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58-514: The Dot Wiggin Band is an American band fronted by Dot Wiggin of the 1960s outsider music band the Shaggs . They released their debut album, Ready! Get! Go! in 2013 on Jello Biafra 's label Alternative Tentacles . Dot Wiggin was the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter of the Shaggs, along with her sisters Helen (drums) and Betty Wiggin (guitar, vocals). In 2012, bassist Jesse Krakow organized

116-603: A Brian Wilson song." (Moore's father, Bob Moore , was a consummate musical insider, having worked as a session musician with the Nashville A-Team .) Related topics Documentary films Primitivism In the arts of the Western World, Primitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealization that means to recreate the experience of the primitive time, place, and person, either by emulation or by re-creation. In Western philosophy, Primitivism proposes that

174-485: A book titled Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music , which attempted to introduce and market outsider music as a genre. He summarized the concept thus: ... there are countless "unintentional renegades," performers who lack [an] overt self-consciousness about their art. As far as they're concerned, what they're doing is "normal." And despite paltry incomes and dismal record sales, they're happy to be in

232-507: A contemporary version that repudiates previous primitivist discourses. Some characteristics of neo-primitivist art include the use of bold colors, original designs, and expressiveness. These are demonstrated in the works of Paul Gauguin , which feature vivid hues and flat forms instead of a three-dimensional perspective. Igor Stravinsky was another neo-primitivist known for his children's pieces, which were based on Russian folklore. Several neo-primitivist artists were also previous members of

290-476: A dialogue between "the works of Picasso – not only the major works but also the experiments with aesthetic concepts – with those, no less rich, by non-Western artists." Picasso Primitif meant to offer a comparative view of the artist's works with those of non-Western artists. The resulting confrontation was supposed to reveal the similar issues those artists have had to address such as nudity, sexuality, impulses and loss through parallel plastic solutions. In 2018,

348-542: A few acts in the definition that broke through to mainstream fame as novelty acts; Tiny Tim , for example, is included despite a consistent three-decade career in the music industry that included a major chart hit, Joe Meek was one of the United Kingdom's most influential and successful sound engineers of the 1960s, and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy had a brief moment of widespread fame in

406-452: A framework through which outsider recordings are understood ... [They] seeded many ideas and practices, affirming them as desirable in the context of rock mythology." In 1969, Zappa co-founded Bizarre Records , a label dedicated to "musical and sociological material that the important record companies would probably not allow you to hear," and approached the production of Trout Mask Replica like an anthropological field recording . Beefheart

464-632: A lost golden age . Begun in the 1930s, by francophone artists and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the Négritude movement was readily adopted throughout continental Africa and by the African diaspora . In rejection of Western rationalism and European colonialism, the Négritude artists idealized pre-colonial Africa with works of art that represent pre-colonial Africa as composed of societies who were more culturally united before

522-406: A more deeply expressive, permanent human nature and cultural structure in contrast to the nascent modern realities", by studying the cultures of the primitive peoples encountered by explorers. The spoils of European colonialism included the works of art of the colonized natives, which featured primitive styles of expression and execution, especially the absence of linear perspective, a simple outline,

580-426: A new exhibition focusing on primitivism in modern art. Instead of pointing out the obvious issues, the exhibition celebrated the use of non-Western objects as inspiration for modern artists. The director of the exhibition, William Rubin , took Roger Fry's exhibition one step further by displaying the modern works of art juxtaposed to the non-Western objects themselves. Rubin stated, "That he was not so much interested in

638-515: A possum has of skittering safely across a six-lane freeway. ... The outsiders in this book, for the most part, lack self-awareness. They don't boldly break the rules, because they don't know there are rules. As was common with journalists who championed musical primitivism in the 1980s, Chusid considered outsiders more " authentic " than artists whose music is "exploited through conventional music channels" and "revised, remodeled, and re-coifed; touched-up and tweaked; Photoshopped and focus-grouped" by

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696-434: A sexual utopia free of the religious sexual prohibitions is in line with the perspective of pastoral art, which idealizes rural life as better than city life. The similarities between Pastoralism and Primitivism are evident in the paintings Tahitian Pastoral (1892) and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898). The artist Gauguin said that his paintings celebrated Tahitian society, and that he

