Globalization trends of culture, the idea of multiculturalism, bringing and acceptance of foreign elements into the culture, open coquetry of the "West" with culture and arts of the "East", eclecticism, but also paradoxical what happened to be the fate of modern art after postmodern deconstruction of the meaning and the reduction of his function to ability to serve in variable updating roles towards individual and society, is 46 years after the release of books Asphyxiating Culture repeatedly bringing me to read (...) and review it. The topic, therefore, is to examine the validity of Dubuffet appeal, its insertion into the broader context of the forms of "dehumanization" of art, but also review of the reference just in the context of relations culture - art. New search respectively the determination of periphery in arts and culture should besides unfinished theme energizing academic debate of last years, if not decades, thus defining theme of Art, can and should briefly look at the issue of the institutionalization of art; the relationship of artistic production and its cultural context, which is not transferable; "foucaultian" power of discourse established by culture; extremely interesting affinity of art and advertising; aestheticism of culture; enforcement of discontinuity issues and pluralism as in the thought also within the artistic creation, namely for topics that Dubuffet advises and argumentations plays. Nearly half a century after his call and its final words -"therefore, our artistic production, which is not subjected to a thorough critique of culture and effectively not reveals the futility and absurdity, is no refuge for us" - we need to talk about our accountability. Dubuffet today. (shrink)

Analyzes the development of art during the past decade paying special attention to the works of Mondrian, Arp, Newman, and Dubuffet.

Using the art-brut theory by Jean Dubuffet as a starting point, the text aims to give profile to the changes, the figure of the outsider has experienced since the collapse of the category of the avant-garde. Under the auspices of cognitive capitalism and with the help of social media, the concept of outsiderness has transformed itself from a figure of authenticity and resistance against oppressive social circumstances to the realization of the unmediated, tactless, and brutal universalization of particularities.

The paper leans on a movie cult from the 1960s, Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, of which a famous sequence is often mentioned, the one in which the protagonist, the photographer Thomas (considered here as a "conceptual character"), repeatedly enlarged the photographs he made in a park, in order to find an answer to the mystery surrounding the murder of a man: magnification which leads, on the one hand, to a gradual loss of definition of images, with the grain of (...) the picture becoming more and more evident, but also, on the other, in the emergence, from the very material of the print, of a fundamental detail that will help solve the mystery. What interests is the link between indicative referentiality and evidence documentary, between degrees of definition and authentication powers. The paper also analyzes the links that intertwine, in the film, between the photographs of Thomas (by Don McCullin) and paintings painted by another character of the movie, Bill (directed by Ian Stephenson), but also, outside the film, with all a series of examples from artistic production and visual culture of the time: very low definition images of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas (the famous Zapruder Film), the portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald directed by Sigmar Polke by simulating the halftone technique, the war photographs of Don McCullin and David Bailey's Fashion Photographs, Random Earths Studies by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, Materialologies and Texturologies by Jean Dubuffet, as well as Zen for Film by Nam June Paik. Fimiani's text addresses also two contemporary installations which have tried to return to the issues from the photographic sequence of Antonioni's film: Blow-Up Blow-Up (2010) by Joan Fontcuberta and Portrait Landscape (from the Object Classifier series) (2015) by John Houck, an installation in which photograms of Blow-Up are analyzed through facial recognition software. (shrink)

Passivité et création est un livre ancré dans une double pratique: la peinture et la philosophie. Sa composition s'inspire du trajet suivi par Maurice Merleau-Ponty dans l'élaboration de son cours au Collège de France de 1954-1955: "Le problème de la passivité: le sommeil, l'inconscient, la mémoire". A partir de l'étude de la pratique de certains artistes et de l'analyse de textes philosophiques, il s'agit de décrire une passivité de forme particulière, une passivité "opérante", corrélative d'une forme dynamique de la subjectivité. (...) Cette passivité, "dimension d'un mouvement dont je suis le médiateur, mais qui d'une certaine façon se fait en moi sans moi, à mon insu", de nombreux artistes du 20. siècle s'en sont faits les témoins (Arp, Bacon, Dubuffet, Klee, Michaux, Rauschenberg, Schwitters, Spoerri, Nicolas de Staël, Bram Van Velde...), appelant aussi cette expérience "inconscient", "hasard", "imprévu", "surprise". Dans la perspective esquissée ici, l'accès aux autres cesse alors d'être un "problème". L'autre a déjà sa part dans mon expérience la plus singulière. Mon expérience peut devenir expérience pour d'autres parce qu'elle s'inscrit au sein d'une dimension phénoménologique qui n'est ni de moi ni d'autrui, mais commune. Quel est le rôle de cette passivité structurelle dans la création comprise comme transformation de la vision et du monde lui-même? Et comment peut-on en retourner la fragilité en pouvoir? (shrink)

Passivité et création est un livre ancré dans une double pratique: la peinture et la philosophie. Sa composition s'inspire du trajet suivi par Maurice Merleau-Ponty dans l'élaboration de son cours au Collège de France de 1954-1955: "Le problème de la passivité: le sommeil, l'inconscient, la mémoire". A partir de l'étude de la pratique de certains artistes et de l'analyse de textes philosophiques, il s'agit de décrire une passivité de forme particulière, une passivité "opérante", corrélative d'une forme dynamique de la subjectivité. (...) Cette passivité, "dimension d'un mouvement dont je suis le médiateur, mais qui d'une certaine façon se fait en moi sans moi, à mon insu", de nombreux artistes du 20. siècle s'en sont faits les témoins (Arp, Bacon, Dubuffet, Klee, Michaux, Rauschenberg, Schwitters, Spoerri, Nicolas de Staël, Bram Van Velde...), appelant aussi cette expérience "inconscient", "hasard", "imprévu", "surprise". Dans la perspective esquissée ici, l'accès aux autres cesse alors d'être un "problème". L'autre a déjà sa part dans mon expérience la plus singulière. Mon expérience peut devenir expérience pour d'autres parce qu'elle s'inscrit au sein d'une dimension phénoménologique qui n'est ni de moi ni d'autrui, mais commune. Quel est le rôle de cette passivité structurelle dans la création comprise comme transformation de la vision et du monde lui-même? Et comment peut-on en retourner la fragilité en pouvoir? (shrink)

