By 1995, David Bowie had seemingly lived hundreds of artistic lives. To find new territory would require him to venture far, far, out of the box, which led him to his 20th studio album, Outside or 1.Outside. His first collaboration with Brian Eno since the late 70s’ Berlin Trilogy pulled from an eccentric list of influences, including cult classic television shows about small-town murder investigations and a medical facility near Vienna, Austria.
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Bowie and Eno adopted the same unchronological narrative style of the ABC cult favorite, Twin Peaks. Like Twin Peaks, the album centered on the murder of a teenager from Oxford Town, New Jersey. And like the show, Outside is as macabre as it is uncommercial. Over the twenty tracks of music and spoken word, Bowie and Eno paint a strange and unusual sonic picture—the first brushstrokes of which they saw at the Maria Gugging psychiatric clinic.
The Art Commune That Helped Inspire David Bowie’s 1995 Album, ‘Outside’
The Gugging clinic in Austria was notable for housing the Haus der Künstler, or House of Art, which the Gugging established in 1981 as a communal home and art studio for its patients. These Gugging residents, many of whom had schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions, created all forms of art, which came to adopt the descriptor of “Art Brut” or “Outsider Art.” Naturally, David Bowie and Brian Eno found this clinic to be a potential wellspring of inspiration for their dark concept album titled Outside. So, the pair visited the clinic in person in 1994.
Speaking to music journalist Gene Stout about the visit, Bowie said, “The stunning, rather cold atmosphere of the place is overwhelming. 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.” Moreover, Bowie said, “They paint without any feeling of judgment. Whatever they feel is what they paint,” per The Guardian. Bowie incorporated this practice into the making of Outside by instructing the artists to “redecorate the studio” before they began tracking.
“They got into it so much that it was hard to get them into the music,” Bowie recalled. “What it did was give the whole thing a sense of play, which is a part of real freedom of expression.”
Bowie’s 1995 album, Outside, didn’t perform exceptionally well on the charts, peaking at No. 21 on the Billboard 200 and a more notable No. 8 in Bowie’s native U.K. But what it lacks in mainstream staying power, it certainly makes up for in eccentricity.
Photo by KMazur/WireImage
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