Creativity Explored in San Francisco, Spitt Pastel, these are a representative image, they're carrots, Kenzie, here using a found surface, Felix Gonzalez Torres, print on which he has written a poem about the seasons, Bertha Atoya, a wonderful printmaker who also includes a text element in her work, Ori Ramirez, a wonderful artist from Creative Growth in Oakland, Carl Hendrickson, who is paraplegic, who works with the facilitators at Creative Growth to make these wonderful minimal sculptures, Marlon Mullen, his seemingly abstract paintings like this one are all based on images he finds in magazines and newspapers. And Jeremy Burleson from NIAD, and he has two related bodies of work, one of which is sculptures that are based on medical equipment, this is an oxygen ventilator, he has another series of restraint devices, handcuffs and things of that kind. And then actually a third body of work which are these lanterns that hang from the ceiling, so this was an installation shot of Jeremy Burleson's work in CRE. This is the studio of creativity explored Lance Rivers, another one of the artists in the show, and I was very interested in at the time and continue to be the particular ecology of the studios at these three centers which are very wonderful. And in fact a subsequent exhibition that I worked on with David Wilson, a San Francisco based artist took the model of these three art centers and extrapolated it into another exhibition called The Possible where we brought in weavers, ceramic artists, print makers from around the world to work in studios that we built inside the museum and that were we basically turned the museum for the period of four months into a kind of a collaborative studio and included amongst the artists who were involved in this were the artists from Creative Growth and you can see some of their art hanging from the ceiling there at the end of the exhibition there was a fashion show where there was a collaboration between artists from Creative Growth and others and it was wonderful. Hello everybody I don't have a watch so I'm going to look at myself if I'm running out of time so I'm not checking my mail and it's great to be here tonight also with Lin we've been on I think at this point we've had seven panels together on the question of the insider and the outsider and in the first part of my career I said on panels about biennals and now I seem to sit only on panels about the insider and outsider and I started thinking of a funny joke about the man in the hospital that is locked inside his room and he starts banging on the door of his cell and calls for the doctors and then looks through the window and says are you crazy you locked yourself inside I think that is one of the crucial problems or questions that fascinates me in the question of the insider and the outsider another way to say would be to quote Michel Foucault who famously said that psychology can never tell the truth about madness because it is madness that holds the truth about psychology I think in the questioning of the insider and the outsider we are bound to learn something about the borders and categories that hold what we call contemporary art in place and I think that at least explains my fascination with that question not so much in broadening the gates for the barbarians to come in but more in understanding what are the categories and what are the foundations that hold in place what we call contemporary art in the hope possibly of changing the shape of those walls I think also that the question of the insider and the outsider reveals many of the myths and fears and aspirations that move contemporary art particularly in these last few years I think that one myth that we've been searching in the question of insider and the outsider art is the question of authenticity and the question of innocence and I think it is quite revealing that an art system that is more and more invested in the market and more and more preoccupied with values and so on looks at the question of the outsider as a sort of mythical creature that can help us regain our innocence and not officially advise wonderful questions they ask themselves can I regain my innocence and I think that is ultimately one of the questions that leads this attraction towards the the outsider or anyway I myself also come back to can I look at art with an innocent gaze and whether or not there is a conservative question and that's something that we should discuss further on and I have a few images but they are not so prevalent anyway, there are most images from the Venice Vietnam which was called the Encyclopedia Palace which is this object you see back here which was, I don't even know if it was an artwork or not, it was an object built by Marino Aureti and it was a model for a museum that would contain the entire knowledge of the world and the exhibition itself more or less dealt with similar feats of innocence and the attempt of organizing knowledge through images and the attempt of knowing everything. This was the other starting point of the exhibition which was Carl Gustav Jung's red book I show these two images because I think they also help clarify my position towards the question of the inside and the outside and that is first of all not to fetishize the disabled not to fetishize the outsider as somebody being sick I wanted to start by on one hand with Aureti was not recognized as an artist who thought of himself as an artist and on the other hand as Carl Gustav Jung again as somebody who we don't think of as an artist we certainly don't think of him as a patient, if anything we think of him as a doctor and I think in the juxtaposition I wanted to stress that I was less interested in the outside as the deviant or the deceased or the patient and more as different forms of deletantism and different forms of amateurs. I think more than the term outside I'm interested in the question of the amateur and the question of the deletante and the question of people who make images either as acts of love or as ways to spend their time and I think if you look at from that perspective the distinction between the professional and the non-professional starts blurring even further some of the motivation that have driven my interest towards outsider art or towards less canonical artworks have to do also with in a way to in a way with the question of the artwork I think of shows particularly the Venice Biennals and other shows I put together less as exhibitions of artworks and more as exhibitions of images. Now many levels images are at the same time too important I think to be left to artists alone. We all make images, we all make images of different intensities and I think images are a matter of life and death and there is a question that not only artists should be left with dealing with. On the other hand I think we live in a society that is more and more based on images and in which artists paradoxically have less and less of the same. Most of