Inside-Out: Autonomy, Formalism and the Legal Architectures of Outsider Art

This piece pinpoints material and immaterial legislative junctures in the development of outsider art's entanglement with psychiatric institutionalisation. Using a speculative and historical materialist framework that traces the origins of the asylum with the history of industrial labour forces, the piece engages with accounts of immateriality and aesthetic formalism to understand the genealogy of forms intertwined with those of law and capital, exemplified through the outsider art movement. Close attention is paid to the role of autonomy within the artists' work, the law governing mental health nationally and internationally, and the extent legal architectures play in creating the works, both physical and non-physical. The nomenclature of consent and capacity, found within physical and non-physical legal architectures regulating psychiatric incarceration in the UK and international mental health and disability law, are argued as generative in separating outsider artists from the 'insider' art world, mediating and producing the aesthetics as a result.