Theatre by ACC Art Books

ART BRUT

The collection

Theatre

The Collection de l’Art Brut inherited some five thousand pieces collected between 1945 and 1971 by Jean Dubuffet, founder of the concept of Art Brut. It currently boasts more than seventy-thousand works, the result of research and acquisitions carried out over more than forty years. This book from the series Art Brut. The Collection accompanies the fourth Biennale de l’Art Brut. These exhibitions feature works exclusively from the collections of the Lausanne Museum, some of which have never before been exhibited. Exploring the relationship between theatre and Art Brut opens up new perspectives on these creations and provides an opportunity to bring together works of a very diverse nature: drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and adornments. A large number of films and documents, predominantly from the Collection de l’Art Brut archives, provide us with invaluable information on the creative context of the works as well as giving them an added dimension. Some of the creators selected appropriate theatrical codes with a view to designing a project of which they are the primary beneficiaries. Others testify to an intuitive practice of staging or ‘performance’. They wear clothes and accessories made with their own hands and, by interacting with public space, their bodies become the medium for messages they share or advocate. Others define a singular universe within their works by creating a context, a backdrop, lighting, and staging.

ART BRUT

COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT LAUSANNE

€ 32.00 | $ 40.00 Can. $ 50.00 | £ 25.00

COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT LAUSANNE

Preface

Palmerino Sorgente in his studio, rue Notre-Dame, Montréal, 1999

As with Vehicles in 2013, Architecture in 2015, and The Body in 2017, this fourth Art Brut Biennale exclusively showcases work from Lausanne’s Collection de l’Art Brut. Pascale Jeanneret, curator of the exhibition and curator of the Collection de l’Art Brut, chose ‘theatre’ as the biennial’s theme. This common thread opens up new perspectives and new ways of understanding the museum’s works. The theme also provided an opportunity to invite playwright Éric Vautrin to reflect on the Art Brut works featured in the exhibition. I would like to express my sincere thanks to him for his involvement in this project. The topic also helps broadens the scope of our Biennale de l’Art Brut by showcasing a range of works, from drawings and paintings to sculptures and textile pieces, as well as numerous films and photographs, most of which come from our archives and bear witness to the practice of staging or ‘performing’ among Art Brut creators. Their bodies become the vehicle for the messages they share; often they engage with public space through the wearing of various accessories such as coats and headgear. We refer here in particular to Helga Sophia Gœtze, Eijiro Myama, Giovanni Battista Podestà, Vahan Poladian, Martial Richoz, and Palmerino Sorgente, who all use public space to convey their message. Their creativity goes hand in hand with the desire to communicate by coming face to face with the general public. Still, they are not on a stage in front of an audience. Their theatrical space is a public space through which they wander and perform. Their audience is comprised of random passersby who observe them — sometimes with interest, sometimes with mistrust or indifference. For other creators, the theatrical aspect is reflected in the paintings and drawings themselves, in the depiction of theatres with all their distinctive features, including stage, curtains, and balconies. These include Aloïse Corbaz, Eugen Gabritschevsky, Berthe Coulon, and Brooks Yeomans. Still others invent theatrical characters, for example Marguerite Burnat-Provins, who portrays a certain Ganezime acteur, or Armique auteur dramatique in her paintings. In Adolf Wölfli’s work, on the other hand, there is no visual element directly related to the theme in question. Wölfli is, however, both an actor and director of his own persona, through the fictional stories he develops and which accompany his drawings. Louis-Henri G. and Reinhold Metz also used writing as a creative method: the former by writing hospital discharge letters that are structured in several acts and use the nomenclature of a play; the latter by rewriting Don Quixote by Cervantes and illustrating it with hundreds of plates.

