Lo-Fi: From Temporary Popcorn Headquarters: Burbank Senior Citizen Project Across From The Cartoon Network

Family Portrait by R. Stevie Moore

Sincerity draws us into outsider art.  Art made by those untrained by and uninvolved with the industry lacks the heady cerebral environment that Art trudges through.  It exists unrestrained by culture and when put up against mainstream art, can make the latter appear repressed and elite.  Many fine artists choose to use this association, incorporating outsider aesthetics into their work to take on a tone that reads more sincere and correspondent with the common, the low-to-the-ground. This tone touches more these days, as it situates itself below the wireless, impalpable network that drives our culture.  

R. Stevie Moore’s DIY home recordings have been composed and produced almost entirely apart from the institution of pop music (in his basement), purposefully.  The result is an overwhelmingly numbered series of eclectic recordings best described as manic depressive - containing severe and sudden shifts in mood and littered with delusions of grandeur throughout.  Moore's emotion is unmediated as he is free to be expressive of his influences without consciousness of intention, meaning or progress.  This process of responding only to one’s irrational imagination and desire stands far apart from any institutionalized industry, which operates in a very calculated manner.  

Since the heyday of DADA, artists have been continually questioning the elitist and transcendental qualities of fine art.  Showcasing the irrational and the impulsive, as done on Moore's recordings, has always been a popular technique for conducting this questioning. The integration of these techniques into the mainstream expresses the sustainment of this desire to subvert fine art conventions, but also the legitimization and assimilation of the phenomenon.  But such is the cultural cycle - as once radical collage techniques manifest today as decoupage, indie finds indie-pop, Ariel Pink follows R. Stevie Moore's model and folk art becomes one of the most prevalent styles in contemporary Art, etc, etc..   

Aurora Robson, Cosmic Wheel, ink and junk-mail collage, 7" x 7", 2007

Today, works of art that introduce imagery, materials and techniques considered pedestrian - or even lowbrow - to the fine art context, serve as certain examples of the weaving of anti-elitism into the mainstream.  These works are more easily seen as ironically interactive with ideas of artistic absolutism and idealism, than truly subversive of these ideas.  (Post-modern trends and techniques, after all, become situated in a certain hierarchy themselves.) Works in this genre portray reality, the everyday experience, and address the inevitable failures of reaching an ideal or absolute, but simultaneously continue to exist as works of fine art - part of the industry. The self, or cultural, depreciatory tone found in this expression of failure is found in different ways throughout works by artists using outsider aesthetics.

In this vein, artists Aurora Robson and Christine Gray merge craft with fine art as a contradictory designation of status.  Robson's junk mail collages are fantastical abstractions that hover between transcendence from the crude source material and being inevitably tied down to it.  Artists such as Jeff Soto and Daniel Davidson create pictorial paintings weaving a traditional technique with street art influences. Beyond depicting scenes, these paintings portray the artists themselves as receptors of their environments who are seeking a divine beauty, but are again tied down to their common existence.  While the pictorial technique suggests this divine beauty, these scenes are instead of a beauty - just as sublime - but informed by the actual visual experience of living in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. 

Michael Scoggins, Hold the Whole World, graphite, Prismacolor on paper, 67" x 51"

Michael Scoggins makes reference to Naive Art and Art Brut by creating large scale trompe l’oeil replications of scrawled sheets of notebook paper to voice obscured political and psychological opinions.  Many of the scrawls make self depreciatory statements, jab at the political state of America, and mock our values.  These pieces reveal ostensibly personal views, in a manner that's bold and direct, but distorted by humor and irony that is just as bold.  These works as well strive for grandeur in their larger than life size and in this boldness, but are restrained by angst.     

As the Information Age pushes pluralism to its limits, giving more people and more ideas validity than ever before, the interplay between what's been established to be art and what is outside of art becomes fertile ground.  Post-modern themes of failure, angst and fragmentation within the art-world continue to be further complicated by the changes in the nature of communication.  Today, direct inspiration and sincerity carry weight, as they stand far apart from the intangible experience of communicating within and comprehending our culture.     

Listen to "Don't Let Me Go to the Dogs" by R. Stevie Moore