Year in Review ’92 : Emergence of Outsider Art Throughout L.A. : Art: The most pointed visual metaphors of urban unrest during the year came not from professional artists but from graffiti writers.

The Los Angeles riots stained the fabric of the year with blood and fire. It’s impossible to judge anything that happened here in 1992 without thinking of the fear and the flames, the beating and the death. The violence wouldn’t stay inside the television, it came to the front door.

The riots were the kind of nightmare reality that make the arts seem irrelevant. In the larger sense they make art all the more pertinent. The myth of Los Angeles itself is a kind of artwork fashioned by the collective unconscious. How can we go on calling this place Lotusland and Tinseltown or imagining it as a painting by David Hockney after what happened?

Curiously, but almost predictably, L.A. art had cast premonitory signs of augury before the carnival of chaos exploded. Joe Goode saw tornadoes coming. Peter Alexander dreamed of haunted night-town streets. Even the normally cool Ed Ruscha allowed the most forbidden of all L.A. subjects to enter his art--tragedy.

Months before the conflagration, the Museum of Contemporary Art presented the exhibition “Helter Skelter.” It showed a group of mainly younger locals and purported to expose L.A.’s dark underbelly. In the light of real flame, the show seemed even more epicene and callow than it had in person--but it was on to something.

The artists who really expressed the urban pulse mounting to hysteria were not professionals. They were the ethnically ecumenical graffiti writers, kids who take to the dawn streets to paint apocalyptic baroque cartoons on surfaces ranging from warehouse walls to boxcars--offering subjects bracketing hopes for ecological purity with warnings against drug abuse.

The best of their works are galvanic creations of spontaneous contemporary art. Their draftsmanship links the history of drawing from the Renaissance to Disney. Their composition is ruled by huge, nearly unreadable words rendered in rubbery arabesque letters creating surface tensions worthy of the Abstract Expressionists. They do everything that contemporary conceptual art does and they do it better. They make site-specific installations with social conscience to spare. They address real people outside the protected confines of galleries and museums.

It is of central significance that the most pungent and pointed visual metaphor of this critical moment in the life of the city came not from professional artists but from a group, like the rioters themselves, not in the system--outsiders.

But, make no mistake, every artist in this culture regards themselves as a species of outsider. Modernism was initially a response to a culturally bankrupt 19th-Century civilization. Artists acted as if they were saying: “Anything is better than belonging to this venal, corrupt society. I’d rather be crook, outcast or crazy than choke on the rules of this game.”

Proof lies in the most important original exhibition devoted to a theme of modern art seen here this year--”Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art” at the County Museum of Art (through Jan. 3). Organized by curators Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, it is a responsible, scholarly demonstration of the direct influence of outsiders on noted modern artists as seemingly dissimilar as Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet and George Herms.

Many of the show’s outsiders were urban hermits, lost in obsession, or bedeviled souls confined to institutions for the mentally disturbed where they compulsively made art to fulfill fantasies and exorcise demons. In the year of the the riots, the outsiders went berserk and the tattered homeless shuffled everywhere like the cockroaches of conscience. The appearance of “Parallel Visions” in such an ambience seems self-justifying and spookily prescient. But there was more.

An exhibition called “Thrift Store Paintings” appeared in Orange County at the South Coast Plaza annex of the Laguna Art Museum. Collected by artist Jim Shaw, it was made up of pictures found in second-hand stores. It looked like art made by people with native talent, promise and imagination who were either overlooked by the system or said, “To hell with it.” Thrift-store art has all the resonance one attaches to anonymous people who live in dowdy one-room apartments in great cities.

UCLA presented “The View From Inside,” a compendium of art made by Japanese-Americans unjustly imprisoned in detention camps during World War II. The bookstore at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions presented a show of envelope art by prisoners. Outsiders all.

This spate of exhibitions at a time of economic uncertainty and urban anarchy signals a sense of things gone badly awry in the culture and its art. There is something missing from both that can be found in the awkward sincerity and total engagement of outsider art.

Authenticity.

Today’s corporate society snookers its minions into playing roles that don’t usually conform to a complete human model. People can be very successful and still feel alienated and bogus. Many a yuppie has experienced flashes of envy for street people. They are outcast but they have freedom and don’t have to answer to anyone. That, of course, is a fantasy that can be traced back to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s romantic 18th-Century notion of the “noble savage.”

In truth, poverty, unless self-elected, is crushingly confining as are the other states of being that make one an outsider. It is amply clear in their art. The outsider art in “Parallel Visions”--compelling as it can be--has a suffocatingly walled-off quality. It’s difficult to look at for long and never yields new information to a second viewing. There is something rigid and ungiving about it, even when it is overtly cheerful.

Unless we add recognition of thwarted suffering to our aesthetic admiration of such art we are doing it smug disservice. It is like finding the homeless quaint, colorful and picturesque.

Art and culture mired in convention or gone berserk are equally failed. What creativity requires is that place in the shadings of the mind where the extremes remain in balanced tension, harmonized. That’s what gives us Van Goghs and Jackson Pollocks, Andy Warhols and Alexis Smiths.

After the riots, some L.A. artists took it upon themselves to attempt to aid in the healing. Preeminent among them was sculptor Robert Graham. In July his “Source Figure” was installed downtown on the First Interstate Bank World Center Plaza at the top of the Bunker Hill steps. The nude African-American female figure’s cupped hands make a gesture at once nurturing and accepting. The serene appearance of the figure after the riots was coincidental, but too apt to seem accidental.

It was no accident when at year’s end, MOCA announced that Graham had trained a group of Latino former gang members to produce an open-ended edition of bronze “Source Figure” torsos. They will be sold for MOCA’s benefit as long as there is a demand, at a price a hundred-fold less than what they would cost in limited edition.

It was a resounding gesture saying that art and the civilization it represents should be for everyone. No outsiders.