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Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art BrutAuthor(s): Kent MinturnSource: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 247-258Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeThe President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeThePresident and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum of Archaeology andEthnologyPeabody Museum of Archaeology and EthnologyPeabody Museum of Archaeology and EthnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20167651Accessed: 30/11/2010 11:54

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Dubuffet, L?vi-Strauss, and the idea of art brut

KENT MINTURN

In early 1945, just months after the Liberation, the

French artist and writer Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)

began his search for examples of art brut, or, as he

would come to define it, art produced by untrained,

isolated, or illiterate individuals "unscathed by artistic

culture."1 In June of 1948, Dubuffet, along with five

others?Jean Paulhan (a writer, linguist, and Editor of the

La Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise), Andr? Breton, Charles

Ration (a Parisian dealer in African art), Michel Tapi? (an art critic), and Henri-Pierre Roch? (a translator,

journalist, and novelist)?officially established in Paris

La Compagnie de l'art brut, an association dedicated to

the discovery, documentation, and exhibition of art brut.

Later that summer the Compagnie^ "Foyer de l'Art

Brut," or exhibition space, was transferred from the

basement of the Galerie Ren? Drouin, located on the

Place Vend?me, to a pavilion in the garden area behind

the offices of the ?ditions Gallimard publishing house, 17 rue de l'Universit?. The relocated Foyer de l'Art Brut

was opened to the public on September 7, 1948, and a

little over two months later, Claude L?vi-Strauss attended

the opening of a show dedicated to the work of Joachim Vicens Gironella, an autodidact Catalonian artist who

had spent a year (1939-1940) in a French internment

camp near Braum.2

Shortly thereafter Dubuffet exchanged letters with

L?vi-Strauss. Here, courtesy of the Fondation Dubuffet,

Paris, and the Mus?e de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, they are

published for the first time, along with a translation of

Dubuffet's "Honneur aux valeurs sauvages [In Honor of

Savage Values]," a lecture delivered to "La Facult? de

Lettres de Lille" [Faculty of Literature, University of Lille,

France], January 10, 1951, on the occasion of the

opening of the exhibition, "Cinq petits inventeurs de la

peinture [Five Little Inventors of Painting] (Paul End/

Alcide/Liber/Gasduf/Sylvocq)," at the Marcel Evrard

bookstore, 7 Place de B?thune.3 The letters mark an

important but overlooked intersection between one of

the key figures of the postwar avant-garde and the

founder of structural anthropology. Read in conjunction with Dubuffet's "Savage Values," they can help us better

understand the idea o? art brut, its relation to the rise of

Structuralism, and its place within the broader spectrum of postwar French thought.

At the time of their meeting, L?vi-Strauss was a

recently appointed professor at the Institut d'Ethnologie de l'Universit? de Paris, and a research associate at the

National Science Research Center, Paris. He returned to

Paris for good at the end of 1947 after spending the war

years teaching at the New School for Social Research, New York (1942-1945), and then briefly serving as

cultural advisor to the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. By his own admission, L?vi-Strauss's experiences in New York had an immense influence on the

development of his groundbreaking methodology. The

similarly dispossessed structural linguist Roman

Jakobson inspired L?vi-Strauss to approach art and

myths diacritically and look for meaning not in real

world referents, but rather in the appearance of

differential structures within a "limited set of conceptual

oppositions." The ?migr? Surrealists, who landed in New

York around the same time, bolstered L?vi-Strauss's

belief in the productive role of authorial passivity and

implausible juxtapositions in the creative process. And

from the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, via his installation and organization of the Northwest

I would like to thank Sophie Webel, Director of the Fondation

Dubuffet in Paris, and Lucienne Peiry and Vincent Monod at the

Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland, for making this

material available and giving me permission to publish it; Francesco

Pellizzi and Nuit Banai at Res for their enthusiasm, guidance, and

editorial expertise; Denis Hollier, Adam Jolies, Laurence Gobin, and

Gini Alhadeff for reading and commenting on earlier versions of my

essay and translations; and finally, the faculty and graduate students of

the Department of Art History at Northwestern University for inviting me to present some of this material in the form of a lecture at the "Art

and Image" Symposium, April 23-24, 2004.

1. Jean Dubuffet, "Art Brut in Preference to the Cultural Arts,"

trans. Paul Foss and Allen S. Weiss, ArtandText27 (1988):31-33.

2. The Gironella show opened on November 9 and ran through December 3, 1948. Dubuffet's short text for the exhibition, which

originally appeared in a small, handmade catalogue, is reprinted in the

first tome of Dubuffet's collected writings, Prospectus et tous ?crits

suivants, ed. Hubert Damisch (Paris: Gallimard, vols. I-II, 1967, vols.

III-IV, 1995):184-186.

3. These five individuals were patients of Dr. Paul Bernard at the

hospital in Saint-Andr?-lez-Lille. Their full names are as follows:

Gaston Dufour (Gasduf), Paul End, Sylvian Lee (Sylvocq), Stanislas Lib

(Liber), and Alcide. Unlike Dubuffet's other major pronouncements on

art brut, "In Honor of Savage Values" was not immediately published. It eventually appeared in Prospectus I (Paris: Gallimard,

1967):203-224. However, this should not be taken as a sign of

Dubuffet's indifference toward the text. He went out of his way to

include it in a later, more condensed anthology of his literary corpus, L'homme du commun ? l'ouvrage, ed. Jacques Berne (Paris: Gallimard,

1973):93-118. The text of the lecture has been slightly abridged here.

248 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004

Coast Indian Gallery in the American Museum of

Natural History, L?vi-Strauss gained a new appreciation for the synchronie, non-hierarchical arrangement of

ethnographic data.4

Also, during his stay in New York L?vi-Strauss

putatively lost interest in "so-called professional art," and began to collect objects which might conceivably fall under Dubuffet's rubric of art brut. In a short

autobiographical article entitled "New York in 1941"

