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The French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet introduced the concept of art brut to a wider audience in the 1940s in order to promote the work of those creative people who lived outside of the official art world, basically on the margins of society. As Dubuffet’s principles with regard to art brut – the “mandatory” characteristics of the art brut creators – were extremely strict, it comes as no surprise that this very specific concept has been much broadened, which resulted in the birth of “outsider art”. This paper focuses on the evolution of art brut and outsider art. The author tells a short history of these styles, illustrates the differences between them, and demonstrates the present contradictions between the two concepts by taking into consideration the constitutive factors of the current art world.
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The Venice Biennale is sort of a patent agency for art: if a work is exhibited at the Biennale, it is already regarded as being in the centre of the contemporary art world. In the present year the peculiarity of the Biennale consisted in the emphasis on peripheral works: outsider art was brought to the centre of the art world. The notion of outsider art is full of contradictions – it is difficult to find its place either in traditional art theory, as well as within avant-garde conceptions. This paper aims at tracing a parallel between outsider art and the readymade, it highlights the similarities and differences, and proposes a new term instead of outsider art: the “institutional ready-made”.
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This paper focuses on the history of a French concept, “art brut”. The author intends to analyse the different phases of the definition of this concept and the institutionalization of the art forms covered by it. The analysis proceeds in three steps to the final conclusion, presenting the birth of the first collection dedicated to outsider art, analysing the different definitions of art brut from Jean Dubuffet to Céline Delavaux, and presenting the institutional profile of the Halle-Saint-Pierre museum from Paris. The conclusion is that art brut gained much in interest and has become one of the major domains of contemporary visual creation.
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Peter von Matt discusses the ambivalent relationship between 20th century literary discourses and the representations of Switzerland. The emergence of a critical approach toward Swiss patriotism in literature is analysed in its historical context. The author presents Switzerland through its myths, and contemporary language issues related to these myths. He is interested in the contradictions that continue to characterize Swiss politics and Swiss literature. The conflicts between local and global, national and universal in the works of Switzerland’s major writers are presented as a love/hate situation, where the ambivalent nature of Eros serves as an analogy for the analysis.
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