Art and the Homeless

A murder. I say, it's so abstract.  (Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands ) In an alternate historical timeline, in which Sartre had been an American citizen, a people who are (as everyone knows) the most litigious people on the planet, he might have stated his philosophy a little more succinctly had he but read any law school textbook. College textbooks are exchanged after use (and still costly when purchased "used") but eventually they find their way into the bargain bin, where they may be read purely for interest, and discarded after reading without concern for their incidental value. But, then, his philosophy would have been less interesting reading. Sartre would have been a more pragmatic thinker had he been concerned at all with the law. Ethics? yes. Due process? -no. Sartre was an idea man. The argument over the reality of ideas is a moot point when a court of law inquires into the motive behind a criminal act. As a rule, actus reus plus mens rea equals conviction. That...

Jean-Paul Sartre's On Revolution, written in 1946 (apparently unpublished until 1964), and read in a translation published in 2021, is the best thing I have read by Sartre. For the record, I have read Being and Nothingness, several of his essays, and both read and attended his play, No Exit. I am neither a Sartre scholar, nor a stranger. From Being and Nothingness I learned defiance in the face of intimidating choices. His amicus brief published in defense of Jean Genet was magnanimous, since there was absolutely no advantage in it for Sartre, and a prime example of what Sartre calls "gratuitous gesture." We may be confident that, had he been an American during the McCarthy-era Communist witch hunts, he would have been an eloquent defender of civil liberties. A source of frustration with Sartre is his ipso facto reasoning. Improvising, now, on what I take as typical Sartre style, consider “the rebel demands freedom because he conceives freedom and as such he is alread...

Before modern times, art was the prerogative of wealthy patrons, and the institutions of the Church and State. An artist did not paint what he wanted, but what the patron ordered, in a word, by commission. Portraits of important persons were most in demand. Next, religious ikons and historical scenes dominated the subject matter of painting. Pagan mythology was the subject of imaginative painting, and (again), as specified by the patron. Amateur artists were unknown before modern times. Training in art was by apprenticeship. There were no art schools. The materials of art, such as oil paint, were scarce and costly. Precious materials were not wasted on idle subjects. It was not until the emergence of a mercantile economy that speculative subjects found a place in art. The nature landscape, without human figures or narrative subject, would be the first revolution in art. The interest in scenic backgrounds extended to quaint village scenes and rustic peasants, and eventually led to cosm...

There are artists who, like a hobbyist, make no effort to show their work, going so far as to conceal it. As a student of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1983, an example of one such artist was brought to my attention. It was Henry Darger (1892-1973). The academic problem was how to evaluate an artist such as Henry Darger as an artist  -not as a clinical case.  Art is not social work even if, as it often seems, an artist's art is overshadowed almost to irrelevance by the life of the artist. An artist's life is circumstantial. Personal analysis of an artist is even worse. Blunt-speaking critics must refrain from the use of such nontechnical terms as "closet artist." It is a paradox because the problem of suppressed expression is the elephant in the sacristy of both creativity and personality. Henry Darger's artistic quirk is not as easy to define as simple pornography, in which actual human beings are being exploited, making a case for...