(1943), L?vi-Strauss warmly recounts the hours he spent with Max Ernst, Andr? Breton (whom he had befriended

in 1940, on the boat from Marseilles to Fort-de-France,

Martinique), and Georges Duthuit wandering through New York's heterogeneous neighborhoods in search of

neglected masterpieces and overlooked treasures. In

particular, L?vi-Strauss recalls "a small antique shop on

Third Avenue which, in response to our demand became

Ali Baba's cave."5 In terms similar to those employed by Dubuffet in "Savage Values," L?vi-Strauss emphasizes the auratic power of art untouched by the demands of

the market and the encroachments of what T. W. Adorno

would call "the culture industry." Such works, L?vi

Strauss contends, challenge received notions about taste,

value, and beauty: "One surrounds oneself with these

objects not because they are beautiful, but because, since beauty has become inaccessible to all but the very

rich, they offer, in its place, a sacred character?and

thus one is, by the way, led to wonder about the

ultimate nature of aesthetic emotion."6 By 1948, as the

correspondence suggests, L?vi-Strauss had also taken an

interest in art made by prisoners. He advises Dubuffet, in his expanding search for examples of art brut, to

contact Mr. Putrot d'Alleaume, secretary general of the

International Congress of Criminology, Raris. In his

response Dubuffet seems very interested in the idea, but as far as we know, he never followed up on it. This, we

can assume, had to do with Dubuffet's ongoing efforts to

disassociate art brut from other previously "discovered"

forms of marginalized art, including the art of criminals, children's art, na?ve art, primitive art, folk art, and the art

of the insane.7 Art brut, by definition, is art without

precedent. Five months prior to his rendezvous with L?vi-Strauss

at the Foyer de l'Art Brut, Dubuffet returned from the

second of three trips he would take to Algeria between

1947-19498 (fig. 1 ). These voyages were in effect self

imposed exiles replete with ethnographic overtones.

Unfortunately, the relation of these trips to Dubuffet's

concomitant conceptualization, theorization, and

promulgation of art brut has been neglected by art

historians.9 During his second trip to North Africa

Dubuffet carried several Carnets de croquis (small, ruled

notebooks) in which he took notes, drew pictures of the

4. For more on this period in L?vi-Strauss's life see Thomas Crow, "A Forest of Symbols in Wartime New York," in The Intelligence of Art

(Raleigh, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999):25-50; and

Jeffrey Mehlman, "L?vi-Strauss and the Birth of Structuralism," in

?migr? New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan

(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,

2000):181-196.

5. Claude L?vi-Strauss, "New York in 1941," (1943) in The View

From Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York:

Basic Books, 1985):258-267. The same exoticizing and Arabicizing

phrase?"Ali Baba's treasures"?was used in one of the first critical

responses to art brut which appeared anonymously in Paru (January

1948), as cited in Lucienne Peiry's Art Brut: The Origins of Art Brut

(Raris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 82. Upon returning to Raris, L?vi-Strauss

sold some of the objects in his collection to his friend, Dr. Jacques Lacan (Mehlman, ?migr? New York, p. 194). Dubuffet was also a

personal acquaintance of Lacan's, and visited him frequently at

l'H?pital Sainte-Anne, Raris, in order to look at works of art created by his patients.

6. L?vi-Strauss, "New York in 1941," p. 263.

7. Dubuffet included the work of Giovanni Giavarini, the so

called "Prisonnier de Bale" [The Prisoner of Basle] in the art brut

collection, and with Louis Lambelet he co-wrote a short entry on the

artist for Fascicule I of ?Art Brut (1964), but this seems to have been an

exceptional case. In "Savage Values" Dubuffet dismisses na?ve art and

the art of "Sunday painters" as art made by people "totally influenced

by classical art . . . [who] imitate it the best that they can." In an

interview with John M. MacGregor published in Raw Vision 7

(Summer 1993), Dubuffet declared, "[children's art] is completely

opposed to what interests me, because it's an effort to assimilate

culture" (p. 42). And, of course, Dubuffet felt very strongly that art brut

was not the same thing as the art of the insane. This conviction led to

his untimely break with Andr? Breton. For more on their dispute, see

Prospectus I, pp. 491-498.

8. Dubuffet's first sojourn was to El Gol?a, Algeria, February 15

April 7, 1947; his second was to El Golea and Tamanrasset, Algeria, November 16, 1947-April 21, 1948; and his third, to B?ni-Abb?s,

Timimoun, and El Gol?a, Algeria, from the end of February to April 28,

1949.

9. While there is a growing body of literature devoted to

Dubuffet's visits to North Africa, scholars have failed to discuss these

trips in relation to art brut. See, for example, Max Loreau,

"Pr?sentation," in Le Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule

IV: Roses dAllah, clowns du d?sert (Raris: Jean-Jacques Rauvert, 1967);

Genevi?ve Bonnefoi, "Roses d'Allah, clowns du d?sert (1947-1948), ou une ?chapp? sur l'illimit?," (1953) Lettres Nouvelles (September

1967); Werner Schnell, "Spuren im Sand Jean Dubuffet als 'Orientalist'

1947-1949," Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 54 (1993):315-343; Ernst

Gerhard G?se, "Dubuffet in Afrika," in Andreas Franzke and Ernst

Gerhard G?se, eds., Jean Dubuffet: Figuren und K?pfe (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1999):39-43; R?gis Durand, "Glimpses of the Artist as a

Clown of the Desert," in Sahara (Raris: Baudoin Lebon Galerie,

1991 ):7-17; and the exhibition catalogue, Jean Dubuffet, voyages au

Sahara (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

Minturn: Dubuffet, L?vi-Strauss, and the idea of art brut 249

Figure 1. Photograph of Jean Dubuffet with camel at El Gol?a, Sahara Desert,1947-1948. Photo credit listed as "DR" on p. 459 of the retrospective catalogue DUBUFFET, ed. Daniel Abadie, Raris: Centre Pompidou, 2001.

local inhabitants, and in keeping with a longstanding

ethnographic practice, attempted to learn local dialects

and expressions by phonetically transcribing them in his

mother tongue.10 This experience led Dubuffet to look at

his own language in a new light, and consequently, to

write his "Textes en jargon"?a series of short, whimsical

r?cits composed in a French so orthographically incorrect they must be read aloud to be understood

(the first of these, 1er dla canpane [The Air of the

Countryside, spelled phonetically] was published by Dubuffet and his wife, Lili, under the auspices of les

publications de VArt Brut, in December of 1948). As

Dubuffet later explained to Raymond Queneau:

For three years I studied very assiduously an Arabic dialect

spoken by the Bedouins of the Sahara, and I began by writing this language phonetically in Latin characters; the

very strange appearance of the grammatical forms which resulted from it caused me to see that our spoken language is as remote from written language as this Saharan dialect

can be from literary Arabic, and that our language written

phonetically by a foreigner in the same way as I wrote the

spoken language in El Golea, presented grammatical forms as strange (and as fascinating) as my Arabic jargon. It is then that the idea came to me to try to draft a small text

written phonetically. I had the feeling that by becoming accustomed to writing (and thinking) in this way, one would be compelled to discover a very interesting species of art, and I am completely passionate about this undertaking.11

These experimental writings demonstrate the

proximity, in Dubuffet's mind, of art brut and ?criture

brute. Dubuffet never tired of reminding his readers that

"the wind of art brut blows on writing as well as on

other avenues of artistic creation."12

10. A large portion of one of these notebooks, which has the

?mage of a sailing ship and the word "Navigateur" [Navigator] embossed on its cover, has been reproduced in the exhibition

catalogue, yean Dubuffet, voyages au Sahara (Raris: Gallimard, 1995).

