Jean Dubuffet, Bricoleur by Stephanie Chadwick;

Author:Stephanie Chadwick; [Chadwick, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501349461
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2022-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.11 Jean Dubuffet, Portrait d’Antonin Artaud cheveux épanouis (Antonin Artaud with Blooming Hair), August 1946, pencil and gouache on paper, 41.5 × 33 cm. (16.3 × 12.9 in.). © Fondation Dubuffet, Paris / 2020 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York—ADAGP, Paris. Private collection, Germany. Photograph courtesy of the Fondation Dubuffet, Paris. Reproduced in Jean Dubuffet, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule III (Paris: Fondation Dubuffet, 2003), 31, no. 29.

Just as Balinese audiences see the Dalang in Balinese puppetry as a conduit to authentic experience, so too did Dubuffet envision the artist as a visionary. His artistic aims were thus strikingly similar to Artaud’s claims that the Balinese theater was a magical agent whose elaborate forms and enthralling dances (Balinese theater features a variety of electrifying “trance dances”) could awaken the viewer from a culturally induced automatism.121

Both men wanted to create a kind of inverse trance dance in order to create an enlivening artistic encounter. Delivering Artaud’s awakening jolt, Dubuffet hoped also to “short circuit” and re-situate meaning. In contrast to “cultured” art, which relies upon enthralling notions of beauty, symmetry, and gracefulness, Dubuffet meant to shock, transfix, and transform the viewer with disorienting asymmetry, distortion, and hybrid, alien-seeming forms. His aims in this regard aligned with Artaudian theater but for one crucial difference—Dubuffet’s “short circuiting” of meaning presupposes the possibility of art’s (albeit opaque) intelligibility and the interpretive agency of both the artist and the viewer. In other words, for Dubuffet, affect worked in tandem with intellect, never negating the capacity of the viewer to “re-act” (imaginatively re-enact) the artistic movements that foster creative experience.122

“Art is a language,” Dubuffet attested, an “instrument of knowledge, [an] instrument of expression”—or, one might say, art combines thinking and feeling to inspire the thrill of interpretation.123 Adding that “painting has a double advantage” over verbal language, Dubuffet asserted its power to “conjure objects with greater strength” and “open to the inner dance of the painter’s mind a larger door to the outside.”124 Notions of primal (pre-linguistic) forces that “move” the viewer to feel and act in certain ways (as laid out in The Theater and Its Double and certain forms of affect theory) resonated with some of Dubuffet’s writings on art and, perhaps, his notion of Art Brut as the product of a primal creative impetus. Yet, the overarching themes of his painting and writing indicate that he wanted (and believed in) more for his art and, importantly, from his viewer, in whom “a whole inner mechanism” must “start working.”125 Adding that art “has always been considered in this way by [so called] primitive peoples,” Dubuffet’s art was not meant to suggest a mere return or re-attunement to a state of primal affective response (mere physiology) but rather a “turn,” a movement toward embracing the dual nature of thinking-and-feeling human experience. Affect, the viewer’s deep, physiologically experienced emotive reaction, was one of two responses Dubuffet hoped to instigate; the other was interpretive. The exploration of Artaudian affect thus marked a unique moment

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