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dubuffet - anticultural positions
6
I NOW COME TO MY SIXTH AND LAST POINT, which deals with the notion of beauty adopted by Occidental culture.
I want to begin by telling you how my own conception differs from the usual one.
The usual conception states that there are beautiful objects and ugly objects, beautiful persons and ugly persons, beautiful places and ugly places, and so forth.
Not I. I believe beauty is nowhere. I consider the usual notion of beauty to be completely false - I refuse absolutely to assent to this idea, that there are ugly persons and ugly objects. This idea is stiffing and revolting to me.
I think the Greeks are the ones who were first to purport this invention - that certain objects are more beautiful than others.
The so-called savage peoples do not believe in that conception at all and they do not understand when you speak to them of beauty.
This is the reason one calls them savage. The western man gives the name of savage to one who does not understand that beautiful things and ugly things exist and who does not care for that at all.
It is strange that for centuries and centuries, and now more than ever, the men of the Occident dispute which things are beautiful and which are ugly. All are certain that beauty exists without doubt, but one cannot find two who agree about the objects which are so endowed. And from one century to the next it changes. In each century Occidental culture declares beautiful what it declared ugly in the preceding one.
The rationalization of that is that beauty exists, but it is hidden from view for many people. To perceive beauty requires a certain special sense, and most people do not have this sense.
One believes that it is also possible to develop this sense, by doing exercises, and even to make it appear in persons who are not gifted with this sense. There are schools for that.
The teacher in these schools states to his pupils that there is without doubt a beauty of things, but he has to add that people dispute which things are endowed with that, and that people have so far never succeeded in establishing it firmly. He invites his pupils to examine the question in their turn and so, from generation to generation, the dispute continues.
This idea of beauty is, however, one of the things our culture prizes most and it is customary to consider this belief in beauty and the respect for this beauty as the ultimate justification of Western civilization. The principle of civilization itself is involved with this notion of beauty.
I find this idea of beauty a meager and not very ingenious invention, and especially not very encouraging for man. It is distressing to think about people being deprived of beauty because they are too corpulent or too old. I find even this idea - that the world we live in is made up of ninety percent ugly things and ugly places, while things and places endowed with beauty are very rare and very difficult to meet - I must say, I find that idea not very exciting. It seems to me that the Occident will not suffer a great loss if it loses this idea. On the contrary, if it becomes aware that there is no ugly object nor ugly person in this world and that beauty does not exist anywhere, but that any object is able to become fascinating and illuminating, it will have made a great stride. I think such an idea will enrich life more than the common idea of beauty.
And now what happens with art? Art has been considered, since the Greeks, to have as its goal the creation of beautiful lines and beautiful color harmonies. If one abolishes this notion what becomes of art?
I am going to tell you. Art, then, returns to its real function, which is much more significant than creating shapes and colors agreeable for the so-called pleasure of the eyes.
I do not find this function, assembling colors in pleasing arrangements, very noble. If painting was only that, I should not lose one hour of my time to this activity.
Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes. It has always been considered in this way by primitive peoples, and they are right. Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of expression.
I think this enthusiasm for the language of words, which I mentioned before, has been the reason our culture started to regard painting as a rough, rudimentary, and even contemptible language, good only for illiterate people. From that, culture invented, as a rationalization for art, this myth of plastic beauty, which in my opinion, is an impostor.
I just said, and I repeat now, painting is, in my opinion, a language much richer than that of words. So it is quite unclear to look for rationalizations in art.
Painting is a language much more immediate and, at the same time, much more charged with meaning. Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves. Further, painting manipulates materials which are themselves living substances. That is why painting allows one to go much further than words do in approaching things and conjuring them.
Painting can also - and this is very remarkable - conjure things, which are not isolated, but linked to all that surrounds them; a great many things simultaneously.
In addition, painting is much more immediate and much more direct than language of words; much closer to the cry, or to the dance. That is why painting is a way of expressing our inner voices much more effectively than words.
I just said painting allows, especially much better than words, one to express the various stages of thought, including the deeper levels, the underground stages of mental processes.
Painting has a double advantage over the language of words. First, painting conjures objects with greater strength and comes much closer to them. Second, painting offers to the inner dance of the painter’s mind a larger door to the outside. These two qualities of painting make it an extraordinary instrument of thought, or if you will, an extraordinary instrument of clairvoyance, and also an extraordinary instrument to exteriorize this clairvoyance and to permit us to get it ourselves along with the painter.
Painting now can illuminate the world with wonderful discoveries, can endow man with new myths and new mystics, and reveal, in infinite number, unsuspected aspects of things, and new values not yet perceived.
Here is, I think, for artists, a much more worthy job than creating assemblages of shapes and colors pleasing for the eyes.
