Seeking the gold of time: surrealisms, natural art, art brut, magical art
Jean Paulhan Jean Dubuffet André Breton Antonin Artaud
Fabula, Perrine Coudurier, 8 septembre 2021
[CALL FOR PAPERS]
"Seeking the gold of time: surrealisms, natural art, art brut, magical art"
Dēmēter - Contemporary Artistic Theories & Practices
Summer 2022
University of Lille
Demeter is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed scientific journal. Published twice a year, it privileges dialogue among the arts (visual arts, cinema, theater, dance, music), as well as with the humanities in general (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology). The journal is devoted to thinking through the articulations between theory and practice (artistic practice or analytical practice), between scholarly discourse and creative gestures, between knowledge and imagination.
https://demeter.univ-lille.fr/
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The LaM, Lille Metropolitan Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in Villeneuve d’Ascq, is organizing an exhibition titled "Seeking the gold of time: surrealisms, natural art, art brut, magical art," to be held from June 10 to October 16, 2022. Through a trajectory spanning the 1920s to the late 1960s, the exhibition will study moments and places of intellectual, artistic, geographic, and political convergence among surrealist figures, including Andre Breton and Jean Dubuffet, inventor of art brut, without limiting itself to these major personalities. It will be accompanied by a catalog, a study day, and this thematic issue. A major research effort is underway to reread and reconnect the histories of surrealism, art brut, and their continuations according to an approach in which art would be the effect of irrational or (super)natural forces.
In their collecting practices even more than in their own creation, surrealists free themselves from hierarchies and cast a different gaze on the world. A true revolution is at work to re-enchant everyday life marked by two world wars. Art brut lies at the heart of this reinvention of possibilities. Andre Breton's interest in the creative power of madness appears as early as 1916, when, assigned as an auxiliary military doctor to the neuropsychiatric center in Saint-Dizier, he asked traumatized soldiers: "What do you dream of at night?" Hans Prinzhorn's Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (1922) recognizes the creative force of works produced in asylum contexts. Surrealist journals - La Revolution surrealiste (1924-1929), Documents (1929-1931), and Minotaure (1933-1939) - likewise explore these forms of creation arising from the unconscious. Works also entered the collections of Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and doctors Lucien Bonnafe and Gaston Ferdiere. Jean Dubuffet learned of Prinzhorn's book while frequenting the circle on rue Blomet, where Michel Leiris, Georges-Henri Riviere, Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein, and Andre Masson met. He visited the Heidelberg collection in 1950, five years after his own mission collecting works in Swiss psychiatric hospitals and prisons with Le Corbusier and Jean Paulhan, followed by a visit to Saint-Alban hospital in Lozere.
If Jean Dubuffet is clearly the inventor of art brut, a term chosen after his summer 1945 journey, it is interesting to note that Charlotte Perriand may have used it earlier to describe the collecting, drawing, and photographing of "natural objects" that she carried out in dialogue with Fernand Leger and Le Corbusier. At the same time, the surrealists' "objective chance" also turned toward natural elements. Roots, flints, or oyster shells were interpreted - often in an anthropomorphic sense - by collectors and artists close to surrealist and art brut circles. Before them, Facteur Cheval based the construction of his "ideal palace" on a "stumbling stone" that "represents a sculpture as bizarre as it is impossible for man to imitate." He declared: "I said to myself, since nature wants to make sculpture, I will make masonry and architecture" (Claude and Clovis Prevost, Les Batisseurs de l’Imaginaire, Paris, Klincksieck, 2016, p. 27). The idea of nature as artist, or of art existing in a natural state, spread among visitors to the Palace. "Freeing flint from its earthy gangue" or "contenting oneself with extracting" "metal in its primitive state" are images chosen by Dubuffet and Breton to describe their work of collecting or creating.
At the same time, the fascination of artists and writers for objects brought back from French ethnographic missions was accompanied by growing awareness of the predatory relationship of the West to other cultures, as witnessed by Michel Leiris's L’Afrique fantome or Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes tropiques. This critical approach was matched by a reflexive reading of our own cultural identities, reflected in the journals Documents (1929-1931) and Minotaure (1933-1939). Georges-Henri Riviere, then deputy director of the Trocadero Ethnography Museum, worked to create a museum of arts and popular traditions that opened in 1937, while Gaston Ferdiere, future doctor to Antonin Artaud and friend of the surrealists, advocated for a museum of psychopathological art. Jean Dubuffet would discover there objects that could join his art brut collection, at the moment when he was breaking with a certain taste for exoticism still perceptible among surrealists and sketching his discourse on the "common man."