the images we deal with are commercial they mostly images that invite you to spend money or to do something and I think it's important to ask ourselves again why we make images as humans and what is the position of images within ourselves and within our culture. The second reason or motivation behind my fascination with less canonical work of art is in fact to try to question the canon or to away with the very notion of the canon and I think again if we broaden our spectrum and we look beyond the definitions of art I think very interesting things that are happening. The reason of I'm interested in questioning the canon is not just because I have also delusions of grandeur and I want to rethink the history of art but because also quite frighteningly today I think the hierarchies are established in the name of the market and the good and bad are simply functions of prices and I think it's more interesting to start looking into the cracks of that canon to discover different definitions of art and so to be less interested in the master piece as a sort of burden that forces on to the viewer a specific form of respect and instead think of art objects as different forms of minor art that towards which we can have more complex relationships. I think those are maybe two of the main reasons why I'm fascinated and third probably is the matter of doing away with taste. Taste again is unfortunately often a accomplice of powers and so I think many artists particularly who curate shows and many of the inspiration for my shows come from artists curated shows and I think artists curated shows demonstrate ways of combining art and non-art which fortunately teaches to go beyond taste and rethink categories that are often accepted. I think those are some the points there in the framework that I wanted to talk about. Thanks everybody. I guess just you know touching on things that all of you have mentioned but you know Massimilare you talked about looking into what you call the cracks and when you refer to this idea of the perfect and I guess over the past decade it's really apparent that the work of so-called outsider artists has become presented alongside other forms of contemporary art and the Exhibitions of Galleries, Museums, Biennials to a degree which I think is unprecedented and you know thinking broadly I mean how might we explain this degree of interest in this kind of work and what do we want to be learned from such curatorial shucks to positions I think you know it's especially interesting to you know Massimilare you mentioned about the market the current situation we find ourselves in relation to the economics in the art world how do all of these things coalesce in this space between work that historically had been marginalised and is now more than welcome in the curatorial narrative at least if anybody wants to pick up Well I think some of the comments that were made in the first introduction are very true in terms of the art historical threads that have made this possible in feminism and other kinds of radical art history have certainly opened up the discourse generally the art historical discourse to be open to non-canonical works and I think that is a welcome and ongoing project and I personally don't see my engagement with practices like these or artists like these as one of centre versus periphery I really don't find it useful to distinguish and it's just instinctively not my temperament to do so I see in fact artists such as these on the same playing field very much so as any other artist in my community another thing though regarding the market the category of outsider art I think has probably been promulgated primarily because of its value as a marketing device and one can wring one's hands about that but for the time that it happened and I do hope its time will pass at some point and not to do so in future it served a very important function of bringing work that otherwise would have taken longer to be seen probably into public view so I wouldn't say that the market should be ashamed for having invented this category it was useful to create people made money off of it but it also served to draw a circle around something that would otherwise have been relatively invisible I agree it probably is unprecedented in terms of quantity in recent years but it's certainly not the first wave of Trump enthusiasm and those 70s is the moment where you see a great outpouring of interest and all these discoveries let's say of self-taught work from the south and the upper ages all over the country and often from artists who were in the region so there was a kind of pushback in some senses whether in Chicago or Philadelphia or elsewhere from artists who did not buy into the dominant narratives of New York and were looking to propose alternatives but I think what happened in the 70s and unfortunately it's happening again these questions of authenticity and innocence that the so-called creator who's not part of the academic training system and therefore not, subsequently not part of the inner eschewals of the art world the authenticity and innocence are connected to some notion that this is pouring out of some form of inner expression and I think that that's absolutely untenable when you look closely at the work of someone like James Castle it's very clear he's making a response to an extraordinary world of images and memory of the places he lived he's constructing a world based on the world around him he's using images from advertising and from male order catwalks and the like and this is true of many artists they're not isolated in the sense that they cut off from culture they participate in culture very strongly and the authenticity is not about some notion of the romantic genius cut off in this separate zone and I think we've seen too much of that again and what makes this work interesting to or can make this work interesting is how it reflects with work that's being made by concurrently and how it helps us think through some of the issues of professional artists we're seeing now I just wanted to add something about the market because I was actually reading the other day on the Christie's website that they were somehow marketing outside the art as a new hot commodity and I was of course referred to as the initiator of that trend so I guess I'm also complicit with that but I think the question for me is obviously it's always the question of assimilation but the question is how can some of these objects and not necessarily just the objects made by outside artists but how can we preserve their status as foreigners and as as strange or as strangers I think that to me is a question as a curator that it's not just a matter of assimilating certain target works and proclaiming them as important as let's say the central canonical works so it's not a matter of saying every target is as important as other masters of contemporary art but it's how both the work of outsiders or the works from different