An example of Dubuffet's transcription of Arabic into phonetic French

can be found in the hors-s?rie Beaux Arts Collection dedicated to

Dubuffet (Paris, 2001), p. 15.

11. Jean Dubuffet, letter to Raymond Queneau, dated October 30,

1950, in Prospectus I, pp. 481-483. For more on Ler dla canpane and

its relation to art brut see Dubuffet's "Notice sur les gravures constituant cet album," ?n Prospectus I, pp. 476-478.

12. Jean Dubuffet, "Project pour un petit texte liminaire

introduisant les publications de 'L'art brut dans l'?crire' (1969)," in Le

Langage de la rupture (Raris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978),

250 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004

In some respects Dubuffet's story is an old one; he

was not the first French modernist to travel to North

Africa in search of artistic inspiration. In going there he

was consciously following in the footsteps of the

painters Delacroix, Fromentin, and Matisse, and the

literary luminaries Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers,

Maupassant, and Gide. Yet, at the same time, Dubuffet's

visits to Algeria and the art he produced while there

remain historically specific insofar as they relate to the

paradoxical status of postwar French ethnology in the

face of decolonization. At certain points in his travels

Dubuffet's attitude toward the Saharan Bedouins is

reminiscent of L?vi-Strauss's treatment of the Nambikwara

Indians in Brazil, as described in "A Writing Lesson,"

chapter 28 of Tristes Tropiques (1955).13 Dubuffet, like

L?vi-Strauss, apparently provided the "natives" with

pencils and paper and encouraged them to draw. In one

of Dubuffet's aforementioned travel notebooks, there are

two examples of drawings "made by an Arab"14 (fig. 2). Ben Yahia, the individual who created these drawings

clearly tried to imitate Dubuffet's style. Yahia's drawings are, in effect, imitations of imitations, given that

Dubuffet's goal while traveling in North Africa was to

"paint as an Arab."15 These images can be thought of as

concrete examples of what Homi K. Bhabha calls

colonial "mimicry," wherein the "recognizable Other"

becomes "a subject of a difference that is almost the

same, but not quite."16 Again, one is immediately reminded of Levi-Strauss's account of the Nambikwara

chief who, by mimicking the actions of the ethnographer,

produces imitation writing?a tale which, Jacques Derrida claims, smacks of "ethnocentrism thinking itself

as anti-ethnocentrism."17

At other times Dubuffet's mindset is closer to Roland

Barthes's as revealed in The Empire of Signs (1970), a

semiological account of his travels in Japan.18 Dubuffet, like Barthes, frequently finds himself confronted with

letters, signs, or inscriptions that are inaccessible,

indecipherable, or meaningless to him. For example, in

a letter to Jacques Berne mailed from Algeria, Dubuffet

marvels at the desert as a chaotic palimpsest, filled with

marks and signs "like an immense notebook of

disorganization, a notebook of improvisation ... an

elementary school blackboard full of scribbles . . ."19 He

emphasizes that these unintelligible marks and signs, like the Bedouins' footprints, "are not preserved very

long." Above all, Dubuffet was fascinated by what he

perceived to be the Bedouin's nomadic nature, the

impermanence of their existence, and their inability to

leave permanent traces. Transitory lives, ephemeral

inscriptions?in short, the Bedouins seemed to offer

living proof of one of Dubuffet's pet ideas: "Man Writes

on Sand"20 (fig. 3).

Initially, Dubuffet's conception of the ideal art brut

artist equated to a heroicized l'homme commun

[common man] or l'homme dans la rue [man in the

street].21 However, during his stays in North Africa this

pp. 229-230, an anthology of ?crits bruts collected and edited by Michel Th?voz, one of Dubuffet's most astute intellectual disciples, and director of the Collection of L'Art Brut, Lausanne (1975-2001). For

more on the concept of ?criture brute see Pierre Dhainaut, "L'?criture

brute, qu'est-ce que c'est?" La Quinzaine Litt?raire 285 (September 1

15, 1978):10; Henri-Charles Tauxe "Les ?crits bruts," 24 Heures

(February 16, 1979), and Pierre Enkell, "Je ne parviens pointement ?

m'exprimer," Nouvelles litt?raires (March 29, 1979).

13. Claude L?vi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955) trans. John and

Doreen Weightman (London: Chaucer Press, 1973):294-304.

14. These drawings are reproduced in the exhibition catalogue,

Jean Dubuffet, voyages au Sahara (Raris: Gallimard, 1995), pp. 18 and

25.

15. Dubuffet, quoted in R?gis Durand, "Glimpses of the Artist as a

Clown of the Desert," Sahara (Raris: Baudoin Lebon Galerie, 1991):14.

16. Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of

Colonial Discourse," October 28 (Spring 1984)126.

17. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976):120.

18. Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). In 1947, at precisely the same time

Barthes was searching for "writing degree zero," Dubuffet was looking for its artistic equivalent. In a letter to Jacques Berne dated October

14, 1947, Dubuffet expresses his interest in the idea of "art-zero." See

Jean Dubuffet: Lettres ? J.B., 1946-1985 (Hermann: Raris, 1991):31.

19. Jean Dubuffet, Lettres ? J.B., p. 35.

20. Dubuffet first sets forth this idea in Prospectus aux amateurs de

tout genre (Raris: Gallimard, 1946), translated in Mildred Glimcher,

ed., Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality (New York:

Abbeville Press 1987). 21. Dubuffet's interest in the common man and the quotidian is

perhaps related to a larger shift in French ethnology. In 1938 the

Museum of Ethnography at the Trocad?ro in Raris changed its name to

the Museum of Man. Michel Leiris, who enacted the shift from

ethnography proper to the common and quotidian, wrote an important but short article on this entitled, "Du Mus?e d'Ethnographie au mus?e

de l'Homme," La Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise (August 1938):344-345.