From the mid-1930s onward, various actors from different disciplines invented tools of resistance to the inhumanity and social alienation generated by totalitarianisms. During World War II, far from Paris or New York, a "war-time intelligence" (Louis Parrot) unfolded. Marseille, Toulouse, and the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban became points of diffusion for surrealism in its French components (Aragon, Artaud, Breton, Crevel, Eluard, Bousquet), but also Spanish ones (Buñuel, Dali), and even Dada (Tzara). The innovations and ideas carried by these figures met those of several doctors, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, such as Lucien Bonnafe, Francois Tosquelles, Henri Ey, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Canguilhem. Art brut, not yet bearing its name, held an essential place in this context of resistance and invention. Dubuffet understood this clearly when he traveled to Saint-Alban in 1945.
In November 1947, the Foyer de l’art brut opened, conceived by Jean Dubuffet as an exhibition space for the fruits of his research. In September 1948, the Foyer moved to a pavilion lent by Gallimard and became the Compagnie de l’art brut, whose founding members were Andre Breton, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Paulhan, Charles Ratton, Henri-Pierre Roche, and Michel Tapie. The previous spring, Dubuffet launched a major publishing project in collaboration with Breton: an Almanach de l’art brut. Twelve booklets were planned, revealing works by around forty art brut authors with texts requested from various personalities. But the project failed, and in 1951 Dubuffet dissolved the Compagnie de l’art brut and moved his collection to the United States. Collections and discourses split apart, opposed each other - sometimes violently - while still sharing artists and sensibilities.
Since the publication of Malraux's Musee imaginaire in 1947, everyone has been building their own art history and personal museum. Breton does so with the creation of the gallery A l’Etoile scellee in 1952 and the publication of L’Art magique in 1957. Dubuffet re-creates the Compagnie de l’art brut and installs his collection in 1962 at 137 rue de Sevres, then begins publishing a series of booklets titled L’Art brut. Esoteric arcana, psychic dispositions, and material cultures of the neglected struck a chord in a postwar world both consumerist and socially restless. From 1948 onward, artists linked to revolutionary surrealism and later to CoBrA sought to establish organic modes of relation in opposition to bourgeois values and the predominance of reason. A few years later, art brut and fantastic realism were replayed through the lens of countercultures. The tension between natural object and cultural object thus shifted register.
This thematic issue of Demeter aims to explore more specifically some of the historical or aesthetic stakes raised by the exhibition project. Proposals intersecting art history with the history of collections, psychiatry, or natural sciences, combined with philosophical, literary, anthropological, or psychoanalytic approaches, are welcome to grasp points of contact between actors of surrealism and art brut.
Several lines of inquiry are already identified as especially fertile:
-> The role of natural forces and objects in the collections, creations, and discourses of surrealist or art brut actors
-> The apparent opposition between singular and universal that takes shape in those same discourses
-> The desire to bring forth a counter-culture or counter-history of art and/or of the human, in which the natural might play a role to be determined
-> Correlatively, the desire to decolonize minds or invent a form of intellectual resistance
This issue is coordinated by Savine Faupin, chief curator in charge of art brut; Jeanne-Bathilde Lacourt, curator in charge of modern art; and Christophe Boulanger, assistant curator in charge of art brut.
Submission of contributions
Contribution proposals must be submitted to the editorial board by October 1, 2021. Authors whose proposal has been accepted must send their article to the editors by December 20, 2021 at the latest.
Proposals accompanied by a short biobibliographical presentation of the author should be sent to the following addresses: sfaupin@musee-lam.fr, cboulanger@musee-lam.fr, jblacourt@musee-lam.fr, in Word (.doc) or OpenDocument (.dot) format.
For more information on this issue, please contact: apenamejia@musee-lam.fr
Download the full call on the journal website (with bibliography): https://demeter.univ-lille.fr/article95/appel-a-publication-demeter-8-i-chercher-l-or-du-temps