Art Brut as Non-Representational Expression

  You will find it hard to find the Guru.                                                                                                                                     If you kill not the louse of habit-forming thoughts.                                                                                                     Self-originated and self-destructive.                                                                                                                     Tomorrow I will visit a freak show.

               -A man holding a handful of lice instructs Naropa

Pascal-Desir Maisonneuve 'The Eternal Infidel'

Strolling the streets of Lausanne a few years back, I came across, much like a chance encounter in a Surrealist manner, a curious cottage building situated in an out-of-the-way location from the more popular tourist trails. A banner propped up at the front spotted the words ‘Collection de l’Art Brut’ and featured a photo of an art object: an uncanny face, with puffed up cheeks and swirly eyes, an assemblage made up of seashells which I found out later was a piece by Pascal-Desir Maisonneuve titled as The Eternal Infidel. Without hesitation, I entered this museum without any idea of what to expect. Strolling around the museum, I was assaulted by new forms of creative expressions: obsessive repetitions, highly sexualised and perverse outbursts of libidinal energies, childlike naivety, labyrinth topologies, works that seem to have no particular connection with each other, other than their unbounded expressive qualities. I was struck by intense sensations that triggered memories of the free-flowing creativity of childhood doodling, which was then immediately projected into future possibilities of applications and openings. It was an encounter that disrupted my habitual subjectivity, illuminated and affirmed the world as chaos, and forced me to think, to map my surroundings and bodily affects through direct experience.  Thus begin my encounter with the rhizomic ‘canon’ of art labelled as Art Brut, or Outsider Art, of which Maclagan categorised as

“work produced by the inmates of psychiatric asylums, usually with the diagnostic label ‘psychotic’; work resulting from the practice of some form of automatism, usually under the aegis of spiritualism; and work that, through some combination of formal originality and social marginality, seems to owe nothing to conventional culture” (1991, p. 32)

Reading up on Art Brut’s history and its various modes of representation enabled me to contextualise this aesthetic phenomenon within its particular frameworks; it enabled me to situate Art Brut within its specific and unifying characteristics. However part of that intense, rejuvenating and thought provoking affects that I experienced on my chance encounter with Art Brut was lost in this process, and my subsequent discoveries of creative expressions that are not constructed and informed by dominant aesthetic paradigms became subjectified within and reaffirmed the theories utilised within such frameworks of understanding.

However, discovering the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, an encounter much like my discovery of Art Brut, opened my eyes to a new way of seeing, or rather, feeling the sensations and ruptures of art outside the regime of representations. The aim of this essay, as inspired by my first excursion at Collection de l’Art Brut’, is to apply such a [non] methodology to the Art Brut phenomenon in an effort to resist its capture into signification, to regain its transformative potential in an ethical manner of celebrating difference in a non-dialectical framework. I will give a brief history of Art Brut, followed by a discussion on its subjectification into primitivism, as a manifestation of the unconscious and its instrumental utilisations in the field of psychiatry. In the process, I shall discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of becoming and schizoanalysis as tools that enable an ethical mode of reception.

 

Framing the Art Brut Legacy: Dubuffet and his Fascination with Immanent Creativity

To account for the articulation of Art Brut within modernity, it is contingent to refer to the Surrealist movement. Influenced by the discovery of the unconscious within Freudian psychoanalysis and the convulsions of writers like Lautreamont and Apollinaire, Surrealism sought to combat the over-rational trajectories of modernity by evoking the unconscious with its latent dream states, unbounded imagination, marvellousness, through the practice of free associative methods such as automatic writing. Madness is projected as a key towards unbounded creativity. As Breton states, “I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane” (1972, p. 5).

This led to the discovery of Hans Prinzhorn’s seminal book, Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922), which conducted studies of artistic works produced by inmates in mental institutions. This became a rich source of inspiration for the Surrealists, who were interested, not so much on Prinzhorn’s theories, but the impact of Prinzhorn’s collection of artistic expressions that appeared to them as a line of flight into the realm of the unconscious. Thus begin Jean Dubuffet’s research and collection of what will be gradually termed Art Brut. While he does not consider himself a surrealist, he was nevertheless familiar with its concerns and fascinated with the art of the insane, of which he considered as an authentic source of creativity that is uncontaminated by the cultural sphere. Commenting on the pictures in Prinzhorn’s book, he says, “I realised that everything was permitted, everything is possible. Millions of possibilities of expression existed outside of the accepted cultural avenues” (Cited in Peiry, 2001. p. 43).

Jean Dubuffet

This was confirmed during his research trip to Switzerland and Southern France in 1945. Through correspondence with an array of asylums, Dubuffet discovered a dispersed milieu of art works, which included out of many, the symphonic tapestries and word/image transfusions of Adolf Wolfli and the mutated animalistic human portraits of Heinrich Anton Muller. With the help of others, Dubuffet then initiated the L’Art Brut journal, followed by The Foyer de l’Art Brut as a means to exhibit Art Brut, leading to the formation of The Compagnie De L’Art Brut. At this point, Art Brut was understood, not just as the art of the insane, but “as a pole, an unattainable point at the antipodes to cultural conformity; and then as a wind, a waft of fresh air which inspires originality” (Cardina, 1994, p. 23). Thus, the phenomenon is understood as expressions of an immanent creativity; and its creators as individuals, in which Cubbs argues is a reappropriation of romanticism’s ideology (1994, p. 85).

