Arthur Bispo do Rosario beyond the walls of the asylum³

Abstract

This article proposes a perspective on Arthur Bispo do Rosario’s work that assigns a secondary role to the pathology and prioritizes his experience. The comparison with Marcel Duchamp is usually made due to the formal similarity among their works of art. However, the heterogeneity of their trajectories challenges the audience to reflect carefully about the experiences of each one. In Arthur Bispo do Rosario, his status as an inmate clearly entails heavy constraints of the material and contextualizes his work. In his inventive and unusual project, he establishes less an aesthetics of ugliness but much more - by its strength of truth - one of artistic beauty, not as a formal and plastic law, but as a result or achievement of an aesthetic experience that becomes an artistic experience. The standpoint pursued in this article does not follow the usual paths - like the recurrent comparisons between these two artists -, and it searches to see beyond the discernible limits of the work volumes, highlighting a truth interposed like “almost-subjects”, in accordance with Georges Didi-Huberman’s theoretical framework. To examine the textile work of Arthur Bispo do Rosario by the gaps of perception is to assume its indeterminacy and to put it into the category of the unstable, in which stand the objects of art that mediate the lived realities. To emphasize its magnitude is also to emphasize its importance as a possible tool to decontaminate and eradicate the prejudice on the look that categorizes and penalizes artists and their works of art by diagnosing them.

Keywords:
Arthur Bispo do Rosario; outsider artist; phenomenology; aesthetics reception; Marcel Duchamp