This paper presents the concept of “Raw Art,” following its main articulations in the field of art and mental health until the 1960s. Through a critical analysis, the text shows how this concept, despite encouraging the appreciation of artistic materials produced by psychiatric patients and other naïve artists, contributes to a segregationist categorization of the so-called “mad” artists, by adopting a reductionist and idealized understanding of creation as a spontaneous expression, accessible to these subjects precisely because they are “outsiders.” Such notion, although still used today, underwent remodeling and renaming-as “outsider art”-between 1960/70, following the denaturalization of isolation for the so-called “insane” brought by the Psychiatric Reform and the advent of significant changes in the conception of art and artistic production.
Keywords:
Raw Art; Jean Dubuffet; outsider art; contemporary art