Adolf Wölfli 'The Kander Valley in the Bernese Oberland' (1926)

Heinrich Anton Müller 'Man with flies and snake' (1920s)

The romanticism of Art Brut is somewhat inconsistent with Dubuffet’s idea of the authenticity of the faceless ‘common man’, which was “revealed a posteriori to be a prefiguration of the author of Art Brut,” as inspired by his observations of the celebratory and non-dialectical difference between “merchant and customer” during his wanderings around “the working-class neighbourhoods of Paris” (Piery, 2001, p. 36). Walter Benjamin interprets aura as a form of critical distance that is inherent within reality: “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (1969, p. 225). Dubuffet’s search for Art Brut is much like a search for aura, the displaced objects and aesthetics of modernity. The articulation of the common-man situates his project within a working-class framework, which together with Benjamin’s aura, seem to point towards a mutation of Marxism and a displacement of the present, a faceless proletariat that sits in uncomfortably from the romanticism associated with Art Brut. 

 

Dubuffet’s framing of Art Brut within the cultural sphere, his project of making it public, was met with many uncertainties due to the very idea of Art Brut as non-participatory with conventional culture. The off kilter location of The Compagnie De L’Art Brut and his insistence “that nothing could be exhibited away from the museum” out of fear “that works could be devalued if they were shown alongside the ‘normal’ creations of contemporary artist” points towards a practice of secrecy, a refrain within the trajectory of exposure (Maizels, 1996, p. 43). Dubuffet’s general framework was to resist the commercialisation of Art Brut. Nevertheless, works were put up for sale at the The Foyer de l’Art Brut in 1948; of which he affirmed the attention and acceptance the marginal works were gaining (Peiry, 2001. p. 75).

The rhizomic milieu of Art Brut soon expanded into a widespread phenomenon around Europe and also the United States, in which unconventional artworks by artists such as Henry Darger, Bill Traylor and Fran Albert Jones were discovered. Art Brut, or Outsider Art, the more commonly used term in the present, “has become a catchall phrase for everything that is ostensibly, raw, untutored, and irrational in art” (Rexer, 2005, p. 6). Its legitimisation also gave way to particular generalisations of its creative phenomenon, an instrumentalisation of its affects and its uses in the field of psychiatry.

 

Primitivism: The Fetishisation of Art Brut

 The movement of Western colonisation resulted in a stereotypical portrait of the indigenous and displaced non-west as a site of fear, of xenophobic uncertainty. However, the expressions of the non-west became a site of fascination and inspiration with artistic movements and events such as Surrealism, Picasso’s primitive works and Paul Klee’s native and bizarre sketches, Through the  “exhibitions of those artefacts plundered from colonised societies” artists were motivated “to disengage from bourgeois values and adopt complex and difficult styles which both dismantled and critiqued traditional forms of representation” (Booth & Rigby, 2000, p. 294). This is an act of appropriation, in which the artist, who views civilisation as a deadlock, generates the image of the primitive as an exotic other of a displaced culture that is believed to be more in touch with the earth, more authentic than western civilisation.

While this seems to be an heroic disavowal of the hegemonic weight of Western culture, at times it seems more like a fetish, a mythical construction of the other out of their own fantasies of that unreachable field. This is most evident in Germain Bazin’s statement on the artistry of the primitive man:

“Though these races have no known historical relationship, they hold in common an asesthetic notion which exalts the painted or sculpted form into a revelation of the Beyond, a sign fraught with supernatural powers. This is true not only in the case of ancestral images, fetishes and totems evoking beneficent spirits and evil demons, or the masks used for ritual dances and ceremonies, but also in the case of objects of everyday use whose stylized patterns have symbolic value…; for the primitive man lives at all times in contact with the beyond…” (Cited in Errington, 1998, p. 76)

Thus, the primitive man is invested with the power to access the metaphysical, the spiritual. Similar implications are made on the man who practices Art Brut. Maclagan states, “If ‘primitivism’ is a myth that seems to haunt European culture from the outside, ‘outsider’ art is something like an image of the primitive within” (1991, p. 32). This can be interpreted as a destabilisation of the geographical difference between the civilised west and otherly cultures. Nevertheless, for Art Brut, primitivism is reinvested into the figure of the artist as a madman, mystic, the marginal outsider living off the edges, but within the habitus of society.

There is a concern that when understood within a dialectical relationship with Western civilisation, primitivism’s difference, which becomes recognisable, will be absorb and used as a constructive effort in reaffirming the Western civilisation. Edward Said has theorised that the Orient as other has “helped define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1978, p. 2-3). In the case of Art Brut, the irrationality of such works will be seen within the framework of the primitive, and in the process the civilised notion of accepted art canons will be reaffirmed.

