ISSUE #7 – The self-taught enigma

A collective study on a figure of art history

Introduction

The 2013 Venice Biennale dropped a bit of a bombshell when, in the official exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni, some forty participants with no artistic training were presented side by side and indiscriminately with seasoned artists from the professional sphere. Controversy raged: how could productions that ignore art theory and its traditions be included in the most important biennial in the art world? How could the creativity of works – conceived without any in-depth knowledge of aesthetic criteria – fascinate to the point of serving as an enigma?

Produced during a study day organised by Charlotte Laubard, head of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Genève, the entries in this feature look back at the place of self-taught artists during the 20th century in order to resituate the historical and theoretical issues that took part in the construction of the self-taught enigma. The entries aim to undo certain mythologising representations of artistic practices by examining what self-learning concretely produces within a creative process. To this end, they postulate an approach at the crossroads of disciplines, calling on learning theories from the fields of sociology, anthropology, pragmatic philosophy, and cognitive and educational sciences.

Not only do these entries look to create space for artistic productions that have been kept on the margins of art institutions, they also call on us to completely revise our criteria of judgement within the context of the unprecedented broadening of creative practices that have been disrupted by globalisation and digital technologies.

The conferences both feed and complete the research run for a vast historical exhibition organised by Charlotte Laubard at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Etienne (October 2021-April 2022).

Content

A history of legitimacy

In this podcast combined with a large body of images, Charlotte Laubard (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) explores what she calls the ‘self-taught enigma.’ Multiform, this enigma questions the modes of art learning and artistic invention as much as the criteria of legitimacy that govern art history. In particular, Laubard compares the trajectory of artists who have been subjected to various labels such as ‘brut,’ ‘outsider’ and ‘naïve’ with that of avant-garde artists from the 1950s who had to implement a form of unlearning in order to break with tradition on the one hand, and creators from non-Western spheres and learning environments on the other.

Charlotte Laubard

Auto-reverse learning: Daniel Johnston and recording

Portrayed as an absolute oddity, both solitary and providential, the American singer-songwriter and cartoonist Daniel Johnston (1961-2019) has often been labelled an outsider, ‘naïve’ and ‘crude,’ by artistic historiography. Based on readings of his work that are in turn mundane, hagiographic and biographo-pathological – and accompanied by his songs in the background – Christophe Kihm explains how Johnston embodies a certain myth of the self-taught genius, in contrast to the values of a pop music considered inauthentic and commercial.

Christophe Kihm

The self-taught enigma, from the making of the work to its recognition: what can we learn from accounts of learning?

By evoking a series of discoveries made during her research on ‘informal’ or ‘unformatted’ learning, Hélène Bézille explores the socio-historical construction of the figure of the autodidact. She observes in particular how this dual figure, oscillating between disqualification and recognition, alienation and emancipation, gained legitimacy from the 1960s onwards with the construction of the self-made man and the growing ‘artification’ of what we see as radical singularities.

Hélène Bézille