provinces including contemporary art can still maintain a critical power that disrupts categories and I think that's also a question of how do you let that happen when you're installing the show now how you retain the artwork's power to be disrupted in a certain manner and I don't have an answer for that but I think that is a question that it's not a matter of assimilation it's not a matter of making the outsider artists look canonical but let an artwork be non-canonical all the time or let an artwork be disrupted I mean for me this is what all art should be disruptive and I don't personally see the value in distinguishing or maintaining a difference in one's expectations about what art made by people who have certain conditions versus people who have other conditions so yeah I think that maintaining the strangeness of all art should be made strangeness should be preserved not just art made by people who come from a disability I'd just like to pick up on you something you mentioned in your introduction Massime about the interest in this field of this kind of work from artists and it also followed into something you just mentioned about how artists in places like Chicago, in the late 60's and 70's where people in Philadelphia I ignore the many much important senses for art at that time I did pick up on this work and I think especially a lot of my interest in this work was informed by say Jim Schruer's collection of thrift store paintings or Mike Kelly's interest in the work of adolescence or even Jeremy Deller in the UK has collected contemporary British folk art I mean they seem to me open up new ways to address some of the questions I'd like to maintain that but it seems to me a lot of interest curatorial in the last take it has probably been informed by artists' interest whether it's Rosemary Trockel's or Mike Kelly's and so on First of all going back also to the fortune of outside art within the 20th century it is particularly in the first half it's largely history written by artists not Dubuffet and obviously the world and not always without problems because I mean it's also a history of assimilation it's a history of artists thinking of themselves as capable of just claiming the product of other people if not as their own as meaningful artworks so it is also a history of particularly when it comes to this of a form of assimilation if you really form of even colonialism not that you appropriate the work of the outside artist with a freedom and a carelessness that you wouldn't have when it comes probably to the work of an inside artist so I think that's and I don't know if that's something you are researching in your exhibition but it is certainly a history that goes throughout the 20th century of the artists assimilating or using the work of the so-called outside event always an interesting story have been said that I think yes I don't have an answer about why curators are more and more attracted by artists curate the shows I think certainly throughout the 90s and this for me it was a privilege or experience to encounter and all that but it's also again within the history of art there is an entire tradition that things of art has some category of images or of cultural studies and I think that's also where my personal interest come from to understand that we should think of art in a wider context that it's not just a sort of self-reflexing masterpiece I think that is the problem that I have most problems with because the more you go to the museums and we have an accepted notion of what an artwork is that I think more and more people are uncomfortable with In your introduction comments you know a lot of I think everyone's comments is about terminology because I think we all understand that the term outsider art is a very imprecise term I think it's a very useful term in sort of giving us an idea of something that is different however it's different too but it's clear that the term outsider art embraces very diverse approaches to creative production so that the term's been applied to the work of artists with disabilities self-taught artists of all kind so-called visionary art as well as many forms of enacting the art including folk art so it seems to me that the term in this sort of ridiculous embrace is not so useful in its lack of precision and I was just thinking that you know going forward I mean how useful is Roger Cardinal's term from 1972 as I mentioned around the same time the centers were founded in the Bay Area so I mean how useful is the term given the complexities of individual artists motivations, intentions and circumstances and how going forward might we establish more precise even useful terminology in relation to this field well as you say Matthew outsider art meant one thing in 1972 and it was the English language convent for DuBuffet's term of art group and he meant by that mystics, visionaries and people in the same as I was who he categorized as asocial and not antisocial that simply just doesn't apply to most people making art in fact for many people making art with disabilities there's an enormous drive to encourage them to self-identify as artists they are not somewhere apart they're actually moving forward into art worlds the impetus is very much about being part of an art world so there seems to be there's no way in which that original definition has much currency but so the term has then been so expanded as to be in some ways completely useless I think it's not easy to find an alternative that would in any way encompass all these categories and I don't think it's worth trying but I'm not sure what the categories are because what's the difference now we're talking about not domesticating this work maintaining a sense of strangeness allowing it to disrupt the canonical but part if you see one of these works whether it's a drawing by James Castle or one of Jutta Scott's work in a museum installation you wouldn't know by looking at it the biography of the artist and if we can't tell by looking what are we drawing on with saying this is different and apart and if our only resource is biography then I think we have a huge problem because we use biography to be symptomatic so this person has these issues and look here's the work as if the work is consequence of these biographical facts and that is simply not the case it's not true in terms of people with mental disabilities of some symptomatology that references different mental states that's completely disproven and mostly a great deal of work made by professional artists looks very similar and if we can't go back to this point if we can't tell visually the difference on what terms are we making a distinction which though should be an argument for treating all visual culture in the same way I think that's to be why don't we go to museums and have castle but also cartoons and also I think paradoxically an interesting way would be to think of all the artworks or all the visual manifestations as symptoms