754-809: A tribute to the Shaggs, in which he invited Dot, Betty and Rachel Wiggin of the Shaggs to be honored guests. At the Q&;A portion of the evening, Dot was asked if she still wrote songs, to which she replied yes. Jesse raised his hand and asked if he could help her record them. The Dot Wiggin Band quickly formed, and recorded their first album in winter of 2012, and began performing live in 2013. Band members include Dot Wiggin (vocals, songwriting), Brittany Anjou (keys, co-vocals, toy piano), Laura Cromwell (drums, vocals), Adam Minkoff (guitar/bass), Nick Oddy (guitar), Rich Bennett (guitar), Mike Fornatale (guitar), and Jesse Krakow (bass, vocals, songwriting). The album includes recent songs written by Dot as well as songs she wrote for

812-485: A way to respond to it. The headline of this exhibition was, "A major exhibition offering a new perspective and inspiring a rereading of art history." The exhibition looked at the transformation in our view of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Bondil wanted to explore the question about how ethnographic objects come to be viewed as art. She also asked, "How can

870-504: Is primitivist program music about the subject of Paganism , specifically the rite of human sacrifice in pre-christian Russia. Foregoing the aesthetic and technical restraints of Western musical composition, in The Rite of Spring the composer employs harsh consonance and dissonance and loud, repetitive rhythms as a mode of Dionysian spontaneity in musical modernism . The critic Malcolm Cook said that "with its folk-music motifs and

928-443: Is rarely captured in professional studios. Harper credits the discourse surrounding Daniel Johnston and Jandek with "form[ing] a bridge between 1980s primitivism and the lo-fi indie rock of the 1990s. ... both musicians introduced the notion that lo-fi was not just acceptable but the special context of some extraordinary and brilliant musicians." Critics frequently write about Johnston's "pure and childlike soul" and describe him as

986-406: Is usually regarded as a cultural phenomenon of Western art, yet the structure of primitivist idealism is in the art works of non-Western and anti-colonial artists. The nostalgia for an idealized past when humans lived in harmony with Nature is related to critiques of the negative cultural impact of Western modernity upon colonized peoples. The primitivist works of anti-colonial artists are critiques of

1044-700: The Blue Rose group . Russian artists associated with Neo-primitivism include: In November 1910, Roger Fry organized the exhibition titled Manet and the Post-Impressionists held at the Grafton Galleries in London. This exhibition showcased works by Paul Cézanne , Paul Gauguin , Henri Matisse , Édouard Manet , Pablo Picasso , and Vincent Van Gogh , among others. This exhibition was meant to showcase how French art had developed over

1102-729: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts had an exhibition titled From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-Face Picasso, Past and Present . The MMFA adapted and expanded on Picasso Primitif by bringing in 300 works and documents from the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and the Musée National Picasso – Paris. Nathalie Bondil saw the issues with the ways in which Yves Le Fur presented Picasso's work juxtaposed to non-Western art and objects and found

1160-490: The Prolegomena to Homer (1795), the scholar Friedrich August Wolf identified the language of Homer's poetry and the language of The Bible as examples of folk art communicated and transmitted by oral tradition . Later, the ideas of Vico and Wolf were developed at the beginning of the 19th century by Johann Gottfried Herder ; nevertheless, although influential in literature, the ideas of Vico and Wolf slightly influenced

1218-690: The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns , the Italian intellectual Giambattista Vico said that the lives of primitive non-Europeans were more attuned to Nature's aesthetic inspirations for poetry than the arts of civilized, modern man. From that perspective, Vico compared the artistic merits of the epic poetry of Homer and of the Bible against the modern literature written in vernacular language. In

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1276-474: The Russian icon and the lubok . Neo-primitivism replaced the symbolist art of the Blue Rose movement . The nascent movement was embraced due to its predecessor's tendency to look back so that it passed its creative zenith. A conceptualization of neo-primitivism describes it as anti-primitivist Primitivism since it questions the primitivist's Eurocentric universalism . This view presents neo-primitivism as

1334-591: The Salon d'Automne in 1903, and the other in 1906, influenced fauve movement artists such as Maurice de Vlaminck , André Derain and Henri Matisse , but also Pablo Picasso . In particular, Picasso studied Iberian sculpture , African sculpture , and African traditional masks , and historical works such as the Mannerist paintings of El Greco , from which aesthetic study Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and invented Cubism . Primitivism in art

1392-556: The non-European Other provoked philosophers to question the Mediaeval assumptions about the fixed nature Man, of society, and of Nature , doubted the social-class organization of society and the mental, moral, and intellectual strictures of Christianity, by comparing the civilization of Europe against the way of life of the uncivilized natural man living in harmony with Nature. In the 18th century, Western artists and intellectuals participated in "the conscious search in history for