In an effort to combat such a reappropriation, Foster calls for a “counterprimitivism”, much to the likeness of Bataille’s transgressions, in which “the primitive might be thought disruptively, not recuperated abstractly” (Cited in Li, 2006, p. 17). Nevertheless, as Li observed, counterprimitivism, or what she terms neo-primitivism, that “emphasizes absolute difference or radical alterity” of the primitive results in “an ironic reversal” because it still “needs the absolute difference of the primitive in order to achieve the non-ethnocentric, critically reflexive, ethical stance it aspires to” (2006, p. 18-19).

It will always be troublesome, for a subject within the dominant paradigm to ethically approach the other, even if its intentions were to negate its very own position. Bauman states, “There are no tourists without the vagabonds, and tourists cannot be let free without tying down the vagabonds…” (1998, p. 93). The observer and critic of Art Brut is much like a tourist, a position of power held over the vagabonds, the outsiders. It is this dominant position of power that enables the observer to invest in his or her desire to allow “cultural bonds and blinders to slip away,” to “become a fellow traveller with the [outsider] artist on his creative explorations,” to embark “on an exciting and mysterious journey” ((Faber, 1990, p. 7).

To utilise primitivism as a means to conceptualise Art Brut would be to capture its creative potential into the problematic issues that arise out of the Civilisation/Primitive binary. It should not be seen as from the beyond, as a metaphysical phenomenon. Rather, the outsider artist should be seen as a person that is minoritarian, whether through mental illness or departure from sociality, which because of this becomes more perceptive to the process of creativity and offers a line of flight towards the desubjectification of oppressive and stagnant regimes. Deleuze hardly refers to the other, but mentions becoming-woman, animal, music, cosmos, and also evokes primitivism in order to define nomadology. While such categories can be considered as other in relation to the dominant framework, they are not evoked as oppositions, but as becomings, as exits out of parasitic significations and trajectories that affirm rather than allow us to truly encounter. As Deleuze and Guattari declare:

 If human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes. (1988, p. 171)

To escape a simple relation with Art Brut as other, the perceiver should not simply embark on a mysterious journey as a ‘tourist’ or ‘fellow traveller’ but make the ethical decision to transform in the process, to deterritorialise his/her subjectivity through genuine and respectful connections with the works in question.

Art Brut should not be seen as an other, a representation of madness and inconceivability. Similarly, in the reception of such works, we should not hold on to our static sense of a civilised self; we should not be, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘human all too human’. Deleuze and Guattari declare, “in relation to the percepts or visions they give us, artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects” (1994, p. 173). The outsider artist’s marginalisation, whether through psychiatric illnesses or a retreat from the codification of society, enables them to perceive an intensification of the world as an organic flow of affects. It is much like a sacrifice: their increased sense of intensities allows them to practice the creative function of translating such affects into artworks, to frame affects into artworks that becomes a gateway for its release; but they might suffer from too much of it, too much intensity that results in debilitating illnesses and alienation. Thus, it is only ethical that we avoid subjectifying them as primitives, as madmen. In viewing, or indeed feeling Art Brut, we should take the plunge into that affective zone of indetermination, engage with its sensations, its colours and its energy. In this process, the perceiver does not become or merge into otherness, but becomes quite otherly to both modes of subjectivity, which in other words, points towards flux, changeability as projected to the future.

 

Psychoanalysis and the uses of Art Brut in the Field of Psychiatry

The field of psychoanalysis, being “a field of inquiry into the human mind and mental development, aimed at therapy for mental disorders,” has “a different fundamental focus from aesthetics, which is concerned with the abstract nature of beauty” (Cooper et al., 1996, p. 347). With Art Brut, aesthetics is seen as a key towards the functions of the human mind, the creativity inherent within the psyche that is blocked out by the ego. Perhaps, this is explicitly so because Art Brut has its roots in psychiatry, it was spawned from the art of the insane, which was discovered by psychiatrists such as Prinzhorn who believed that works of the mentally ill illuminated the processes of the creative drive in which all artistic expression sprouts from (Maizels, 1996, p. 15). 

As of recent, the dominant mode of psychiatry as applied to the criticism of art is the Freudian model. In this model, the child in his early development is seen as “a complex shifting force in which the subject is caught up and dispersed,” has “no centre of identity and in which the boundaries between itself and the external world are indeterminate” (Eagleton, 1996, p. 133). In subscribing to the Oedipus complex, the formation of the superego and the locus of structure, the subject emerges as a split subject “torn precariously between conscious and unconscious; and the unconscious can always return to plague it” (ibid, p. 136). The unconscious, or the more popular use term the subconscious, have been internalised and propagated within popular culture. The outsider artist is seen to practice at a vantage point, due to lesser integration into society and phallicism, which allows greater access to the unconscious.

There is the danger that if such a framework is taken lightly, the mental status of outsider artists will be amplified as a means to pacify the inconceivability of their productions. Furthermore, if one were to romanticise on the outsider artist’s access to the unconscious, their connections with reality will be played down and their art works will become useless within the structural and cognitive patterns of society. For example, one of Johann Hauser’s drawings, with was really a “response to a reproduction of a Boucher nude,” a “strategic method” that was informed not simply from his inner psyche but is observation,” was described as “a sample of his manic creativity” (Maclagan, 1991, p. 44-45). It becomes reductive, when art brut is simply inserted into the model of the unconscious, in an appropriation of its otherly difference and irrationality.

