Aesthetic or Inarticulate Form

Stephen James Newton, a painter and a writer, notes a stylistic inertia that characterizes psychotic art. In tandem a lack of development psychotic art also shows an obsession with intricate patterns and the decorative (like drawing a frame around an image). Both of these things he sees as evidence that psychotic artists use their aesthetic as a buffer against deep emotional substructures of the unconscious mind.

The intricate, decorative patterns characteristic of so much Outsider Art as well as its use of obscure religious symbolism constitute an obsession with surface style. Surface pattern is used as an “elaborate defensive network” designed to suppress unconscious inarticulate form, which he writes, is integral to true creative healing as it risks displaying unconscious fears and threats.

Inarticulate form, so pivotal to the work of the abstract Expressionists and the modern abstract painters of Europe, bring to consciousness the accidental, indefinite, distorted properties commonly repressed in perception to insure a good gestalt and a relatively stabile world view. Abstraction in the mid 20th century collectively lent inarticulate form symbolic and emotional resonance.

“Aesthetics” Newton writes are a “bulwark against the chaotic disruption of surface consciousness and rationality…(48)” To see a form aesthetically is to mark the moment it looses unconscious potency and becomes mere surface decoration. The modern use of chance and chaos are a threat to notions of beauty, balance, and stability. However Newton goes on to suggest that the threat of inarticulate form only works to increase the experience of aesthetic catharsis by eliciting a stronger and stronger amount of repression on behalf of the beholder until such repression becomes impossible. “…any increase in the depth of horror and ugliness of the depressive content will evoke a corresponding increase in formal harmony and beauty to contain it (51).”

Newton’s interpretation is part of a general, modernist unease with beauty and pleasure. Dubufett’s constitutes a large part of this reaction against a notion of the beautiful primarily by creating a new aesthetics of ugly. Taking ugly as a significant and useful tool Dubufett would make muddy, gray crusty paintings. His intention was to use vulgarity in order to offer a total alternative to dominating trends in western painting, like perspective, and the illusion of volume, as well as pleasureable uses of color and line.

His figures are flattened and devoid of the soft volume that characterized the common depiction of the female. Dubufett painted legs splayed with an angular grotesquery of sharp lines drawn into thick muddy paint. Dubufett would interpret “outsider” artist’s rawness, their disproportionate figures, and their an inability to create illusionist, space as ugly. For in a skilled and cultured artist like Dubufett such disproportion was a reaction against European art culture, an element lacking from the outsider’s work that he was influenced by. His work adopted signifiers of ugly, ugly not being one of the intended meanings of the mentally ill.

Newton, Stephen James Painting, Psychoanalysis, and Spirituality.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001

Dubuffet’s Reception

In 1946 at the second major exhibition of Dubuffet’s work the critics and public’s reaction was one of hostility and alarm. A critic wrote, “These 48 paintings alarmed the public by their imagery of cruel irony (few people realized how funny they were) and by their use of crude materials. In the best Dada tradition, paintings were slashed by infuriated spectators. Many of the critics were wildly antagonistic…(Hall and Metcalf 174)” Neither the public nor the critics could accept or take seriously the child’s scrawl and the raw unrefined imagery that informed Dubufett’s work. They could not conceive of the brutish and the raw aesthetically. Isn’t this proof that the Paris public understood Dubufett’s art work, recognizing the critique such art set against their small, upper class, Eurocentric world. It recalls the Nazi’s reaction against modern art in their attempts to undermine it by their Degenerate Art show. Both reactions act as a sign that Art Brut and modern art lived up, in someway, to its radical rhetoric.

 

Dubuffet sought an art that was free of tradition and fashion. An art that opposed the system of official culture that ‘asphyxiates’ creativity. Art Brut took the “common” man’s art seriously. Dubufett saw it as radically democratic and opposed to high art that was used as a “weapon of caste” and imperialism ( 85).

 

In light of Cubb’s critique that Outsider Art has is not democratic but inflates an obsolete mythology that characterized modernity what new interpretive framework must take its place? She reminds us that perhaps outsider art was never taken on its own terms but only when it entered into high art practice, therefore already contaminated with those things Dubufett sought to avoid. Art Brut becoming nothing more than a sign, a hollow shell whose authenticity we can no longer be believed in and never should have.

 

Dubuffet himself would seem to romanticize the marginalized. “Madness is a positive value” he said. Such phrases would seem implicate Dubufett in this process of misuse and misinterpretation where originality and psychosis is grotesquely combined.

 

Hall, Michael D. and Metcalf, Eugene W.

The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994

The Outsider Myth

 The rhetoric of Outsider is full of fiction and myth. It constitutes part of the outside, marginalized people and styles of the Philosophical and Social discourse called the Other. The discourse of the Other, like the Outsider, is made up of the marginalized and the socially disempowered. It consists of art made by non-western societies (unfairly labeled Primitive art), art made through out history by women, as well as childrens art, and art of the mentally ill.

