Beauty and Ugliness

Dubuffet’s work and language carry an undercurrent of moral judgment that often accompanies aesthetics of ugly, while an aesthetics that seeks beauty is often accused of escapism and hedonism.

Dubuffet also commented that the distinctions between the categories of ugliness and beauty are western concepts. He sees questions of beauty or ugliness as irrelevant to primitive art or art brut. Arthur Danto in his book the Abuse of Beauty would agree beauty was not “the point of most of the world’s great art (36).”

How can I then justify using the terms ugliness or beauty if they were part of a false hieractical system? Or if questions of beautiness or ugliness are limiting concept provided by a Eurocentric view of art?

The problem with the two terms is that I risk reducing art into binary categories, essentializing artists and making their works easy, ignoring their paradouxes. I want to use ugly and beauty as helpful terms in an understanding of art. The categories are contingent, but are useful in describing an artist’s tone and intention, not in perpetuating a simple duality. Herbert Marcuse in The Aesthetic Deminsion writes, quoting Adorno, “‘even the cry of despair…still pays its tribute to the infamous affirmation’ and a representation of the most extreme suffering ‘still contains the potential to wring out enjoyment (66).’” In other words, both extremes carry their own contradiction within them. Beauty contains seeds of decay and the ugly the chance of redemption.

Dubuffet’s Aesthetic

“The secret is to a thing badly. If you serve someone spinach that is cooked the way it should be, no one notices or remembers that they have eaten spinach. Whereas if you burn it, it shocks their taste buds and they become immediately aware that it is burned spinach and they gain new insights into the characteristics of spinach, etc (23).”
-Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet’s intention was to shock the viewer out of normal visual experience or to extend his metaphor the normal palette. He saw his art as a reaction against both the good tastes of academic traditional art and also the refined, esoteric tastes of the avant-garde. Dubuffet saw himself as radically democratic. Through the appropriation of a common vernacular he avoided the elitism of the avant-garde, with its obscurity and complexity. But he also saw himself as radically individualistic. His willful raw, unfinished, “badly” made images were meant to offend good taste and the common preference for the sentimental and picturesque.

By over (or under) cooking his paintings Dubuffet hoped that the experience would cut through all pretense to an experience of raw, unmediated matter. This constitutes in large part his turn from academic finish to physical gritty surfaces and crude draftsmanship (see the blog entry about craft below).

Dubuffet sought subject matter that was both banal and crude. He thought of himself as a realist directly engaged with the world, devoid of artifice and the restraint that characterized western culture. “Painting operates, through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves (18).”

Dubuffet rejected the categorical, analytic thought that was integral to western thought. In his attempt to reject the obscurity and categories of Occidental culture Dubuffet turned to the art of the insane and “primitive” art.

In his attempts to reject western culture Dubuffet was unable to avoid adopting the rhetoric of irrationality and naiveté with which the west characterized primitive art. But Dubuffet did see primitivism as a healthy alternative to the artificiality and linguistic dependence that was a distinctive feature of western thought. He would, however, romanticize the “irrationality” and “madness” he found in art of the insane and “primitive”. He saw insanity as a way of getting closer to reality instead of the loss of reality and the escape into fiction and delusion that so often accompanies clinical forms of insanity.

Though much of Dubuffet’s thought came under critical suspicion and notions of the raw and the unmediated as well as notions of authenticity were called into question Dubuffet was also able to expand the cannon of art, calling previous forms of art to be reevaluated and reappreciated. It allowed a whole new supply of signifiers into the discourse, signifiers of innocence and humor and crudeness.

Rowell, Margit Jean Dubuffet.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York 1973.