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The introduction offers an overview of the book and describes how it proposes a historical and theoretical account of how modern and contemporary art developed in dialogue with the creative work of psychiatric patients in Brazil. The author introduces the tensions that characterize the specific historicity of the relation between madness and modern art: between patients’ art as used for clinical diagnosis and as evidence for how to move beyond academic convention in art (chapter 1); between reports of the work’s spontaneous production and its encouragement within art therapy studios; between support for a common understanding of creativity and the legitimization of patients’ work based on style (chapters 1–2); between claims to a vital necessity for art shared by all and a universal model of aesthetic reception that is underpinned by normative subjective response (chapter 3); and between claims that the patients’ work is contemporary art and a discussion of the work’s contemporaneity in relation to psychiatric history (chapters 4–5). Finally, the introduction makes a case for a historiographic approach that insists on discontinuities rather than continuities, defamiliarization rather familiarization, in order to parse the specificities of each context and history.

This chapter turns to the creative work of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Brazil’s most famous “outsider artist.” The author addresses what it means to respect the rights of the mad when approaching their work through the lens of contemporary art. Unlike the other Brazilian patients considered in this study, Bispo’s work was legitimated as art after his death. The chapter engages Frederico Morais’s publication Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Arte além da loucura (Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Art beyond madness, 2013) as well as this curator’s key role in Bispo’s canonization into contemporary art. The author probes whether an insistence on Bispo’s work as contemporary art in the end abandons one type of epistemic control (psychiatry) to inscribe the work within another: a timeless aesthetic formalism to which the patient never laid claim.

The Introduction establishes Forest’s artistic identity as a trickster and troublemaker through some of his most famous publicity stunts and subversive public interventions. Works discussed in the Introduction include 150 cm² of Newspaper (1972), The City Invaded by Blank Space (1973), The Artistic Square Meter (1977), The Golden Mean and the Force Field of 14,000 Hertz (1987), Fred Forest for President of Bulgarian National Television (1991), and Forest’s unauthorized protest performance at the Centre Pompidou’s Vidéo Vintage exhibition (2012). The Introduction also discusses Forest’s contributions as a theorist and educator, his ties to leading intellectuals and critics like Vilém Flusser and Pierre Restany, and his tense relations with French art institutions, including his epic legal battle with the Centre Pompidou (1994-97).

The trip across the Altiplano in the Bolivian Andes was a crossing into isolation and solitude. Today we little understand people who sought solitude. The writings of the third century CE Desert Fathers and the 18th romantics provide two different experiences of solitude. In the silver city of Potosi, noblewomen withdrew into solitude and silence in a convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns. In an abandoned village, one man stays behind, keeping a museum of the remains of the village and creating a rock garden that makes him an “outsider artist.”

The term outsider artist refers to artists who have no formal education in art and do not belong to the art world. Outsider art is known as art brut in Europe and “raw art” in the U.S. This chapter studies the life and works of the outsider artist Henry Darger. His work often features seven heroines, called “Vivian Girls,” who arm themselves with guns and fight determinedly to liberate child slaves from the control of evil adults. The most striking characteristic of Darger’s paintings is their strange naïveté and self-authorizing innocence. Some reject his work as the product of perversion, while others are riveted by it as a mirror of their own desire.