IMPOSSIBLE EDUCATION

Even if it is completely legitimate to encourage public interest for Art Brut by using teaching methods, we definitely cannot speak about education.
Neither culture nor anticulture, but creation in its pure state, Art Brut cannot be reduced to some kind of know-how which could be transmitted or itemized. The creators of Art Brut invent every time their own technique or use the existing ones - which they have never heard of - in a completely new manner.
Many of them are driven to create an important body of work, without any knowledge or experience, guided just by their inner feeling that makes them act. Augustin Lesage created thus his first painting three by three meters, even if, as he acknowledged himself, he "did not know anything about art." The illustration of one of his poems drove Gaston Teuscher, inspite of being 71 years old, to a very contemporary graphic production full of meandering and embryonic forms.
When faced with these blatant evidences of unashamed ease, the human institutions, convinced about the virtue of effort and difficulty as far as art is concerned, turn a deaf ear. Just to take one example, the museums exude mimetic behaviour, the exact opposite of the spirit of Art Brut. The collective structures of exhibition, wanting to justify and reproduce their existence, propose to their public that wants to be educated activities based on repetition that run against the creativity in the raw state. The young overflowing energies can thus be channelled. Nevertheless, to copy princess Aloïse means as little as copying Mickey Mouse.
In the best case, the studio activities proposed to children during important exhibitions enable them to draw, paint, make collages or sculptures. Despite that, the question of the initial desire to exercise this talent in a normed space is evaded. Similarly to art therapy, the work produced in such way - even if aesthetically interesting - answers the demand of a collective entity. It does not emanate from the subject itself, and this can be unfortunately - with rare exceptions - immediately recognized.