Curating in the Age of Live Performance Allen S. Weiss Figure 1. Raimundo Borges Falcão (b. probably late 1940s near Salvador, Bahia, Brazil) in his carnival disguise at Carnival Fantasia “Blue Shark.” Near Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 2000. Color photograph 7˝ × 5˝. (Photo by Dimitri Ganzelevich; courtesy of Beate Echols and the American Folk Art Museum) A radical paradigm shift concerning the theorization of Outsider Art recently occurred with the exhibition When the Curtain Never Comes Down, shown at the American Folk Art Museum in 2015, and its accompanying catalog.1 Consideration of this event thrusts us into the ambiguities and contradictions of Art Brut and Outsider Art, as well as into the complexities of the contem- porary sense of “performance,” such that we enter a hermeneutic labyrinth where categories are confounded and ontologies destabilized. Curator Valérie Rousseau presents the project in terms 1. This text first appeared as “L’art brut au risque du musée” in Critique (Paris) 863 (April 2019), trans. Philippe Roger. — Ed. TDR 64:1 (T245) 2020 https://doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00900 ©2020 Allen S. Weiss 145 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00900 by guest on 26 September 2021 familiar to amateurs of Art Brut, writing of the “utter self-sufficiency” of the “solitary creator” producing works with “no dependence on the Western art canon” (2015:7) and “without guides or points of reference” (17). This Romantic vestige of a certain ideal of aesthetic and existential purity finds its hyperbolic instance in Jean Dubuffet’s notion of Art Brut, the celebration of art that does not know its own name, art that is least like art. Dubuffet well knew that any attempt at a rigid definition would be antithetical to the spirit of artistic openness that he promulgated, and in his preface to Michel Thévoz’s Art Brut (1976), he claims that no common definition will fit all the works in this category, as each creation is a reflection of a different mental position, a different private world, and their only thing in common is that such art exists as far as possible outside cultural influences, marking their radical difference from what Arthur Danto will come to call the “artworld” (1964) — that intellectual, social, and economic system that determines what is deemed art. Thévoz in turn goes on to claim that Art Brut is the name of that which cannot be defined, speaking of “an upsurge of singularities and intensities of unknown origin” (1976:167), echo- ing the radical epistemology of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, published four years earlier ([1972] 1977). Dubuffet established this gambit in a liminary text to the firstFascicule de l’Art Brut (1949): “To define something — or even to isolate it — is already to damage it quite a bit. Almost to kill it [...] I was hardly born to make things explicit but rather as a lover of IMPLICIT languages. Art brut is art brut, and everybody well understands this” ([1947] 1967:175–76). This anti-institutional, countercultural, anti-aesthetic position remains seduc- tive — for both Art Brut and experimental art alike — thus “Art Brut” may be productively understood as less a category (though collectors and curators treat it as such), and more an instrument of discovery and self-discovery, a tool to transform consciousness, revealing a force that has no other name than life, waiting to be expressed. The paradoxes and contradictions are ineluctable: generally speaking, given marginaliza- tion as the condition sine qua non of the existence of Art Brut, every attempt to write, collect, and curate such works brings them and their creators further and further into the art world they eschew. Indeed, the two most often heard complaints among amateurs of Art Brut are antithet- ical: either that such works have been scandalously excluded from art history, but the day must come when the term Art Brut becomes obsolete, and there remains only art; or else that the art establishment is appropriating Art Brut, as it has devoured all else, an assimilation that will eventually destroy the very integrity of such works. We are thus confronted with two possible options: segregation or assimilation. Yet Art Brut had already begun to enter The Museum at the very moment of its inception. On the last page of Art Brut, Thévoz notes that in The Voices of Silence ([1951] 1953), André Malraux, cultural insider par excellence, reproduces works by two Art Brut creators, Guillaume Pujolle and Otto Stein (albeit listing the works as “anonymous lunatic drawings”) (1976:168); and in the very last sentence of Outsider Art, Roger Cardinal astutely wonders whether the makers of Art Brut will fabricate a Trojan horse to enter the cul- tural world (Cardinal 1972:180). This moment has come, with a vengeance. Not that long ago, curator Maurice Tuchman organized the