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The VM as Outsider Art
- The VM as Outsider Art
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RE: Let's rate some bulls
Koen G > 05-01-2025, 11:58 PM
I'm planning a long overdue video on stacking patterns in another section, so I'm not going to discuss that yet. I haven't thought about it in the plants though.
Regarding autism, I agree of course that it has always existed. However, I am always cautious when people project it onto the Middle Ages. I think we underestimate how vastly different their world was from ours.
Apart from that, I wonder if outsider art could exist as a concept in the Middle Ages at all. Our society offers a place for it, but that mustn't always have been the case in the past. Someone with autism and the people around them also wouldn't have had the insights and "mental vocabulary" to see what's going on.
Whatever the case may be, we'd be extremely deep into the realm of speculation. Opposed to the idea of a single unusual mind is the increasing certainty that more than one person made the MS.
I'll split these posts into a new thread tomorrow. I assume your views will be shared by others. -
RE: The VM as Outsider Art
Bernd > 06-01-2025, 12:30 AM
He was mentioned before but have you actually taken a look at Adolf Wölflis artworks?
The similarities to VM rosettes are quite remarkable and similarly feature repeating elements.
After a traumatic and violent childhood, Wölfli spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital and without any education began creating an endless stream of drawings, music and monumental stories, sometimes mixed together.
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Quote:[The images Wölfli produced were complex, intricate and intense. They worked to the very edges of the page with detailed borders. In a manifestation of Wölfli's "horror vacui", every empty space was filled with two small holes. Wölfli called the shapes around these holes his "birds".
His images also incorporated an idiosyncratic musical notation. This notation seemed to start as a purely decorative affair but later developed into real composition which Wölfli would play on a paper trumpet.
In 1908, he set about creating a semi-autobiographical epic which eventually stretched to 45 volumes, containing a total of over 25,000 pages and 1,600 illustrations. This work was a mix of elements of his own life blended with fantastical stories of his adventures from which he transformed himself from a child to 'Knight Adolf' to 'Emperor Adolf' and finally to 'St Adolf II'. Text and illustrations formed the narrative, sometimes combining multiple elements on kaleidoscopic pages of music, words and colour.
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RE: The VM as Outsider Art
oshfdk > 06-01-2025, 05:04 AM
Certain elements of the design do look similar, but there are not that many different ways of combining angular and circular elements. Overall, Wölfl's designs are in what I'd call free flow whimsical style, while VMS designs look certainly preplanned and there is not a trace of horror vacui in VMS, I'd say the opposite is true. Especially in the herbal section the author is not bothered by leaving large parts of the page empty, which I think is one part of the appeal of VMS imagery at least for me. It's very symmetrical and regular for some drawings and charts, but also can be very asymmetrical for the others. -
RE: The VM as Outsider Art
Koen G > 06-01-2025, 09:46 AM
I still think both paradigms cannot be compared.
Wölfli is an outsider artist because he was not trained in any of the major art styles of his time. When they say he was uneducated, that's what they mean. He had clearly been to school and learned how to read and write though. Learned how to use writing utensils, some basic techniques... What makes him an outsider artist is that artistically he does his own thing, without any reference to the art styles of the time, nor any apparent interest to reference them.
The Voynich references (depending on who you ask) herbals, the Balneis tradition, Zodiacs, pharmacologies, astronomical/astrological diagrams, mappamundi... It almost seems desperate to follow the cultural expectations of its time, despite some apparent difficulties to do so.
Wölfli's education and means were probably below average for his time, but he ventured to make his own art despite this. The means and education of the Voynich makers were well above average for their time, and they produced the VM, for whatever reason.