See also Leiris's L'homme sans honneur: notes pour le sacr? dans la vie

quotidienne, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: ?ditions Jean-Michel Place 1994),

and his celebration of the "quotidian marvelous" in his preface to an

exhibition of paintings by Elie Lascaux (Galerie de la Pl?iade, June 29

July 20, 1945), translated as "Elie Lascaux," in Broken Branches (San

Francisco: North Point Press, 1989):82-83. For more on Dubuffet and

the idea of the "common man" see Pierre Seghers, L'Homme du

commun ou Jean Dubuffet (Raris: Po?sie 44, 1944); Ren? Lew, "Jean

Dubuffet, Portrait du brut en h?ros," La Part de L'Oeil 5 (1989):132

139; Steven Ungar, "Penser Dubuffet: Propos sur l'ordinaire et le

quotidien," in Monique Chefdor and Dalton Krauss, eds., Regard

d'?crivain, parole de peintre (Nates: Editions joca seria, 1994): 47-61 ;

Minturn: Dubuffet, L?vi-Strauss, and the idea of art brut 251

Figure 2. Jean Dubuffet, Carnet de Croquis El Gol?a III, March 1948, Ink on paper, 22 x 17 cm (the size of the

notebook), with a pencil and henna drawing by Ben Yahia glued on page 18. Private collection.

252 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004

Figure 3. Jean Dubuffet, Arabs and Footprints, January-April, 1948, gouache on paper, 42 x 32 cm. Private collection.

Minturn: Dubuffet, L?vi-Strauss, and the idea of art brut 253

Figure 4. Photograph of Jean Dubuffet and local musicians in the Sahara Desert, ca. 1948. Private collection.

ideal merged with an exoticization of the "clowns of the

desert"?the name Dubuffet shamelessly gave to the

Sahara's indigenous inhabitants. These two ideals, the

"common man" and the "desert clown," coalesced in

the figure of Gaston Chaissac, an artist, writer, and shoe

repairman of Arab descent living in Vend?e, France. In

July of 1947, while still in Algeria, Dubuffet penned a

preface for Chaissac's exhibition of drawings at the

"L'Arc-en-Ciel" Gallery, Paris (June 11-July 5, 1947). In

it he compares Chaissac to Yahia, a Bedouin flute player

(fig. 4). Chaissac's art, Dubuffet contends, is as illegible to "our excellent missionaries of art" as Yahia's music is

to Western musicographers.22 By the end of his final trip in 1949, Dubuffet's exoticization of North Africa and its

inhabitants begins to wane. At first Dubuffet describes El

Gol?a as a "bath of simplicities," a "refreshing" and

"rejuvinating" edenic oasis inhabited by men of "grace and beauty."23 Later, in a letter to Jean Raulhan, he

describes the desert as a "bath of discomforts and

annoyances." In the same letter he realizes the

watercolors he has painted during his stay in the Sahara are "general and ?deallie," and have nothing to do with

"the reality of [his] surroundings." He declares, "I have

for the moment renounced the descriptive art of

exoticisms."24 The day after his return to Raris Dubuffet wrote to Jacques Berne: "The Occidental man is not so

bad. . . . Not bad at all, the brave Aryan ... I'm not

unhappy to be living with him again."25 Dubuffet starts

to believe, as he clearly states in "Savage Values," that one need not go outside of Europe in order to find truly

"savage" individuals: "... These savage values to

which I attribute more value than all others, appear to

show themselves, in our worlds of Europe and America, more forcefully and tempestuously than in all other

worlds. . . ."

These three versions of Dubuffet's archetypal art brut

artist?the common man, the desert clown, and the

"savage" European?share a common denominator. To

Dubuffet's mind, all three have escaped written history. Dubuffet's original conception of art brut, then, was not

only about the discovery, collection, and display of

obsolete, overlooked, or "polemical" objects, it was also an attempt to write their makers into history, a kind of

counter-historical literary project on par with those

two great unrealized prewar attempts at subverting

and Christian Garaud, "D?shabitude et banalit?: Jean Raulhan, Jean

Dubuffet et T'homme du commun/" in Jean Paulhan: le clair et

l'obscur (Raris: Gallimard, 1999):321-341.

22. Jean Dubuffet, introduction te Chaissac's exhibition at the

"L'Arc-en-Ciel" Gallery, Raris (June 1?July 5, 1947), in Prospectus II, p.

19, trans, by Sarah Wilson in Gaston Chaissac 1910-1964 (London:

Fischer Fine Art Ltd., 1986). Similarly, in 1947 Andr? Breton naively celebrated the work of the Algerian-born art brut artist Fatma Haddad, a.k.a. Baya Mahieddine, or simply "Baya." For more on this see

Ranjana Khanna, "Latent Ghosts and the Manifesto: Baya, Breton and

Reading for the Future," Art History 26:2 (April 2003):238-280.

23. Jean Dubuffet, letter to Jacques Berne dated March 17, 1947 in

Lettres ? J.B., p. 8.

24. Jean Dubuffet, letters to Jean Raulhan dated March 27, and

April 3, 1949, in Dubuffet Pau I han Correspondence, 1944-1968, pp. 585-587.

25. Jean Dubuffet, letter to Jacques Berne dated April 29, 1949, in

Lettres ? J.B., 47.

254 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004

traditional historicism and reigning notions of progress while simultaneously bringing to light the marginal, trivial, or "outmoded" remains of bourgeois culture:

Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk [Arcades Project] (1927-1940), and Raymond Queneau's Encyclop?die

des sciences inexactes [Encyclopedia of Inexact

Sciences] (1934).26 In fact, the idea of writing a history of art brut and its creators preceded the actual collection

of art brut objects. Dubuffet received approval from the

publisher Gaston Gallimard to create a series of journals under the title L'Art Brut before he went searching for art

brut in Switzerland in July 1945. As he admitted to one

interviewer in 1976: "I had no idea of collecting. I was

only interested in publishing the material."27 Although Gallimard eventually reneged on the contract, Dubuffet

continued to publish articles on individual art brut

artists. The official Fascicules de l'Art Brut did not see

the light of day until the mid-1960s.28

In the 1930s Dubuffet wanted to write a series of

biographies of unknown, average, "non-illustrious"

men.29 To a certain degree he accomplished this goal in

the postwar period with his publication of biographically based texts on individual art brut artists. Yet, given the

fact that the majority of these artists were homeless,

institutionalized, or amnesic, Dubuffet (and the other

authors who contributed to the Fascicules de l'Art brut) had to give them truncated pseudonyms and

imaginatively piece together their biographical narratives. The end result was a strange genre of art

historical writing?a veritable history of art without

"names," "dates," or "histories."30 For example, in his

1947 entry on an anonymous sculptor associated with

the Swiss collector O.J. M?ller, Dubuffet writes:

