Art Brut

It was a rainy day and I decided to make a pilgrimage to a museum I visited when I first moved to Switzerland, the Collection de l’Art Brut. The collection was started by Jean Dubuffet, partially, it seems, after discussions (letters to and fro) with a friend of his who felt she needed to create art, Magali Herrera, but had no official training, and did not consider herself to be an artist. He encouraged her, and later started collecting “outsider” art, but starting with things created in mental institutions or prisons. https://www.artbrut.ch/

I still have no idea why it’s “art brut” and not just “art”, but I’ve also never had any idea why some people are “artists” and the rest of us have to just be…consumers of art, I guess. I think back in the caves, there was probably not one person with a caveman’s version of a beret and a wispy mustache making art on the walls while the others were cooking him (or her) dinner.

Some of the things in the this museum are by people who just had a compulsion to create. Nek Chand started to collect stones and different objects and make them into people and animals, in secret. When he was discovered, the government of India decided to help him out and he was able to hire assistants. The whole garden now covers five hectares. You can see some of his works here: https://nekchand.org/

My favorite from the visit was a man who worked directing traffic every day for most of his adult life, but then went home and drew an imaginary menagerie of creatures. Someone has scanned quite a few of them onto his blog here: http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2014/08/josep-baque.html

I think that humans need to create, and not just create chaos, or personal wealth. We need to decorate and change our world.

I don’t know what I “create” with this blog, but my wish is to bring a bit more kindness into the world, and maybe, sometimes, some beauty or something happy. And when that doesn’t work, I just put in a photo of Foro.