Henry Darger’s Untitled (The Battle of Norma Catherine)

MacGregor, an art historian who has devoted much of his life to the analysis of Darger’s oeuvre, to the prying open of the psychiatric mechanisms, states:

This necessary confrontation with one’s self is, perhaps, the essential component underlying the choice of an artist to work on. Initially, it is arrived at intuitively. There is always a risk of getting lost, of identification, or of project; all of which would result in a loss of objectivity. My own training in psychoanalysis was the best preparation for this work; protecting me from losing myself for too long in Darger’s world, while permitting the occasional “regression in the service of the ego,” which is essential if one is to understand. (1998, par. 32)

While psychoanalysis has illuminated the latent state of desire, raw psychic energy within the Id, its main task, in the assertion of Oedipus, is the act of socialisation, of repressing the potentialities of the unconscious towards familiarity. With this model, even the act of perceiving art, ala MacGregor’s approach, is invested in the economy of a stable sense of self. Freud sees that the artist’s aim is “to set himself free and, by communicating his work to other people suffering from the same arrested desires, he offers the same liberation” (Cited in Funch, 1997, p. 148). However, this communication is always doomed to fail because it is not a manifestation of desire itself, but a sublimation that is coded symbolically. The socialising function of psychoanalysis works to decode such acts of sublimation, to pry open the uneven development of the subject’s desires, only to reinsert the subject back into the mould of normality.

The discovery of the unconscious threatens the economy of a stable socialised subject. But as Kilick and Schaverien states, it is this very crisis that spurs the psychoanalyist “to reinforce or insist on the notion of representation” through “the psychoanalytic theory of the psychic representation of drives” (1997, p. 139). This is most evident in Art Brut’s intersection with the field of psychiatric art, which attempts to use the artistic expressions of mental patients to diagnose particular psychotic conditions. Art generated through therapy sessions becomes a means to detect symptoms of mental illnesses. In the Cunningham Dax Collection’s Selected Works of Psychiatric Art catalogue (1998), art works by mental patients are classified under illnesses such as neuroses, depression, mania, schizophrenia, personality disorders etc. For example, a piece that sports a man standing by the window and covering his ears is accompanied by the text, “Another way to guard against the unpleasant hallucinations is by covering the ears with the hands or even by leaving them out of the picture” (Dax, 1998, p. 63). The collection attempts to give an understanding of the conditions of such illnesses. But its classificatory methodology and its dependency on the representational aspects of art works arrest such creative expressions into the mould of treatment.

Weiss points out two arguments against such a practice: that the “generalized post war use of medicalization in the psychiatric hospitals somehow destroys the creative faculties,” and such environments are “highly directed and not created spontaneously, which thus mitigates against their aesthetic authenticity” (1992, p. 70). Indeed, Prinzhorn shares much in common with R. D. Liang’s anti-psychiatric principles and was quick to reject Art Brut’s status as a form of art therapy. There are artworks within The Compagnie De L’Art Brut that are discovered and attained from psychiatric institutions such as Gugging, a house of artists situated in a psychiatric hospital in Klosterneburg. These include Johann Hauser’s kaleidoscopic child-like colourings and Johann Garber’s microscopically detailed tapestries. The difference between such institutions and the modern practices of art therapy is that “these organizations give their patients complete freedom to express themselves; there is no group work and they are not supervised; each person chooses his work place and pursues his own interests” (Peiry, 2001, p. 201). The Gugging building itself is decorated by the artists, in which individual artworks merge with one another, a transformation of the building’s status as an institution into a collective empowerment through artistry. Thus, perhaps, it must be added that it is not simply a form of individualism that allowed creativity to flourish, but also a sense of community and the lack of institutional confinement that allowed the artists to connect with their environment, to release their creative flows.

To get out of the harrowing aspects of psychoanalysis, its interpretation of all forms of desire as a sublimation of sexuality, the insertion of desire into the mommy-daddy-me triangle, Deleuze and Guattari initiate a return to the pre-oedipal implications of Freudian psychoanalysis through what they call schizoanalysis. Schizophrenia is taken, not as an illness, but a process that illuminates the productive mechanisms of the unconscious: “Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 31-32). The key word here is production: desire does not sprout from a lack but are immanent energy flows, processes that are invested in sociality, in making connections with materiality.

The morphogenetic properties of the earth itself is taken as an example of desire-production:

The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production. For the earth is not merely the multiple and divided object of labour, it is also the unique, indivisible entity, the full body that falls back on the forces of production and appropriates them for its own as the natural or divine precondition (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 154-155).

There is no primitive as other. Primitivism is used in this sense to refer to a very fundamental aspect of our being, of our earth itself. A seed grows into a plant and sprouts a flower that emits particular smells that are intense enough to attract a hummingbird, which then carries pollen grains to a pistil. This enables the fertilisation of an egg within a carpel, resulting in seed development. A new plant forms and the preceding one decomposes, becomes organic matter that is broken down by fungi and bacteria. It also becomes food for mites and soil animals that all have their own cycles of production. Imagine zooming into all these processes in which molecular cells migrate and interact aggressively with each other. Imagine watching an accelerated stop-motion video that allows us to see such processes in motion, the movements and moments before particular entities are formed. There is no divine intervention, no prior organisation needed for its production. Rather, it is a ‘divine precondition’ of the sensations and vibrations of interacting matter as pure intensities that need no intervention for its expressions.