Every piece of information about these statues is totally useless. . . . What import is it to us if their author was a

bureaucrat or a cowherd, an old man or a young person? It

is very unfounded to pay attention to these meager

circumstances. There is no difference between an old and

young man. Not the least in any domain. Or if he was from

Burgundy or Auvergne it's the same. And if he is alive or

dead for who knows how long it is the same to us. Between a contemporary and someone from the last century, or a

companion of Clovis or the big prehistoric reptiles?no difference whatsoever. We are completely wrong to take interest in these details."31

The quasi-ethnographic nature of Dubuffet's trips to

North Africa is not surprising considering he studied

ethnography in Raris in the 1920s.32 At the same time, he frequented Andr? Masson's studio at 45 rue Blomet, a

meeting ground for the "dissident" surrealists Georges Limbour, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille, all of whom

were later involved in Documents, the avant-garde

journal dedicated to blurring the boundaries among

"arch?ologie-beaux arts-ethnographie."33 (L?vi-Strauss, while not yet an ethnographer, contributed an article on

Picasso to Documents, Vol. II, no. 3, 1930).34 In

choosing "Documents" for the title of their journal these

authors announced their anti-aesthetic intentions; the

journal, in other words, was not going to be another

Gazette des beaux-arts or Gazette des beaux-arts primitifs.35 Further, Documents implied a critique of current

museological practices, which tended to sublimate

ethnographic documents and disassociate them from?to

paraphrase Walter Benjamin?their "ritual value."

As is evinced in "Savage Values," Dubuffet's ideas about art brut were also inherently critical of the museum as a cultural institution.36 He often referred to

26. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. RoyTiedmann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1999). Raymond Queneau eventually

published some of his research for this project in the form of a novel,

Les Enfants du limon (Raris: Gallimard, 1938), trans. Madeleine

Velguth, Children of Clay (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1998).

27. Dubuffet, interview with John M. MacGregor published in Raw

Vision 7 (Summer 1993), p. 43.

28. For the full story see, Peiry, Art Brut, pp. 35-104, 125-176.

29. A few of these biographies have been reprinted in Prospectus

III, pp. 175-185.

30. See "Writing the History of Each Artist," in Peiry, Art Brut, pp. 152-157. I will further explore this topic in "On Art Brut as a Literary

Project," the third chapter of my doctoral dissertation, Contre-Histoire:

The Postwar Art and Writings of Jean Dubuffet, Columbia University.

31. Jean Dubuffet, "Les Barbus M?ller et Autres Pi?ces de la

Statuaire Provinciale"(1947), in Prospectus I, pp. 498-499.

32. See Dubuffet's "Plus Modest" (1945), Prospectus I, pp. 89-93,

translated as "More Modest," in Tracks: A Journal of Artists' Writings 1:2 (Spring 1975):26-29.

33. Dubuffet was especially close to Masson, Leiris, and Limbour.

For more on this, see his letter to Jacques Berne dated February 8,

1947, in Lettres ? J.B., pp. 6-8. See also, Andr? Masson, "45, rue

Blomet," in Rebelle du surr?alisme (Paris: Hermann, 1968):76-84.

34. Levi-Strauss ghost-wrote the piece for his then boss, Georges Monnet. The article has been translated as "Picasso and Cubism," in

October 60 (Spring 1992):51-52. 35. Denis Hollier, "The Use Value of the Impossible," in Absent

Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997):125-144.

36. For more on Dubuffet's critique of the museum see the

following texts included in Prospectus IV: "Dubuffet au Mus?e" (pp.

23-24), the undated letter to Florence Gould (pp. 542-543), and

the letter to Paolo Marinotti, January 1, 1967 (pp. 218-220). In

Asphyxiante Culture (1968) Dubuffet overtly criticizes Malraux, who

by then had committed the ultimate sin (in Dubuffet's opinion) of

accepting the state position of minister of culture. See Dubuffet,

Asphyxiating Culture and Other Writings, trans. Carol Volk (New York:

Minturn: Dubuffet, L?vi-Strauss, and the idea of art brut 255

works of art brut as "documents," and likewise wanted

to prevent them from being over-aestheticized. Whereas

L?vi-Strauss came to anticipate the day the masks,

costumes, and totem poles of the Indians of the

Northwest coast would be "moved from the ethnographic to fine arts museums,"37 Dubuffet hoped instead to

shield ethnographic works from the tentacles of "cultural

art" by absorbing some of them into his collection of art

brut. To this end he often searched ethnographic museums for examples of art brut. In the summer of

1945, Dubuffet visited Mr. Eug?ne Pittard, curator of the

Mus?e d'Ethnographie de la Ville de Gen?ve and asked for his help in locating examples of art brut.38 In

"Savage Values" Dubuffet specifically mentions his

admiration for native American art, and his recent trip to

"The Ethnographical Museum of Basle" where he saw "a

group of decorated and painted wooden sculptures

coming from the former German colony of New

Mecklenburg, now called New Ireland." He also speaks about his interest in forms of art which cannot be

contained within the museum, namely Asiatic dance.

His thoughts on this subject echo those expressed in

two works he knew well?Antonin Artaud's Theater and

Its Double (1938), and Henri Michaux's Barbarian In

Asia (1943). To a certain extent Dubuffet's art brut collection can

be thought of as a "museum without walls." Significantly, Andr? Malraux, the person to whom we owe the

contemporaneous concept, was one of Dubuffet's first

supporters and a fervent enthusiast of art brut (he even

reproduced a work by the art brut artist Guillaume

Pujolle in Le Mus?e Imaginaire, 1947). As Malraux

envisioned it, the museum without walls would, with

photography's help, assemble objects from all over the

world, break down boundaries between nations and

cultures, nullify time and space, and diminish issues

relating to authorship. For Dubuffet, art brut also

transcended national boundaries, and nationalisms. It is

not for nothing that Dubuffet first searched for art brut in

Switzerland, a culturally diverse, politically "neutral"

country, and birthplace of that other truly international

art movement, Dada. Moreover, Dubuffet refused to

display the names and dates of art brut artists next to

their works; in so doing he unwittingly answered

Heinrich W?lfflin's call for an art history without "proper names." And, as was the case with Malraux's mus?e

imaginaire, photography played an important role in the

collection, documentation, and publication of art brut.

