in reference to the artistic creation, in general, Dubuffet states:
"il faut qu'il soit une projection immédiate de ces humeurs de l'artiste..."
if we assume that there is little advance consideration of developing a well-rounded and cohesive oeuvre--by the ArtBrutists--during the actual creation of the works, the artist then is free to change. and we must assume that the artists' temperment must necessarily change from day to day...so if there is no professional motivation underlying, one is truly free to be one's expressive-self-in-constant-flux.
"l'art consiste essentiellement dans cette exteriorisation des movements d'humeur les plus intimes, les plues profondément intérieurs de l'artiste."
Dubuffet continues this thought stating that this exteriorization of the deepest essential self will be recongnized by those seeing the art and the we will recognize that psychically we are the same (as the mad, or the psychically free, rather); we possess the same essence, compulsions, and inner-workings.
"we look for an artist who explodes away the surface layers, revealing all those glimmering beneath."
and sometimes we as artists do not realize we've been knocked-up by someone else' ideas, aesthetics. the bastard art we call our own, not realizing it's been tainted by some outside forces to which we'd not seen we were susceptible.
an artist--argues Dubuffet, in regards to those interned in mental hospitals--needs solitude, perhaps a bit of boredom, to find in himself the drive and the will to create. in the absence of other excitations, he will fabricate his own "théâtre de fêtes et d'echantements."
"tous les méchanismes qui fonctionnent chez le fou existent aussi chez le sain, et ils sont l'un et l'autre bien plus semblables qu'ils ne le croient--ou du moins que ne le croit celui-ce qui prétend être sain"
my translation follows:
all the mechanisms that function in the crazy also exist in the sane, and the are both more similar than they believe--or at least less so than those who pretend to be sane are willing to believe.
on the artist Aloïse, whom will undoubtedly be revisited in detail, in future entries...
the figures with blued-out eyes in Aloïse' drawings are often mis-construed to be representative of masked persons. rather, they are blind to the reality into which their portraits gaze, for the simple fact that they don't exist in it. in addition to bluing out the eyes, the figures are further removed from reality by Aloïse' negation of a continuous narrative consistent between the thousands of images. though, some narrative may be perceived from one page to the next, the absence of any continuous logic frees her oeuvre from such banal requirements. and further, it insists on a certain timelessness, impermanence, and irrationality as its rules, rather than its exceptions.
Dubuffet, unconvinced of Aloïse' acting mad--though her sever autism is documented in other writings-- says that one mustn't lose sight of the fact that one who's given themselves over entirely to madness has, at least in some small part, done so voluntarily.
Foucault, who we'll revisit in a few days, says in Madness and Civilization "madness is the déja-là of death... what death unmasks was never more than a mask...from the vain mask to the corpse, the same smile persists. but when the madman laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death."
