Dynamic Similarity: Outsider Art and Avant-garde

The article analyzes the emergence of the discourse of outsider art. The author reveals the connection between the discourse of outsider art and the field of avantgarde culture. The formation of outsider art was conditioned by the crisis of the rationalistic paradigm and the intention to revive European culture, which had lost its vitality, with the Dionysian principle of the art of primitives and the mentally ill. The surfaces of emergence and the authorities of delimitation of outsider art were initially marginal in relation to the field of art. Instead of traditional authorities of delimitation in art – art critics, museums, art historians, and collectors – the discourse of outsider art was formed by psychiatrists, philosophers, and avant-garde artists. The article focuses on the formation logic of the outsider art discourse and the specifics of the legitimization of this phenomenon. The change in the traditional way of legitimizing this art phenomenon was largely due, on the one hand, to the transformation of the philosophy of culture and, on the other, to the emergence of the idea of Dionysian values, the irrational in culture with the appearance of the concepts of the unconscious and the designation of its meaning in the context of personality and culture. All the above mentioned made the field of psychiatry valuable in the context of artistic culture, while psychiatrists became new authorities of delimitation in art and culture. These processes of the crisis of the European rationalistic paradigm were clearly reflected in avant-garde art; the Cubists, Expressionists, Primitivists, and Surrealists started to incorporate these strange phenomena into their artworks, thereby simultaneously assimilating them and giving them new characteristics. Thus, the article focuses on the process that was reverse in relation to the processes described earlier. Not marginal phenomena, such as naive art, primitive cultures, and the creativity of the mentally ill, influenced the field of ”high art”, but what had been a rightful, legitimate and rational field of European culture discursively changed and became ready to include marginalia.   Keywords: outsider art, art brut, avant-garde, discourse, discourse analysis, Cesare Lombroso, Hanz Prinzhorn, Hilma af Clint, Pavel Karpov, André Breton, Jean Dubuffet

TEC enhancement due to energetic electrons above Taiwan and the West Pacific

The energetic electrons of the inner radiation belt during a geomagnetic disturbance can penetrate in the forbidden range of drift shells located at the heights of the topside equatorial ionosphere (<1000 km). A good correlation was previously revealed between positive ionospheric storms and intense fluxes of quasi-trapped 30-keV electrons at ~900 km height in the forbidden zone. In the present work, we use statistics to validate an assumption that the intense electron fluxes in the topside equatorial ionosphere can be an important source of the ionization in the low-latitude ionosphere. The data on the energetic electrons were obtained from polar orbiting satellites over the periods of the 62 strong geomagnetic storms from 1999 to 2006. Ionospheric response to the selected storms was determined using global ionospheric maps of vertical total electron content (VTEC). A case-event study of a major storm on 9 November 2004 provided experimental evidence in support to the substantial ionization effect of energetic electrons during positive ionospheric storms at the low latitudes. Statistical analysis of nine magnetic storms indicated that the VTEC increases coincided with and coexisted with intense 30-keV electron fluxes irrespective of local time and phase of geomagnetic storm. We concluded that extremely intense fluxes of the 30-keV electrons in the topside low-latitude ionosphere can contribute ~ 10 - 30 TECU to the localized positive ionospheric storms.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 1 table accepted for publication in Terrestrial, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (TAO), Dec. 2012 A special issue on "Connection of solar and heliospheric activities with near-Earth space weather: Sun-Earth connection