Goya, "The Madhouse"
In reference to de Sade, "The madness of desire...the most unreasonable of passions--all are wisdom and reason, since they are a part of the order of nature....There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored."
In the "classical experience" of art and madness, "there existed a region where madness challenged the work of art, reduced it ironically, made its iconographic landscape a pathological world of hallucinations; that language which was delirium was not a work of art. And conversely, delirium was robbed of its meager truth of madness if it was called a work of art."
And on Nietzsche & Artaudian madness..."(it) is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art; it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void (into which they slipped)...Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably, and hangs forever over history."
Though madness is not the only language "common to the work of art and the modern world...but (rather) through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, (it) actually engages within itself the world's time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without an answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself."
**It's perhaps important to reiterate here this blog's agenda, as well as my own here at the computer. I'm busy reading everything written on the subject of Art Brut, particularly the works and writings of Jean Dubuffet in his search for art in the mental institutions in Europe. Before Madness and Civilization, I'd written about Michel Thévoz' writings on Art Brut and art chez les fous (Thévoz was the first director of the Art Brut Museum in Lausanne, and a dear friend of Dubuffet), and is an incredibly insightful critic and art historian.
In the months to come, I'll be updating this site with photos from my visits to archives here in Paris--including the Sainte Anne Hospital, the abcd-artbrut Gallery, and the Biblitheque Nationale Française.... among others. At the moment, the blog is a synthesis of what-all I'm reading, what I'm making here in the studio, as well as my two cents on art-openings and exhibitions I've attended. And as I mentioned above, I'm aiming to condense these text-fragments into something a bit more directed and pithy... thanks for reading~~
1 comment:
I feel like such an old man for saying this:
Isn't there a point in the survey of language and expression at which one cuts off the inward wrangling and merely hopes that meaning is current and consigned meaning...pure or contaminated?
These encapsulations--you dutifully and instructively cite them as such, are maddening in their respective authors' paring down of human functions and perceptions.
I'll restrain myself to the Marquis, as an example. I find his observation, via Foucault (?...Pardon, it's been a while and I don't intend to pick that vile book up again) dubious, "a region in the classical experience...where madness challenged the work of art..."
???
I don't pretend to know the contemporaneous history well enough to argue the tenor of that day, but I can say with good gut confidence that a perpetual madness prevails and duly informs what we create now--in and out of institution walls.
The classical experience?
Doubtless there's an imperative distinction between art and art of the "mad"--if only to hopefully appreciate the parameters of what we do not understand of the psyche, but when such minute distinctions are made between the uncommon art and the common must there not be faithful parallel scrutiny paid to the distinctions between the tones of response between one era and another? What I mean is, by what critical license does the Marquis (again...or Foucault) say this era of impact is over?
Control and rehabilitative surroundings must surely have changed over time, but wretchedness is wretchedness, it adjusts. It's inspiration--and therefore output, must surely too.
My point is simply, and perhaps this might be said regarding many of the post-structuralist observers, that there is an unnerving tendency to take certain variables for rock solid critical truth while luxuriating in the indeterminate aspects of others. It tends to feel arbitrary and ultimately empty. After all, what use is an arbitrary discipline?
That burns me up!
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