This myth mirrors the myth of the modern artist as a heroic, nonconformist who asserts his autonomous individuality against a conformist and authoritative society. Structuralist and poststructuralist thought (an intellectual movement coming out of the 50 and 60’s and constituting a wide range of thinkers) with its emphasis on semiotics and the death of authenticity sought to discredit this myth. It was recognized that the originality of both the modern artist and the outsider is conditioned by the collective “text” of the culture. Postmodern thought would bring a damning critique over the category of the Other. It would suggest that to label an art form “Other”(or “Primitive,” or “Outsider”) tells us more about the labeler than the object itself. The terms Primitivism, Outsider Art, and the discourse surrounding female artists were all severely critiqued as male, Eurocentric extensions of chauvinism, imperialism, and colonialism.

 Yet this often ignored the process of absorption and appreciation that was saddled with the system of domination and control. This Other was not exclusively exploited but also recognized as a possible means of a critique on western culture. The critical position adopted by the modern artist was largely due in part to an appreciation and inspiration by this Other (notably Picasso’s appropriation of African art as well as Gauguin, also Paul Klee’s interest in children’s art, and the surrealists and, as mentioned, Dubufett’s interest in the art of the mentally ill). Appreciation happened together with the systematic pillaging of foreign objects (as well as people).

 Joanne Cubbs in her essay “Rebels, Mystics, and Outcastes: the Romantic Artist Outsider” takes a stance against the misuse and misinterpretation of outsider art. She writes, “the discourse of Outsider Art imposes a false intentionality upon some makers, obscures the original subversive meaning of others, and finally asserts it own hegemony of meaning over those it views as culturally disempowered in a way that is similar to the system it protests…the category of Outsider Art is itself the invention of an elite coterie…(Hall and Metcalf 86)”

 She notes that Dubufett’s work was devoted to extending the notion of avant-garde. Dubufett is creator of the term Art Brut (raw art); an artist who was integral in securing a discourse beyond a medical and psychoanalytic framework for Outsider Art. The untutored and untrained unknowingly became the newest inspiration for the modern artist and his/her attempt to undermine high art practices.   

 Outsider Art extends the false myth of romanticized individualism that plagued modernity. “Outsider Art is the most extreme example of the Romantic tendency to conflate social and artistic nonconformity, to re-encode social marginality as a willful act of creative individualism (85).”

 Though offering a sharp critique Cubb’s never explains how this should change the way we deal with the discourse of Outsider Art.

 Hall, Michael D. and Metcalf, Eugene W

The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994

The Modern Artist and The Outsider

Modern art is and modern artist helped create a culture of individualism. But intellectual currents in the 60’s became suspect of the cult of individuality and an artist’s desire for subjective expression. Afterwards in a backlash against the rhetoric of subjectivity and the expression of the unconscious artists sought to avoid subjective expression. But the discourse of individualism survived in the Outsider artist.

 Outsider art is one of the many terms given to art created outside the mainstream art world. It therefore includes a diverse amount of artists. The terms given to these unconventional artists are often misleading and are not adequate descriptions. An artist may be grouped as an outsider simply because there is nowhere else to put them. Other terms used beside outsider art is self-taught and naïve art. This category comes out of Art Brut, meaning “raw art.” Art Brut was a term created by a French artist, Jean Dubufett, in the 40’s and was meant to describe the art of the untrained and marginalized. Dubufett was largely interested in art made by the mentally ill. Outsider art then can mean art made by schizophrenics, children, and the insane, but it also includes self taught artists or any artists outside of the official mainstream.  

As the label suggests the art world found it difficult to place Outsider artists in any of the convenient categories available to established and academically trained fine artists. The Outsider appeared to be irreducibly individual and so inherited the individuality that was glamorized and celebrated by the modern artist.

 The modern artist profited from the, often romanticized, stereotype of the individual artist genius as well as contributed to its persistence with bull-nosed and reclusive behavior. For the modern artist individuality became an end in itself. Where did the modern artist seek inspiration for this maverick, nonconformist expression of individuality? Outside the realm of the institutionalized and official cannons of high culture. Modern art looked to folk art and art made by children or the institutionalized because it sought signifiers outside of what was considered aesthetic, which it saw as stifling. An Outsider artist uses a privately cultivated technique and ignores (or is unaware of) the concerns of the officially sanctioned art world. They often have a highly personal, idiosyncratic style that lacks the refinement of the schooled artist. Many modern artists adopted the unfinished and raw look of a child’s drawing or a psychotic’s disproportion. This process would come to modify how we looked at these works and change what we mean by finished as well as changing notions of value and skill.

However, the distinctions between outsider and insider have become obscured and are no longer useful categories in finding the insider from the outsider. Modernity has created a condition in which all styles are readily appropriated. As Arthur Danto writes in an article on Outsider Art, there is “no obvious way to tell whether the artist is a former short-order cook who took up painting or someone who graduated with highest honors from Cal Arts (64).” Yet the distinction does remain useful on another level. The short order cook and the student may use the exact same signifier with dissimilar intentions and meanings.