Logo NAÏF 2012 no tema 1

O Inesperado na Arte

Marta Mestre

Art critic and historian

Our gaze is transformed much more than art is. Our perspective on things becomes free from a closed and discursive order, and exists as an emotive tangle that articulates an interplay of images and times circulating comfortably between “high” and “low” culture.

Spontaneous art, that is, the visual production that is produced apart from the institutionalized world of art, has an increasingly expressive power of empathy and seduction, and this is due to the weakening of the rigid distribution of genres, themes and hierarchies throughout the 20th century.

Found everywhere a little, with a higher or lower degree of expressivity, we notice that “spontaneous art” — that which is always where we least expect it, where no one thinks about it, nor even speaks its name — has admirers all over the world and is constantly being affirmed in its own right, whether in Brazil or… in Finland.

In 2006 I made a trip to Finland and had the opportunity to visit artists and productions of so-called spontaneous art. It was an intense experience, where I could perceive the symbolic, cultural, identitary and economic importance that this artistic field can have. Getting to know now the Brazilian production that has arrived at the Bienal Naïfs de Piracicaba I notice that, despite being countries with very different realities, there is a common feature that confers unity to their visual productions.

There is a wide range of jargon used by specialists to characterize this type of production: naive art, outsider art, art brut, raw art, folk art, visionary art, “visionary art environments” etc.; nevertheless, it is a single order of imagination and beliefs, images that seem to have emerged from a newly discovered Eden, which are intensely inhabited by anachronisms and obsessions. They appear as surviving facets of a “nameless history” that reach us in a devastating, intense and disruptive way.

The Finnish case has epic contours, by the succession of its episodes, and by the way in which, in less than thirty years, it has managed to garner enormous visibility for a field which was previously disregarded. It begins with the story of Veli Granö, a contemporary artist who made the Onnela — Trip to Paradise series, portraits of twenty folk and outsider artists in the context of their idiosyncratic worlds. The series was shown in 1986, at a gallery in Helsinki, kindling the immediate interest of various levels of society.

The Finnish example is full of many striking happenings in the creation of an aesthetics of the collective body as a whole with the help of the government: the opening of the Contemporary Folk Art Museum (in the city of Kaustinen); the leadership on the European program Equal Rights to Creativity — Contemporary Folk Art in Europe, in partnership with Hungary, Italy, Estonia and France, to which a publishing house is associated for the publication of high-quality editions of works by “spontaneous” artists; the exhibition In Another World, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Helsinki (Kiasma), a selection of the best Finnish spontaneous art, along with historical artists of the European collections (Alain Bourbonnais, Aloïse Corbaz, Madge Gill, Chris Hipkiss, Giovanni Battista Podesta, Henry Darger or Adolf Wölfli); and the National Ministry of Culture’s awarding of the Finland Prize, in 2007, to Veijo Rönkkönen — one of the artists photographed twenty years before by Veli Granö — for his work which received the attention of international curator Harald Szeemann.

This movement led to the need to invent a name for the “new” art: ITE art, an acronym for “Itse Tehty Elama”, which signifies “self-made life”, and institutes the idea that life exists through the aesthetic dimension of each and every person.

The Finnish case makes us think about various aspects. I suggest two for us to consider in the context of the Bienal Naïfs do Brasil in Piracicaba.

In the first place: what is the meaning of the name “Bienal Naïfs”?

The experience of the jury this year, coupled with a reading of the documentation of previous editions, makes it clear that the production from all over Brazil which is featured at the exhibition ranges beyond the universe of “naive” art. This is an overly restrictive term for extremely restless images, a term that does not consider their diverse and unlikely artistic origins, which can be indigenous art, the art of people with mental problems, or art produced in altered states of perceptions, to cite some examples.

We can even talk about the “unsuitability” of the term naive in respect to the world of artists who have participated in the various editions of the Piracicaba biennial, if we remember what Freud wrote about the “fetish”, one of the elements that best characterizes the nature of the naive images.

Upon introducing the concept of “fetish”, Freud (1) referred to the fact that it forms a totalitarian image. The fetish image is a “sealed” or “inanimate” image that is reminiscent of a sort of stopping of the gaze. According to Freud, what constitutes the fetish is the moment of history where the image stops, as though it were the immobilization of a ghost. The fetish is also a veil, a curtain, a “point of repression”. For this reason, the amazed perception of the naive artist often appears crystallized, an eternal return. As stated by Laymert Garcia dos Santos: “naive art is the art of emotion, a shout from the heart”, and he adds: “the magical effect is produced in the gaze, it crystallizes the image” (2).

Freud’s point of view on the nature of the naive images makes complete sense when it is lamented that a “naive” artist copies a successful form, and repeats it over and over. But this does not concern a response to an already conquered market, but rather to the very nature of the naive image: the interplay of repetition among the elements is necessary for the production of the fetish.

By its circumscribed character, the term “naive” can only partially denote the extensive production that arrives at Piracicaba, and it limits the possibility for thinking about the biennial’s future. Nevertheless, from Jean Dubuffet to Roger Cardinal, it has always been hard to find a comfortable designation for this artistic field; and the Finnish “solved” the question by inventing the aforementioned name “ITE art”, which is more than a marketing label attached to a confined cultural policy. For relating much more with life than with art (like the poetics of Joseph Beuys, the German artist for whom life existed through the aesthetic dimension of each person), it ensures longevity to the artistic field we are talking about.