1450-601: The visual arts . The emergence of historicism — judging and evaluating different eras according to their historical context and criteria — resulted in new schools of visual art dedicated to historical fidelity of setting and costume, such as the art of Neoclassicism and the Romantic art of the Nazarene movement in Germany who were inspired by the primitive school of Italian devotional paintings, i.e. before Raphael and

1508-511: The "Brian Wilson" of lo-fi. R. Stevie Moore , who pioneered lo-fi/DIY music, was affiliated with Irwin Chusid as well as being associated with the "outsider" tag. He recalled "always ha[ving] the dilemma that [Irwin] did not want to present me as an outsider, like a Wesley Willis or a Daniel Johnston, or these people that are touched in the head and have a certain gift. I love outsider music ... but they have no concept as to how to write or arrange

1566-515: The 1960s with several national television appearances. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys is regarded as the most famous example of an outsider musician. Chusid felt that "it's difficult" to argue for Wilson as an outsider due to his popularity, but acknowledged that his struggles with mental illness and the widely circulated bootlegs of his unreleased 1970s and 1980s demos "certify his outsider status". Chusid credited outsider musicians for

1624-623: The 20th century", and "the fifty most significant indie records". Lester Bangs famously praised the band as better than the Beatles , and Zappa also held the band in high regard, much higher than the Shaggs themselves, who were embarrassed by the record. In the 1990s, interest in outsider music was spurred by books such as Incredibly Strange Music (1994) and compilations devoted to obscure musicians such as B. J. Snowden , Wesley Willis , Lucia Pamela , and Eilert Pilarm . Outsider musicians tend to overlap with " lo-fi " artists since their work

1682-596: The Europeans arrived to Africa. Notable among the artists of the Négritude movement is the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam who was associated with Picasso and the surrealists in Paris, in the 1930s. On returning to Cuba in 1941, Lam was emboldened to create dynamic tableaux that integrated human beings, animals, and Nature. In The Jungle (1943), Lam's polymorphism creates a fantastical jungle scene featuring African motifs among

1740-698: The French colony of Tahiti , where he adopted a primitive style of life much unlike the way of life in urban France. Gauguin's search for the primitive was a search for sexual freedom from the Christian constrictions of private life, evident in the paintings Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), Parau na te Varua ino (1892), and Anna the Javanerin (1893), Te Tamari No Atua (1896) and Cruel Tales (1902). Gauguin's European perspective of Tahiti as

1798-590: The Shaggs , Harry Partch , Robert Graettinger , Tonetta and Daniel Johnston . Conversely, the book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (2007) argues that "few of the outsiders praised by their fans can be called innovators; most of them are simply naïve." Skip Spence 's Oar (1969), Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (produced by Frank Zappa, 1969), and Barrett's The Madcap Laughs (1970), according to music historian John Encarnacao, "were particularly important in helping to define

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1856-493: The Shaggs in the 1970s that had not been previously recorded. The Dot Wiggin Band opened for Neutral Milk Hotel on tour in April 2015. The band has many fans and support from Shaggs' audiences worldwide. In performance, Dot sings old Shaggs songs re-created live by members who have become familiar with the repertoire as recorded on the original Shaggs albums, which has created interest and confusion amongst audiences unfamiliar with

1914-422: The Shaggs. The live touring lineup features members of sister band, Bi TYRANT, a feminist hardcore punk band from Brooklyn led by co-vocalist Brittany Anjou . Albums Singles Outsider music Outsider musicians often overlap with lo-fi artists, since their work is rarely captured in professional recording studios . Examples include Daniel Johnston , Wesley Willis , and Jandek , who each became

1972-546: The Tahitians; European fantasies invented in "effort to essentialize notions of primitiveness", by Othering non-European peoples into colonial subordinates . In 1905–1906 period, a group of artists studied the arts from Sub-Saharan Africa and from Oceania , because of the popularity of the Gauguin paintings of Tahiti and the Tahitians. Two posthumous, retrospective exhibitions of Gauguin's works of art in Paris, one at

2030-533: The Western stereotypes about colonized peoples, while also yearning for the pre-colonial way of life. The processes of decolonization fuse with the reverse teleology of Primitivism to produce native works of art distinct from the primitivist artworks by Western artists, which reinforce colonial stereotypes as true. As a type of artistic primitivism, the artworks of the Négritude movement tend to nostalgia for

