can stuff like Boxcutter be considered "outsider art"

jahquarius

ByTown's Finest
the art is made from afar, with no connection the "insiders", with no validation from the "institutations" of the scene... appropriates some of the techniques from the scene and adds falvours from a different tradition (i.e. "IDM")

in this case, the "insiders" have little in the way of economic or political power (always an element in outsider art...), but they do have tremendous "street" power and absolute control over the art form...

if something like Springheel Jack has an outsider art take on jungle, does something like boxcutter have the same on dubstep.

i'm stoned.
 

Blackdown

nexKeysound
yeah i'd agree. kid kameleon and i talked about this quite a few times - he's the king of sourceing 'outsider art'.
 

tht

akstavrh
the conceit of outsider art is usually that an artist is outside of more than just a clique of likeminded artists and received protocols

to use your logic someone like charles ives or possibly even james joyce would be categorised alongside henry darger

i think the term is very awkward and largely useless beyond simple taxonomy anyway

why don't you create your own term instead of elasticating an existing one?
 

swears

preppy-kei
I think the term refers to being "outside" of conventional society, or any established system or market, (the art school system for example) rather than not belonging to a particular scene such as dubstep.
 
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jahquarius

ByTown's Finest
i guess what got me thinking about the irony of this, and boxcutter in particular, is how many reviews put him and burial together in the same column (both albums came out at around the same time) and many writers made hay out of the fact that bxc was an outsider to the scene.... and that somehow this made the music "less authentic" than burial (clearly an "insider")

i wondered how one thing gets branded as inauthentic when something like electronic music from the congo or jangly pop from malaysia gets to be called "outsider art".... is it because the tradition he's coming from (pasty white guys making electronic music in their bedrooms) isn't *quite* far enough from the sound he's incorporating?
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Agreed- outsider art is usually those outside the marketplace/social norms...

But Boxcutter places himself outside (in the clique sense) by dint of the fact that he is clearly steeped in the traditions of warp-style electronica, rather than Burial who even on a blind listen is deeply indebted to all the same roots as the rest of dubstep proper (ie- jungle, 2step, rave vocals) although his end product sound is arguably even further from a resemblance to mainstream Dubstep than boxcutter who cleaves more definitely to a halfstep form... the analogy being that boxcutter is to dubstep as Squarepusher was to jungle...?
 

mms

sometimes
In no way is it outsider art, it operates on a commercial record label, distributed and marketed thru the normal channels, using the tools people associate with dance music to make a very slight hybrid of an evolving genre of dance music, playing gigs in the same way that his contemporaries do.

Outsider art was first coined for art brut, and then broadly represents art mainly outside the boundaries of official culture, say, art made by the mentally ill etc, basically art not made by trained artists, art with one sole purpose, raw art, art that doesn't go thru mainstream art world channels, art connected to some cultural traditions.
 
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noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
I thought jahquarius was kind of kidding in a facetious way at first.

Can Chris Watson be considered "outsider art"? How about Constable?

Gerrit.
 

Tyro

The Kandy Tangerine Man
He's certainly not an outsider.What he does fits well within the boundaries of the music marketed as IDM.You might just as well just call him a 'Dubstep Bandwagon Jumper'.
 

mms

sometimes
He's certainly not an outsider.What he does fits well within the boundaries of the music marketed as IDM.You might just as well just call him a 'Dubstep Bandwagon Jumper'.

Thats a reductive argument, both for dubstep and idm or whatever its called, esp as his first records were on hotflush. It's quite a miserable world your arguement suggests imo, that music can't develop outside the percieved genre boundaries of the dubstep police.
 

Tyro

The Kandy Tangerine Man
Thats a reductive argument, both for dubstep and idm or whatever its called, esp as his first records were on hotflush. It's quite a miserable world your arguement suggests imo, that music can't develop outside the percieved genre boundaries of the dubstep police.

Of course music can develop outside of genre boundries.The point that I was making is that his music is being marketed within a genre of music that plays with and 'subverts' existing dance music styles.Call it ''warp-style electronica'' IDM or whatever,his music fits
perfectly within those marketable confines.To describe what he does as outsider art is plainly wrong.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
I'm no massive Boxcutter fan, but in spirit I absolutely agree with mms, especially as the Dubstep scene coagulates in the centre into more rigid conventions, it is on the edges that the interesting things occur...
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
i dont get what makes boxcutter any diff from the usual model of outside, watching from a distance 'auteur' types like squarepusher to drum n bass or milanese to grime/dubstep etc. are they all 'outsider art' as well?
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Nope. In music it requires somebody like Jandek, although nowadays he gigs like a normal musician, so I'm not even sure if he qualifies...
 
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