of our culture and to try to decrypt them to understand something about ourselves so you know work thought of himself as a psycho story I don't know what exactly he meant but what he meant was that you could learn something about not only by looking at art history but by looking at advertisement by looking at the art of the alienated as it was called at that time so I think that is for me the key can we think of institutions and it's significant that we use the same word for museums and hospitals think of institutions as places where different kinds of visual manifestations are included and wouldn't let us understand better ourselves that is why I personally welcome the influx of outside art along with other manifestations of so I agree with Mr. Liano that this type of institution he's proposing which you've embodied in your exhibitions very successfully is a very exciting direction but within this kind of multiverse that embraces different kinds of visual culture I would still as a curator like to have the capacity or the responsibility of skewing towards images that even if they aren't art let's say artistic that have a strangeness even if they weren't made as art and maybe that's a kind of curatorial colonialism I'm not sure but if one gives up entirely the idea that there are certain things that have some kind of special something then in not adept hands could become just boring when you welcome everything you do a great job at choosing things that are wonderful and strange in response to your question about outside art I do think from a curatorial perspective and an art historical perspective it is a term that has outlived usefulness in terms of what shall we call these things I think the only reason to bring forth a category from my perspective as a curator is if it serves the purpose of the art and making let's say the artistic and making some kind of experience that has something I would consider having an artistic quality more available to a viewer so I wouldn't say categorically I don't want to have any categories that distinguish certain types of art from another I could imagine an instance where one might want to define with language or by selection in a certain exhibition certain types of things in order to draw out some quality some shared quality that would not otherwise be visible but at this point I think it is nothing but a kind of lingering social prejudice to draw that circle around art made by people with disabilities I want to bring this back to this question about except for something myself from Catherine when we were making the exhibition of Stez very keenly aware and conscious of how much about you discuss an extraordinary story in itself should we mention that this was a death a new woman with Down syndrome to what extent should that narrative become implicated in the actual exhibition itself and I think it remains unresolved but I think certainly we become or re-grammatite to these narratives as it relates to artists who perhaps didn't have a voice or didn't externalize their voice during their lifetime so I think it's very unusual for us to have a temporary artist's private life unless they've been profiled by Calvin Thumpkins in the New Yorker when all of a sudden we learn a lot you remain fascinated by the life of self-tooler outside our artists whether it's Darjeel James Castler or Ed Sheeran Scott but I wanted to fold that back into your point you made Lynn about James Castler is that he was constructing a world from his world and how useful is when we're left with the work I mean as you said when we walk into a gallery it's not clear when it's here at James Castler this is the work of a man with whatever issues he had during his lifetime but the biographical narrative is implicated in the work I think it's a question probably when you get to the biographical narrative if it's up front and center you walk into a show and it says I was next had these issues well from that moment on in the New Yorker I didn't think about well you filtered through that and I think it's there's a distinction to be made between work that's determined by these issues and work that's informed by these issues and I think in every case I know of the work may be informed in some ways by limitations but limitations can be of access to technical facilities or materials artists of all kinds have limitations that inform their practices cameras of certain kind were available they couldn't afford something or other it becomes a factor in the making of the work but we don't see it as determining the work and providing these parentheses within which the work is created and I think that this sense of timing maybe by the time you want you leave due to Scott's show it wouldn't be useful to know something of this biographical fact data but I don't think it's necessary I don't think one needs to start with it and I'm not sure when we're actually meeting tomorrow if at all and Mike is why I've talked about group shows is because I would say it's much less lean because it's not about tracing the evolution of the practice it's not about mining an imaginary but in a solo show like this which is kind of a retrospective or a survey show it's perfectly appropriate to talk about something like this any retrospective or survey show will jowl in the wall labels talk about certain biographical facts about the artist it's not unusual at all but when would say Jackson Pollock's problems with alcohol and his psychoanalytical sessions when would they come up first blown maybe when you get to the stage come up a lot in some kind of heroicizing mythmaking but generally speaking that wouldn't be what you lead with I'm not saying you should lead with it but I don't think we should be shy of it either I mean I think biography is interesting it illuminates the art but I don't think we should shy away from it and I think we're on the cusp of a period thank goodness for it where we can talk about these things openly without it overly determining the way we experience the art or sort of shunting our experience into a predetermined place where it is outside or somehow covered in a veil of weirdness that it doesn't ever ask for and maybe it doesn't deserve I think one thing we tried to do in this exhibition was to underscore Judith Scott's history with creative growth because it's unlikely these objects would have been made if she hadn't encountered creative growth so it's trying to articulate the narrative, the relationship between an individual institution and how that juxtaposition allowed these things to evolve but Massimo, how do you do this? Well first of all I thought it was quite perfectly handled in the exhibition the biographical data and I could tell somehow there's been a lot of questioning and thinking behind those decisions and those are also decisions that as I was working on this but now I ask myself hundreds of times because in general first of all I like exhibitions to be quite verbose