Art - Sue Steward on how work by outsiders turns the canon inside out

In 18th-century London, it cost a penny to enter Bedlam and gawp at the insane. Hogarth paid his penny, and in the Rake's Progress series he included a background detail of a chained inmate drawing on the wall of his cell. Given that the mentally and criminally insane were still synonymous then, it's a curious inclusion, and unlikely to be an acknowledgement of "art as a healing process" as we understand it today. At the dawn of the 21st century, artworks by patients in hospitals, clinics and art therapy workshops can be commodities in the art market, and paintings or sculptures by artists socially marginalised by circumstance or unpredictable mental states are increasingly evaluated by the same criteria applied in the mainstream. This autumn, several exhibitions in London offer the opportunity to sample the broad range of works corralled together as "outsider art", a term that originated in the psychoanalytically explosive first half of the 20th century, and which is clearly showing the effects of time.

In 1996, "Beyond Reason: art and psychosis, works from the Prinzhorn Collection" was a low-key, high-impact exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery, presented in the room above a Howard Hodgkin exhibition. It was a magical, mystifying, emotional experience, leading visitors through a haunting landscape of expressive art. After Hodgkin's familiar, pulsing colours and art gallery chatter, visitors found a silent, slow-moving room where time seemed suspended as they moved among muted and zinging paintings and drawings, some scribbled, others meticulously detailed. An institutional blouse was embroidered with an autobiographical text; untranslatable calligraphies described unimaginably awful lives. The works, drawn from more than 5,000 pieces collected by a German doctor, Hans Prinzhorn, from asylums all over Europe, have been housed at Prinzhorn's Heidelberg hospital since the pre-war years.

The Prinzhorn experience raised questions about the criteria for evaluating this kind of art, but left no doubt that "art" it was. Repeated viewing revealed fresh layers in this public excavation of someone's inner landscape. In retrospect, it was voyeuristic: the works had been painkilling exercises, cathartic expressions of an inner world in which the person was locked, and weren't intended for viewing, processing or debating. Their creators didn't think of themselves as artists. Today, the same people would be medicated, tranquillised, cured even, and sent home.

In the catalogue, the present curator of the Prinzhorn, Inge Jadi, described the works as "art brut", the term invented in the 1940s by the French surrealist Jean Dubuffet, whose life was transformed by the collection. His definition covered self-taught, obsessional creators unmotivated by the need for an audience, and certainly not interested in market forces. Dubuffet's prototypical "artist brut" was Adolf Wolfli, a German schizophrenic in a Bern asylum, whose 25,000-page books told his stories in intricate, text-and-collage pages, illustrated musical scores which he performed - exceptional work by any standards.

The Prinzhorn exhibition was preceeded by a milestone exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1979, "Outsiders: an art without precedent or tradition". Its curators, the London dealer and writer Victor Musgrave and a young academic called Roger Cardinal, followed Dubuffet's line and mixed self-taught, untrained, visionary and mediumistic artists with those who had diagnosable mental disorders. In his seminal book of the same title, Cardinal translated "art brut" as "outsider art" and launched a new category of 20th-century art, which has been wholeheartedly adopted in the United States. The exhibition included complex, colour-drenched crayon drawings by an Austrian schizophrenic called Johann Hauser, a resident of the Gugging House of Artists in a psychiatric hospital outside Vienna, as well as works by two self-taught, working-class British artists who drew in inks, Madge Gill (an east London housewife who was directed by a spirit guide) and Scottie Wilson (a scrap dealer turned artist who started drawing after he found a particularly attractive fountain pen in his daily haul).

Roger Cardinal is now back in a curatorial role for "Private Worlds: outsider and visionary art", an ambitious exhibition featuring works by 27 artists, which he has co-curated with the London dealer Henry Boxer and Colin Rhodes, the author of Outsider Art: spontaneous alternatives (Thames & Hudson, £7.95). The show includes the work of Hauser, Gill and Wilson, as well as Louis Wain, a successful London illustrator of cats who, in 1924, became a patient at Bethlem Royal Hospital and then obsessively produced a series of psychedelic "kaleidoscope cats", indicating his fragmenting psyche. Representing today's young artists is the visionary painter known as Von Stropp (just one of his 123 deed-poll names), whose entangled still lifes feature rabbits, birds and dense foliage, all exquisitely executed. They have been likened to Durer, and therefore discredited in some quarters. Rhodes cites Von Stropp as an example of those artists on show whose work is not distorted in "that expressionistic way" to fit comfortably as an "outsider". He also likens him to the American photographer Morton Bartlett, who made quality monochrome pictures of mannequins of children which he constructed, dressed and posed. Such conventionally skilled workmanship places them "outside the outsiders while aspects of their lives and ways of working keep them there".

The autumn exhibitions offer a range of styles and bio- graphies, broad enough to confuse anyone seeking a solid definition of outsider art. The seven-strong group calling themselves "outlaws" challenges the image of outsider artists as isolated, social misfits working obsessionally in bedsits among piles of hoarded images or operating under medical direction. Jane England's "Obsessive Visions: art outside the mainstream" at England & Co chips away at the notion that art by people with biographies or mental states different from the perceived norm deserves different treatment from mainstream art: she presents them in Cork Street grandeur in trendy Notting Hill, and will include life-sized, mosaic-clad, concrete sculptures made by the self-taught Indian folk artist Nek Chand.

The term "outsider" is clearly still useful, and not only for marketing purposes. Some artists enjoy the sense of belonging; others, such as the surrealistically inclined Albert Louden and Chris Hipkiss, resist it because of its "nutty" connotations and because it prevents them from earning what "mainstream" artists can make. Colin Rhodes believes that art should be viewed as art without worrying about biography, and suggests that artists such as Adolf Wolfli, Madge Gill and Scottie Wilson stand the test with many mainstream artists. "All that separates them are their biographies," says Rhodes. But that's enough to ensure that we don't see their work in retrospectives at the Tate or the Hayward.

"Private Worlds: outsider and visionary art" is at Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham (020 8892 0221), until 11 November. "Outlaws" is at Diorama Arts, 34 Osnaburgh Street, London NW1 (020 7916 5467), from 11-22 September. "Obsessive Visions: art outside the mainstream" is at England & Co, 216 Westbourne Grove, London W11 (020 7221 0417), from 4 October-8 November. See also Outsider Art (Artsworld TV Channel 199 on Sky Digital): "Inside the Outside" on 22 September at 7pm and "The Outside Edge" on 29 September at 7pm

Sue Steward is consultant editor at Raw Vision magazine

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