Select Page

Playing with Autism and Outsider Art

by | Vol 32 (3) 2014

Throughout the twentieth century, autism has been variously interpreted and as a result has become a flexible signifier. Over the last decade, both the academic world and popular culture have paid particular attention to the self-expression of people living on the spectrum. On the occasion of the most recent exhibition in the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, which put numerous autistic artists in the spotlight, Leni Van Goidsenhoven reflects on conceptual changes within autism discourse, the danger of the savant-rhetoric, cultural interventions and the category of “autistic art”. She moreover shows how Museum Guislain’s project experiments with autism and outsider art by incorporating playful elements.

Related articles

  • Arnulf Rainer and Outsider Art

    The Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer has been collecting outsider art for half a century already. In the Vienna of the 1950s he himself was regarded as a mad outsider. In 1994 Rainer worked with psychotic artists at the mental hospital in Gugging. His interest is not so much in the visual aspect of outsider art, but rather in the way madness moves the hand across the page.

  • On the Status of Outsider Art: Traces of a Critical Reflection

    From a background in art history, more specifically, from a background of research in contemporary art and the state of art during and after WWII, the author starts with the observation that a sharp delineation between the creative expression of psychiatric patients and art is difficult to determine in some cases. A description of the status of outsider art needs to take into account that, on the one hand, to collect the plastic expression of psychiatric patients, naive art, folk…

  • What is playing?

    Playing, for a musician, is not reducible to the production of notes but involves entering into resonance with the movement of music through different levels of integration of the gesture. Between sounds and silences a "space in movement" wells up, creator of a new subjectivity, always "to be born" like the music itself. This opening into a new spatiality is favourable to the creation of a milieu where people can "grow together" while all remaining singular. The orchestra constitutes, in…