Dialogues with Art Brut
On the 15th anniversary of his gallery, Christian Berst’s dream has come true: to build a bridge between Art Brut and contemporary art. Opposite the first space, he is opening a second one called The Bridge. The programming will be entrusted to external curators. The first one, Phillip March Jones, offers Mark My Words to really draw our attention to this subject (17 October - 21 November, 2020).
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Your beginnings... I started out by delighting in the great inspired ones, the literary madmen, Lautréamont, Nerval, Rimbaud. One day, in a bookshop, I came across a book about Adolf Wölfli.Then I discovered les Fous
littéraires (Literary Madmen), André Blavier’s anthology. Taking an interest in Wölfli, I remember reading Dubuffet, in particular the
Prospectus with all his texts on Art Brut gathered in this volume published by Gallimard. I very soon had the feeling of a gap between what I was reading and Wölfli’s work. Dubuffet was talking about emancipation from the academic canons and the dominant culture, describing a form of artistic Rousseauism that seemed to me to contradict the complexity and sophistication of many of the brut productions I was discovering at the time. I began to frequent people who had become interested in this subject before me, but the further I went the more I found problems with the Art Brut milieu. I began to question a number of Dubuffet’s dogmas. Immodestly, I would say that my conception was a little more generous than that of these specialists. I wanted others to take hold of the subject rather than remain in a circle that defined Art Brut in opposition to contemporary art. But I have always hated binary visions, in art and in politics alike. I’m a proponent of nuance, of related ideas that sometimes overlap and intertwine. The creation of the gallery is the result of a combination of circumstances. Sixteen years ago, as I had worked in publishing, I decided to create my own publishing house and to do so I took a ground-floor space looking onto the street, near Bastille (1). My entourage, who were fed up with hearing me continually talk about ancient Mesopotamia, because of the genesis of our civilisation, and about Art Brut, perhaps for reasons close to my own, encouraged me to hold exhibitions there. We created an association. At first I didn’t have much time to take care of it, but then it turned out that the two most active people left. An audience had come that exceeded our expectations, and so either someone had to take over or we had to stop. So I improvised. I didn’t frequent the art world, I didn’t know how a gallery worked, I didn’t have any money. I learned on the job.
The first difficulties?
The dogmatism of some advocates of a segregationist line in Art Brut. Unfortunately, I encountered the same thing in the contemporary art world. For the latter, Art Brut was the business of Dubuffet and a few reactionaries opposed to the art of the “elites”. It was complicated to explain that I was looking for a third way, that of dialogue and reciprocal enhancement.
ROLE OF COLLECTORS
Things are starting to shift... Exhibitions were held in a past that predates my story, but to my astonishment they weren’t followed up: for example, Harald Szeemann’s wonderful work in 1972 at the Documenta in Kassel on the notion of “individual mythologies”. At the Kunsthalle in Bern he had also shown the collection of Hans Prinzhorn (2). In 1978 the exhibition les Singuliers de l’Art [The Singulars of Art] was held at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, but the selection went beyond the realm of Art Brut, and included simple self-taught practices. It was more representative of what the AngloSaxons call Outsider Art, that is to say everything that isn’t contemporary art, and indeed I reproach this concept for operating with the same binarism. You can’t put a selftaught artist who has a “professionalizing” practice on the same level as Adolf Wölfli. Personally, I saw things evolve when the proportion of collectors of Art Brut exclusively, among those who frequented my gallery, decreased compared to those who came from other spheres, especially contemporary art. Without wishing to flatter them, my collectors are distinguished by their culture. They are people who are interested in philosophy, literature, some of them also collecting modern or primitive art. On the other hand, in the institutions, very little is changing, except for the occasional case of works that I have been able to defend and that have been acquired by institutions in France—I’m not talking about MoMA, which is more proactive in the field, even if the major exhibition that would show this field as such has yet to take place. Nonetheless, things are going to speed up because we are seeing that Christie’s has an annual sale of Art Brut, where the artists featured set records. Alas, once again it’s the market that will dictate the tempo for the museums. Fortunately, a young generation of curators and art historians is emerging, who are taking an interest in Art Brut of their own accord, since it is almost absent from university curricula, where there is a glaring neglect.
But is it possible to write a history of Art Brut?
