A Healthy Dose of Insanity

This week, my French class took a field trip to the Musée d'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. It's an exhibit of "outsider art," meaning artwork created outside the boundaries of normal culture. Usually the artists are mentally ill, prisoners, or children. Because these "artists" exist outside mainstream ideas of what is fashionable or acceptable, they supposedly have the greatest level of creativity, at least according to l'art brut enthusiasts.

The exhibit was breath-taking, but also somewhat disturbing. It's interesting to see how artists straddle the line between genius and madness. Here's a few highlights (photography wasn't allowed inside the exhibit so some of these pictures I found online):

Pascal Desir Maisonneuve used tropical seashells to make portraits mocking famous politicians and monarchs (the one shown above is Queen Victoria)

Emile Ratier, although blind, made mobile sculptures animated by cranks and other resonant mechanisms. The noises, the grating, and the grinding were the only way he could determine if his contraptions worked (since he couldn't see them). 

Nek Chand created a 40 acre sculpture garden out of waste products, called the Rock Garden, in India. 

Aloise Corbaz, a Swiss schizophrenic, was a governess in the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II. She became obsessed with him and much of her work features women romancing royal figures. 

Her work also demonstrates "horror vacui" - or the fear of empty spaces common among art by the mentally ill. In her work, every blank space on the canvas is covered. 

Morton Bartlett, a Boston-based freelance photographer and graphic designer, had a secret hobby of creating and photographing intricately carved, lifelike plastic dolls. He would spend months bringing a doll's facial expressions to life and up to a year modeling, casting, and painting each part. The dolls weren't discovered until after his death.

Sorry if this was a bit of a creepy post... but it was just so fascinating. I did edit down the artists I chose to write about (some were much more... provocative than those I've described). I promise I'll follow this up with a more light-hearted blog update soon!