La ronde des images 1977

Editor: So, this is Jean Dubuffet’s "La ronde des images" from 1977. It's a mixed-media piece that incorporates acrylic paint. It strikes me as this fascinating, almost chaotic, collection of faces and forms, sort of stitched together. What stands out to you? Curator: What immediately grabs me is the intense materiality. Look at how Dubuffet seems to relish in the application of paint. There's a visible physicality, a sense of direct engagement with the materials themselves. Do you notice how each of these painted blocks seem to retain their own "thingness"? Editor: Yes, each section almost feels like its own individual piece, butted up against its neighbor, and made of stuff – stuff carefully made into art! So, instead of a unified image, are you saying that it’s a collection of discrete material events that we are witnessing here? Curator: Precisely. Consider the socio-economic context: post-war consumer culture. Is Dubuffet perhaps reflecting on mass production by giving us this accumulation of "images"? The work borders on craft – it's an arrangement of pieces made with intense manual labor, not so different from a textile worker arranging various textiles and materials, right? Editor: That’s such an interesting angle – the comparison to textile work! I never thought about the connection between "high art" and the craft involved. Curator: Think about Dubuffet's concept of "Art Brut" – raw art, art outside the mainstream. He challenged the art world's elite system by questioning its hierarchies and modes of artistic production. Editor: So, looking at it now, the chaotic arrangement almost becomes a statement on the means of art production, it seems to imply there are no rules of the game. And this can only be expressed using raw, deliberately crude, manual work, a labor, on basic materials! It’s less about the faces and more about the *making* of the faces. I think I understand it so much better now. Curator: Exactly. The consumption of art here hinges on an understanding of production. We've shifted away from an obsession with mere imagery and returned to process.