SUI GENERIS

Dubuffet, as reported by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, educates us on the Art Brut movement which the artist Dubuffet championed.  While I have not had a chance to see the Dubuffet show at the Folk Art Museum, the points that Mr. Schjeldahl emphasizes in his article are relevant.

Dubuffet was chiefly concerned with the elevation of “people uncontaminated by artistic culture”. That is to say, he thought that those outside of the artistic culture had more to say than those inside it. Dubuffet used the Art Brut movement to destroy the complacency of insiders.

“Art brut must be sui generis, from the hands and minds of “unique, hypersensitive men, maniacs, visionaries, builders of strange myths.” Although he used the word men, he also wrote that women could build strange myths also.

I like the term sui generis. It is a term that I have not applied to transparent drawing, so I will do that now.

Sui generis, by one definition, is a concept or idea that cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental. This getting at something fundamental is certainly what transparent drawing at least attempts to do. If you show everything in one analogue drawing, I don’t know how more sui generis you can get.

I also like Dubuffet’s term, builders of strange myths. By getting outside the typical complacency generated by conventional artistic culture, we increase our chances of becoming visionaries.

Certainly, the blinders put upon us by our rigid educational and enculturation institutions only serves to direct us toward conformity.

Yet it remains possible to propose design solutions which appear to have been generated by maniacs, visionaries, and builders of strange myths.

The drawing above was based on Dubuffet’s Art Brut work, La Maison aux deux Chemins.  I tried to capture the unrefined, innocent quality of his work.  I used his work basically as a plan, and then projected up and down from that.   It is interesting that his work is titled La Maison, or the house.  Quite possibly my drawing could be of a house.