A further aspect to ponder is: how can the curatorship lend visibility to “spontaneous art”?

The curatorship is essential to bring into the codified field of the visual arts the expressions characteristic of ordinary life, everyday experience, the domestic territory, the rural expanses, the primitive, indigenous world, altered states of perception, and others. “Worlds” that are very gradually becoming part of the schedules and programming of museums, but which, ironically, reveal their regenerative role in the scenario of the crisis of the history of Western contemporary and modern art.

The growing importance of the “unauthored arts” also reinforces how many critics and historians see it as a breath of fresh air for the increasingly rigid art scene brought on by the homogenizing power of globalization and the standardization of art.

Nevertheless this regenerative potential of “spontaneous art” should not be instrumentalized in the closed circuit that sees modernity first and contemporaneity afterwards, through interposed stages and as inexhaustible places to which we submit according to the diving suit that brings us to the greatest depth.

We consider that the regenerative capacity of “spontaneous art” has much to do with an anthropological function, which relegates the aesthetic condition to the second plane. This function has the potential to generate a magnificent mirroring effect, which under the veil we display to others, allows for the conveyance of observations about ourselves, our culture, our notions of art, our values and attitudes.

A categorical example of this more anthropological than aesthetic paradigm was the exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre, held at the Centro Georges Pompidou, in 1989. For the first time, it featured Western contemporary art together with art from the rest of the world, and from other categories. This exhibition gave meaning to what Hans Belting would designate as “global art” (3), which “in its new expansion, can substantially change the concept of both contemporary art and art in general, since it is in places where it has never been in the history of art and where there is no museum tradition” (4).

Hans Belting’s words evidently involve a serious argument about the end of the “history of art as a model of our historic culture” (5), and a criticism on the places of enunciation that have traditionally produced the discourses about art, and in this case, about “spontaneous art”.

It must be remembered that the optimism that exists today about this increasingly shown and recognized artistic field lived under a regime of cultural apartheid for many years. As aptly pointed out by Michel Thévoz “even in the imaginary museum of Malraux, the works by Aloïse or Guillaume Pujolle were in a purgatory with the anonymous and ignominious caption drawings by the insane. And when the 1975 edition of the Documenta V of Kassel had the audacity to introduce the works by Adolf Wölfli and Heinrich-Anton Muller — without a doubt one of the most inventive artists in this field — it isolated them in a section designated as psychopathological”. (6)

The aforementioned regime of apartheid has increasingly been dispelled, but some paradoxes still remain.

I will conclude by pointing out one which, as I see it, still generates significant obstacles.

I am referring to a pedagogical paradigm which is often applied to “spontaneous art”, and which indefinably reconstitutes the very inequality it aims to suppress, as if there were a goal of equality along with a social, aesthetic and symbolic “fracture” to be eliminated. This is a dubious game that can signify completely different things: either to encourage the artists to remain in their “lost paradise” considered as a place for the survival of an art that should not be corrupted, or to construct their “emancipation” with a view toward an “equality of intelligences” (J. Rancière).

In the former case, there is a discourse that locates spontaneous art and spontaneous artists within a subalternity, which leaves them expressionless. Deprived of expression, this art and these artists speak only through a middleman (the one who “discovered” them, the gallerists, the judges panel, the historian etc.). For this reason, these images are normally seen in a “bad light”, because they are badly described, badly captioned, badly photographed, badly used.

In the latter case, the “emancipation” consists of a restoration of the places and the subjects of enunciation in order to recognize and develop all of the consequences of the “equality of the intelligences”.

Perhaps this is why some people say that we should always look at a work of spontaneous art with the artist at our side, listening to his/her story.

Everything takes place as though these artists, instead of having painted, sculpted or embroidered, had narrated their lives, their worlds, the places they (and all of us) come from. I am extremely curious to learn about the story that Maria Caldeira Bochini tells, in the canvas in which three girls play without toys, or to hear Carmela Pereira singing the song that her Carnival characters are about to celebrate. But very specifically, I am most curious to listen to the faint tones exchanged between the two men in O barco do pescador [The Fishermen’s Boat], in the wetlands depicted by Jefferson Bastos.

 

1 Sigmund Freud, “Souvenirs d’enfance et souvenirs-écrans”, in Psychopathologie de la vie quotidienne, Payot, Paris, 2004.

2 Laymert Garcia dos Santos, “Regarder autrement”, in Histoires de voir (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, May 2012.

3 The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989, the exhibition held by ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art (from September 2011 to February 2012) used the date of Les Magiciens de la Terre as a chronological mark for the concept of “global art”: http://www.globalartmuseum.de/site/act_exhibition.

4 At http://globalcontemporary.de/en/exhibition

5 Hans Belting, O Fim da História da Arte, Cosac&Naify, p.12.

6 Michel Thévoz, Art brut, psychose et mediumnité, Éditions de la différence, Paris, p.10.