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Roger Cardinal"signs of presence"A lectureWe live in a period strangely attached to signs and especially spontaneous traces. In the context of cinema, the fascination with crime, and above all the reassuring myth of the criminal's fatal mistake, have become a dominant of the crime film, where the resources of forensic science are invoked so as to convince us that the slightest physical contact - a fingerprint left on a glass, a hair on a pillow, a footprint in the mud - will leave an inevitable and unfalsifiable message, nothing less than the unique signature of the individual. We might suppose that we leave irreducible marks of our passing in every place and at all times. That wilful expressive object commonly called the artwork represents a declaration of presence par excellence. For those who produce artistic compositions - in the form of drawings, paintings, sculptures, graffiti or texts - each scrawl, each arabesque, each loop is the result of a physical impulse transmitting a cerebral or nervous tremor which cannot but confirm the awareness, on the part of the person in question, of his or her own condition of being. We may conceive of this person - bearing witness to himself or herself through the intermediary of a hand that sheds imprints - as an expressive organism entirely transported by the adventure of orchestrating internal affects and ideas. Although not all those who attend creative workshops are likely to achieve recognition as artists, it remains nevertheless the case that their readiness to undertake the experiment of self-expression deserves our fullest admiration. The entire being of these exceptional individuals seems prepared to set the creative impulse entirely free, with no concern for social or technical convention. They grab hold of the pencil or the brush in order to demonstrate to themselves - long before anyone else - that there is something crucial going on in the gap between the individual and the surface over which he or she is leaning. And once the brush touches the paper, an image is born, the natural child of this fertile contact. Thus, quite spontaneously, a first step is made towards explaining oneself, a first step which may indeed develop into an autobiographical narrative, sealing the link between author and drawing. Since we usually arrive rather late on the scene of this sort of self-declaration represented by the work of the handicapped person, we are, insofar as we act as spectators or critics, like a detective who must scrutinize not only the imprints on the paper but also the impressions they leave on his own sensibility. Clearly, what is happening is something more than mechanical objective decoding. A message has begun to be articulated and we are bound to want to construe it. This can only be done through an act of empathy. A valid interpretation can only be a function of reciprocity. What seems most characteristic of the art of the handicapped is its urgency, its air of febrile lyricism. These have to do with the artist's continual movement toward self-discovery and self-definition, and thereafter the impulse toward communication with others. From the virtual image to the image realized on a surface, we pass on to the image as received and absorbed by the spectator. It is this last transition which, remarkably, seems to activate the aesthetic emotion Is this then our cue to speak of beauty? Hardly, or at least not in the ordinary sense. For if there is beauty here, it is a special sort of beauty which goes beyond the simple appreciation of an agreeable texture, a nuance of colour, or an adroit curve. As is the case with authentic Outsider Art, the virtue of such works as these can scarcely be separated from our sense of being caught within a magnetic field: they demand our fullest engagement and undivided attention. Miraculously, what is spontaneous and arbitrary can then take on an absolute authority. We stand before these expressions as before windows which have suddenly been thrust open. Of course, we cannot cross the sill; yet most certainly we feel a subtle breath of wind upon our skin, lulling or darting, soft or sharp, which bears a guarantee of contact and meaning. Roger Cardinal wrote the first book about Art Brut, Outsider Art (London & New York, 1972). |
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