In an early call for help in finding examples of art brut, Dubuffet announced that he would gladly accept either

"original works or photographs of these works," as if the

two were somehow interchangeable.39 Dubuffet's

collection of art brut was also "wall-less" in the sense

that it was literally nomadic and non-site-specific. In

1951 he packed up the collection and sent it to Alfonso

Ossorio's estate in East Hampton, Long Island, New

York, where it would stay for the next eleven years before returning to France in early 1962. Then in 1975

Dubuffet transferred the collection to The Ch?teau de

Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland, where it remains to

this day.40

Lastly, it should be mentioned that Jean Raulhan, Dubuffet's close friend and mentor, also had a

background in ethnography.41 Long before he

accompanied Dubuffet on his first trip to Switzerland in

search of art brut,42 or became a member of the

Four Walls Eight Windows, 1988):109-112. For secondary

commentary on Dubuffet's ideas about art brut and its relationship to

the museum see, Michel Th?voz, "Le paradox d'un mus?e de l'art

brut," Opus International 82 (Autumn 1981):37-39; Lucienne Peiry, "An Anti-Museum," in Art Brut, 177-223; Hubert Damisch, "Note sur

l'art brut," Encyclopaedia Universalis, t. Il (Raris, 1968):508-509; and

Louis Cummins, "Undermining the Museum: The Rhetorics of Michael

Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke and Louise

Lawler," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (CUNY, 2002):89-95.

37. Claude L?vi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982): 3-4.

38. For more on this visit, see Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut, p. 46.

39. Jean Dubuffet, "Notice sur la Compagnie de l'art brut" (1948),

translated by Carol Volk as "A Word About the Company of Raw Art," in Asphyxiating Culture and Other Writings (New York: Four Walls

Eight Windows, 1988):109-112. 40. It might be helpful to think of art brut as a "homeless" or

"exiled" art in terms similar to those used by T. J. Demos in his Ph.D.

dissertation, "Duchamp Homeless? The Avant-Garde and Post

nationalism," Columbia University, 2000. Claude Esteban has laid the

groundwork for this kind of an approach in his article, "L'art

d?poss?d?," La Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise 174 Gune 1967).

41. See Jean Paulhan et Madagascar (1908-1910), Cahiers Jean

Paulhan 2 (Raris: Gallimard, 1982); Mark Auge, "Les Diff?rences et

L'Indiff?rence: Raulhan ?crivan Ethnologue?" in Jean Paulhan Le

Souterrain: Colloque de Cerisy (Raris: Union G?n?rale D'?ditions,

1976): 17-40; John Culbert, "Slow Progress: Jean Raulhan and

Madagascar," October 83 (Winter 1998):71-95; Christian Garaud, "Du

bon usage des vieillards: Victor Segalen et Jean Raulhan ?crivains

ethnologues," in Ethnography in French Literature, ed. Buford Norman

(Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi 1996); Michael Syrotinski, "Allegories of Ethnography," in Defying gravity: Jean Paulhan's Interventions in

Twentieth-Century French Intellectual History (Albany: SU NY Press,

1998):25-46; and Anna-Louise Milne, "Food for Thought:

ethnographie et rh?torique selon Jean Raulhan," Litt?rature 129 (March

2003):107-123.

42. Raulhan published an account of this trip in the form of an

falsely na?ve ethnological travelogue, a voyage to a magical, exotic

land in the heart of Europe. See Jean Raulhan, "Guide d'un petit voyage en Suisse au mois de juillet 1945," Cahiers de la pl?iade (April 1946).

256 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004

Compagnie de l'Art Brut, Raulhan studied under Lucien

L?vy-Bruhl and conducted ethnographie research on

"the semantics of the proverb." On the eve of World

War II he was a participant, along with several members

of the former Documents group, in the brief but

important Coll?ge de la Sociologie (1937-1939). (L?vi Strauss attended, but did not participate in, the College's

meetings.)43 In 1939 Raulhan rereleased his 1913 study of Les hain-tenys, a transcription and translation of

Malagasy proverbs. The revised version includes

Raulhan's self-reflective commentary in which he waivers

between ethnography proper and autobiographical reflection, and as such is reminiscent of Michel Leiris's

L'Afrique fant?me (1934).44 Both works occupy a middle

ground between the twilight of ethnography and the

birth of postcolonialism. Dubuffet, who had an

insatiable appetite for Paulhan's writings, was certainly aware of his early ethnographic studies. In fact, while

traveling in Algeria, Dubuffet sent Raulhan examples of

Arabian proverbs.45 Dubuffet and Raulhan were planning to travel to Madagascar together in the spring of 1947.

Even though this trip was eventually canceled, Raulhan

did visit Dubuffet in El Gol?a in March of 1948.

Dubuffet and L?vi-Strauss's mutual respect for each

other's similar pursuits was apparently short-lived. We

know that L?vi-Strauss, along with forty-eight others

including Henri Michaux, Andr? Malraux, Georges Henri Rivi?re, and Robert Dauchez, paid his dues and

became an official subscribing member of the Compagnie de l'Art Brut in 1949.46 Later that year L?vi-Strauss

attended the "L'Art Brut Pr?f?r? aux arts culturels"

exhibition at the Galerie Ren? Drouin (October 1949), which included 200 works by 63 different artists.47 Yet, after this date there is little if any evidence to suggest Dubuffet and L?vi-Strauss stayed in touch. In a letter to

Jacques Berne written in October 1970, Dubuffet would

complain L?vi-Strauss had become too theoretical: "There are too many cogitations on Theory

... it is the

malady of the epoch. . . . Into the fire with Levi-Strauss

and Michel Foucault."48 However, anyone familiar with

Dubuffet's life-long love/hate relationship with French

intelligentsia will wisely take these comments with a

grain of salt. Dubuffet tended to deride only those he

deeply admired, and in retrospect it is clear he had more in common with these two great "cogitators of

Theory," than he cared to admit. Dubuffet's incessant

critique of madness, highlighted in the second half of

"Savage Values," undermined the age-old equation of

primitivism, infantilism, and insanity, and in so doing

paved the way for the French anti-psychiatric movement

of the 1960s. Whereas Foucault chose to champion Artaud, Gilles Deleuze often referred specifically to

Dubuffet, and even characterized his own philosophical

project as a "sort of art brut."49

While some writers have jocularly labeled Dubuffet an anthropologist or ethnologist,50 others, including

Michel Th?voz, Gilbert Lascault, Leonard Emmerling, and Henri-Claude Cousseau have sought, in a more

scholarly manner, to draw direct parallels between Dubuffet and L?vi-Strauss.51 In very general terms, it is

possible to talk about Dubuffet and L?vi-Strauss's similar

43. L?vi-Strauss's laudatory review of the College's activities, "La

Sociologie fran?aise," which appeared in Georges Gurvitch's La

sociologie du XXe si?cle (Raris, 1947), p. 517; trans, in Denis Hollier,

ed., The College of Sociology, 1937-1939 (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1988):385-386.

