On “Roger Cardinal: Castles are Elsewhere”
SL and I recently picked up “(Untitled 4)” by Ted Gordon from the collection of Roger Cardinal from the Jennifer Lauren Gallery. Roger Cardinal is well-known as the person who coined the term “Outsider Art.”
As part of the purchase, Jennifer was kind enough to include a copy of the book, “Roger Cardinal: Castles are Elsewhere”, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name. Here’s how they described the show:
Castles are Elsewhere is an exhibition that commemorates the life of Roger Cardinal (1940-2019), whose fascination with the extraordinary led him on a wondrous odyssey upon which he encountered creativity in the most unexpected places. Roger is probably best known for his seminal book titled Outsider Art, published in 1972 - the first of its kind in the UK which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. It was followed a few years later in 1979, with the ground-breaking “Outsiders” exhibition at The Hayward Gallery.
Through the treasures in his private art collection, his books, his letters with people within the field like Jean Dubuffet, and a selection of his fascinating diaries that he wrote daily, this exhibition will give an insight into Roger's life, and we hope a fitting memoriam to a man who encouraged us all to look at art and life differently, to see that 'castles are elsewhere.'
The book is a warm tribute and gives great insight into who Roger Cardinal was and how he thought about the practice of art. In various essays and reprinted interviews, he covers a dizzying list of art typologies: Outsider Aesthetic, Outsider Architecture, Autistic Art, Prison Art, Memory Painting, Folk Art, Self-Taught art, Contemporary Folk Art, Naive Art, North American Outsider Art, Black Folk Art, Marginal Arts, Graffiti, Doodles, Industrial Objects, Posters, Kitsch, Primitivism, and so on.
At one point in an interview by Laurent Danchin, first published in French in Civilisations Imaginaires, Halle Saint Pierre, he holds forth on the definition of Outsider Art and all of its variations.
Notwithstanding his 50 years in academia, he speaks in common easy to understand words, explaining that when you use words like “brut” and “outsider”— words that have a history— you are naturally going to have issues around previous use and previous understandings. “Anyone who is not mischievous can understand” that “we shouldn’t have to rehearse the entire debate around its original coinage.” Naming things is hard.
I was struck by the centrality of Chicago in his work and especially around Phyllis Kind, who comes up again and again in his journals and writing.
Agnès Cardinal, Roger’s wife, wrote a touching essay about his life practices, including the dutiful creation of a “logbook” where he recorded events of the day as well as his “current thoughts, dreams, encounters, and experiences.” “We grew old,” she says. It's all we can ever hope for.