Sunday 1 June 2008

Art Brut

The other day I went to my favourite museum ever, and I bought this poster.
The museum is the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, and it's full of art made by people who I like to group collectively as "crazy" (no offense intended), but who the museum far more PC-ishly describes as
"marginalised people entrenched in the attitude of a rebellious spirit or impervious to collective norms and values, those who produce Art Brut include prisoners, inmates of psychiatric hospitals, eccentrics loners and misfits. They work in solitude, secrecy and silence, unconcerned by public criticism or the gaze of others. Their works are unaffected by influences from artistic traditions and apply singular methods of representation. These creators devise their own techniques, often with completely novel means and materials."

I first went to the museum in 2004, and at the time they were having a special exhibition of the dude featured in my new poster. I can't really remember much about him, but he made these awesome wooden sculptures, lots of horses and donkies and stuff, and they were all surprisingly life-like (and life-sized) but with big goofy smiley faces turned at funny angles. The poster is a picture of him with a horse he made (which I'm very pleased to say is still in the museum) that he bunged an ill-fitting bridle on, jumped on and pretended to ride. I really wanted to buy this poster at the time, but I was a bit of a grotty backpacker back then and I doubted that the poster would make it all the way back home unmangled so I didn't buy it. And now, years later, they still have the poster for sale. It's like fate. All over our living room wall.

Other excellent stuff at the museum includes the totally awesome faces made out of shells (some dude from the 1800s, I think, who used to buy other people's collections of huge and wacky shells and then stick them together somehow to make really excellent faces), the other shell-themed thing (these semi-religious looking and extremely detailed garden-type scenes made of squillions of little shells all stuck together, painted with garish nailpolishes and lit with unnecessarily high-watt bulbs), various animal sculptures made out of sticks, and this rather excellent and creepily sweet-looking book about a planet full of adorable little children being brutalised by mean men with dogs and rescued by mysterious trans-gender kiddies who happily usually manage to save the day that they are currently having an extended exhibition on.

It's wacky and excellent and I thoroughly recommend it.

2 comments:

mischa said...

i have recently learnt from my artist flatmate that the kind of art you describe is known in the "industry" as "outsider art", which is a cool name and reminds me of that 80s film about young hooligans with names like pony boy and soda pop.

ps. i like your creative spelling of donkeys!

rswb said...

yeah, I wondered for ages about the donkies. I think french is killing my powers of spelling. I tried for about 5 minutes to spell "colour" the other day, and in the end I had to look it up in a dictionary. And I'm really great at spelling. Sigh.