BRUTAL BEAUTY
"Not all Art Brut is brual enough...Let the sifting and the ranking begin."
by John Perreault
A witty fellow I know is not at all amazed that untrained, deranged, and sometimes mentally or communicatively handicapped people can sometimes produce formally inventive, profoundly moving, and truly meaningful artworks. What is amazing, he says, is that people who are trained in art can sometimes make art too, "with every bit of history sticking to their brains." Well, that certainly puts Art Brut and Outsider Art into perspective.
Of course, this is ringing a change on my statement that Van Gogh, Strindberg, or Henry Darger produced great works not because of mental problems, but in spite of them. The supposed connection between creation and madness is something we have been taught to fight, because it reduces art to a pathological symptom and therefore to a level of concern less serious than science, economics, or weather-forecasting. Instead it is more productive to see art as a sign of health, like Karl Jung's mandalas or Winston Churchill's landscapes.
But just when we thought we had put that demon to rest and purged the last remnants of the surrealist valorization of madness, Art Brut, partially under another name (Outsider Art), comes back as a new and lucrative art market and re-ignites the insanity problem.
Does anyone remember Jean Dubuffet? A rich wine-merchant, he took up art in mid-life and became the most successful post-War French artist, save the dreadful Bernard Buffet and---aesthetically speaking---the astounding Yves Klein. Klein claimed Yves Klein-blue, tried to fly, and sometimes made paintings/events with naked women. Dubuffet painted with mud and then filled in squiggles with tri-color patterns. What started as angst became joy. The late Lawrence Alloway, who curated a Dubuffet exhibitions at the Guggenheim, once told me that when he and his wife were visiting Dubuffet at his villa in the south of France, Dubuffet summoned everyone to breakfast by blowing his trumpet.
It now looks as if Dubuffet's greatest contribution to art will not be his paintings, flat or three-dimensional (as in his black and white "sculpture" downtown at Chase Manhattan Plaza), but his invention of Art Brut. He named it; he collected it. He wanted and appreciated visual production unhampered by academies, markets, or good taste. His own taste favored art by untrained artists at the visionary and, yes, the insane end of the spectrum.
In the meantime, the category evolved. The group of Chicago artists called The Hairy Who, probably inspired by Dubuffet's lecture at the Chicago Art Institute in the late '50s, discovered the hospitalized Joseph Yoakum's gnarly landscapes, carnival banners, and Grassroots Art. In the '70s when I was teaching contemporary art here and there, I always inserted a slide lecture on Art Brut and Yard Art. Students were assigned to go out and photograph local examples; and no matter what God-forsaken place it was, they always found a little bit of madness in several front yards: wacky signs, bottle trees, collections of burnt Barbie dolls.
It all seemed so innocent then. No city slickers pulled up in BMW chariots to load up on eccentric carvings or vertiginous accumulations. Now we have to contend with the big, big category of Outsider Art, which on some days seems to include everything in the universe including folk art---but not Grassroots Art, now dropped as a term.
A case in point is New York's annual Outsider Art Fair. This thoroughly enjoyable, dealer-driven extravaganza claims to limit itself to self-taught, visionary, intuitive, outsider, and art brut categories. It is no worse than similarly structured "craft" or "art" fairs. You have to take the bad with the good. Here at the edge there is still some energy. Outsider collectors are as insatiable as any other art collectors and are always in search of the best and the new.
So late last January in the Puck Building at the 9th Annual Outsider Art Fair, one saw much of the same stuff---the great ones like Darger, Bill Traylor, and Purvis Young from Miami, and on down, including some suspicious work: ugly, flaccid and soul-less. This year there was one big surprise: the string, yarn and cloth-wrapped lumps of Judith Scott (shown by Ricco/Maresca at the Fair and also at their gallery in Chelsea). Judith Scott, who has Down's Syndrome, was rescued at the age of 43 by her twin sister from the State Institution of Ohio. Enrolled in the Creative Growth Center in Oakland, under the "guidance" or with the permission of fiber artist Sylvia Seventy, Scott began wrapping branches and then secret objects. Actually, according to John MacGregor's article in The Outsider magazine (an excerpt from his book "Metamorphois: The Fiber Art of Judith Scott") she was impossible to stop. The results are more than remarkable. I first saw some of them at the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore this fall. They are creepy and beautiful all at once. She is major.