2088-528: The discovery of oil painting . Whereas academic painting (after Raphael) used dark glazes, idealized forms, and suppression of detail, the artists of the Nazarene movement used clear outlines, bright colors, and much detail. The artistic styles of the Nazarene movement were similar to the artistic styles of the Pre-Raphaelites , who were inspired by the critical writings of John Ruskin , who admired

2146-628: The existence of dub reggae ("invented by an outsider, Lee "Scratch" Perry "), the K Records and Sub Pop record labels, and the "punk/new-wave/no-wave upheaval that undermined prog-rock and airbrush-pop in the mid- to late-1970s [and] hyped itself with the defiant notion that anyone―regardless of technical proficiency or lack thereof―could make music as long as it represented genuine, naturalistic self-expression." Specific acts that "significantly contributed―directly and indirectly―to contemporary popular music" include Syd Barrett , Captain Beefheart ,

2204-456: The existence of multiple worlds in which things are different from the human world. The three-hundred-year Age of Discovery (15th c.–17th c.) exposed western European explorers to the peoples and cultures of Asia and the Americas, of Africa and Australasia, but the explorers' perspective of cultural difference led to colonialism . During the Age of Enlightenment , the explorers' encounters with

2262-466: The infamous 1913 Paris riot securing its avant-garde credentials, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring engaged in Primitivism in both form and practice" while remaining within the technical praxes of Western classical music . During the Age of Enlightenment , intellectuals rhetorically used the idealization of indigenous peoples as political criticism of European culture ; however, as part of

2320-508: The mentally ill. The word "outsider" began to be applied to music cultures as early as 1959, with respect to jazz , and to rock as early as 1979. In the 1970s, "outsider music" was also a "favorite epithet" in music criticism in Europe. By the 1980s and 1990s, "outsider" was common in the cultural lexicon and was synonymous with "self-taught", "untrained", and "primitive". Although outsider music has existed since before written history , it

2378-548: The moral superiority of a primitive way of life represented by the myth of a golden age of pre-societal harmony with Nature, as depicted in the Pastoral genres of European representational art and poetry. Notable examples of European cultural primitivism are the music of Igor Stravinsky , the Tahitian paintings of Paul Gauguin , and the African period artworks of Pablo Picasso . Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913)

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2436-431: The painters before Raphael (e.g. Sandro Botticelli ) and recommended that artists paint outdoors. In the mid-19th century, the photographic camera and non-Euclidean geometry changed the visual arts; photography impelled the development of artistic Realism and non-Euclidean geometry voided the mathematic absolutes of Euclidean geometry , and so challenged the conventional perspective of Renaissance art by suggesting

2494-518: The past three decades; however, art critics in London were shocked by what they saw. Some called Fry "mad" and "crazy" for publicly displaying such artwork in the exhibition. Fry's exhibition called attention to primitivism in modern art even if he did not intend for it to happen; leading American scholar Marianna Torgovnick to term the exhibition as the "debut" of primitivism on the London art scene. In 1984, The Museum of Modern Art in New York had

2552-471: The people of a primitive society possess a morality and an ethics that are superior to the urban value system of civilized people. In European art, the aesthetics of primitivism included techniques, motifs, and styles copied from the arts of Asian, African, and Australasian peoples perceived as primitive in relation to the urban civilization of western Europe. In that light, the painter Paul Gauguin 's inclusion of Tahitian imagery to his oil paintings

2610-477: The pieces of 'tribal' art in themselves but instead wanted to focus on the ways in which modern artists 'discovered' this art." He was trying to show there was an 'affinity' between the two types of art. Scholar Jean-Hubert Martin argued this attitude effectively meant that the 'tribal' art objects were "given the status of not much more than footnotes or addenda to the Modernist avant-garde." Rubin's exhibition

2668-435: The presence of hieroglyphs , distortions of the figure, and the meaning communicated with repeated patterns of ornamentation. The African and Australasian cultures provided artists an answer to their "white, Western, and preponderantly male quest" for the ideal of the primitive, "whose very condition of desirability resides in some form of distance and difference." The painter Paul Gauguin departed urban Europe to reside in

2726-405: The same line of work as Celine Dion and Andrew Lloyd Webber . ... Their vocals sound melodically adrift; their rhythms stumble. They seem harmonically without anchor. Their instrumental proficiency may come across as laughably incompetent. ... They get little or no commercial radio exposure, their followings are limited, and they have roughly the same likelihood of attaining mainstream success that