44. Like Dubuffet, Raulhan eventually disabused himself of his

ethnographic pr?tentions. In 1939 he admitted, "there's no need to go to Madagascar to experience the proverb." See John Culbert's excellent

discussion of this in "Slow Progress: Jean Raulhan and Madagascar," October 83 (Winter 1998), p. 83. It should also be noted that Raulhan was critical of L?vi-Strauss's methodological stance in Race et histoire

(Raris: Unesco, 1952). See Jean Gu?rin (one of Raulhan's pseudonyms), "Col?res de M. L?vi-Strauss," La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise

29 (May 1955):935; and the contextual material presented by

St?phane Massonet in "Quelques lettres ? propos du relativisme

culturel. Roger Caillois, Jean Raulhan et Ren? de Solier," Gradhiva 19

(1996):97-114.

45. See Dubuffet's letter te Raulhan dated April 18, 1948, in

Dubuffet Paulhan Correspondance 1944-1968, eds., Julien Dieudonn?

and Marianne Jakobi (Paris: Gallimard, 2003):509-510.

46. Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut, p. 86.

47. See Dubuffet's eponymous essay for the show's catalogue, "Art

Brut in Preference To The Cultural Arts," trans. Raul Foss and Allen S.

Weiss, ArtandText27 (1988):31-33.

48. Letter to Jacques Berne, October 22, 1970, p. 190.

49. Quoted in John Rajchman's introduction to Deleuze's Pure

Eminence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 7.

50. Giulio-Carlo Argan, "Dubuffet anthropologue," L'ARC 35 (April

1968):26-29; Jean-Francois Jaeger, "Extrait du rapport de l'ethnologue

jeanafosicran Egreja," L'Herne 22, (1973):336-339; and Lutembi, "Terrifiante Anthropologie," Quelques introductions au Cosmorama de

Jean Dubuffet satrape, Cahiers du coll?ge de Pataphyque, dossiers

10/11(1960). 51. Michel Th?voz, "Jean Dubuffet: Culture et Subversion," La

Gazette de Lausanne (August 10, 1968) and Art Brut (Geneva: Skira,

1976); Gilbert Lascault, "La Pens?e sauvage en acte," Cahier L'Herne

22 (1973):218-233; Henri-Claude Cousseau, "L'origine et l'?cart: d'un

art l'autre," Paris-Paris: cr?ations en France 193-1957 (Centre Georges

Pompidou, 1981):229-254, translated in part as "Origins and

Deviations: A Short History of Art Brut," Art & Text 27 (1988):6-28; and Leonard Emmerling, "Dubuffet und L?vi-Strauss," in Die

Kunsttheorie Jean Dubuffets (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 1999):

120-122. For a more cursory treatment of this subject see Pierre

Sterckx, "Dubuffet Structuraliste?" Artpress 272 (October 2001):26-29.

Minturn: Dubuffet, L?vi-Strauss, and the idea of art brut 257

emphasis on synchronies over diachronics, and their

decidedly anti-Sartrean views of history (even though Dubuffet, in contrast to L?vi-Strauss, would never have

articulated his position as such). Also, both Dubuffet and

L?vi-Strauss rely on the opposition of categories to

structure their arguments?e.g., Dubuffet's "art brut vs.

cultural art" and L?vi-Strauss's "nature vs. culture."

Interestingly enough, these opposing categories or terms

were often gustative. Parts of Dubuffet's "Savage Values," such as his discussion of the presence and absence of

vitamins in raw and cooked foods, sound as if they

belong in L?vi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked (1964).

And, in retrospect, it could be said that Dubuffet and

L?vi-Strauss share a common blind spot?even though their works are contemporary with and attuned to the

demise of the empire, they never address the

postcolonial context as such.52

More specific connections can be made between

Dubuffet's theorization of art brut and L?vi-Strauss's The

Savage Mind (1962). Before going into these, however, one point should be clarified. Savage Mind, the English translation of the original title of Levi-Strauss's La Pens?e

Sauvage, is somewhat misleading. Needless to say, the

word "savage" is retrograde and carries a host of

negative connotations. The title The Savage Mind gives the impression that L?vi-Strauss's book is simply the

latest version of L?vy-Bruhl's Primitive Mentality (La Mentalit? primitive, 1922), and accordingly yet another

attempt at demonstrating the inferiority of the "primitive" mind vis-?-vis the more advanced Western "scientific"

mind. In reality nothing could be farther from the truth.

Savage Thought or Untamed Thinking would have been a more accurate translation of L?vi-Strauss's title. Savage

thought, he advances, "is neither the thought of savages, nor that of primitive or archaic humanity, but thought in a wild state, distinct from cultivated or domesticated

thought. . . ,"53 Dubuffet's definition of "sauvagerie"

likewise revolved around a particular state of mind. In

the late 1950s and early 1960s Dubuffet increasingly

began to define art brut as a kind of mental operation or

activity. In L?vi-Strauss's terms, Dubuffet moved from art

brut's "technical plane" to its "intellectual plane." For

example, in a text dated August 1959 written as a

preface for the exposition "Art Brut" presented by

Alphonse Chave at the Galerie les Images, Vence, Dubuffet describes art brut as a conceptual "pole" rather

than a specific set of formal characteristics inherent to

the works themselves.54

L?vi-Strauss resuscitates the French verb

"bricolage"?which has no English equivalent but refers to the kind of activities performed by a resourceful "do

it-yourselfer"? to further explain his ideas about pens?e sauvage. The "bricoleur," in contrast to the engineer, uses whatever is "at hand," preexisting "odds and ends," or "leftovers."55 Further, the scientific engineer differs

from the bricoleur inasmuch as the former "is always

trying to make his way out of and go beyond the

constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization," while the latter "by inclination or necessity always remains within them."56 Thus, there is an important

temporal component inherent to L?vi-Strauss's definition

of the bricoleur which coincides with Dubuffet's

definition of the art brut artist?both figures are

antithetical to diachronical models of history. Moreover, both employ mental operations which have remained

the same throughout time, and create things which

reside outside of time, or cannot be placed in time. It is not par hasard then that L?vi-Strauss resorts back to the

pantheon of art brut to make his point?in the process of defining "bricolage" he specifically mentions The Postman Cheval, France's most famous art brut artist.57

