(Yes,
another art exhibition that's come and gone. Would you expect anything
else around here?)
”Our
culture is like a garment... that no longer fits us. This culture is
like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the
language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.”
- Dubuffet
Art
in the Raw
Jean
Dubuffet is a smart choice on the Pallant House gallery's part. Like
Edward Burra who graced these walls before him he's an
important figure who's been neglected by British galleries in recent
times. (By their reckoning, for nearly fifty years!) But more
importantly he was arguably the rock that started the rolling,
outsider art's Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McClaren rolled into one. He
coined the term Art Brut (“raw art”) in 1945, as he sought an
antidote to classicist orthodoxies outside the art world. He waxed
lyrical over art which was “completely pure, raw... invented in all
it's phases by the artist, from his impulses alone.”
All
of which, needless to say, is a hopeless romanticism. Dubuffet was
using the mentally ill in the way Gauguin
used Tahitian islanders or Picasso
African art – fetishistically, expecting somebody else to
busy themselves with building your escape capsule, envisaging a group
of noble savages who had somehow escaped all of society's
conditioning. It's labelling the other according to your needs.
Except
worse. The wish to reframe insanity as some kind of super-lucidity, a
kind of contemporary sequel to shamanism, seems a lot to load on
people who weren't coping that well with life in the first place.
It's like when a rich person comments the homeless are free of ties.
The correct rejoinder is “how the hell would you know?”
Yet
let's not be too hasty. Unlike Gauguin or Picasso
Dubuffet was no mere plunderer, he was as interested in collecting
and displaying examples of Art Brut as he was in it influencing his
own art. And he was as interested in art by children or the otherwise
untrained as he was by the insane - it was merely the last group that
won all the notoriety.
Plus,
more widely, Modernism had a history of being right for all the wrong
reasons. Art Brut did prove a handy method of slipping the seemingly
pervasive rules of Classicism, which at that point seemed so
naturalised, of getting back to making marks on paper. Though
Dubuffet was influenced by and associated with the Surrealists, in
this sense Art Brut was as much a proto-punk movement.
The
show starts with a quote from the man describing his two tendencies - “to exaggerate the marks of invention, and the other, the opposite,
which leads me to eliminate all human presence... and drink from the
source of absence.”
The
Source of Absence
...which
is followed, naturally enough by an example of each tendency. “The
source of absence” is represented by one of his Texturologie
paintings 'Texturologie IX (Jain)' (1957). (The
illo above is actually of 'Texturologie VIII (Dec)',
but is probably enough to give you an idea.) Dubuffet painted this
series flat on the floor, often scattering sand on the canvas,
attacking the surface with sandpaper and other abrasive substances,
or scoring it with a fork. The results look as though they could have
almost been made by some random process, even by being left out in
the elements. The question they ask us is – why bother to
paint things, when you can make suggestive marks
which work just as well, if not better?
They're
like Ernst's
frottage and grattage works pushed along a step, with the
apparent absence of an image creating a mystery in the mind of the viewer. The point isn't so much that eventually you do decipher some
hidden image, like in a join-the-dots game. What makes the viewing
compelling isn't the image you make out, so much as the prevailing
sense you're just on the cusp of descerning it. In today's bid for
Pseud's Corner I'm going to suggest these paintings work more like
meditational aids; your eye lingers, just as when you watch clouds
pass in the sky.
They
remind me of all the times I've blithely quoted Norbert Lynton's line
about Picasso being close to the roots of art. You look at this work
and start to feel that Picasso was really reclining in the penthouse
of art while Dubuffet laboured in the basement, scratching
obsessively on the walls with a compass end. This is art at it's most
hands-on, most inky-fingered.
Mapping
the Ghost Society
The
following works belong to a loose series dubbed the Paris Circle,
made as Dubuffet returned to live in the French capital. These
couldn't be more unlike the celebration of the 'gay' Paris in
Impressionism, a parade of peacocks, it's streets teeming but
possessed of some underlying order.
'Affluence
(Attendance)' (March 1961, above) seems deliberately poised
to leave you unsure whether this is a crowd scene or just a page of
doodles, a jumble of faces. Each face is (as the indicia puts it)
“lit in streaky whites and pinks”, while the torsos are filled in
with darker hues, their separating black outlines left barely
visible. This throws the faces into the foreground, as if they float
on some murky sea. Each is seen either straight on or as a perfect
profile. And even when the figures face each other, such as in the
upper left, it's hard to figure out whether they are actually
engaging one another or just happen to be lined up together on a
canvas.
It's
so reminiscent of the drawing exercise where you fill a sheet of
paper with cartoon heads, each one a separate character caught in as
few lines as possible, that this cannot be accidental. Dubuffet said himself: “I do not see in what way the
face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other.
A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any
other country, with its towns, and suburbs.”
The
sense of that ambiguity being deliberate, as if the faces themselves
are not sure whether they are linked or not, is taken up by a
subsequent painting – 'Vire-Volte (Spinning Around)'
(May 1961, above), which hits you like the onset of a fever. This time the
figures are in a definite street scene, but it doesn't appear to be
doing them much good. They're split into two by a central barrier
that seems more undulating river than neat, straight road. Yet even
within their own sides they line up awkwardly, stuck together and yet
simultaneously isolated. (I would semi-seriously link this painting
to the celebrated French distaste for queueing!)