Schizophrenia is a “harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning, living centre of matter” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 21). In other words, the schizo becomes exposed to the processes of desire-production without the reterritorialisations of significations and codifications. The schizo’s subjectivity decomposes in the process of experiencing the expressions of matter in its raw state. In this sense, the outsider artist first experiences the art brut of materiality, the creative impulses of the world itself. The outsider artist then expresses such intensities via the creation of works of art, which is a process “of compounding, or composing, not a pure creation from nothing, but the act of extracting from the materiality of forces, sensations, or powers of affecting life, that is, becomings, that have not existed before and may summon up and generate future sensations, new becomings” (Grosz, 2008, p. 75).

 

Bringing it all back to the Common Man

Through his relationship with Heinrich Anton Muller, Dubuffet observed that he “loved nothing so much as his madness,” that “this was his reason for living, and nothing enchanted him more than to project it onto living sheets of paper which he then fixed to the wall and gazed at” (Cited in Maizels, 1996, p. 50). Indeed, there is a sense of joy in such an acts of creation, of production without the mediation of culture. And there is joy when we are able to encounter and feel the intensities of such works of art without the mediation of representations.

This brings us back to Dubuffet’s idea of the common man which functions like a subtext to the political potentialities of Art Brut. He was attracted to the joyful energy of that faceless multitude, that “festival of man” (Cited in Peiry, 2001, p. 38). Ironically, it is the very banality of the way they handled themselves, the disregard for a face or figuration that situates them out of culture’s grasp. What Dubuffet saw was a mingling of bodies, flows of productive energy that form a rhizomic collective enunciation: “a deterritorialisation, a stammering from within the major language” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 83). It could be argued that such a portrait of the working-class community is based on Dubuffet’s own utopian investments. Nevertheless, what is important is that which is extracted out of his encounter with the common man, his creative appropriation that eventually situates Art Brut as a politically motivated collective enunciation. Our current neo-liberalist economy’s emphasis on individualistic creative development has resulted in a greater interest and legitimisation of Art Brut. Perhaps, within such a climate, it becomes more pressing to reject the framing of the outsider artist as a romantic individual, and adopt Dubuffet’s idea of the common man to situate the rhizomic ‘canon’ of Art Brut as minor art that becomes a collective through its production of sensations and affects, of which we as perceivers should receive as encounters through a child-like perceptibility.

 

References

Benjamin, Walter. (1969). Illuminations. New York: Schochen Books.

Booth. H. J. & Rigby, N. (2000). Modernism and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Breton, Andre. (1972). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Cardinal, Roger. (1994). ‘Toward an Outsider Aesthetic’. In Hall, M. D. & Metcalf, E. W. (Eds.). The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. 20-43.

Cooper, D. E. et al. (1995). A Companion to Aesthetics. Blackwell Reference.

Cubbs, Joanne. (1994). ‘Rebels, Mystics, and Outcasts: The Romantic Artist Outsider’. In Hall, M. D. & Metcalf, E. W. (Eds.). The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture. 76-93.

Dax, E. C. (1998). The Cunningham Dax Collection: Selected Works of Psychiatric Art. Victoria: Melbourne University Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone Press.

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. (2004). Anti-Oedipus. London and New York: Continuum.

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy?. London: Verso.

Eagleton, Terry. (1996). ‘Psychoanalysis’ in Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Errington, Shelly. (1998). The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. California: University of California Press.

Faber, Sam. (1990). ‘Portraits from the Outside: Figurative Expression in Outsider Art’. In Carr, Simon et al. (Eds.). Portraits from the Outside. New York: Parsons School of Design.

Funch, B. S. (1997). The Psychology of Art Appreciation. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Grosz, Elizabeth. (2008). Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press.

Killick, K. & Schaverien, J. (1997). Art, Psychotherapy, and Psychosis. London: Routledge.

Peiry, Lucienne. (2001). Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art. Flammarion.

Li, Victor. (2006). The Neo-Primitivist Turn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Maclagan, David. (1991). ‘Outsiders or Insiders?’. In Hiller, Susan. (Ed.). The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art. London and New York: Routledge. 32-49.

MacGregor, J. M. (1998). Thoughts on the Question: Why Darger?. Retrieved 5 June, 2009, from http://www.art.org/theOutsiderMag/darger-whydarger.htm

Maizels, John. (1996). Raw Creation: Outsider Art and Beyond. Londond: Phaidon Press Limited.

O’Sullivan, Simon. (2006). Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thoughts Beyond Representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rexer, Lyle. (2005). How to Look at Outsider Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Said, Edward. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Weiss, A. S. (1992). Shattered Forms: Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism. New York: State University of New York Press.