Preface

Palmerino Sorgente in his studio, rue Notre-Dame, Montréal, 1999

childhood or our body, our fears and dreams, our sexuality and desires, our taboos and nightmares — or all of these. But it is above all our collective memory, the one that enables us to exist and take part in human and community life, that comes to mind. It is then a question whether the memories are conventional (rooted in language, which allows us to share emotions, opinions, and decisions) or specific to a space and time (linked to places, history, and other shared elements): these memories engage our shared experience of both past and present. The originality of Art Brut compositions and the way in which they invoke memory requires time; they also add texture to the notion of time needed. In my opinion, there is a drama at play in Art Brut works, one that we can identify to a greater or lesser extent: that of the possible disappearance of these common memory markers that place us within a community. This is not specific to Art Brut; every piece of art (and especially theatre) may challenge our collective memory and then create new foundations through aesthetic experience. Thereby we discover the potential of this collective memory, which enables us to understand and take part in the world. This drama plays out differently in Art Brut works — in a wilder, more childish, and perhaps uncertain way. The creators of such works obviously have an intimate knowledge of the tragic possibility of being separated from collective memory; the resulting works may in turn express the experience of distance from those respective communities. The reason I use the word drama is because I do not see these works as signalling exclusion or as statements of an irremediable otherness. On the contrary, they highlight a conflict, a question, a force trying to reformulate, reinvent, and rebuild a connection between the artist and the community, so that the separation itself is dramatized. It is a tragedy, as the outcome is uncertain and the work is in a sense a self-fulfilling prophecy: that a connection will be established within a shared space. When such a work is exhibited outside the context in which it was produced, this drama is entrusted to us: Do we, as human beings, connect to something in the work? This fragile and tenuous link is the root cause of the drama in these works, be it tragic, comic, light-hearted, violent, or childish. It reminds us of our own experience of separation. Various media combined in a unique way, in a certain place and time; a dramatized fiction engaged with the audience’s personal and collective memories: this is the only definition of theatre that I know. In this respect, all Art Brut works are theatrical; they emerge then move within us, haunted by a contradictory and memorable energy that brings them to life within a viewer’s mind. You might wonder where the actors, the script, and the stage are. I would confidently reply: within the works and within us as viewers. Very little art is filled with so many figures, first that of the creator, then every figure that the work summons or invents. Even when there are no actual words, the work’s silence — if I may call it that — is filled with words, albeit silent ones. More importantly, this happens uniquely in each work: presences, spaces, and words, even silent, are organized differently in the work of Madge Gill, Giovanni Battista Podestà, or Martial Richoz, to mention some of the artists in this exhibition.

Firstly, theatre can be seen in each of these Art Brut works: they bear a very real theatricality. It is not, however, a theatre we would regard as classical or traditional, akin to that created in sophisticated Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century (which was itself a reinterpretation of seventeenth-century classical theatre, itself a free interpretation of what was then thought to be Greek or ancient Roman theatre), in which actors would recite a text in a specific setting, according to the traditions of a ‘well-executed play’ with its various scenes, its ‘climax’, and its more-or-less happy or tragic outcome. But for the past 150 years — and possibly much further back — there has been what has been described as ‘art theatre’, or today ‘creative’ theatre (original productions), which continually reinvents these basic theatrical elements in order to adapt, reflect, or take on board the present and topical: a combination of art, a specific time and place, a narrative, and viewers who find unexpected echoes of their own memories, starting with the collective memory of which they are the guardians. Art Brut works are laden with a theatricality that is close to that of creative theatre — and it is not surprising that such works sometimes inspire creative theatre, even forming one of its legacies, as we will ultimately see. Madge Gill at home in London, 1947

We could certainly argue that these works are part of a mental theatre, bringing theatrical figures onto the mind’s stage. But I think it is more than that: it is a theatre of the future. The works invent a theatre that does not yet exist. This is well known in theatre history: Seneca, Victor Hugo in part, Georg Büchner, and Alfred de Musset and his ‘scene in an armchair’, for example, created works — texts, in those cases — that were way ahead of the arts of their time. They wrote for a theatre of the future that did not yet exist (partly because they wrote such unusual narratives that could not be produced, in their opinion, on stage, and partly because the audience of the time did not know how to receive them). In the twentieth century, Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Antonin Artaud revolutionized the notion and practice of theatre almost without creating shows. The theatre of Art Brut has the same potential: more than a scene that is played in our minds, it is a potential theatre of the future, creating a new theatricality that is more defined each time a new work is exhibited. Most of the works do not go beyond this state of potential, instead entrusting us with the task of interpreting and understanding the fervour of their characters, scripts, and movement. Some of the works go a step further towards

Ni Tanjung stands on a threshold that separates her depictions from reality, that keeps life and death separate. She stands like Dante on the path to Hell, at a moment in time, acting as a messenger for the world but removed from both time and our world, like an actor on a stage. In theatre, the stage is an intermediate space between the theatre itself and the imaginary world created by the backdrop from which the characters’ ghostly figures emerge. The drama in Ni Tanjung’s work comes from the confrontation with the shadows that inhabit the real world.

The burden of enchantment: Morton Bartlett

danced and sang. Nowadays she is weak and no longer leaves the small room in which she draws, mainly at night, colourful faces assembled in groups on canvases that recall Indonesian shadow theatre puppets. Several documentaries show her dancing and singing among the many faces that adorn her room, holding a mirror in which she sees herself and the moving reflection of her figurative drawings. In both types of work, Ni Tanjung composes using shadow and light — erecting a wall of black stones so that she appears white and then producing, at night, an infinite theatre of shadows. She also composes with separation, constructing in both cases a curtain of faces. Through her dance or her reflection in the mirror, she moves between these stone or paper walls and the world. She replays the ancestral shadow theatre of her country, the wayang, in which the puppeteer is also a storyteller, revered as an intermediary between two worlds. This theatre, originally linked to the cult of ancestors, is performed when the balance of an individual or society is under threat or going through change (for example in times of disease, family celebration, or drought); the shadows projected on the screen restore the cosmic order that has been momentarily disturbed. And like Ni Tanjung’s intimate theatre, a wayang performance takes place at night and lasts nine hours (from 9 p.m. to sunrise, around 6 a.m.), thus forming part of a cosmic cycle.

