The other night, in the rain, in the dark, I watched Serge Bromberg's documentary on the salvaged rushes of Henri-Georges Clouzot's abandoned film from 1964: L'Enfer. According to Clouzot's meticulous storyboards, the film was about a young couple, Odette and Marcel Prieur, who own a remote hotel beside a lake. The plot, it seems, was simple: the elongations of the husband's paranoid jealousy.
The everyday was to be filmed in black-and-white – the medium of realism – while the medium of fantasy was Technicolor. This was where Clouzot wanted to experiment. In colour, the husband's paranoid fantasies were offered in gorgeous hallucinations: infinite formal machinations.
So I was partly there to see what Clouzot had done – this film maker so despised by my adored Nouvelle Vague film makers – as he tried to invent a film which would out-experiment them all. But really I was there, in the dark, in the rain, for Romy Schneider. I was there for her body glazed in olive oil, wrapped in cellophane. And it's true that the body of Romy Schneider was vulnerably visible: the Technicolor lilt of her hips as she waterskied, or another shot in experimental black and white, where her breasts are doubly exposed.
Soon, however, I felt something else entirely. It wasn't that each individual innovation, with mirrors and inverted colour, wasn't a pleasure. But these experiments soon made me feel scared.
After seeing the initial rushes, Columbia had given Clouzot an unlimited budget. And so he demented himself with form. Over four days, according to Schneider, Clouzot filmed her lips. Her lips! For four days, the makeup and lights made her lips green, or blue, and he filmed them, smoking, open-mouthed, pouting. This wasn't the end of Clouzot's meticulous mania. He had two crews on set at all times. It was meant to speed up the filming. Instead, it only led to dead-ends, to confusion. He reshot scenes in a haze of repetition. Eventually, the lead actor, Serge Reggiani, left the set. And finally Clouzot had a heart attack, at which point everyone, relieved, could end the shoot.
According to the notes, Clouzot had "spent most of the 1930s in institutions, a period he obliquely referred to as 'a depression'": and as I watched I began to think that there was a strange overlap between these various conditions – personal, artistic, fictional – between his depression, his artistic experimentation, and the husband's fictional jealousy. They were all forms of paranoia, when the human becomes invaded by infinite anxiety.
And this is one reason why Clouzot's film was called hell. Because we all know that hell isn't other people. Hell is when other people have disappeared.
So I sat there, scared. Because this has always been what scares me most: the easy possibility of madness. Of my many fears, my greatest is the fear of going mad. It has always terrified me. And as I watched Clouzot's fragments, I developed a new inflection to this fear: the ordinary idea of madness now seemed eerily similar to the everyday practice of formal experiment. Madness seemed the reasonable result of trying to invent the new vision of Romy Schneider.
And then I went to see The Museum of Everything's collection of outsider art – and the same question presented itself, just inverted. Clouzot's problem had been his unlimited commercial backing. So it was impossible for him to finish. The problem in the art of the unknown, the unexhibited, is of having no backing at all. So, it seemed, it was impossible to finish.
This was obvious in the repetitive, infinite size of so much art in the museum. But it was also obvious, in miniature, in so many works' refusal of empty space. Everything had to be filled. There was no clear way of finishing. Perhaps, then, this is why the wonderful, saddening, disturbing works in the Museum of Everything are both art and not art, simultaneously. They are objects which have acquired some kind of emotional value, inseparable from living: like Emery Blagdon's constructions of wire and copper coils, which Mark Titchner calls "machines for healing that just happened to have a sculptural form".
Probably the most famous artist in the Museum of Everything is Henry Darger, who wrote a 15,000-page story: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. This strip cartoon describes a great sadness. In it, Darger tries to create a world where children are saved from the malice of adults. At a certain point in its composition, Darger added illustrations, so the story became a vast collage cartoon strip. The vastness is important, as is the fact that it's a collage. For Darger's style is a bricolage of the mass styles of others. His battle scenes are taken from film stills in magazines; the drawings of little girls are from clothes catalogues; the flowers are from children's books. Even the clouds come from cartoons. One way, therefore, of putting this problem would be to ask how far Darger has a style.
Madness, wrote Foucault, is the absence of art. But if only this were true! If only there were a neat frontier between them, with flags and sentry boxes. The everyday problem is in working out how much madness one can bear; at what point a style emerges from infinite experiments, or infinite private repetitions. So although I agree with Peter Blake, who writes in the museum catalogue that the deep pleasure of this art is the "privacy" in which it was made, without the possibility of its ever being exhibited, it seems to me too difficult to be so definitive.
All art is public art and it is private art. And this is a problem.
One of my favourite formal experimenters is Gertrude Stein. Of these experiments, my least favourite is probably her 1,000-page The Making of Americans. But this non-novel, it occurs to me, seems to be a valuable aspect of this collage. It was, after all, a version of outsider art, since it was written around 1906, but not published until 1925, in a limited edition. And also because, in the middle of this style, so close to madness, there is this admission of experimental defeat:
"Sometimes I am almost despairing. I know the being in Miss Dounor that I am beginning describing, I know the being in Miss Charles that I am soon going to be beginning describing, I know the being in Mrs Redfern, I have been describing the being in that one. I know the being in each one of these three of them and I am almost despairing for I am doubting if I am knowing it poignantly enough to be really knowing it, to be really knowing the being in any one of the three of them. Always now I am despairing."
Art is when the knowledge of imaginary others is known poignantly. With that adverb, Stein bravely refutes her experiments in the depiction of character. And it moves me partly because it is an admission of fictional defeat; but also because it proves her sanity.