Ksenia Blokhina
State Institute of Art Studies, Russia
French artist Jean Dubuffet is the creator of a term “art brut” (most of the art brut collection made by the artist, are works of psychiatric patients). Despite the fact that the definition of this concept has rather vague borders, the principle of allocation of art brut in special preferences becomes more logical if we consider it in the context of the theoretical work of the artist and his views on a social function of art. On the basis of such texts of Dubuffet as “Art Brut is preferable to cultural arts”, “Anticulturals positions” and others the report addresses the problem of art as an independent linguistic system. Dubuffet argues that contemporary culture is based on absolute trust to the existing means of expression, the origins of which he sees in antiquity, and to the written language in particular. So, on the one hand, affecting this subject, the artist joins the great debate on the crisis of Western culture, which transformed its language in a rigid system that determines the quality and categories of thought of each member of its society. The problem was discussed by the artist’s friends such as A. Artaud, J. Paulhan, M. Blanchot and others. This theme can be clearly illustrated by the series of portraits of Dubuffet and his interpretation of the concept of beauty, which, according to the artist, is to be contrasted with the ancient ideals.
On the other hand, in Dubuffet’s texts it is possible to discover lots of common traits with the structuralist approach to language learning. One of the most obvious ones is the artist’s definition of the concept of art through the word “langage”, that is according to F. de Saussure, through the concept of “speech activity”. Thus, the artist wanted to emphasize the importance of pictorial language as an integrated, comprehensive activity, as a communicative, cognitive process, rather than aesthetic one. Dubuffet also addresses such issues as objectivity of pictorial language, the problem of professionalism, communication of artistic image with reality, and others.
All this allows us to reveal a completely different aspect of art brut. Art brut allows one to describe the artistic activity as an innate characteristic of every person, free language, which is far from the accepted classical aesthetics. After all, it was only through the development and authoritarianism of Western culture and of its mechanisms of production that art started to be defined as a language only of the “talanted” people.