François Tosquelles’ and Jean Dubuffet
A critique of the outsider art
The conference will discuss the legacy of the Franco-Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles. In the occupied France of the 1940s, he healed his patients by “curing” the psychiatric institution itself. Using culture (amateur cinema, theater, and literature) and politics (self-management, cooperatives, and anti-Stalinist communism), he worked and engaged with avantgarde poets like Paul Éluard, Antonin Artaud and Tristan Tzara, the post-colonial philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and philosopher Félix Guattari. During those years, Tosquelles had a disagreement with the artist Jean Dubuffet, who invented the notion of outsider art (art brut) so as to name the artistic practices “executed by people untouched by artistic culture”. Tosquelles criticized the idea of a raw art because he refused to exoticize or alienate madness, separating madness from normality.
Bio
Joana Masó is a professor of French literature at the University of Barcelona. She is a researcher with the UNESCO Chair on Women, Development and Cultures, and works at the intersection of literature, critical thinking, contemporary art, and curating exhibitions. She has co-edited Jacques Derrida’s text on aesthetics, Thinking Out of Sight: Writings on the Art of the Visible (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and on architecture, Les arts de l’espace: Écrits et interventions sur l’architecture (La Différence, 2015). She has also coedited Hélène Cixous’s essays dedicated to art, Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Since 2017, she has led the research project “The Forgotten Legacy of Tosquelles” at the University of Barcelona, under the ADHUC—Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality. She has published François Tosquelles. Soigner les institutions (2021), forthcoming in English, Tosquelles: Curing the Institutions (Semiotext(e), 2025) and Tosquelles. Avant-garde psychiatry, Radical Politics and Art (2024), the American Folk Art Museum in New York exhibition catalogue.
Thursday 12th of December 2024
20h at Museum Dr. Guislain
Free admission / Register here
Intruiged? Check out the lecture on Curing the Institutions with François Tosquelles
A Politics of Madness