and full of words I also think that again the sort of stupor that people have in front of artworks in typical contemporary art museums is problematic I think sometimes we do actually need the biography we do need an excess of words to steer away the attention from the viewer that otherwise would just be passively receiving the artwork as a manifestation of beauty and often as a manifestation of the power of the institution itself so I think for me maybe because I'm Italian and Vasari or the lives of artists I think the biographical touches help waking up the attention of the viewer that otherwise just dares the Picasso for its presumed beauty and most often for its hidden prize I think that's a problem. Do we go to the museums just to stare with our mouth open and say oh that's beautiful or we go to learn something more about ourselves and about the stories behind these objects you know I think for me ultimately this is an example that unfortunately has hurt over and over because I use it all the time I think we have much more complex ideas of museums for example here at the Brooklyn Museum or the Metropolitan Museum when we step into galleries of Egyptian art or Greek art or even medieval art where our knowledge and our assumptions about what art is are much more complicated and porous and then when we get to the contemporary art galleries our understanding of what museums should do and what artworks are are mostly very concerted. Artworks are pretty pictures on the wall in front of which we have to open our mouth in a state of stupidity and admiration and I think sometimes those biographical elements help us wake up from that and understand that those objects are more complicated there the history there the story the biography behind. I don't mean to criticise the show what I would say that for me was very important was the emphasis on the standard of creative growth not only because had Judith Scott it was highly improbable she would have made this work but for the way in which it set up an art making studio and it functioned like a studio and the gallery projects into it and there's people making work in very different kinds but it functions like any studio situation that a student would have gone through in an art school or any other kind so in other words she was going through which is placed in relation to art making situations which are absolutely standard and normal this is what we understand by learning experiences to make art and I think that's a very, I've not seen that done before and I think it's a really important contribution I want to point out that if only this was normal this studio situation I think there would be a lot more great art in the world because it's a very fantastic model and it's actually unlike an art school on the one hand or like a solitary artist studio on the other it's communals of the artists are together artists working in many different disciplines side by side with access to tools and materials but Matthew when we were working on the show together pointed out another very important difference between these studios which are not schools there's no instruction different between them which is that the artists never have to leave there's a tremendous pressure here in school to produce something and then get rated up Judith Scott the first year she was there didn't do anything she sat there and I don't know what she thought she was doing or what the people there thought she would ever do but it took a very long time for her to get her act together and start making art which I'm sure in these centers have been there for 30 years 40 years and I think you know in reflecting on these centers through the work I did on the show with Matthew I think that this model the space where you're with other people and you never have to leave should look into that I didn't do very much art school during our first year there you go I'm going to just bring one last up to the panel and hopefully we'll open it up to questions from the audience because I'm sure there should be lots and really the final thing I was interested to talk about this point in the evening is you know as curators of contemporary art you know A. do we have responsibilities whatever they might be ethical, moral, etc in relation to the objects we present and contextualize and if that's the case do these responsibilities change or shift do any work isn't able to communicate their intentions for example perhaps artists is no longer alive they left no record although the artist doesn't have access to conventional forms of communication such as the case of Judith Scott so it's really a question about responsibilities we have as curators to objects and then in this different category of objects do those responsibilities shift or change this goes back to my days as an art student and I'm conflicted between being interested in art history as a social history of art and also what the German speaking word used to call pure visibility now the belief that you can look and understand and write a history of art by simply looking at the objects which is based on the assumption that the artist is dead whether or not he or she is alive and the object is a universe that contains all its meanings in itself without the artist so I can say I stand somewhere in between I do believe we need to approach these works as though the artists were dead and I think paradoxically in the case of outside art we are even allowed to do that more freely than when you have a gallery from Chelsea telling you how to hand a show and there are more spaces of freedom sometimes you obviously have to be as a reader conscious of your horizon of expectations I think now you need to be a reader that reads what is in the text and not comes with ideas that are imposed on the text so I think that is possible as though they were somehow without their fathers and mothers and still described them within the history of culture but I guess that's a method of responsibility whether or not the artist is an outsider I think it's a method of responsibility all the time I agree and I would just say in relation to artist's intent it's maybe less a question of curatorial responsibility or opportunity that when there is an artist who is available to express their intent it just adds another opportunity for a curator to have access to that that facet of the works being and perhaps to foreground it because art objects don't always in fact probably rarely end at the edges of the object the artist who made them often I think has some idea of how they should be presented and what world they should live in and I think that it is certainly valuable and as I say an opportunity for curators to take that into account but I don't think that that is the only way for works to be shown I do think that once a work is born it enters into a world of free things and curators have an opportunity and a right I guess to recontextualize but just need to do that with a