The bizarre way David Bowie achieved “artistic freedom” with ‘Outside’
As you enter the fascinating world of outsider art, the first thing you’ll encounter is the fierce debate over a fitting definition. However, one key facet that often seems to apply to all mediums of so-called ‘outsider art’, is the notion of creativity without an audience in mind. David Bowie certainly encountered this when he answered an invite to visit the “Outsiders’ Wing” at the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic of Klosterneuburg just outside Vienna, Austria.
At the time, Bowie had reenlisted Brian Eno for his 1995 record which would eventually be titled Outside. This came after he had experienced an artistic drought. He had suffered somewhat of a creative mid-life crisis and was questioning what he should be doing with his art. He decided to return to the days when he would create without an audience in mind. To quite literally get back to basics.
This ethos was instantly instilled when he first saw the Outsider Wing. “The stunning, rather cold atmosphere of the place is overwhelming,” he recalled of the sweeping drive towards the famed institution. “You have to drive past the regular asylum before you get to their wing, which is completely covered in paint. They’ve painted every nook and crevice, the walls, all the trees outside. Everything that’s standing and still, they’ve painted.”
The doctors at the so-called Gugging encouraged art as a form of therapy. So, materials were made free for use, and no surface was sacred. “The feature that really struck us was the fact that these guys paint without any feeling of judgment,” the Starman recalled in an interview with Gene Stout. This factor was particularly appealing to Bowie during a period where damning critical judgement had him second-guessing his own work. “They don’t subscribe to any school,“ he continued. “Nobody there is going to say, ‘Oh, the cubists were wrong.’ They don’t care. Whatever they feel is what they paint.”
Bowie wished to usher this level of freedom into the studio when he had finally formulated the idea of Outside. In order to get the musicians he had hired onto the same page, he took a leaf out of the Gugging’s book. “The first thing we did was get all the musicians together and make them redecorate the studio,” he recalled.
It was a success. “They got into it so much that it was hard to get them into the music. What it did was give the whole thing a sense of play, which is a part of real freedom of expression,” he said. For Bowie, and the musicians, a sense of fun was injected back into the process; he was back in his Ziggy days of creating with abandon.
He reaped the rewards. Outside is an album that defined Bowie in many ways, taking a concept that channelled commentary on the world into unfettered art, resplendent with a bohemia of influences, and somehow made it catchy. The result was a return to form and the charts. “My highest entry on the Billboard chart was in 1983 with ‘Let’s Dance,’ which went in at No. 33 and then crawled its way up,” he said. “This one went in at 21, so I am absolutely ecstatic. It’s a validation that some complicated stuff can still get a space.”
All thanks to a bizarre invite out of the blue, and a novel studio experiment that cause artistic flow to unravel with aplomb and paint fume intoxication in equal measure.
