Let's Blow Up The Moon

with this (as with a lot of so-called Outsider Art) we expect that the power of the art comes from being an unfiltered and childlike expression of how someone sees the world every day. because they're just Painting What They See uncorrupted by theory or the whims of the art world.

which robs the artist totally of agency, of personhood, and of the ability to make critical decisions. and also just is not true.

like Vincent van Gogh wasn't trained as an artist from his youth, that's true. Um. He was a professional art dealer, though. He was in social circles with a bunch of the artistic luminaries of his time. He went to France's most prestigious art school for a year. He had Opinions about academic art. He was not insulated from the theory and history of art, he was actively engaged with it. He references the Old Masters in his work, he experiments with new avant-garde styles like Impressionism, Fauvism and Cloissonism, he has a strong and clear understanding of formal composition, and more to the point he's got a clear idea of what he wants to achieve, which is why in his painting he's often hacking away at the same idea or subject 20 times until he's got it where he wants it.

I don't think it's coincidental that it's van Gogh who always gets the brunt of the "naive expression" framing. He was, after all, Mad, and that's how we're taught to think of Mad people - as childlike/animalistic and without complex reason.

But it's just fucking bullshit. Yes van Gogh was Mad, and his Madness shaped his artwork, if only because he only seriously started painting because his brother suggested it after he lost a bunch of jobs and got institutionalised.

But his artwork isn't journaling and it's not a naive outpouring of his feelings.

He was an artist making considered (and educated) technical and imaginative decisions on how to express something. He learnt from others and he was consciously exploring ideas in his art.

And with van Gogh specifically we know all this. We know what his motivations were, and what he was learning, and what he was interested in exploring technically, and what he wanted to pull out of his subjects. We know this because, famously, after his brother got him into painting Vincent wrote to him constantly about how his artistic journey was going, about his latest pieces, about what he was interested in exploring, etc. We have an enormous body of written evidence that van Gogh's work is no more naive or less considered or technical than his contemporaries, and that he thought about it as a technical and theoretical artistic exploration.

but he was Mad and he killed himself so we don't have to take any of the things he said seriously. so that's ok.