Conference: Art Brut – Japan – Switzerland

Organized by Prof Hans Bjarne Thomsen, University of Zurich and Director Dr. Monika Jagfeld, Museum in Lagerhaus, St. Gallen.
The purpose of the symposium is to examine art brut, a form of art that has seen a great growth in popularity during the last decades, and to test its boundaries, not only in geography, but also in its cultural contexts. We aim to look at the phenomenon with interdisciplinary viewpoints, examining art brut from multiple vantage points, not only from Japan and Switzerland – both with widely different mechanisms – but also from the viewpoints of specialists in various fields: from academia, the museum world, social welfare, and the art world.
A larger problem is to examine the limits and integration of art brut in these various fields and to see how the present isolation of the genre can be prevented. The symposium and the accompanying exhibition of Swiss-Japanese art brut art at the Museum im Lagerhaus in St. Gallen is the culmination of a multi-year project that included various research partners and university students who took part in travel, institution visits, political activism, exhibition planning and – finally – in the present symposium.
Historically speaking, art brut (and its English variant “outsider art”) has been regarded as a separate subfield of art, an art form that is segregated, not only by its theme, but also in terms of geography and pedagogy. For example, until recently, the western world was not aware of the outstanding production of Japanese art brut or its remarkable artists. And the study of art brut still is not integrated into the mainstream of art historical departments in the universities of the world and tends to be ignored.
It is the belief of the organizers that a wider acceptance of art brut is needed and that the art form needs to be integrated into a general understanding of art, not only in the museum world, but also in academia. Art brut is not only a subfield of art, but one that needs to be integrated into the curricula of art history. Such changes are necessary in Europe and Switzerland, and also in Japan and in the wider world. For this reason, we have gathered people from various countries and from different backgrounds – academia, museum, artists, welfare specialists, journal publishers – in order to come to terms with the problems and reach a wider understanding of how art brut can end its isolation and become a vital part of mainstream culture. In effect, this represents an attempt to take the “outsider” out of outsider art and make it a part of our regular experiences of art and culture.
The wider project and the symposium has also been one based on border crossing, as it represents collaboration between the museum world and the university – both in Switzerland and in Japan. And within the exhibition rooms of the Museum in Lagerhaus in St Gallen, we also see this border crossing in the way that the art brut objects from Japan engage in dialogues with Swiss objects placed next to them. This is the first that such an innovative staging of objects from both Swiss and Japanese artists has taken place, and the act symbolizes the cross-cultural aspects of the project: only by crossing borders can we achieve real communication.