Singapore’s Creative Industries

In labelling Singapore as a ‘cultural desert’ and ‘nanny state’, the government is articulated as an authoritative state that utilises an explicit regime of control, the grooming of subjects through strategic ideological nationalistic rhetoric, in its efforts to strengthen Singapore’s economic and social stability. Perhaps, such charges are valid for the immediate post-industrial years of Singapore’s development, which Kong refers to as a pragmatic developmental state that prioritises economic development above other matters” (2000, p. 6). This is most clear when Dhanabalan, the Minister of Culture in 1983, emphasised that the state has concentrated “on improving the standard of living of Singaporeans,” while “the quality of life in Singapore,” which includes artistic endeavours,” are taken as a secondary and distinct issue (1983, p. 16).

However, the negative labels mentioned above are less reactionary in the present, ever since the cultural or artistic sphere has been targeted as a developmental block within government policy. Within the span of the past few years, the government have pumped in substantial capital towards the development of arts education, infrastructure and assistance schemes. In this essay, firstly, I will analyse the economic-rationale that influences Singapore arts policy under the current rubric of the Creative Industries. Secondly, I will trace the origins of Singapore’s cultural policy and its aims in nationalism, and determine the place of national identity within current policy arrangements. It is my aim to demonstrate that, while Singapore is far from being a cultural desert and that arts policy have indeed increased arts activity, it is still crucial to examine how its developmental trajectories resemble an artificial network build on a desert.

In light of globalised informational flows, technological advancement, and economical competition, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA) initiated the Creative Industries Development Strategy (CIDS). This is an effort to tap into the opportunities associated with the rapid growth of the Singapore’s creative sector that contributes to an estimate of “between 2.8% to 3.2%” of Gross Domestic Product” in 2002 (ERC, Sep 2002, p. 1). The growth of this cluster from 1986 to 2000 “grew by an average of 17.2 per cent per annum, as compared to average annual GDP growth of 10.5 per cent” (MICA, 2003, p. 54). Thus, the creative sector is singled out as a contingent area of development due to its increasing economic viability.

The definition of the creative sector in CIDS is based on Florida’s definition of the creative class that “includes people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content” (Florida, 2006, p. 8). A more systematic rendering initiated in the CIDS renders it into three broad clusters: Arts and Culture, which consists of performing arts, visual arts etc; Design, which consists of advertising, architecture etc; and Media, which consists of broadcast, film and media etc. This is supported by three corresponding initiatives: Renaissance City 2.0 that aims “to develop Singapore into a highly innovative and multi-talented global city for the arts”; Design Singapore that aims to “establish Singapore as Asia’s leading hub for design excellence”; and Media 21 that aims to “develop a thriving media ecosystem” (MICA, n.d., par. 7). The convergence of these three clusters through “convergence, customization, collaboration and networks”, and its directed contribution to the economy forms an ecology of Singapore’s creative industries (Cunningham, 2002, p. 59).

In citing examples of successful artistic milieus such as the rise of Renaissance Art in Florence under the patronage of the Medici family, Sanyal argues, “Art is not the result of unregulated bohemianism but the result of patronage” (2006, p. 8). A contingent issue that arises with the increased governmental patronage, the structuring of the creative industries, is concerned with the use-value and practicality of a top-down approach. There is a split between an understanding of artistic production as organic process and it being a result of governmental intervention.

One initiative sparked off by the Renaissance City scheme is the emergence of an arts hub/district within the central business district. In an interview in the Straits Times, William Lim, a prolific architect and urban theorist states, “I’m not sure you can do an arts hub deliberately. These things have to grow on their own energy.” (Cited in Tan, 4 Feb 2009, par. 20) Furthermore, the high rentals within the arts district facilitate the growth, other than national museums, of art entities with sufficient capital within the capitalistic economy. This disadvantages minor arts organisations and communities. He elaborates further that for creativity to thrive, the government should draw inspiration from the “chaotic order” of notorious districts such as Geylang, the bustling and hectic red-light district, to create “spaces of indeterminacy” for artistic production (ibid, par. 10-11). Thus, Lim transverse the dichotomy of control and spontaneity by not simply rejecting the use-value of governmental intervention, but gesturing that arts and cultural policies should be sensitive towards the experimental and radical nature of creativity, which thrives on the authenticity associated spontaneous communitarian organisation that might not fit into the government’s obsession with ‘cleanliness’.

The rationale behind the creative industries is not limited within its designated clusters as it is understood that it “not only contribute towards the economy directly, they also have a powerful, indirect impact on the rest of the economy – by adding style, aesthetics and freshness to differentiate our products and services” (MICA, n.d., par. 3). It is envisioned that the propagation of creativity will engender a healthy transformation and rejuvenation of Singapore’s capitalistic economy, a switch from one-dimensionality to multi-dimensionality that is essential for continuous growth. Thus, the creative industries function as a source and indicator of entrepreneurship within the wider economy, bringing to mind Schumpeter’s theory of Creative Destruction which he describes as an industrial mutation “that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating the new one” (1994, p. 83).

