synthesizing notes III : Michel Thévoz

from Art Brut, psychose et médiumnité:

Dubuffet believed that the most cultured people were the 'everymen,' those who found high culture intimidating.
He said of his own work, in an interview, "I seek to paint like everyone--like the everyman."
The interviewer is baffled.
"I am the only one in the world who paints like everyone," he explained.
(note : Sartre's 'serial alterity // passive activity // recurrence)

Baudelaire : "Genius is infancy revisited at will." (+ perhaps the capacity to play one's alter-egos, those perhaps retired since childhood)

Foucault : "la maladie mentale est comme une archéologie de la libido."

Feyerabend : "they must make an oneiric world to discover the characteristics of the real world"... (de la délire heuristique)

Dubuffet : "il n'y a que de l'art psychopathologique."

Thévoz : "la teneur artistique d'une oeuvre est en raison même de sa déraison."

Nietzsche : "si on voulait la santé, on supprimerait le génie."

Thévoz : "The theory of mediumnity adequatly reflects, or in each case is symptomatic of, the condition of the damned of Earth in search for their soul."

Augustin Lésage

Thévoz argues that spiritism/occultism is at base "psychology projected on the exterior world." unless we believe mediumistic practices actually channel the dead, we must believe that the medium is both author and 'reader' of the received messages. by displacing ownership of the messages received, the medium is freer to express 'pulsionnel' aspects of his being--those perhaps previously sublimated by the author.

et jadis,
le Platon dit que "les plus beaux poèmes épiques ne sont pas les effets de l'art de poète, mais d'un état d'inspiration et de possession. Tel poète sera possédé par telle Muse, telle par telle autre."

translation:
Plato says : "the most beautiful epic poems are not the effects of the poet's own artistry, but the state of inspiration (that comes from) possession. this poet will be possessed by this muse, each by each other."

synthesizing notes II : michel thévoz

from Art Brut:

it's essential to understand that the original impulse to study & classify ArtBrut as such (Dubuffet et al) was an antagonistic gesture--against culture, against 'fine art proper.' Thévoz points out that the modernists' initial interest in ethnographic art was similarly motivated. however, where the fetishization of ethnographica sets up a false dichotomy between Occidental Art and that of the Other, ArtBrut attempts no such polarization.

naïves perhaps cannot be accused of mystification (of their work/lives), rather the art world is guilty of "mythification" of these artists who are "with only one foot" in fine art, and with the other very hesitant to move from surer ground.

while there is no visually apparent defining characteristic to l'art chez les fous, the circumstances under which it is created are unique (life in l'asile vs la réalité):
*Thévoz compares life in the asylum to that of semi-somnambulance...the outside world ceases to be at all pertinent, and one undergoes an marked decline in ability to conceptualize reality.
*he also suggests that those interned were already existing on the cultural margins. they'd most likely not "paid the ransom (ie sold their creative innocence) to acquire the finesse of abstract-thinking, technical mastery," etc.
*the asylum also strips the interned of all reason to adhere to the structures of finite time and socially mandated behavioral limitations.

this is just a nice idea : "one may choose to 'émajusculer' reality rather than immasculating the Ego."