Definitions, however, are driving everyone nuts. An example of this is the American Folk Art Museum's traveling exhibition "Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century", seen last year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Folk Art Museum seems to be trying to appropriate Outsider Art for the age-old Folk Art cause. I think it's swell that the Folk Art Museum will be the Outsider Art outpost in New York, but this certainly stretches the usual definitions and perceptions of folk art. Folk artists, since they learn from elders, are not untrained in the same way that outsider artists are untrained. The latter start from inside, hence the highly desirable aura of authenticity. Folk Art is made for receptive local communities or, later, for tourists, whereas Outsider Art is made for oneself or, in its adversarial form, to convert others to some revelation. But in these times all categories are up for grabs: the Guggenheim recently surveyed 19th century academic paintings, The American Museum of Folk Art is showing Art Brut from a French collection and the American Craft Museum often delves into design and the decorative arts. Missions and visions are changing.
But "Self-Taught" has not yet come to New York, the Outsider Art Fair is over, and not everyone has the time to train to Baltimore to see the soon-to-be-expanding Visionary Art Museum, a visionary museum started by a visionary founder, the somewhat controversial Rebecca Hoffberger. Hoffberger's use of life-story wall labels drives conservative museum professionals crazy.
Fortunately "ABCD: A Collection of Art Brut," is at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York until mid-July. ABCD means "Art Brut Connaissance et Diffusion." This is a collection with a mission, that mission is that of Dubuffet's Art Brut: "works that as far as possible escape cultural conditioning and proceed from truly original mental attitudes." One wall text at the Museum says "True art crops up whatever you aren’t expecting it (Jean Dubuffet 1949)" another, also Dubuffet, is a bit longer: "We see no reason whatsoever for putting them in a special department, as some people do…It is our viewpoint that the function of art is the same in all cases. There is no such thing as art by the insane any more than there is such a thing as art by dyspeptics or people with bad knees."
At the very least, the exhibition can show the outsider-novice or the curious viewer were the madness began. Dubuffet sold (or traded) wine to the surrealist poets and painters. One cannot imagine that a man of his intelligence did not know what they were up to. He took the appreciation of the "art of the insane" from the realm of potential inspiration or conscious imitation to the realm of art validity, from valorization to validation.
But now, connoisseurs and art critics, it is time to get to work. Not all Art Brut is brutal enough. And as this admittedly choice selection demonstrates, not all Art Brut is really worth looking at or thinking about.
Let the sifting and the ranking begin: Adolf Wölfi (1864-1930), Martin Ramirez (1895-1963), and Henry Darger are at the top of my list. They each left substantial bodies of work and, at least to my inner eye, dealt heroically with other realities. More importantly they convey these realities, often in a frightening way. One yearns to see more of Jeanne Tripier's strange embroidery, if there is much more. Here, as elsewhere, there are one-of-a-kind sports and oddities that stick in the mind. In this case it is an eerie spirit drawing: "This drawing, executed through the mediumship of Harriet Ramsey was presented by her/ Georgiana Houghton, June 3rd, 1867." Also curiously moving are M. B. Murry's abstract "writings" that he, a farm worker, claimed came from God.
And at the bottom? Anything "cute", like the work of Aloise and Madge Gill. In other words, as the Dubuffet text implies, if Art Brut is art then it has to be judged as such. The same goes for every other artwork now under the Outsider Art umbrella.
There is both an Aristotle and a Plato inside of my brain. The Aristotle part wants everything to be neatly categorized and insists that nothing can be more than one thing at a time, just as---doubtful premise---two objects cannot inhabit the same space and time. Certainly a thought or an object can fit into a thousand categories simultaneously. Categories overlap, one category does not exclude another, even its opposite. On the other hand, the pre-loaded Plato part of my brain comes with all the dangers of downloaded ideal forms. Historically, there could not be an Aristotle without a Plato first, but isn't there some other way of looking at things?
Outsider Art is still an open category and we are going to have to live with that and a continuing battle of terms. Terms are turf. Once everything is locked into place and there are no more disputes, Outsider Art will be dead: it too will no longer be art.
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"True art crops up whatever you aren't expecting it" (Jean Dubuffet 1949.
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