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Donald Kuspit For one year, from February 1983 to February 1984, Jean Dubuffet (190185) painted nothing but what he called Mires (Test Patterns). He then followed them, for the rest of 1984, with a series he called Non-Lieux (No-Grounds). Works from both series are on display at the Pace Gallery, suggesting their affinity. Boldly gestural, both have a swashbuckling, free-form look, although the Mires’ gestures sometimes seem to form faces and figures, resembling children’s drawings, and sometimes loosely align in a grid, while the NonLieux works seem more chaotically “instinctive,” and also anguished. They seem more from the “dark side,” as their black areas suggest, however overrun by red, white and blue streaks, quixotically interlocking in an unstable pattern, while the more tightly constructed Mires, with their luminous red, white and blue, seem lyrical in comparison. Indeed, some of the Mires allude to the bolero, as their subtitles indicate, a lively Spanish dance in triple meter. A bolero is also a waist-length jacket open in front, typically worn by bullfighters, suggesting the confrontational daring of Dubuffet’s painterly handling. But however delightful and fanciful the Mires and dramatic and
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Mainstream outsider takes on culture
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morbid the Non-Lieux, both stem from Dubuffet’s longstanding interest in graffiti: they are street art elevated to high art abstract expressionism, more broadly arte informal. The “indeterminacy” and “disorder” of the Mires links them to Dubuffet’s Texturologies and Materiologies, as Daniel Abadie noted when they were first exhibited at Pace in 1985. All three involve what Abadie called Dubuffet’s “ambition to create a meta-language [of visual art] with its own rules and syntax free of any habitual mind-set, thereby eluding both the sneaky subliminal conditioning of the culture and established social norms, in which the painter discerns the same reductive power, the same refusal of any independent adventure of the mind.” Neither is as “indeterminate” as they are thought to be, however “instinctive” they may be: but the instincts have their own determinate character. Dubuffet hasn’t escaped culture, neither street culture nor the culture of high art, but rather confirms their inability to be escaped. Even his credo is culturally conditioned and ratified avant-garde gospel, a supposedly independent “speaking out” that has become tediously dependent on visual clichés, as his paintings are. They are not the fantastic “riddles” they claim to be, but are among the many pretenders to the throne of an imperialistic avant-garde institution that has seen better days. Dubuffet is the prisoner of a naive, hidebound psychology an ideologized psychology as well as avant-garde (both suffering from a hardening of the creative arteries) because it involves an obsolete, simplistic idea of the mind’s relationship to being, the reality that is beyond it even as it participates in it.