Outsiders : Music   The 365 Days Project   Francis E. Dec   Jim Roche Outsiders : Visuals   Assorted   The Ancient Order Flyers   The Free Jack Ads   The Orion Series UbuWeb

Formerly known as UbuWeb's Found + Insane section, we've redesigned and renamed it Outsiders, reflecting broader cultural trends toward the legitimization of Outsider work, be it in the visual, musical, or literary arts. Beginning with the mainstreaming of Folk Art (now known as Outsider Art) and the work of Jean Dubuffet in the mid-twentieth century, and moving into the present with the recent well-received museum retrospectives of visionary art of the insane (Adolf Wolfli and Henry Darger), there appears to be an insatiable hunger for this raw and emotionally-charged work. Certainly aided by compilations such as Jim Shaw's Thrift Shop Paintings and Irwin Chusid's masterful study of Outsider music, Songs In The Key of Z, UbuWeb hopes to continue to expand the field and connect it to the rest of the site's avant-garde bias. In this section you'll find Outsider music, art and literature, with the centerpiece of the collection being curator Otis F. Odder's vast 365 Days Project, in which an MP3 a day -- of mostly outsider, novelty, and oddball recordings -- was made available for the public to download. Briefly taken offline at the end of the project, it is now presented here in its entirety, complete with images and vast commentary on each selection. You'll also find a newly expanded selection of outsider, found, and insane visual poetry and street posters from the streets of New York City, Chicago and elsewhere, with special features of the mysterious Windy City Ancient Order Flyers, or the bizarre Free Jack Ads found on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Finally, there is a vastly enhanced display of the work of the East Village poet Orion, whose prodigious, mysterious and poetic scrawlings can be found on lampposts up and down Avenue A. More than merely novelty, UbuWeb's Outsiders section overlaps with what the rest of UbuWeb's thrust, several of these artists appear in other -- and more academic -- sections of the site. As with all the content that is housed on UbuWeb, we find distinctions increasingly more difficult to make. And that's just the way we like it. -- The Editors