Look at what lies at your feet.
The true measure of a creation is its ability to inspire. Jean Dubuffet's art is an elementary introduction into what it means to make magic from our everyday experiences.
In my current exploration of the book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David W. Galenson, I came across a beautiful passage about the experimental artist Jean Dubuffet, that piqued my interest in his work.
“Dubuffet’s art was visual, as his goal was to draw on a variety of types of art by the self-taught or untrained to break with traditional concepts of artistic beauty and create an art that represented the viewpoint of the common man. He devoted considerable effort to devising new technical procedures to achieve this, including the use of accidental effects. During the 1950s, for example, he produced works he called assemblages by cutting up and reassembling painted surfaces. He explained that this technique, “so rich in unexpected effects, and with the possibilities it offers . . . of making numerous experiments, seemed to me an incomparable laboratory and an efficacious means of invention.”
Jean Dubuffet began making art in earnest at age 41, after a stint in the army and a successful career as a wine merchant.
In this youtube video by the Barbican Centre, he offers wisdom on what it means to be an artist.
Close examination of Dubuffet's top 10 tips for Artists
- Do what you always do and you will get what you always got - gravitating towards the use of inexpensive materials (as opposed to more traditional art supplies) to make his art, Dubuffet experimented in all possible directions and found ways to make his art accessible to people from all walks of life.
- Be a cook, not a chef - Dubuffet was an artist of the people, and he wanted to create art that was more modest and that could speak to the average person on the streets.
- Embrace publicity - he was aware that his work provoked strong public reactions and harnessed it to grow public perception of art. One can muse that perhaps, art was the technology of the day, and therefore provoked love and outrage the same way technology does today.
- Art should be born from the materials - we should let the material speak for itself. With his work with assemblages, he created collages with found materials; with butterfly wings or remnants of previous paintings, with figures from steel wool, charcoal, vines and lava stone; from the debris of a burnt-out car.
- Relish the burn - the secret is to do [art] badly (experiment), and gain new insights into the next direction. Dubuffet curiously sought out the art of the possible.
- Put [painting] in danger - some of Dubuffet's paintings were so materially rich that they melted off the canvas. He enjoyed putting his treasures in peril. I particularly enjoyed the idea that, "when we are at the point of losing something, it becomes illuminated."
- Be brutal - he praised instinct and passion over reason and logic.
- Create your own parallel universe - check out his amazing work, Le cirque and reflect on his advice that we should "let our minds see saw and riff.."
- Embrace contradiction - through tireless experimentation and rebelling from any form of cultural conditioning. He famously said, 'Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.’
- Learn how to laugh