Shattered Forms

Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism

By Allen S. Weiss

Subjects: Art
Series: SUNY series in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
Paperback : 9780791411186, 158 pages, September 1992
Hardcover : 9780791411179, 158 pages, September 1992

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Table of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION
Invocation of a Different Art

PART I. ART BRUT

1. The Primacy of Matter: Art Brut and Modernism

2. In the Devil's Kitchen: Morbidity and Memory

3. Figurations and Disfigurations: On the Grotesque

4. The New Disfiguration

5. Outside In: On the Problem of Demarginalization

6. A New Anxiety of Influence

7. Art Therapy, Outreach, Art Brut

PART II. OTHER MODERNISMS

8. Ecrits Bruts: The Other Scene of Writing

9. Music and Madness

10. Radiophonic Art: The Voice of the Impossible Body

11. Kinomadness

12. Edible Architecture, Cannibal Architecture

Notes

Select Bibliography

Description

Art Brut, also termed Outsider Art, has long been suppressed from most art historical writing. Why this rejection? The hyperbolic expressions of Romanticism and Symbolism nourished a desire for derangement and dissociation that inspired both Expressionism and Surrealism. Simulated delirium became the object of the new art — experimental, avant-garde, modernist — which arose from the fragmented codes, the shattered forms of everyday communication. But what of those artists whose works, and often whose deliria, are the manifestations of sheer eccentricity, of social isolation and marginalization, or of madness? In this book Weiss investigates the origins of the unrestricted contemporary artistic field, seeking its sources in those works hitherto absent from the official histories of art — works that constitute art's dark interior, its disturbing netherworld. Secluded, occluded, excluded, Art Brut nevertheless extends the limits of artistic creativity and aesthetic discourse, regardless of whatever anxieties such works may produce. Shattered Forms explores the relations between Art Brut, the psychopathology of expression, and avant-garde Modernism, attempting to show how the consideration of Art Brut should lead to a revision of our theoretical and museological paradigms.

Allen S. Weiss is a writer, translator, editor, and curator in the fields of Aesthetics, Art History, Cinema Studies, and Comparative Literature. He edited Art Brut: Madness and Marginalia (a special issue of Art & Text); co-edited Psychosis and Sexual Identity and Portraits from the Outside: Figurative Expression in Outsider Art; and wrote The Aesthetics of Excess, published by SUNY Press.