Art + Australia. Issue 6 (56.1): Outside

ISSN: 0004-301 X
144 pages | Softcover | B&W and colour images 
December 2019

Editor: Edward Colless
Authors: Edward Colless, Darren Jorgensen, Robyn Adler, Vincent Le, Leon Marvell, Jack Sargeant, Eva Collins, Jessica Laraine Williams, Wes Hill, Anthony White, Grace McQuilten, Anna Parlane, Charles Green, Gareth Jenkins, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Louis Mason, Azza Zein, Prudence Gibson, Vladimir Minusk. 

Within the milieu of contemporary art 'the outsider’ is a literal misnomer, a tag deserving of the sort of revision and decolonising that has been so thoroughly performed on ‘the primitive’. ++++++ It’s not hard to script such a sales pitch for this takeover of the outsider’s relatively uncultivated extraterritoriality. ++++++ Do we not already have a perfectly good term to account for the rich diversity of this kind of art without resorting to the offensive, derogatory, repressive or exclusionist anthropological and normative psychiatric indictment of so-called ‘outsider’ status? ++++++ Could that ideologically neutral but inclusive label, ready to be stamped on the outsider’s papers, simply be ‘contemporary art’? ++++++ Under judiciously cosmopolitan critical and responsible curatorial policies, the outsider would be a strategic and attractive émigré from the outlands or the border zones of culture, accommodated and assimilated into the contemporary art portfolio as productive stock, and a worthy citizen of the contemporary world. ++++++ Within this perspective there indeed will be no restricted ‘outsider’ status, no one unwelcome, alien, estranged, exiled or reclusive.