sense of respect I think curators have a variety of different kinds of responsibility and different kinds of shows working on a retrospective with a living artist you I think enter into some kind of contract based on trust and mutual willingness to support the work to bring it to a certain conclusion if the artist is not alive you have a different kind of responsibility with works in a group show whether the artist is alive or not I think the intention or the desires of the artist expressed or not are less relevant than dynamic of the group show I think you always have a responsibility to the material artifact of the object not to present two parts and not the third because it didn't fit or something like that so there are a whole range of things but I think there are also types there are shows that are relevant historically and become inappropriate in some senses at another historical moment and there's a responsibility around that and I'm thinking about there are a lot of artists who would not want to be in a show put under a national banner a show of French art there are a lot of women who do not see any need now for shows devoted to women's art there might have been in the 60s but the dynamic has changed and what was a spearhead has become a ghetto in those terms and we could extend that and I think we might make some of those arguments in this arena as well so I guess one of the reasons the thought came up with me when my son Catherine was organizing this exhibition is that because Judith Scott had no verbal or written communication there's no understanding of which way is the correct orientation for any of these objects so there's no up, down there's no bottom or top so they consequently have been presented in really wild and different ways so when they were presented in London they were suspended on fishing wire at the Brooklyn Museum we presented them on these low platforms which is relatively close to how the works were made when she worked at the table top in the studio in Brooklyn I think we'd like to open it up to questions from the audience and we really hope there are questions either for an individual or to the general subject and we'll do our best to answer them so if you have a question please raise your hand what's going on? Thank you, that was really very informative and wonderful thinking about art fairs and the fact that the outside of fair is now going on and Armory opens next week Ducie, next month Ducie art fairs are incorporating outsider art into their curatorial acceptance their committee meeting vetting as a next step as a next logical step in merging bringing outsider inside I think that's just for joining just for this I love my profession not very much but enough to say that fairs are not curatorial project so I would not use that idea to anything that is to do with art fairs but I think the outside art fair just closed in New York and Edlander runs us in the audience and certainly I think a fair like Frees Masters in London has opened up territory within the Frees around art fairs to basically include anything and so I think some things are changing some things is porous and I think this year at the outside art fair Anne Durand and Jay Gordy curators and critics of contemporary art curates an exhibition that occupied one of the spaces within the outside art fair so I think there is definitely a different or porous relationship between what goes into what is considered to be contemporary art fair I don't know much about art fairs or the market but I think it's inevitable that artists like the artists that were in the create show will find themselves increasingly in mainstream galleries and they'll show in whatever art fairs those galleries happen to be in and I think one of the intentions of the founders of creative growth and creative to explore the cats was to create economic narratives for those artists so they were very interested even before the centres opened that the artists would benefit from their creative labels and I guess where some of that economy now exists is within the larger narrative of art fairs Other questions? Thank you so much for your comments I'm wondering when you are meeting with an artist or a group of artists to exhibit their work how do you how do you determine what sort of writing they would like in an exhibit about their work what sorts of questions do you ask what kinds of conversations do you have especially if it's a lesser known artist It's worth an entire other panel I think to bring it to this panel I think what your question raises is first of all the question of the intention of the artist Am I as a curator responsible to the presumed intention of the artist I think if you look at literary criticism there's been 30-40 years in which the role of the author has been defined and analysed in much more complicated terms when it comes to two arts often the assumption that many artists that you sit down and you listen take notes tell the truth send the text back to the artist get the artist to realise it and send it back to you and I think that's the death of creating the death of criticism the death of many of the excitement of interpretation that I think makes up the artwork or art as I like at least so I don't think there is an answer how you go about that I think it's also a matter of contrasts and expectations within individuals and also within institutions that are artists who firmly want to control the reception and description of the work there are others that are more open Lin, when you mentioned the exhibition you made with Rosemary a collaborative dialogue between you and the artist that brought new material into the exhibition and perhaps Trump wasn't so familiar with or she brought material into things very important to her so is that part of this question, is that dialogue? That's probably an unusual exhibition in the sense of the back and forth also because there was so much that was not hers but I think in general you can say as curating you're between the artist and the institution so you're protecting the artist from the institution but you're standing for the institution in relation to the artist so you go back and forth depending on which way the pressure is coming in order to make this come to some resolution the institution has its needs too which very legitimate in relation to its public health and safety all those kinds of things obviously legitimate needs so that's how you break them into a relation that's key In regard to the creative exhibition our approach for the 20 artists was to have a novelist Kevin Killian write all of the entry texts in the catalogue for each of those three artists so he was coming from a perspective that was not art historical but he was a very close looking thoughtful person who was able to look at these the images and the objects and make connections to other artworks to things in visual culture and culture generally and it was really clearly presented as one