Courbet, Realism, and Vulgarity

 

In considering the connection between disgust and reality Courbet came to mind. Courbet was the creator of the realist movement in art. Though the movement is called Realism it is initially a misleading term. Courbet did not paint with anymore visual accuracy than a great many of his predecessors or many of his successors. (Consequently there is a great retrospective of Courbet’s at the Met going on right now that I got to see. However they do not have the Burial of Ornans or the big studio self portrait)

 

Indeed after Courbet the Impressionists thought of themselves as seeing reality freshly, realistically, without the artificial fetters of the past. All that to say an objective view of “reality” is always in question. Yet Courbet is father of the term. So what conditions did Courbet’s art fulfill in order to merit the term “reality?”

 

Perhaps some these are obvious: Courbet refused the sentiment or metaphysical representational motifs popular in his day. Instead Courbet painted his own local populace intending to show them without fetters in all their rags, poverty, and quiet dignity.

 

Through out art history reality (and sometimes revolution) is paired with dirt. Caravaggio hundreds of years before Courbet’s Stone Breakers or Burial at Ornans would paint his Madonna with dirty feet and a bloated body outraging the viewers of his day, Death of the Virgin. Similar complaints were laid against Courbet and his representation of nude women. I’m sure that I am missing a lot of history in between but I’m just trying to make a quick case, Joseph Beuys would materials like dirt and rust and fat. Beuy’s work would smell breaking down common sensory limitations of an artwork and making it confront the audience (an experience of disgust?) More recently Anselm Keifer’s paintings have dirt in them, as well as being representations of  earth.

 

The representation of dirt and the confluence of disgust and reality reveals an interesting tie in the notion of reality as something base, mute, and well, dirty. Might dirt also be a veiled reference to feces too. Think Chris Offeli’s Madonna? Might Offeli be aware of the connection between Caravaggio’s dirty virgin and his own black elphant dung Madonna, the Holy Virgin Mary? 

 

 

Courbet has a famous quip, “Show me an Angel and I’ll paint one.” In his desire for fidelity to reality Courbet refused to paint an angel. (I can’t think of a religious scene Courbet did paint). Courbet is the father of Realism because of his turn to the common, the vulgar, the ugly.

 

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.

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. 

Skill in Modern Art

In James Elkin’s Master Narrative and Their Discontent he suggests the possibility of reincorporating skill into the art historical discourse (specifically the history of painting). He notes the common gap between art academics and the rest of the world who still insist, “my six year old could do that.” Outside the art world a common standard used to judge all art is a 17th century academic aesthetic, that primarily includes the ability to render as the eye sees. Modern art is judged against photographic standards of realism. Thus the discomfort with modern art that often snubs its nose at craft in the traditional sense.

Skill signifies the triumph of culture in the culture/nature division. Jeff Koons comes to mind as the artist who epitomizes an artist who totally accepts his industrialized commodity driven culture. Koons does not build anything but is a director who hires his objects and images out to be made by professional craftsmen. A Koons piece is icily finished, polished and perfect, as good as the finish on any new automobile or plastic toy. Koons makes craft a weapon of alienation and tension, where kitschy, banal, sentimental objects are made car size with laser-crafted precision. Hence, Koons brings to light one use of craft in art. The machine has long trumped man’s handmade ability.

If skill signifies this triumph of culture over nature then the modern art’s cultivation of naïve craft, taken from folk art, children’s art, and the art of the mentally ill, would come to signify the acceptance of organicity and the animal state of nature. It also assumes an antagonistic posture towards culture. The raw and unfinished signifies an emotional release, the expulsion of tension, out of sync with the restraints and repression implied by skill and craft. Craft, from this point of view, rings emotionally hollow.

Skill became an embarrassment to the modern artist who sought to avoid it if s\he had it or to intentionally oppose it. Yet however fashionable this turn away from skill became the wide spread abandonment constitutes part of the mournful tone of modernity. Despite its rhetoric of progress and utopia, the cultivation of naiveté was a form of rebellion against high European culture. Notables are Gauguin’s famous abandonment of his upper middle class life to live in Tahiti, Picasso who curbed some of his own skills as a draftsman to draw like the adept child, Klee as well, Nolde, Dubbeffett, and Guston.

Skill in the production of artists like Koons and Hirst (one might add Peter Halley and many others) signifies the triumph of the mechanistic commercial world and our alienation from a world of computerized images and assembly line things, from all those things the artist who adopt intentionally “poor” signifiers think of as integral to humanity and to their experience of the world.

Skill necessarily concludes in the loss of the artist’s hand/body- and by extension it’s individuality. Perhaps concluding in the mobility of the film, capable of photography’s cold and seamless mimesis and of perfecting time and the real movement of the eye and the chronology of an action. The machine of course beats the eye, the mind, and the hand.

In the history of modern art, craft is made into a conservative position that reinforces passé, artistic tradition. While an art that intentionally courts the improvisational and the aleatory believes itself to be outside of the any standardized aesthetic. A contradiction, it always succumbs to the expansion of the aesthetic and the canonization of the rawness of expression, thus its rebelliousness is weakened and the artist necessarily moves on to something new.