Their
bold white outlines at first make the background appear flat, yet
rather than reassuringly solid it's a morphing surface of shades and
hues - like a bruised skin. The signs in the background are parodies
of shop names, saying things like 'Knick-Knacks' or 'Ghost Society.'
Notably
in the introductory quote Dubuffet contrasted the dead language of
culture with the streets, and here he is clearly putting forward Art
Brut as a more contemporary method of expressing the alienating urban
experience. The naïve, child-like style of the work reacts potently
with the grotesque subject matter. It induces a reaction similar to
when you see art by children who have been in a war zone; shootings
and bombings depicted in the deadpan, innocent style usually reserved
for picnics and birthdays. Yet here it is not the friction of style
against content that causes that reaction - rather, it is how
spookily easily the two fit together. The division of the painting
into zones, the isolated, heavily outlined figures... it's like the
direct eye of children's art saw the harsh truth all along, which the
soothing classical conventions of our culture tried to shelter us
from.
'The
Irish Jig (Le Gigue Irlandaise' (Sept 1961, above) is
another sequel to 'Affluence', albeit one that
takes things in quite a different direction. It's almost like a
time-lapse photo taken after the earlier painting, with the faces
reduced to morphing, cellular forms – form fading away before your
eyes. The faces are still semi-visible through cartoon motifs, dots
within circles as eyes, stretched sausages as mouths. But what most
jumps at you is the change in palette, the murky browns, bruised
purples and off-whites left behind for a riot of bold primary
colours. (That these three pictures could have been created within a
matter of months seems extraordinary.)
A
Mad Desire To Impose Order
It's
this work which provides the link to the Hourloupe series, which
Dubuffet worked on through the rest of the Sixties and dominates the
rest of the exhibition. The word, though invented, seems rooted in
“hourler” (to shout), “hurler“ (to howl), “loup” (wolf)
and last but not least “l'entourloupe” (to make a fool of).
These
sprang from doodles Dubuffet absently made while on the phone. After
the cellular jigsaw puzzle of 'Irish Jig', the
individual elements become larger, more amorphous and more complex,
just as the colour scheme reduces to red, blue and black, often in
the form of stripes. These are them fitted into the outline of an
overall shape, such as in 'Solario' (1961, up top)
or 'Site Inhabited By Objects' (1961, above).
Dubuffet’s
intention seems to have been to challenge the apparent solidity of
objects; what appears to be a teacup sitting stoutly on the shelf, or
even the head of another human being, is actually only a morphing
swirl of atoms on which we impose our prejudices and associations. He commented how he “intended to challenge the objective
nature of being. The notion of being is presented here as relative
rather than irrefutable: it is merely a projection of our minds, a
whim of our thinking.”
Though
I like not one single thing about any of these works, which look to
me like nothing other than crazy paving on bad drugs, it's those
regular, stick-of-rock stripes that really rankle. The volatility of
the earlier works is held in thrall by those bold outlines,
imprisoned by those stripes as evenly spaced as the bars of a
dungeon. After the savage figures and suggestive forms of earlier,
it's like swapping the wild woods for an English country garden.
In
a reversal of the standard dictum of Modernism, the works look wrong
in all the wrong ways - not shamanic and visionary
but obsessive-compulsive, a mad desire to impose order. (With their
questioning of objects they seemingly resemble Cubism. But this is
superficial, for they're just one-faced likenesses.)
Yet
at the same time with their bright colours they seem fashionably
Sixties, almost 'pop' in effect. (At this time Dubuffet also took to
using contemporary disposable materials such as polystyrene for
sculpture.) Given the changes in art around that time, principally
the growth of pop, there's the taint of opportunism about this new
direction. The result is a strange, queasy mixture of the calculated
and the disturbing – they're psychotically jolly.
The
Hourloupes probably work best used as elements of design, such as in
the twin posters Dubuffet made for his Tate and ICA shows in 1966
(above). Though the text is hand-drawn and lent a charming wonkiness,
the straight letter forms still give the morphing cells something to
rebel against. (Dubuffet would seem to have excelled in design. The
show includes other posters, catalogues and even invitation cards he
designed – all simple yet striking.)
The
exhibition, in short, suckered me in with a few fantastic
introductory works then proved a let-down with almost every
subsequent room. In one way I feel like I'd finally got to hear the Stones, but heard a compilation chiefly devoted to the Eighties and Nineties. But perhaps there's an upside to that. I came out of
the Burra show feeling I'd had my knowledge and appreciation of him
expanded, but as a consequence wouldn't need to see another Burra
show for a while. I came out of this feeling I'd had my interest in
Dubuffet piqued rather than sated. Like his Texturologie paintings,
not only is his mystery, his allure, still out there but I feel it
more keenly than before. Dubuffet is still raw to me.
This
Dubuffet exhibition was part of a group of shows at the Pallant
House Under the umbrella title 'Outside In', all dedicated to various forms of Outsider Art. To hear about
the others go here...
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