Colorful Apocalypse
Birds of a Feather…A Room of his Own and Tortured Saviours
Outsider artists fascinate because of their work's and their otherness. Outsider artist's eccentricity and eclecticism and the seeming originality of their work place them outside of the traditional art historical narrative. It is this otherness which has fascinated and intrigued art historians, critics, and collectors since Morgenthaler, Prinzhorn, and Dubuffet first brought attention to the works of outsider artists. Because outsiders' works are hard to categorize within a traditional art historical contexts, critics and viewers have had a tendency to strip the art from the artist. The works are viewed primarily as found art objects – and often they actually
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This is unlike Dubuffet and most art critics and historians who tend to acknowledge that mental illness is a contributing factors to the artists originality, but deal with the negative aspects of mental illness obliquely. Some of them go to the extreme of equating insanity to freedom and its savagery to nobility. Having too much first hand experience with mental illness to entertain such luxurious notions, Buttoms forces the reader to confront the reality of what it is like to live with someone who gets instructions and unsavory facts from God by relating tales from Thompson and how his bourgeois family rejects him and his art continuously throughout the day. It is here that Buttoms reminds us that we dislike or at the very least are uncomfortable around otherness. That we distance and insulate ourselves from others much as Thompson's family has restricted Thompson's paintings to the attic and censor the mail for unsavory images and idea. In do this, he shows us our own ugliness through the faces and actions of Thompson's family whose prejudice is painful to read, but that most of us are guilty of in our own lives with people who are much more normal than Thompson in their perversions. We are reminded that outsider art hanging in galleries and museums and in textbooks is perceived differently than outsider art in our neighbor's garden or our mother's sitting