Ni Tanjung at home in Bali, 2012

An American graphic designer and photographer, Morton Bartlett crafted and staged dolls depicting young children. Then, in the privacy of his apartment, he used them as subject matter for subtle drawings in graphite or disturbingly realistic photographs. These images, created with extraordinary care, are both extremely delicate, bordering on tender, and loaded with a sensuality that approaches the erotic. They combine perfection and the forbidden, blurring the line between the two. Unlike the photographs of dolls by Hans Bellmer, for example, which carry an explicit erotic charge, here any sensuality is veiled and diaphanous, literally integrated into the innocent, childish enchantment of figures and the situations in which they are placed. Once again, these images become thresholds between reality and fantasy, between innocence and perversion, between ordered perfection and sexual dysfunction. This threshold is heightened by the astonishing execution of the figurines, situations, and images themselves that succeed in bringing these inert figures to life, such that they almost exist between life and death. Morton Bartlett’s photographs and drawings are eminently theatrical — if theatre is indeed the place where absence becomes a presence through the intervention of artificial forms. They secretly replay the drama of the confrontation between innocence and desire, between control and lack of it, between order and disorder. These are just a few examples. We should also mention Dunya Hirschter’s collages, Madge Gill’s invention of a multiplied self, and Martial Richoz’s ‘re-enactments’ of public transport, as well as the other creators in this biennial, to further describe how some Art Brut creators can invent free and original theatres outside the formal framework of a cultural institution. By bringing figures to life, staging characters that may or may not portray themselves, and creating paradoxical situations, they perform dramas that call into question the possibility of human life, i.e., evolving from the wild and becoming structured thanks to communications enabled by speech and a collective symbolic and spatiotemporal memory. These works are weighed against disorder, ghosts, and the erasure of the future in the past. They expose the enigma of reality, the dissolution of language and death, producing forms that do not describe but dramatize these confrontations. In doing so, they restore the potential for humanization through fiction and

The burden of enchantment: Morton Bartlett

Ni Tanjung at home in Bali, 2012

Morton Bartlett sans titre untitled, entre between 1936 et and 1965 tirage numĂŠrique unique single digital print 13 x 10 cm cab-11097

Morton Bartlett sans titre untitled, entre between 1936 et and 1965 tirage numĂŠrique unique single digital print 12,7 x 10,3 cm cab-11098

Morton Bartlett sans titre untitled, entre between 1936 et and 1965 tirage numĂŠrique unique single digital print 13 x 10 cm cab-11097

Morton Bartlett sans titre untitled, entre between 1936 et and 1965 tirage numĂŠrique unique single digital print 12,7 x 10,3 cm cab-11098

Marguerite Burnat-Provins La Confiance, 1926 aquarelle, pastel et mine de plomb sur carton watercolour, pastel, and graphite on card 49,5 x 35,5 cm ni-2184

Marguerite Burnat-Provins Un Grand Prince, 1934 aquarelle et mine de plomb sur carton watercolour and graphite on card 37,4 x 27,9 cm ni-2202

Marguerite Burnat-Provins La Confiance, 1926 aquarelle, pastel et mine de plomb sur carton watercolour, pastel, and graphite on card 49,5 x 35,5 cm ni-2184

Marguerite Burnat-Provins Un Grand Prince, 1934 aquarelle et mine de plomb sur carton watercolour and graphite on card 37,4 x 27,9 cm ni-2202

Paul End. Reine Marie PoincarĂŠ, George V, entre between 1949 et and 1951 crayon de couleur et mine de plomb sur papier coloured pencil and graphite on paper 50 x 64,5 cm cab-690

Paul End. sans titre untitled, entre between 1949 et and 1951 crayon de couleur et mine de plomb sur papier coloured pencil and graphite on paper 50 x 65 cm cab-691

Paul End. Reine Marie PoincarĂŠ, George V, entre between 1949 et and 1951 crayon de couleur et mine de plomb sur papier coloured pencil and graphite on paper 50 x 64,5 cm cab-690

Paul End. sans titre untitled, entre between 1949 et and 1951 crayon de couleur et mine de plomb sur papier coloured pencil and graphite on paper 50 x 65 cm cab-691

ART BRUT

The collection

Theatre

ART BRUT

COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT LAUSANNE

€ 32.00 | $ 40.00 Can. $ 50.00 | £ 25.00

COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT LAUSANNE