The Protean Viewpoint in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Point of view is a primary category of narrative, given that other elements such as characterization, description, language, worldview, structure, and genre, if they are to be convincing, need to be consistent with the adopted vantage point. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, where there is little direct dialogue, a polyvalent and multilayered diegesis, where an uncertain narrator recounts what different characters see, feel, and say, becomes a signature technique. According to Boris Uspensky, the “ideological point of view,” defined as the way of looking at the world conceptually, is not explicitly expressed, but found rather at the phraseological level of the narrative—marking a return to rhetorical criticism. “Many years later, before the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” From the outset, the viewpoint is marked by extreme shifts in person, character, time, tenses, and space, mapping its polyphony. This polyvalent narrator shifts from character to character, while the phraseology evokes different genres of the marvelous (myth, legend, folk tales, children’s stories, fairy tales, chronicles, travelogues, and ethnographic accounts). This overlay supports the verisimilitude of magical realist narrative. Ultimately the authorial mask is revealed to be Melquiades, himself a protean figure, a gypsy, merchant, explorer, ethnographer, inspired in Don Quixote’s Cide Hamete Benengeli. The narrator’s worldview coincides with the characters, such that no one shows surprise before the supernatural. The ideology appears naive, provincial, rural, primitive, and akin to outsider art, while maintaining a sophisticated technique.

Alfred H. Barr, MoMA, and the Entrance and Exit of Outsider Art (1936–1943)

Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936), curated by Alfred H. Barr at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, was the first major exhibition of outsider art at the epicentre of the art world. The entrance of outsider art in the art museum coincided with the changing role of the curator: from a custodian of fine arts to an exhibition author with creative agency. The disconnection of outsider art from canonized art history and the peculiar appearance of the works and their makers inspired new curatorial narrations and settings. Barr’s inclusive vision of modern art and curation was, however, strongly criticized, and a few years later that vision was replaced by a hierarchical one demanding the exclusion of outsider art from the art museum. The developments at MoMA between 1936 and 1943 exemplify how outsider art served as a catalyst for the curatorial turn in which the division between the roles of curator and artist began to shift.

Religious and spiritual motifs in the art of the patients of Nikkilä Hospital

This article focuses on religiousness and spirituality in the art works of psychiatric patients of Nikkilä Hospital, Finland. The pictures analysed here belong to a collection held at the Helsinki City Museum and they were made during the twentieth century. The theoretical frame of the study is a cultural study of mental health. The collection is approached as presenting a specific kind of imagery which has connections not only to the personal history and diagnoses of the patients; their cultural context and hospital environment is also taken into account. The religiousness and spirituality of the Nikkilä collection are also compared with outsider art and examples of art history internationally.

PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT AS AN ARTIST: FORMING THE DISCOURSE OF OUTSIDER ART IN THE EARLY XXTH CENTURY

The author of the article studies the discourse of outsider art and refers to the beginning of its formation: the phenomenon of the art of the mentally ill, which is delineated and legitimized at the early twentieth century. Following the conceptual apparatus of Michel Foucault, the surfaces of emergence and the authorities of delimitation of the art of outsiders (in the early stage of the art of the mentally ill) are initially marginal in relation to the field of art. Instead of traditional instances of art –critics, museums, art critics – in the case of the art of outsiders, the discourse of outsider art was formed by psychiatrists, philosophers, and leftist artists. The transformation of the traditional way of legitimizing the phenomena of art was largely due to the change in the philosophy of culture and, on the one hand, the emergence of the idea of Dionysian values, irrational in culture, on the other, with the emergence of the concepts of the unconscious and the designation of its meaning in the context of personality and culture. The latter has made the field of psychiatry valuable, and psychiatrists new levels of differentiation in culture and art. But it is important to note the cardinal changes that took place in psychiatry in the period of the turn of the XIX–XX century. Including as a result of the activities of the German and Swiss schools, psychiatry becomes complex, multi-component scientific knowledge, was striving to study various aspects of the human psyche. On the other hand, in Germany and Switzerland interest in the art of the mentally ill was formed largely as a result of the active influence of expressionist painting, literature and aesthetics and other avant-garde tendencies; all this sets the stage for significant success in understanding and evaluating the art of psychiatric patients. It is also important that the actual process of legitimizing the art of the mentally ill in the texts of Walter Morgenhalter and Hans Prinzhorn had gone through the using by psychiatrists of the description’s language and analysis’s logic of the indicated phenomena inherent in the contemporary critical art theory.

The Aura of Eccentricity: Reflections on Outsider Art Rhetoric and its Impact on a Critical Discourse

In the field of Art History, affecting art with the artist’s aura is a central mechanism of canon creation that mythologizes artists into objects of desire. This tendency permeates outsider art whose appeal is rooted in biographical exceptionalism and eccentricity rather than aesthetic aptitude (see Morgan 2018). Reviewing the work of Henry Darger, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and A.G. Rizzoli—artists whose works are accumulative, some suggest compulsive, in reiteration and magnitude—this essay explores the pitfalls of projecting an aesthetic affect onto the artist and in turn building their value upon a fabricated aura of eccentricity. The aura of eccentricity resides at the nexus between material and idea. It is both real and mythologized, materially communicated through excess, opulence, and exaggeration of shapes, scale, colour, and medium yet ideologically created in the realm of differentiating adjectives and semantic flourishes. Engaging with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, this essay argues that material culture demands self-awareness of our own interpretive prejudices, in this case fashioning the artist outsider with eccentric narratives retroactively projected upon them through the interpretation of their work.