person's perspective I personally am very interested in what artists think about their work and unless I have a good reason not to I'd be inclined to represent that in how I describe the work to others Certainly in my experience of collaborating for 12 years with the artists of creative growth the staff of creative growth and centers like that it's just extraordinarily complicated because the majority of the artists is because of the nature of their disability don't have conventional forms of communication they don't refer or relate their work to conventional narratives of art history and certainly I found that in each of my accounts with different artists it's almost like starting from scratch each time so we have to learn almost like a new language in order for me not only to acclimatize to the things I'm looking at but also to establish some relationship with the artist's intentions which in the case of Judith Scott I was fortunate enough to meet there was no communication so there's a huge space sometimes between you and the work I wanted to pick up on something that Lynn said in her introduction reimagining the periphery and the center and I was thinking if you could speak a little bit more about the periphery and the margin as sites of resistance and actually I think in some ways creative growth maybe could be an example of that as initially there's a label of outside art or art made by people with disabilities of communal art making because of that and what do you think of that and are there other examples Thanks Well I think that the center for creative growth and the other two institutions in the Bay Area are remarkable and the many other institutions that have been based on them in Australia and the Richards elsewhere they've done remarkable work I'm thinking in part of a case in point might be not as far as best who showed a very mainstream leadership gallery many persons in the 40s and 50s who did not move to New York from Texas but lived his life as a big fisherman in large part on a remote part of the Texas coastline and whose relationship with the New York art world got at arms length and who developed a very complex philosophical system around you probably know it was a label system which was a world view which is embodied in his work which was not actually included in the presentations of his work during his lifetime but have subsequently been incorporated in for example Bob Gover's presentation so I would say in someone like Forrest Brest who had been to art school who was very familiar with the New York art world and the whole museum structure and all of that that's choosing to be elsewhere as out of a position of strength not because it couldn't have been otherwise and I think increasingly whether it's geographic removal or distancing in other ways or refusal to get involved with certain kinds of structures within that art world we could talk about David Hamlin's when he moved to New York from the West Coast how much work he made in Harlem how much work was made that was fugitive how much work that was made outside certainly outside of market so it's not in that case perhaps a case of geographical removal but say in terms of distances but it's about an attitude in the value system Thanks, we have another question sorry, I'll put it in the middle here The artists that we've discussed that have sort of purity and integrity to our work which is what has brought us to embrace it now that these artists over a period of time as you work with them are intersecting with the marketplace or being paid or making money off work is being sold how do you perceive that this has affected them in other words if they have done a particular sort of thing that has been more accepted or bought or purchased or they have seen fighting for do they tend to then go in that direction are they how do they respond At these three centers the gallery and sales in the gallery have been part of the model from the very beginning from the early 1970s the artists who work in these studios can see the gallery they can see the visitors depending on their kind of disability they know the work is being sold some of them make art that sells they do get paid they're just like anybody else who is excited when someone buys their work they may be excited that they're getting money so yes there are things trends if you can call them or individual career paths that these artists take and follow in these three centers depending on their degree of disability there are some who are more aware than others of what is happening but it's front and center and has been part of the model from the very beginning thank you I think what's interesting for me is just the pure creativity of people and the ability to just the will to create and make I'd like to know what attracts you guys to this type of art personally what do you get out of working with these types of artists what kind of what they make or new materials what do you personally get out from working in this area first of all there is a very nice essay by Al Foster about the fascination of the surrealist for the outsider artist and he basically claims that actually outsider artists far from being creative is mostly repetitive he express a long game for order rather than a celebration of chaos and I don't remember the title of the essay it's and I think that's also quite interesting to for us to think about then certain manifestations of outsider art are which now are described as obsessive tend to be extremely formulate tend to be extremely built on the repetitions of visual formulas and so for me so it's not a matter of the myth of the liberated mad person that can do whatever she wants for me the interest towards certain forms of less canonical or not recognized as artistic practices is that I think they tell us something about our culture and tell us something about ourselves that art itself cannot tell us and that's the most simplistic way to describe it if anything because they tell us how humans use time and how humans use images which I think is a peculiarity that distinguishes from animals so that's my personal interest Larry? For me there's just no difference at all between the art that I like that is made in these studios and art that I like that is made outside the studios there's differences between individual works but I'm my attraction to these works has nothing to do with the fact that the artists are disabilities Len? I start with the work that's fascinating to me and it doesn't in the beginning it's irrelevant where it's coming from but I think that something you said earlier it's not where this comes from and I think that we look at many objects in an aesthetic perspective and some days we can look at scientific models like the Leicesters class objects as works of art or within an aesthetic framework that doesn't mean we think they're always works of art we can look at them in histories of science these artifacts are very labile and