exhibition Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992), the first large grouping of Art Brut in a major museum, with the exception of works in the donation that Daniel Cordier gave to the Centre Allen S. Weiss is the author and editor of over 40 books in performance theory, landscape architecture, gastronomy, sound art, and experimental theatre, including Phantasmic Radio (1995) and Varieties of Audio Mimesis (2008), as well as a novel, Le Livre bouffon(2009). He directed Theater of the Ears(a play for electronic marionette and taped voice based on the writings of Valère Novarina; 1999–2001) and Danse Macabre (a marionette theatre for the dolls of Michel Nedjar; 2004, 2009), and most recently produced the film Dolls of Darkness (2016), about Nedjar’s dolls and the Holocaust. He is Distinguished Teacher in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at NYU. [email protected] Allen Weiss S. 146 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00900 by guest on 26 September 2021 Pompidou in 1989, and the inclusion of works of the mentally ill in the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition organized by the Nazis (Munich, 1937). When Tuchman was asked why he chose to do an exhibition revealing the influence of Outsider artists on modern art rather than simply organizing a show on Outsider Art, he answered that no board of trust- ees of a major museum in the USA would agree to that. This has certainly changed. Consider that today the work of Henry Darger has entered the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and that one of his works has attained an auction price of $750,000; that there have been count- less exhibitions on the subject, as well as dozens of museums, galleries, and major collections around the world dedicated to Outsider Art; and that even the chief art critic of the New York Times, Roberta Smith, has long been dedicated to this sort of art. This is all quite inside. As was the case throughout the entire history of the avantgarde, no matter how radical and conten- tious, the “art world” always manages to assimilate, normalize, and commodify art of every sort, Art Brut included. Dubuffet’s polemic in favor of these strange, eccen- tric, extraordinary works has devolved into an entire field of art history, criticism, and the- ory, at the core of which are all the paradoxes and contradic- tions that at first made for such a lively polemic, but which are now put in the service of museo- logical categories of inclu- sion and exclusion. Perhaps the greatest irony is that it was Dubuffet himself — the most anti-institutional and counter- cultural of aestheticians (if one dare use the word in this con- text) — who effectively institu- tionalized Art Brut in 1976 with Figure 2. Palmerino Sorgente (b. 1920, Castelforte, Italy; d. 2005, Montreal, the creation of the Collection Canada) in his workshop on Notre-Dame Street, Montreal, Canada, 1999. de l’art brut in Lausanne. Given Collection Société des arts indisciplinés, Montreal. (Photo by Marie-Christine Cyr the fact that “art” itself remains and Georges Aubin Jr. © Société des arts indisciplinés; courtesy of the American undefinable — one role of exper- Folk Art Museum) imental art being to belie any definition that might be proffered — the equivocations of Art Brut should not come as a sur- prise. Art Brut is a victim of its own success, and it has attained its ultimate paradox: perhaps the moment has indeed come when Art Brut is indistinguishable from art simpliciter, and we need no longer preface such discussions with parables and paradoxes of creative purity. Despite Curating in the Age of Live Performance Curating in the several obligatory bows to Dubuffet, Rousseau makes a crucial move in bringing these works into a broader and more contemporary context, insisting that, “the mnemonic qualities of such visual experiences are partly indebted to the ceremonial background in which the works origi- nated and will be subsequently perceived — and replayed. This mechanism leads us to examine the contextualization of images and their sources” (2015:21). An entire museological program unfolds: the polemic concerning sources is precisely the point where the relations between art brut and art simpliciter are to be found; broad contextualization complicates claims about the sup- posed self-sufficiency of the solitary creator; the study ofceremony suggests continuities between psychology, sociology, and ethnography; and the problematic of replay places us within the con- temporary discourse of performance and performativity. 147 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00900 by guest on 26 September 2021 Of hermeneutic import is the insistence on the “excess of energy” (Rousseau 2015:22) at the origin of these works, a thematic traversing modernism via Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Artaud, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari, et al.