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Project "Marginal Art in Serbia"
Released from academic rules and canons,
artists of marginal art create "a new art world", called:
Outsider
Art,
Art Brut,
Art hors-les-normes,
Arte irregolare or
Außenseiterkunst, and also -
Marginal art. Under the influences
of external, social environment and their own, inner world, artists
of marginal art create artworks of layered artistic and
psychological messages.
The main goal of the project was to recognize, understand, interpret
and promote the marginal art in Serbia. The project included
digitization of marginal artworks from collection of MNMU, semantic
annotating of images and publishing on the Web site of MNMU. The
project was implemented by a multidisciplinary team, consisting of
art historians, psychologists and IT specialists. The tasks of art
historians and psychologists were to recognize artistic and
psychological messages of artists and to determine appropriate,
descriptive terms. The role of IT specialists, based on recognized
terms, were to semantically annotate images of artworks, linking
them to the available
Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) in the field of art.
Linking to Link Open Vocabularies made it possible to include images
of marginal artworks from the collection of MNMA into
Web of Data.
Descriptive meta tags were built into the headers of images, making
them portable with images themselves. Semantic annotated pictures
were published on the
website of MNMA. |
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The most significant artistic tendencies in European art in the last
decades of the nineteenth century were to mark the birth of European
Modernism. Its profile was outlined by dynamic reversals in the
field of aesthetics at the beginning of the twentieth century,
primarily in France and Germany, or more precisely in the artistic
surroundings of Paris, Munich and Berlin. The constructors of
Modernism rejected academic and the realistically seen. The
objectively visible world has become bygone time.
The pressure of artistic canons within ruling artistic
establishment became claustrophobic. The life became too complex and
the experience of miscellaneous knowledge marked the ending to old
forms of expression. However, there has always been a discrepancy
between the recognition of new forms of artistic speech and new
aesthetic values. Certain time is always needed to gain confidence
in the quality of work, and to institutionally consolidate some
elements of the breakthrough into the new, and publically
undisturbed life. New art has become the result of new intellectual
constitution. The original dimension in which the artist can express
own freedom is the degree of applied abstraction to express the
thematic essence of his interior. The art of outsiders was born out
of an impulse, nonharmonized with the established artistic forms,
regardless to the current courses. The creators of outsider art
often live on the margins of society and do art for their own needs,
using their spontaneous, authentic creative energy and
non-conventional originality, liberated from all burdens of artistic
tradition, canons, education and artistic dictations of the
Mainstream. It could be said that exciting creative inventiveness of
outsiders was presented with evasion of new pictorial energy,
seriously dangerous for the Mainstream art. In the atmosphere of the
maximum freedom it is not easy to establish appropriate criteria for
evaluation of the degree of the aesthetic. Everything is left to the
sensitiveness of individuals to react and their form of creative
antagonism towards the surrounding world. This individual
nonconformism is especially visible in Surrealism and Dadaism, which
criticized intellectual inactivity of middle class taste. Artistic
outsiders primarily create out of own necessity, not interested in
any criteria imposed by the society to both artists and art.
Obsessively and persistently they keep to the laws of their inner
instincts and phantasy. The appearance of marginal art (English
synonymous for art brut), Art hors-les-normes, Arte Irregolare and
Außenseiterkunst, the art of outsiders, people from the shadow
disturbed many spirits, but doubtlessly created new world of
perception and initiated new ideas. It did not evolve from the
previous art, hence it looked radically new. Pervaded with the
spirit of L'Art brut, Jean Dubuffet created an irrational, primitive
world by leaving Academy in 1948 and working contrary to the
established artistic world for the rest of his life. The book of
Hans Prinzhorn "Bilderei der Geisteskranken" inspired him to
discover raw, expressive power which seemed precious to him. He
studied art of marginal artists: asocial, rejected, mentally ill and
the art of children's drawings in order to closely approach the
instinctive intuitivism.
Always pervaded with some expressive impulse, the outsiders
materialize their vision in an uncontrolled way, which opposes to
conventional contextualization of the history of art. This artistic
independence is specially described by Roger Cardinal the Catalogue
of the exhibition Outsiders: Art without Forerunners or Tradition,
1972, which was organised by Victor Musgrave at prestigious Hayward
Gallery in London in 1979, where the outsider artists were presented
as specific heralds with messages from the parallel world.
Persistently sharpening his analytical and critical mind, the
creator of the term outsider art, Roger Cardinal, has published
several books with this title since 1972; hence this term is adopted
as adequate. Both Cardinal's book (1972) and London exhibition
strongly encouraged the acceptance of art brut and outsider art as
separate artistic categories, especially in official artistic world.
Two years after Dubuffet's exhibition was relocated in Lausanne in
1978, a significant exhibition was organised at Musѐe d'Art Moderne
in Paris entitled Les Singuliers de l'Art. As the art on the margins
of Mainstream, outsider art gradually abandoned the margins. The
wave of foundations of museums and galleries worldwide where the
works of outsider artists are collected, preserved and exhibited has
certainly become our reality. Today, it is difficult for outsider
artists to stay in their isolation. Non-institutionally present for
decades, the art of outsiders was primary energy of pure genetic
expressiveness. For many years it was on the margins of general
cultural audience. It was considered utopian, trivial, worthless,
ill and morbid only because it was unconventional in every way. Like
many outsider artists worldwide who patiently have built their
imaginary towers isolated by secret rooms of their worlds, outsider,
marginal and art brut artists in Serbia have been doing art for
decades. Since the nineteen thirties they have donated us the
infinite volumes of their individualities. Their works seem to be
personal confessions, like a manifesto of suppressed worlds.
In the artistic reality of Serbia, these artists have gradually
become the symbols of entirely new standards in art. The immersion
in the instinctive intuitive origins of their pictorial formulae
provides the direct cognition of art without censorship. With their
personal visions they overcome disappointment and failures of
ordinary life, transforming the lack of social life into artistic
brilliance. The aesthetics and poetics of pictorial language of the
most significant artists of raw vision, marginal and outsider
painters of Serbia (Vojislav Jakić, Sava Sekulić, Ilija Bosilj
Bašičević, Emerik Feješ, Barbarian, Milosav Jovanović, Milanaka
Dinić... and sculptors Bogosav Živković, Dragutin Aleksić, Dragiša
Stanisavljević, Ferenc Kalmar and Milan Stanisavljević) confirm the
values of these world classics.
Author: Nina Krstić |
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