Thus, the CIDS is explicitly utilising the idea of creativity, which was once considered lacking in the nation-state, to engineer success within the late capitalistic economy that departs from traditional modes of production. The integration of artistic endeavours into the economy and governmental patronage of the arts enables greater legitimisation, representation, and output. However, one major concern is the commoditisation of art in which creative diversity becomes reterritorialised into capitalistic logic. The Esplanade, which is considered as Singapore’s art infrastructure par excellence, is a compound that combines a large concert hall, a 2000 seat theatre and smaller venues with a shopping complex. Passion 99.5FM, an arts radio station that was spearheaded in conjunction with the Renaissance City scheme, was shutdown because it was deemed unprofitable in the light of an economic downturn in 2003. As Caust states, “Equating the making of the art with the selling of art undermines the process of the doing” (2003, p. 61).

In order for local artistic productions to tap into the global market, it must, to a certain degree, subscribe to the modes of consumption in the global economy. The hegemonic assertion of English as the de facto language within Singapore’s management of language, much in line with its education policies, influences its management of the creative industries. In a National Day Rally in 1999, then prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, asserted that “since English was the language of technology and international commerce, it was essential that standards should be raised, if Singapore was to attain first-world economic levels” (Cited in Shepherd, 2005, p. 91).

Singapore is a hybrid multi-cultural state that consists of Chinese, Malays, Indians and many other minoritarian races. Similarly, there is a diversity of languages utilised in the creative sector. However, there is a stronger legitimisation of English-based production. In a study of local theatre companies, Chong asserts that the National Arts Council demonstrates that English language companies are given more importance in the arts sector in relation to its funding practices (Chong, 2005, p. 563). Thus, non-English language companies are disadvantaged by a form of traditionalism and oriental outlook asserted on them by the ideology of the creative industries. In this sense, the CIDS’ commoditisation of artistic products results in the hierarchal stratification of difference.

Prior to the 1970s, there were hardly any substantial mentions of culture and the arts by the government. Perhaps, the illuminating potentials of an ideological appropriation of the cultural field towards the purpose nationalistic cohesion resulted in the birth of cultural policy in Singapore. In a 1973 press release, Inche Sha’ari Tadin, then Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Culture, stated:

Already many young people are mindlessly aping foreign mannerism. They think that the process of modernisation simply means drug-taking, a-go-go dancing and pornography. Once our youths have adequate cultural anchorage, they will be less prone to these modern excesses (cited in Kong, 2000, p. 9)

 Another significant utterance was made in 1978 by Ong Teng Cheong, then Acting Minister of Culture, who said that cultural policy “allow[s] Singapore’s rich cultural heritage [to] gradually interact and blend into a distinctive Singaporean culture;” to construct “the necessary cultural ballast and to guard against the erosion of traditional norms and values (1978, p. 1). Thus, it is clear that a particular nationalistic identity is being constructed as a means to soothe the transition into Modernity, in which Western cultural lifestyles are taken as a form of decadence, a bad influence on Singaporean citizens. For this purpose, Confucianism is utilised to construct a Singaporean brand of Asian identity. This is drilled in via the local culture/media industry. One simply has to look at Mediacorp’s vast array of local television series during this period to locate strong elements of patriarchal and Confucian familial patterns.

A disparity arises when one compares this trajectory with the current creative industries rhetoric. There is the concern of whether the brand of Singaporean nationalistic identity constructed through the government’s paternalistic approach can coexist with the propagation of creativity within the CIDS model (Leo & Lee, 2004, p. 52). Cohen states that globalisation “hegemoniz[es] nation-states” towards the creation of ‘an exclusive citizenship a defining focus of allegiance and fidelity in favor of overlapping, permeable and multiple forms of identification” (1997, p. 157). In this climate that relates to the free-flowing, paradigm shifting capitalistic creativity propagated by CIDS, the deterritorialisation of nationalism, which contributes to a citizen’s understanding of his/her sense of self, might be reterritorialised through the reinvention and reassertion of nationalism because of the need to articulate identity.

Thus, the nationalism advocated by the government in early cultural policies are updated and reasserted within the framework of the creative industries. The hard-headed paternal and Confucian elements still exist, but are played down within the articulation of a nationalistic Singaporean product. As part of the Media 21 scheme, local content is encouraged within the creative industries through the emphasis of “Singapore Content and Brand” (Media Development Authority, 2002, p. 13). This is asserted as a form of nationalistic dissemination of a distinct Singaporean product towards the global economy that “establishes a reputation for Singapore as a New Asia Creative Hub” (ERC, Sep 2002, p. 2). Through the products of Singapore’s creative clusters, Singapore “mobilize[s] New Asia as a strategy of branding and a form of cultural capital” that is significant from other creative industries “because it incorporates the ideology of Asian values” and positions accumulated cultural capital “as an economic strategy of regional dominance” (Yue, 2006, p. 21).  Difference is contained and absorbed within the New Asian creative economy through “the active citizenship of communitarianism” and “through communitarianism embodied as New Asian capitalist materialism” (ibid, p. 24).

Creative workers of different ideologies and lifestyles are allowed and even encourage in participating in the creative economy. But they are prevented from acquiring power and representation for their belief systems. Creative workers of diverse backgrounds must all express the state ideology of the economically driven projection of the New Asian brand of nationality. This is evident in the government’s administration of the homosexual community in Singapore. In taking about the Renaissance City, former Prime Minster Lee Kuan Yew said:

…they tell me, and anyway it is probably half-true, that homosexuals are creative writers, dancers, et cetera. If we want creative people, then we’ve got to put up with their idiosyncrasies as long as they don’t infect the heartland (Cited in Lim, n. d., p. 9)

An attempt to repeal the anti-gay law in 1997 was rejected despite the government’s ‘acceptance’ of homosexual creative workers and their contribution to the creative industries. Representations of their belief systems in the public sphere are silenced through the homogenising effect of the New Asia rhetoric.

