29 août 2008
ART?
Indeed, not all has to be dying kids and displaced populations...
We need a bit of beauty and soothing...would art be the response?
Recent conversations with a friend took us from tattoos, freak circus shows and suspensions....
(Circus Mundus Absurdus)
to street art and graffiti...
(banksy, new orleans)
(photo by LaMery, Paris)
Once you're there, you can only wonder what art really is.
Artist Henry Darger seems the right kind of person to illustrate these thoughts further (images below):
http://www.hammergallery.com/Artists/darger/Darger
His work being classified by mainstream art popes as an example of "outside art", one can but wonder about the current western discourses on art:
What is art-who says so? why? how is art legitimated by the society in which it takes place...
"Outsider art" : the very label reveals how the idea of art is represented and constructed in our western society...it tells something about ourselves...(thats real anthropology I guess)
Darger at Bozar...Van Gogh in t-shirts...
For me Darger's work would be "insider art" rather than outsider...inside his mind, outside from mainstream society, rules, conventions...I suspect...maybe the spirit of a "mentally disturbed"-labelled man is where art can take its purest form...
The politics of art claim the right to say: this is-this is not, art...the consumer follows...art pret a consommer, as everythign else...hung on walls of museums, it becomes worth it...worth what? who cares. It becomes art.
The politics of art ask: is "outsider art" legitimate art? They name it, make it exist, and glorify or condemn it. And in this process, creation suffers. hum.
Step into the mirror, and you could easily ask: is "mainstream" art still art? Are Van Gogh tulips on a t-shirt in the tourist crowded shop at the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels art?
or does it have to be marginal, and thus subversive, to the system that produces it to be legitimated by this very sytem, in order to be art?
I wonder where do mainstream and outsider arts meet....for sure an interesting place!