they move into multiple categories they're not fixed in one the other thing I would say is we talked tonight more or less exclusively about outsider artists in relation to people with disabilities but historically in this country there are great many other makers who were called outsiders who did not have mental disabilities they had completely different kinds of profiles they might have been poor illiterate living in a rural community as they had any number of other impediments to go into art school and follow a normal artist career path but there were not people with mental disabilities so we've talked about one sector alone and it has its own set of concerns which don't necessarily come up if we talk about James Castle that we're talking about Sister Gertrude Morgan my interest curatorially largely resides in the work of centers that support artists with disabilities so the work that we the most presented in the context the programs of white columns is connected to artists who work at centers and my encounter with creative growth in 2002 is the trigger for that because it struck me as a wholly radical place and the genealogy of the organization the motivation behind it is found the way that the organization is run just struck me as arguably the most radical art-making context I've ever come across and for me it was kind of joked and it forced me to think about all kinds of things which I'm still sort of a wrestling with um, is there another question? sorry, at the back there um, just coming back to maybe something that has extended the field outside of work and then for what you just did then I'm interested in the way that work made by indigenous people or people outside of the modernism was once conflated outside of art and in the kind of parallel atmosphere of that work we find that in today's kind of graphic museum or post-gaping graphic museum there's a genealogy and movement that the museum itself rather than if that's the place to see this work and thus have sort of the psychological value it's also insufficient that the worlds might have other places to see this work as well and so my question is really is there something that can be applied from that field to what we commonly think is outside of work now which is it you know, rather than arguing for equality within an efficient system is the museum really an intelligent enough space to deal with this material I guess that also folds back to the imprecision of this term outside art which does embrace folk art, vernacular art forms the work of people with disabilities but just as you said people whose trajectory just happened to be different I mean is the museum well maybe a certain type of museum that encourages a certain formation of values and hierarchies but again I think there are many other examples of museums and some of them are already among us upstairs where those categories are much looser and complicated I always use the example of the map. You go to the map everything is much more mixed you go to the contemporary galleries at the map must be big painting be stupefied by it and no sense of context so I think for example going back to what Matthew was saying about artists who created shows you can think of those as temporary museums of sorts in which different types of methodologies are put in place so I think I think different types of museums exist we just take for granted that one kind of museum is the the right one. I think it's also true that in Chinoaxe that's the first re-hanging of the modern galleries that the men recently started to embrace a more complicated story about what modern art might be Larry? Well just a quick observation in terms of this art from these centers certainly looks one way in the museum the way I presented it was I had that one slide and you could see it looked great but it was fairly conventional in terms of its presentation one of the other features of the centers is that visitors, anybody during the open hours can go into the studios and see the work being made so in the centers there are actually two places that you can observe the work one is at a gallery which in each of the three centers is modeled on the same principles of a museum in their white walls and their labels and their lit frames and what have you but very close by immediately adjacent to that is the studio itself which anybody can go into you can sit down with the artists and join them at their work table and that is a very different way of seeing work which most museums don't offer we did in the show The Possible that I talked about earlier which was inspired by creative growth, creativity explored I think your question is a very good one the discursive framework is absolutely of enormous power in shaping the way we receive an object and the same object and the graphic museum will have a different narrative to it from if it's placed in a fine art museum and I think we see that same movement back and forth if you think say of the G's Bend Quilts and the huge interest when they hit the press when the Whitney did that show in 2002 I think and there was an enormous excitement they were called some of the greatest abstract art and poetry and more and so one would have expected to see them from time to time in the Whitney and I know through your auspices Rosie Lee Tonkin's quilt was bought for the Whitney I have never seen them since but the Philadelphia Museum also lots of G's Bend Quilts and they're in the textiles department and if they're shown they would be shown within a very different history so it's not that one is right and the other is wrong but it's what happens if we move these objects back and forth into different disciplinary frameworks that we see them differently and I'm very much proponent of making it fluid Yes I think we have time for one final question so we'll take a question in the front microphone's on its way thank you very much One of the things that I keep thinking about with what you have all been talking about is the viewer and as a viewer I realize that you're talking about things from your from the curatorial perspective and as a viewer I'm not often so much thinking about that and it's not that I'm putting on you an educational element but there's something that's so exciting to me about being a visual person going to different museums going out into the city going into the country being able to go into the thrift stores whatever, we're in a visual culture and so there's something that's educational without being tendentious to me that I just think is really quite exciting about what you've done It was a compliment Say thank you That's not the death that the curator wrote That's the continuing rude health of the curator Well I'd like to thank the panel obviously I'd like to thank you all for your patience and time The galleries are open until 10pm if you haven't had a chance to see killer heels Audrey and Scott both run after at the Brooklyn Museum right now and thank you again