Let’s draw a parallel with primitive art, essentially cultural, whose artists were anonymous: well, art history has managed to incorporate them. There is a history of African art that examines an evolution in forms and modes of representation. The equivalent exists in the field of Art Brut. There is the as yet little-known example of an Art Brut artist, a monk at the papal court of Avignon, Opicinus de Canistris (3). We can see how this visionary, non-standard work is nevertheless part of the culture and part of the catalogue of forms that were those of his time, the 14th century. The Maison Victor Hugo showed asylum collections from the 19th century Le Fétichiste. « Sans titre ». 2003. Tirage photographique d'époque / period photographic print. 15 x 10 cm
where one could almost date the works individually. Can Art Brut be thought of in relation to the continuum of art history? I don’t have a definitive answer, but I think we should at least ask the question. One project for The Bridge is a Japanese curator who will show one of the artists already present in my exhibition on Art Brut in Japan, Ukaï, in dialogue with traditional Ukiyo-e works from the 17th century (4). Subtraction from any culture, if you think about it, is just impossible. Someone who has the ability to express themselves with the creative genius of an Art Brut artist in the rough has a culture of a richness that most “normal” people don’t have. Should we then still talk about Art Brut? Most of those whose task it is to preserve and transmit art to the greatest number of people have been unable to do this work with Art Brut. Even if one removes the qualifier “Brut”, while pointing out to them that there is something special there that deserves attention, I fear that they aren’t any more capable of changing paradigm. So, reinscribing Art Brut in the history of art, but thinking about its specificities. It is true that Art Brut artists don’t seek dialogue with their predecessors, their peers, but they aren’t amateurs either. Their practice refers to the genesis of the creative impulse, which is a way of answering the question of one’s place in the world; it may seem over the top, but in fact it is a quest for harmony, an attempt to make the world habitable. The notable difference is this: artists who interact with the world are in dialogue, exchange, extimacy. This is much less the case, if at all, of the artists I take care of, for whom the other is intimate. If recognition comes by chance, I’m not saying that they don’t accept it as a blessing, a fortiori because they have always felt left out. That said, a work of Art Brut may seem to be addressed only to the one who created it, when in fact, by taking an ostensible form, it exposes itself to being received by another extimacy. Depending on the case, this is more or less apparent.
THE ESSENCE OF ART
There remains the notion of otherness. The notion of the art of the insane is a caricature of another era. Otherness is there, certainly, it’s even sometimes affixed to a diagnosis, which I don’t gloss over because I reject this taboo. On the other hand, without pathologising to excess, we must nevertheless recognise that if otherness is a breeding ground for all artists, it is potentially more fertile in those I work with. On the evening of the opening of the Zdenĕk Košek exhibition (5) a friend said to me: it’s terribly beautiful. I replied: you’re right, it’s a bit like a Quattrocento crucifixion, terribly beautiful to look at and terribly difficult to live with. Košek has made light from a situation that I wish upon nobody else: to feel invested with the burden of saving humanity! What a responsibility, what a burden, what suffering! Likewise, we must remember that Wölfli’s great work was accomplished in the cell of an asylum, and allowed this cowherd boy to escape from it, imagining a world beyond him and beyond us. But otherness is not necessarily endured, if we take as an example the spiritualists who created in a modified state of consciousness, for example: thus the engraver Desmoulin who, during such sessions in 1901, became the seismograph of occult forces, sweeping away all academicism. Social otherness and mental otherness are powerful magnets that attract creation, and the breakthroughs and upheavals observed in the field of Art Brut are often prodigious. Artists and intellectuals have grasped this from the outset. Klee described Art Brut as “sublime”, and Nietzsche stung the Normopaths by reminding them that “those we saw dancing were taken for madmen by those who did not hear the music”. In fact, Art Brut can be seen as a metaphor for the profound insularity of each individual. The great paradox, the miracle, almost, is that it has the power to reveal a part buried in each of us; and this, even though it wasn’t expressly intended for us. What’s the project of The Bridge? The space is dedicated to dialogues between Art Brut and other categories of art. It is a place of pollination. This dialogue should help us to ask the real question of what a work of art is; or what it should be. Why do some seem so similar when the mechanisms behind them are so different? When I put on Dan Miller’s exhibition, I asked Richard Leeman to write the preface because he is a specialist on Cy Twombly. Some of Twombly’s works are reminiscent of Dan Miller’s, but the processes that led to these works are diametrically opposed. On the one hand, an artist, trapped in his otherness, needs to articulate his language to interact with the world; on the other hand, a “professional” artist deliberately deconstructs his own. Yet there is a meeting point. What does it teach us? Here we touch upon the essence of art. n Translation: Chloé Baker (1) It should be noted that the Christian Berst gallery has an important editorial activity, for which it was awarded Filaf Award in 2019. (2) Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), a German psychiatrist who built up one of the first collections of Art Brut. Works from his collection were exhibited in the exhibition of degenerate art (1937) alongside modern works of art. (3) Sylvain Piron, Dialectique du monstre. Enquête sur Opicino de Canistris, Zones sensibles, 2015. (4) Japanese artistic movement of the Edo period (1603-1868), favorishing the engraved representation of the “floating world” of the night—prostitution, gambling, theater. (5) Zdeněk Košek, exhibition at the Christian Berst Gallery, 3 Sept.-10 Oct. 2020.