i went with Edith, from Austria, who's last name, i've lost track of at the moment. it's not that i'm so forgetful--see, Edith was here this weekend visiting my friend Miriam Bajtala, who fell ill and couldn't come along with us. and so, it was just the two of us strangers...either way, Edith is the one person i've met in my time here that shares the same interest in ArtBrut, and specifically art of the insane. and so we had a lot to say to one another. we'd talked most of the way there about what we'd been reading, what we were making in our studios, and why it was relevant at all to read about art brut at this point in our histories. we agreed that it was particularly in effort to unlearn everything piled-on in art school, and in effort to unlearn critical thinking.
the closerie falbala was executed between 1971-1973 by Dubuffet and a team of technicians. it's quite a grand accomplishment, and is representative of the Hourloupe Cycle for which he's most known. the site is nestled away in the woods, and was damp and slippery with wet leaves when we arrived. the Closerie, the garden-simulacrum is just large enough to feel like a site, once you're in it, but not so grand as to feel like a park, say, and is larger than monumental sculpture--or more inviting anyway. and our group numbered about 10 people--two families, including a set of talkative toddlers, and locals from the banlieu. i'll update this post with pictures soon, but what was really most striking about being there, navigating this undulating, black and white terrain, was watching the way in which the groups' shapes and colors interacted with the piece. imagine this: a blond woman in fur coat, 50ish, stockings, and 3 inch heels with a toddler modifies her movements to the terrain and to the child run-amok. i mean at first you'd think the site seems out of place (stark white and black on earth-tones). within the closerie, you realize we the visitors are quite out of place there--tripping, wobbling around, and interrupting each others' views of the work with our brightly colored, awkward bodies.
the interior of the Closerie-the Villa Falbala- is warm, carpeted, and silent. it reeks of laquer and styrofoam, and is a claustrophobic's worst nightmare. the interior motif is blue and white and black (where the exterior is white and black), and for all its cavernous qualities, it's close and calm and very still. within the Villa Falbala is housed the Cabinet Logologique (completed between 1967 and 1969. it's made entirely of carved styrofoam slabs, vinyl based paint, and laquer....hence the odor. if not for the smell, it'd be possible perhaps to live there, in awe of the thing for months. unfortunately photography is not permitted. but if i were to attempt to paint you a picture of what i'd witnessed i'd begin thusly: imagine the linear intensity of Jackson Pollock's splatter paintings, four of them, measuring 20 x 20 feet each in very close quarters, forming a room. though, Dubuffet's lines demark 2D spaces with some intentionality, and within the spaces themselves live small terrains, and the individual terrains converse with one another across the grander space. and the colors of each line and each space are also in conversation. and we were there with three toddlers who, like us, were completely in awe and completely optically over-stimulated . and, the most remarkable things happen to non-archival substances over so much time: you'd never imagine what on earth the medium was--it'd yellowed so much that maybe it was marble, or papier- mache. and the combination of the yellowing and the boldness of the painted primary colors was so ecstatically perfect. and you know, i'm not biased at all...
Dubuffet says of the Cabinet Logologique:
"My work preceding this cycle creates sinuous graphics responding with immediacy to spontaneous and, so to speak, uncontrolled impulses of my hand which traces them. These graphics start uncertain, fleeting, ambiguous figures. Their movement unclenches in the spirit that finds itself in their presence a " suractivation " of the faculty of seeing in their tangles all sorts of objects which make and unmake themselves as the eye moves, thus aligning intimately the transitory and the permanent, the real and the deceptive. It results in (...) a grasp of conscience of the illusionary character of the world we believe to be real, to which we call the real world. "
the site across the road houses the CouCou Bazar, a grand selection of Dubuffet's earlier paintings, the maquettes for Closerie, and several large sculptures from the Hourloupe Cycle.
and it is with apologies that this post comes almost a week after the fact. j'avais la Grippe (the flu) since visiting last saturday. c'est pas la Grippe H1N1, peut-etre la Grippe Dubuffet??
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