There is another facet of Levi-Strauss's savage mind that is closely related to Dubuffet's theorization of art

brut. The French title of L?vi-Strauss's book contains an

untranslatable pun. Homophonically, pens?e sauvage also means Wild Pansy, the flower. This kind of word

play (along with his fondness for alliteration?e.g., Tristes Tropiques, Le Cru et le cuit) is typical of L?vi

Strauss and connects him to a history of avant-garde French literature?i.e., St?phane Mallarm?, Max Jacob,

Raymond Roussel?to which, I would argue, Dubuffet

52. Denis Hollier, "The Pure and the Impure," in Literary Debate:

Texts and Contexts, ed. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York:

The New Press, 1999):14. Hollier makes this point about L?vi-Strauss, but I think it equally applies to Dubuffet. The only exceptions to this

generalization might be a few letters Dubuffet wrote to Raulhan

between April 6?April 16, 1948, in Dubuffet Paulhan Correspondance 1944-1968, pp. 502-508. But even then Dubuffet's position is closer

to Andr? Gide's in Voyage to the Congo (1925) than it is to say, Franz

Fanon's in Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

53. Claude L?vi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1966):219.

54. See Jean Dubuffet, "L'Art Brut," a text from August 1959

written as a preface for the exposition "Art Brut" presented by

Alphonse Chave at the Galerie les Mages, in Vence, France, Prospectus I, pp. 513-516.

55. L?vi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 19.

56. Ibid., 19.

57. The passage reads: "Like 'bricolage' on the technical plane,

mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the

intellectual plane. Conversely, attention has often been drawn to the

mytho-poetical nature of 'bricolage' on the plane of so-called 'brut' or

'na?ve' art, in the architectural follies like the R?lais Id?al du Facteur

Cheval or the stage sets of Georges M?li?s . . ." (p. 17).

258 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004

also belongs.58 Moreover, the title's double entendre

announces the linguistic dimension of L?vi-Strauss's

project. In offering evidence to disprove the common

misconception that only "advanced" cultures are capable of abstract thought, L?vi-Strauss demonstrates that our

modern scientific terminologies are no more accurate or

nuanced than those used in so-called "primitive" societies. As someone who always maintained words are

poor, inadequate translators of thought, Dubuffet would

certainly agree with L?vi-Strauss here. In his homage to

the experimental writer Andr? Martel entitled, "A Grand

Deferential Salute to the Martelandre,"/Dubuffet uses the

example of Eskimos to make a similaj/point. He suspects

that the Eskimos, whose language is/?sually taken to be

less complex than French, actually have means richer

than ours to communicate. More differentiating maybe, or more nuancible."59

L?vi-Strauss's chief concern is declassification. In The

Savage Mind he also asserts that our scientific categories are not as objective and immutable as one might expect. To the contrary, they are arbitrary, culturally constructed, and historically specific?in other words they are timely, not timeless. He concludes: "the truth of the matter is

that the principle underlying a classification can never

be postulated in advance."60 Again, Dubuffet would

concur wholeheartedly. "The role of the artist. . . and

the poet," he once explained to Jacques Berne, "is

precisely to blur normal categories, to disrupt them, and

by doing so restore to the eyes and the mind ingenuity and freshness." In a manner reminiscent of L?vi-Strauss's

analysis of Totemic classifications in chapter 2 of The

Savage Mind, Dubuffet further elaborates:

[Categories] . . .

vegetable, fruit, citrus fruit, orange, are

very arbitrary. . . . Everybody gets used to them by force of

habit, but we could have become very accustomed to other

categories. For example, when one says that a swallow

stabs the sky. Well yes, instead of grouping a swallow with a stork in order to establish a bird category one could have done otherwise, and classify a swallow with a dagger (in the category for sharp objects and perforators) and a stork

with an electric desk lamp (the category for things with feet

with long legs).61

In a long essay dedicated to one of his favorite art

brut artists, Dubuffet specifically praises "Gaston le

Zoologue," [Gaston the Zoologist] for accomplishing this kind of declassification through his work.62

However, if we follow this line of thinking further we

arrive at an insurmountable chasm between Dubuffet

and L?vi-Strauss, which no doubt explains why the two

thinkers eventually parted ways. In the end, their ideas

about art are incompatible. For L?vi-Strauss, ethnology as a whole, and the study of art in particular, deals with

"the problem of communication."63 As a scientist he

breaks down preconceived categories for the sole

purpose of reconstructing new ones, which are meant to

help us interpret the art and myths of other cultures.

L?vi-Strauss believes that the practice of structural

anthropology will enable him, as the pun in the title of

La voie des masques (1975) implicitly suggests, to give "voice" to works of art which would otherwise remain

silent. In the preface to this study of Northwest Coast

Indian masks he posits:

... As in the case with myths, masks, too, cannot be

interpreted in and by themselves as separate objects. Looked upon from the semantic point of view, a myth acquires sense only after it is returned to its transformation set. Similarly, one type of mask, considered only from the

plastic point of view, echoes other types whose lines and colors it transforms while it assumes its own individuality. For this individuality to stand out against another mask it is

necessary that the same relationship exist between the

message that the first mask has to transmit or connote and the message that the other mask must convey within the

same culture or in a neighboring culture.64

Dubuffet, on the other hand, is uninterested in

reconstructing the categories he destroys. Art brut, Modernism's last Other, is precisely that which falls

outside of any "transformation set" or "matrix of

intelligibility." It is always sigular and isolated, inaccessible and inpenetrable. As far as Dubuffet is

concerned, each art brut artist is a "closed-circuit," in dialog with him- or herself alone.65 The essence

of the work of art brut lies in its illegibility, its

incommunicability, and its indecipherability. Dubuffet's

art brut is, ultimately, L?vi-Strauss's "mana": a sign

signifying nothing, a symbol with zero symbolic value.66

58. Cf., James A. Boon, From Symbolism to Structuralism: L?vi

Strauss in a Literary Tradition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972. L?vi

Strauss apparently liked Boon's book; see his comments in

Conversations with L?vi-Strauss (1988), ed. Didier Eribon (Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press, 1991 ):181-182.

59. Dubuffet, Prospectus III, pp. 245-250.

60. L?vi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 58.

61. Dubuffet, Lettres ? J.B., pp. 1-3.

62. Dubuffet, "Gaston le Zoologue," (1965) Prospectus I, pp. 319-332.

63. Claude L?vi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss

(1950) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987):36.

64. Claude L?vi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (1975) (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1982):12.

65. Prospectus I, p. 322.

66. L?vi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, p. 64.