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FAR OUT (p. 3 of 3)

1 | 2 | 3 | JUN '04

It’s not an academic question to McGlynn, who was expelled from the fair last year upon revealing he went to the Ontario College of Art & Design. The fact that he never studied painting or got a degree – and that others, including Clint Griffin, went to the same school – apparently doesn’t matter. But then, last year also saw the expulsion of Matt Lamb, who’s never set foot in an art school but who did happen to own the largest chain of funeral homes in the American Midwest before becoming an artist. The gallery representing Lamb argued that he was "indisputably obsessive"; still he was dismissed. "It’s all a lot of merchandising bullshit," Lamb told me. "How can you go from being an outsider to not being an outsider? So I’m not an outsider. They can stick the whole thing in their ass."

McGlynn, whose art has been selling ever since his OCA instructors laid eyes on it, is sanguine: "I didn’t really learn anything at art school anyway."

And I believe him. After all, what art school grad is not self-taught in some sense? But McGlynn’s experience also helps interpret that exploding cultural atom of the Outsider Art Fair. Because if he can be excluded, then the fringe is managed. And as soon as management is introduced, then the Outsider Art Fair becomes no less an exclusive institution than those of contemporary art. But then, anybody with half-decent incoming co-option radar could have told them that.

Returning to my old friend... We did have lunch and catch up. She’d just done a video installation for a Village gallery. A tribute to prog rock – not ironic, she insisted. In the video, she plays a 10-minute slow-motion drum solo in front of a billowing smoke machine. I didn’t even know she played drums, which she didn’t – or at least not well enough at first. So she’d taken a year off to teach herself. And waiting for my cab later outside the Puck Building, in a bitter wind, I couldn’t get that image out of my mind: My friend playing drums for a year, just because she was creatively compelled to do so. It made me think: Some outsiders are less vulnerable than others. And I was again reassured by that. [ ]

OUT CAST

What started as a fringe visual art movement has inspired museums, sub-genres (outsider music), even Canadian offshoots.

1922 – German doctor Hans Prinzhorn publishes a landmark study of the art of the mentally ill.

1945 – French painter Jean Dubuffet begins to collect the work he later names Art Brut (raw art).

1972 – Dubuffet’s Collection de L’Art Brut museum opens in Lausanne.

1975 – Outsider music champion Irwin Chusid hits WFMU airwaves in New York.

1992 – Annual Outsider Art Fair launches in New York.

1995 – American Visionary Art Museum opens
in Baltimore.

1996 – Montreal’s famous homeless men’s choir Chorale de l’Accueil Bonneau begins creating Quebecois outsider music.

2001 – The Langley Schools Music Project, recordings of pop songs sung by B.C. schoolchildren in the 1970s, becomes an outsider music sensation.

2003 – School of Rock, a Jack Black vehicle inspired by The Langley Schools Music Project, opens.

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1 | 2 | 3 | JUN '04