Jean Dubuffet - Larent Danchin (Notes)

Jean Dubuffet - Laurent Danchin, Finest S.A. / Editions Pierre Terrail, Paris 2001

pg. 10 "I think that as far as being famous is concerned, the best thing is to avoid it. But if you can't help it, the best thing to do is be infamous. This is what I have always aimed for, and I shall go on doing so"

'an untiring apostle of the self-taught and of spontaneous creation'

pg. 34 "A song hollered by a girl while brushing the stairs moves me more than any exquisitely tasteful cantata. Each to this own taste. I like what is minimal, and also embryonic, poorly fashioned, imperfect, mixed. I prefer uncut diamonds, still in their matrix. And with their flaws"

pg. 59 "Art speaks to the mind, not to the eyes. This is how 'primitive' societies have always understood it, and they are right. Art is a language: an instrument of knowledge and an instrument of communication" ("Anticultural Positions", Chicago Arts Club lecture, 20 Dec 1951)

title of chapter 3: Children's drawings, graffiti, Rorschach blots, assemblages: unusual ways of getting away from traditional drawing

pg. 73 "Art should always make us laugh a little, and be frightened a little" (Introduction to a public lecture on painting, 1946)

pg. 73 'Why this interest in children's drawings? "Children art beyond society, beyond the law, asocial, alienated: in fact what an artist should be. This is why their drawings are so piquant, inventive and bold, and so carefree in line and form.

And above all - and this is the essence of painting - a child has the power to see deep within the painted image (even if it's something trivial) without a critical reflex immediately blocking it off, as happens with adults. At all times a child is equally happy to see or to envision, and moves easily from the real to the imaginary, from the physical and conceptual (and vice versa)." - Not shaped too much by societal influences -> trends? (relating to contemp illust)

...But then DuBuffet immediately moderated his admiration: "Yet it cannot be denied that children's art, like everything they do, is a bit lacking in something. Children tackle everything superficially

pg. 76 "the pseudo childlike nature of Dubuffet's work....what this simulated childhood provided Dubuffet with was a radical way of sweeping away the whole of artistic culture; it was a new and powerful way of freeing himself to explore the world round about him"

pg. 85 "Dubuffet only had one aim: not the specific but the general, not the detail but the universal"

pg. 115 Dubuffet and l'Art Brut
"...(Art Brut) is work made by people without any formal artistic culture, work in which mimeticism, unlike what happens with intellectuals, plays little or no part. So the creators of this work derive everything (subject, choice of materials employed, means of transportation, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from within themselves and not from the conventions of classical art or fashionable contemporary art. So what we see is totally pure artistic activity, raw, reinvented throughout every entire phase by its author just according to his own impulses, nothing else"

pg. 187 "I feel that the categories established by critics and art historians are always very arbitrary and based on quite vague criteria. At all events they derive from the viewpoint of the person looking and not the person creating."