Lee’s statement also reflects the use of the heartlanders category, in contrast to the cosmopolitans that are situated within the creative economy, as a way to combat the transgressive elements that might arise from Singapore’s opening up to the global economy. Webb sums up this ideological strategy in saying, “While the authorities realise that plenty of Singaporeans, dubbed ‘cosmopolitans’, are well travelled, well-educated and open-minded when it comes to new experiences, a large portion of the population- the ‘heartlanders’- remain conservative and resistant to avant-garde art house films or sensational art” (Webb, 2002, p. 59). 

The social field inhabited by the heartlanders is marked with a traditionalism evoked from early cultural policy. The infrastructure and products of the creative economy are catered to the cosmopolitans, to accumulate cultural capital in a bid to position Singapore as a city of global cultural standards and to attract foreign talent who are seen as an asset to the creative industries. Lim observes that the first Singapore Biennale was catered to foreigners and the cosmopolitans, as it was funded under “an umbrella event known as Singapore 2006, which included the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Meetings and related conferences” that were held during the same period (nd., p. 8). The segregated heartlanders reap the benefits of the cosmopolitan’s connectivity with the global market. But they are mostly alienated from the products and cultural implications of the creative industries. As Tan states, “The more privileged in society are equipped with cultural capital to decode, for instance, more challenging art work that is often impenetrable for the less privileged working class” (2008, p. 64)

 It is healthy and authentic when local art forms and communities attempt to express a personal sense of national identity through direct experience. However, such expression might be at odds with the communitarianism advocated within the New Asia regime. For example, Royston Tan’s 15 (2003), a film that portrays ethnic youth gangs residing on the fringes of mainstream society, was met with excessive censorship. The silencing of art forms that challenge the dominant paradigm of a clean and orderly New Asian Singapore is often justified by a consideration for the heartland. Bin Sa’at states that “on issues such as censorship, the idea of the heartlander, this silent majority of conservatives, is summoned, and their reservations will be appropriated to extinguish any tentative sparks towards liberalization” (2002, p. 259). Thus, the government utilises the cosmopolitan/heartlander dichotomy, which is unstable in reality, as a basis of control, as and when the creative economy’s trajectory transgresses its set boundaries.

Lee states, “Boundary markers in politics, mass media and censorship laws have remained” despite the government’s push for greater creativity (June 2004, p. 18). This is particularly true for art forms that deal with political issues that are contradictory to the ruling elite’s ideology. Martin See’s Singapore Rebel (2005), a documentary of Chee Soon Juan, leader of the Singapore Democratic Party and propagator of free speech, was banned and pulled out of the International Film Festival. Furthermore, See was subjected to police investigation and his film equipment was confiscated. Creativity, as articulated under the Creative Industries rubric, is limited by capitalistic and paternal logic. Art forms that explicitly enable audiences to think critically about the dominant order in Singapore are discriminated upon if it contradicts the ruling party. There is hardly any explicit anti-governmental thematics in Singapore Rebel. Rather, it simple portrays a side of Chee that contradicts the government-controlled media’s portrayal of Chee as a fanatic, a trouble-maker.

 

In this essay, I have analysed Singapore’s implementation of the creative industries model and its management of nationalism within this neo-liberal climate. Firstly, I discussed the homogenising trajectories of the creative industries through the concern of the government’s top-down approach versus spontaneous growth; the use of creativity to rejuvenate the economy; the reterritorialisation of the creative arts into an economic paradigm; and the turn to global modes of consumption that disadvantages minoritarian forms of expression. Secondly, I discussed how the nationalism constructed by early cultural policy translates into the creative industries through the articulation of the New Asia Creative Hub; the absorption of difference through the rhetoric of communitarianism; the strategic assertion of a split between cosmopolitans and heartlanders; and the use of censorship on art forms that are contradictory to governmental ideology.

The creative industries model has definitely increased the legitimacy and output of local art forms. However, it is delimiting that the majority of these art forms are overly commercial. There are examples of progressive art that utilises creativity in a transformative manner to challenge dominant modes of governmental rhetoric. But in order for local art to be critical within the creative industries, it has to be discreet, indirect, albeit like a simulation of political agency. The government’s top-down approach appropriates all forms of creativity into a neo-liberalist economic paradigm in its attempt to shed Singapore’s status as a cultural desert and nanny state. Its micro-management of this transition proves to be a strategically thought-over plan than retains the cohesion of a state-sanctioned brand of nationalism while integrating into the global economic and cultural field. For an authentic local art to flourish within a progressive trajectory, it should exploit the government’s propagation of the creative industries, but do so in a way that exposes and resists the homogenising elements of this seemingly agreeable policy.

 To end off, lets compare the MDA rap with Ah Beng rap (appropriation of techno into localised territoriality? Is this more authentic as an art form?)

 

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