The 50 remaining drawings that "outsider artist" Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) left for the world are amazing. Illustrated schizophrenia seems pretty crazy, and the intrigue here lies with looking at work that is, more or less, removed from not only the art world, but the regular everyday people world. For most of his life, Wölfli lived in a Swiss psychiatric institution. Now, in a fortunate turn of events, he has his own Institution, The Adolf Wolfli Foundation, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland.
A whole lot of art today strives to do this, I believe. I'm mostly speaking of drawing here, characterized by semi-autistic painstaking repetition. Forced naiveté is very appealing in current work, and by forced, I mean those with MFAs channeling their inner child. Which is really nice, but when its bad, it can be disingenuous and twee. Check out, for instance, a great art blog Fecal Face I look at a lot and you'll get the gist of the spectrum. Or, check out this piece by Aurel Schmidt, whose work I like and instantly reminded me a bit of Wolfli:
*Ergo, all you young things, start making stuff like you're batt-shit crazy.
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