Outsiders welcomed inside

TALK about a cabinet of curiosities. “Create and Be Recognized: Photography on the Edge” gathers the work of 16 individuals working outside the commercial sphere of the art world.

Many gravitated to the margins of society by will or by virtue of mental illness or other compromising circumstance. Some were institutionalized or itinerant. A few worked ordinary day jobs. All of them created bodies of work out of intense compulsion, rather than a careerist desire for external recognition. Recognition has come their way anyway, whether because their creations are insistently fascinating (and some surely are) or because the art world hungers for the new and bizarre.

The exhibition at UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography abounds in oddities: execution-themed photo-collages from a 19th century album; pseudo-scientific examinations of rock faces as evidence of extraterrestrial life; studio-style portraits of handcrafted mannequins, lovingly dressed and posed.

Any of these could pass for the conceptual project of a savvy CalArts graduate and still be interesting, but authenticity is part of the draw. It’s refreshing. It gives the show’s uneven selections a consistent thread of primal legitimacy.

Guest curators Deborah Klochko and John Turner (both independent art historians) have cast their net wide. Most of the work comes from the U.S., but there are also contributions from Austria, France and Russia. The art spans more than 100 years and includes photographs, as well as painting, sculpture, and collage incorporating made or found photographs.

Anonymous images of staged executions are among the strangest and most mesmerizing. Collaged albumen prints, they come from a French album dating from the 1860s or ‘70s. Seams and repeating characters make it obvious that the images are staged tableaux, but the spaces read as continuous, infused with an unsettling air of sobriety and formality.

In one image, a frowning woman in matronly black sits next to an elegant, velvet-cushioned chair, empty but for a large ax resting against it. In another scene, the same woman kneels before a draped platform as if prepared for her own beheading. On one side of her stands a man in everyday clothes, gripping that crescent-bladed ax. On the other side, thanks to the power of collage, stands the same man, in nothing but droopy white underpants. And next to him stands the woman again, now witness to the execution.

These are the darkest fantasies in the show, but there are plenty of others, from frivolous to creepy. Morton Bartlett’s photographs of posed plaster mannequins (mostly young girls) seem innocent enough, the figures tenderly outfitted with facial expression and sprightly clothes, the scenes lighted and shot with skill. But a prurient undercurrent trickles in. The unmarried, orphaned Bartlett (1909-92) called the figures, some taking up to a year to construct, his “sweethearts.” They were his surrogate family and his fixation.

Art historians love the frisson of discovery when an artist outside the mainstream is found to be unself-consciously pursuing something akin to canonized work from within. Bartlett’s work is a great catch in this regard. It brings to mind contemporary artist David Levinthal’s provocative staged photographs of toys but even more so the pictures of sexually elaborate dolls created and photographed by the surrealist Hans Bellmer.

Lee Godie (1908-94) is another example of this phenomenon. Her self-portraits in various guises nestle into a continuum of work in the same vein by such better-known photographers as Cindy Sherman, Judith Golden and Yasumasa Morimura. Godie, like the others, exercises the identity muscle, stretching it and contorting it to see what possibilities arise. Her small black-and-white prints, some hand-colored, are raw and intriguing. In one, she poses as an artist, eyes raised upward to her muse. One hand, lifted to her chest, holds the tools of her trade -- in this case, a tacky plastic watercolor set.

Alexandre Lobanov (1924-2002) presents another case of fluid self-identity. Institutionalized, and without the powers of hearing or speech since childhood, Lobanov aggrandized himself in his photographs, surrounding himself with emblems of military and political power. He drew props busy with images of guns, stars, scenes of warfare and hunting, and emblems of Stalin and Lenin. He inserted himself within the constructed frames and had a studio photographer nearby make the pictures. The contrast between Lobanov’s earnest attempts to look tough and heroic, and his fabricated, almost cartoon-like setting, is poignant.

Many outsider artists occupy alternative worlds of their invention, and their art often articulates these realms in great detail. Richard Sharp Shaver (1907-75) wrote science fiction stories that he illustrated to make the fictional schema more credible. Judging by his work in the show, he managed to convince himself, and not just his readers, that extraterrestrials lived underground and recorded their civilization in “rock books.” Shaver hand-tinted photographs of rock faces to highlight imagery he detected in the patterns. “Notice the fantastic hat on the beauty whose large dark eye has been sadly abused by the saw,” reads one typewritten caption, sounding much like automatic poetry.

Religious conviction drove at least one artist in this group, Howard Finster, a familiar name in the outsider pantheon. Finster (1916-2001) was a Free Will Baptist preacher and prolific artist who created a paradisiacal environment of several acres in Georgia and, among thousands of other creations, also made books of photocopied pictures annotated by autobiographical snippets. One untitled piece is particularly charming. Cutout portraits of two dozen men, women and children scatter across the page. Finster filled in the blank spaces between them with hatch marks so the faces look suspended in an ebulliently doodled web. Atop the sheet he wrote: “Howards family got all mixed up doing fine/We are all alive to day 3:56: Past Midnight Jan-10-1988.” With art like this, born of visions and delusions, passions and pathologies, it’s a shame that even a small amount of biographical information isn’t provided. Idiosyncratic lives are what the artists have in common more than anything formal, chronological or geographical, but viewers will have to turn to the catalog to learn more. The 2004 book adds to the growing body of scholarship focusing on marginalized areas in photographic history -- snapshots, for instance, and anonymous vernacular pictures.

“Create and Be Recognized” reaches into fresh, wild territory. Not all that it grabs is worth holding onto, but in an art scene in which conventions have lost their authority, making subversion less and less convincing, such genuine deviation is exhilarating.

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‘Create and Be Recognized’

Where: UC Riverside, California Museum of Photography, 3824 Main St., Riverside

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; closed Sundays, Mondays

Ends: April 15

Price: $1

Contact: (951) 784-FOTO; www.cmp.ucr.edu