2784-550: The stalks of sugar cane to represent the connection between the neo-African idealism of Négritude and the history of plantation slavery for the production of table sugar . Neo-primitivism was a Russian art movement that took its name from the 31-page pamphlet Neo-primitivizm , by Aleksandr Shevchenko (1913) . It is considered a type of avant-garde movement and is proposed as a new style of modern painting which fuses elements of Cézanne , Cubism , and Futurism with traditional Russian ' folk art ' conventions and motifs, notably

2842-460: The subjects of documentary films in the 2000s. The term "outsider music" is traced to the definitions of " outsider art " and " naïve art ". "Outsider art" is rooted in the 1920s French concept of "L'Art Brut" ("raw art"). In 1972, academic Roger Cardinal introduced "outsider art" as the American counterpart of "L'Art Brut", which originally referred to work created exclusively by children or

2900-654: The term primitivism also identifies the techniques, motifs, and styles of painting that predominated representational painting before the emergence of the Avant-garde ; and also identifies the styles of naïve art and of folk art produced by amateur artists, such as Henri Rousseau , who painted for personal pleasure. Primitivism is a utopian style of art that means to represent the physical world of Nature and humanity's original state of nature with two styles: (i) chronological primitivism and (ii) cultural primitivism . In Europe, chronological primitivism proposes

2958-602: The term "incorrect music" for music that is intentionally recorded to draw bad reactions, from non-musician celebrity entertainers attempting to cross over into music , or from artists who are talented and self-aware enough not to produce such music but do so anyway. Works are usually sourced from home recordings or independent recording studios "with no quality control". In Songs in the Key of Z , Chusid explicitly avoided discussing "unpopular", "uncommercial", or "underground" artists, and disqualified "just about anyone who could keep an orchestra or band together." He did include

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3016-508: The time it reaches the listener, to the point that it is "Music by Committee". On the other hand, outsider artists have much "greater individual control over the final creative contour", either because of a low budget or because of their "inability or unwillingness to cooperate with or trust anyone but themselves." Outsider music does not generally include avant-garde music , world music , songs recorded solely for their novelty value , or anything self-consciously camp or kitsch ; Chusid uses

3074-639: The writing prefigures similar commentary on "the also mentally ill Daniel Johnston." After a 1980 reissue on NRBQ 's Red Rooster Records (distributed by Rounder Records), The Shaggs attracted notoriety for their 1969 album Philosophy of the World , which received prominent national coverage. It was referred to as "the worst rock album ever made" by the New York Times and later championed in published lists such as "the 100 most influential alternative albums of all time", "the greatest garage recordings of

3132-458: Was a characteristic borrowing of technique, motif, and style that was important for the development of Modern art (1860s–1970s) in the late 19th century. As a genre of Western art , Primitivism reproduced and perpetuated racist stereotypes , such as the " noble savage ", with which colonialists justified white colonial rule over the non-white other in Asia, Africa, and Australasia. Moreover,

3190-523: Was defending Tahiti against French colonialism; nonetheless, from the postcolonial perspective of the 20th century, feminist art critics said that Gauguin's taking adolescent mistresses voids his claim of being an anti-colonialist. As a European man, his sexual freedom derived from the male gaze of the colonist, because Gauguin's artistic primitivism is part of the "dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power , both colonial and patriarchal ", which French colonialists invented about Tahiti and

3248-496: Was divided into four different parts: Concepts, History, Affinities, and Contemporary Explorations. Each section is meant to serve a different purpose in showing the connections between modern art and non-Western 'art.' In 2017, the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in collaboration with the Musée National Picasso – Paris, put on the exhibition Picasso Primitif . Yves Le Fur, the director, stated he wanted this exhibition to invite

3306-569: Was not on the Bizarre label, but Larry "Wild Man" Fischer was. Fischer was a street performer discovered by Zappa and is sometimes regarded as "the grandfather of outsider music". In the liner notes of the 1968 album An Evening with Wild Man Fischer , Zappa writes: "Please listen to this album several times before you decide whether or not you like it or what Wild Man Fischer is all about. He has something to say to you, even though you might not want to hear it." According to musicologist Adam Harper,

3364-529: Was not until the advent of sound reproduction and music exchange networks that such a genre was recognized. Music journalist Irwin Chusid is credited with adapting "outsider art" for music in a 1996 article for the Tower Records publication Pulse! . As a DJ on the New Jersey radio station WFMU in the 1980s, he had been an influential figure in independent music scenes. In 2000, he authored

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