"Marwencol': The Outsider as artist

Marwencol is a little town in Belgium, a backwater removed from the worst of World War II though not exempt from the conflict.

Well, actually, Marwencol is the creation of a man named Mark Hogancamp, who continues to struggle with physical and cognitive damage in the aftermath of a vicious beating by five young men in April 2000. After 40 days in the hospital, with no health insurance and without further formal therapy or support, Hogancamp began building Marwencol as therapy, both to improve his hand-eye coordination and to deal with his feelings of rage and helplessness.

He has built a one-sixth-scale village and populated it with doll-sized characters, many based on people in his life. At the same time, he has built an emotionally complex continuing story about those characters, which he tells by creating and photographing tableaux.

Marwencol is a documentary about Hogancamp and his creation. It is also tells how he was befriended by a photographer neighbor, which led to an article in an art magazine and then a Manhattan gallery show.

Welcome to New York

The film presents Hogancamp and his creations with great respect, but at the same time serves as another vehicle pushing him into a wider world that he's not sure he wants to join. He hopes to find kindred spirits in New York, but is simultaneously reluctant to leave the haven that he has created for himself — a haven, it should be noted, that's no idyllic retreat, given the themes of pain and violence that he enacts there.

As Hogancamp remarks on the morning of the gallery opening, "It's like this is the one last thing that I don't want taken from me, and it seems like it is, but theoretically not, it's still mine."

Does Hogancamp risk losing Marwencol when he allows it to be put on display? Does the world's "right" to see his creation trump his own right to continue with his self-rehabilitation unmolested? And, more fundamentally, is what he does art?

Art without irony

Hogancamp himself doesn't think so. "When I frame things, when I film things, I do it for me," he says, "and that's when people see that image, they go, 'Oh man, that's art, oh I love how you do that, that scenery, the backgrounds and everything.' Well, it's still my therapy, no matter how much art it seems to be."

The editors and gallery visitors who see his photographs, of course, see these well-composed and powerful images as art. Tod Lippy, the editor of Esopus magazine, who was the first to publish some of those images, talks about them in the context of an artistic subgenre: doll photography, which is often done with a fair amount of emotional distance.

"The thing that struck me immediately about Mark's work is that there's no irony in it as far as I can tell," Lippy says in the film. "I mean, he's a very clever guy, very smart, but he's in the work, he's not using the work as a tool to do something else. Which is a wonderful thing; you don't see it that often."

Modern art's birth pangs

That immediacy and lack of irony are typical of what's known in the art biz as Outsider art, which itself has its roots in the turmoil that gave birth to Modern art.

Late 19th-Century advances in transportation and communication technology made non-Western art increasingly available to artists. The impact of Japanese prints on the Impressionists, for instance, is well documented. Similarly, the Post-Impressionists (most importantly Gauguin, but also Rousseau and others) turned to European peasant cultures as well as non-Western cultures for both stylistic inspiration and subject matter.

In the next logical step— resulting in part from the impact of Gauguin's work —artists and collectors alike began looking at the artifacts themselves as art, rather than as the inspirations for art. These artifacts fell into three types: primitive art, such as the African masks Picasso was looking at while gestating Cubism; folk art, such as the objects Albert Barnes scattered among the paintings in his collection; and the so-called "primitive" art of young children and the insane.

A loaded term

This last set of artifacts came to be categorized as what the French artist Jean Dubuffet called Art Brut ("raw art" or "rough art") and the art historian Roger Cardinal dubbed Outsider art— works by those not trained in the techniques and conventions of the fine arts. But as the critic Lyle Rexer points out, " "'Outsider art' is a loaded term, one that mixes aesthetic judgments with social, economic, psychological and even political designations."

Because Hogancamp lacks formal training, most art world insiders would categorize him as an Outsider artist. They sincerely respect, admire and support him, to be sure. But in light of Hogancamp's continuing cognitive and emotional issues, I have to wonder what it means for him to agree to their promotion of him as an artist.

As Hogancamp himself explains in the film, "I prefer to live in my world. I want to live here, in Marwencol." Shouldn't he be allowed to?♦


To read another discussion of Outsider art— Judy Weightman's review of Seraphine— click here.