Prehistory is an invention of the later nineteenth century. It was in this moment of technological progress and the acceleration of production and circulation, that three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to reckon the age of the Earth; second, to find a point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki's Transfixed by Prehistory considers (...) the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if it was considered through these three, at once consecutive and interwoven, inventions of the longue durée? This book attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than that of an inevitable march of progress leading up to the "Anthropocene." Rather, it's a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration and incessant invention, since the "new" was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed as much of speed as of slowness, as much of change as of deep time, as much of confidence as of skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be thought again. This book focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger) and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology. (shrink)

Since it gained currency at the end of the second world war, the term “existentialism” has mostly been associated with a cultural movement that grew out of the wartime intellectual atmosphere of the Left Bank in Paris and spread through fiction and art as much as philosophy. The theoretical and other writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon in the 1940s and 1950s are usually taken as central to this movement, as are the sculptures of (...) Alberto Giacometti, the paintings of Jean Dubuffet, and the plays of Samuel Beckett from this time. Existentialism is frequently viewed, therefore, as an aesthetic movement rooted in certain philosophical thoughts and supplanting surrealism at the centre of European artistic fashion. This is the existentialism of black clothes and jazz clubs, coffee and cigarettes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Boundaries: Writing and DrawingTom ConleyBoundaries: Writing and Drawing, edited by Martine Reid; Yale French Studies, iv & 268 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, $15.95 paper.The fifteen articles of this issue of Yale French Studies discern the limits of meaning and legibility wherever writing and drawing become coextensive. In pondering the origins of writing Henry-Jean Martin (in Le pouvoir et l’histoire de l’écrit) has recently asked if (...) script and print have evolved from pictographic or hieroglyphic writing. If so, he implies, to what degree does visual force animate all writing? How does meaning, otherwise conveyed through writing, get complicated or subverted by the shape or motion of its form? When does the writer engage the illegible to call into question communication in general? Citing Michel Foucault, for whom calligraphy and drawing offer a glimpse of an “immense and unavowable teratology” (p. 12), the editor argues that the visible matter of discourse becomes its repressed or irrecuperable—hence supremely literary—worth.She organizes the contributions under three rubrics. Part one studies the history of the relation of writing to drawing through emphasis on psychogenesis. For Serge Tisseron an “inscriptive gesture” (p. 29), a memory of a manual pleasure, is relayed through the artist’s or writer’s labors. The written trace recalls originary separation, the page becoming a “metaphoric container of one’s own body and the mother’s body” (p. 41). Georges Roque shows how postcartesian ideology associates line with philosophy and relegates color to a lower order of sensation. In a Derridean turn he notes, “color is to drawing as [End Page 410] writing is to speech” (p. 57). Jean-Gérard Lapacherie argues that we are taught to exclude reading from the act of looking at a text, and that contemporary literature forcibly erodes that division.Part two is devoted to close analysis of writers who draw. Jacques Leenhardt brilliantly analyzes visual and aural displacements, even condensations, what he calls “monograms of sensation,” in the sketches and notes in Stendhal’s Journal de Paris. Alain Buisine traces the appeal that drawings of Rimbaud’s face had for the poet’s milieu. Claude Gandelman studies Proust’s manuscript drawings in light of the broader process of dreamwork in A la recherche du temps perdu. Looking at the Cahiers, 1894–1914, Serge Bourjea contends that for Paul Valéry the labors of intellection and writing are a “matter of sketching” (p. 137), or of perpetually “rough” drafting. Jacques Derrida’s “Maddening the Subjectile,” Mary Ann Caws’s limpid translation of an essay on Artaud’s textual drawings (“Forcener le subjectile”), defines a pictogram as what moves ceaselessly and inseparably between painting, drawing, and verbal expression.Part three moves toward artists who write. Bernard Vouilloux rehearses Derrida’s arguments about the “supplement” and the pictogram to themes of painting and painters in Rousseau’s early and later works. Michel Thévoz gives a dazzling reading of Jean Dubuffet’s art brut dans l’écriture, the explosive sketching of discourse that fractures the icons of elegance and control that project the myth of clear and classical French. Jan Baetens calls “latent violence” the marvelous areas where image, geometrical form, typography, and enunciation abut each other in M. C. Escher’s drawings, Régis Franc’s comic strips, and Martin Vaughn-James’s La Cage. Renée Riese Hubert sums up the volume with a study of the double binds that Derrida and Adami project in their collaborations of drawing and writing.This issue of Yale French Studies holds to the theme of writing as drawing. Martine Reid’s introduction and her two interviews with Michel Butor and Yves Bonnefoy map out an overall itinerary of vicious circularity. Literature is a continuing regression, fraught with pleasure and risk, that takes place when language, writing, and drawing are conflated. All of the essays are of high quality. Tisseron, Leenhardt, Derrida, and Thévoz set a standard to which the others conform. All adepts of art and literature will welcome this fabulous volume.Tom ConleyHarvard UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)