Contemporary French Art 1: Eleven Studies. (Faux Titre) (v. 1)

Contemporary French Art 1

FAUX TITRE 317 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Contemporary French Art 1 Eleven Studies

Michael Bishop

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2008

Maquette couverture : Aart Jan Bergshoeff Illustration cover and page 6: Ben Vautier, Portrait de Duchamp (1986), mixed technique on wood, 137 x 152 cm. Collection Dagny and Jan Runnquist. By courtesy of the artist. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-2418-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface .......................................................................................... 7 Truth and Infinity: Ben Vautier ..................................................... 9 Shooting for Transcendence: Niki de Saint Phalle ....................... 21 Baroque Minimalist?: François Morellet ..................................... 35 Sublimation, the Irreducible and the Sacred: Louise Bourgeois .... 49 Seeing Being: Alexandre Hollan ................................................. 65 Spiralling, Infinity, Tautology: Claude Viallat ............................. 79 Ritual, Desire, Dys-Covering: Sophie Calle ................................. 95 Raggedness, Fusion and Silence: Bernard Pagès ........................ 111 Structure, Sensuality, Fable, Accompaniment: Jean-Pierre Pincemin ................................................................. 127 Chimera, Caress, Sacred Implosion: Annette Messager ............. 143 Absence and Melancholia, Meaning and Beauty: Gérard Titus-Carmel ................................................................. 159 Bibliography ............................................................................. 177

PREFACE A book such as this, composed of eleven studies devoted to some of France’s greatest artists of the past fifty or so years, requires arguably nothing or, at most, very little by way of introduction, and I thus opt for the latter minimality. As I write this, I am just beginning a second volume of such studies, centred similarly upon the work of some eleven or twelve artists of comparable stature, intensity of purpose and capacity – from Gérard Garouste, Colette Deblé and Georges Rousse to Christian Jaccard, Geneviève Asse and Philippe Favier. Any conclusions of a global kind, moreover, I shall reserve until the completion of this second volume. If I duck the issue here, it is hardly, I trust it will be appreciated, out of idleness. I wish merely to form a more ample picture in my mind before tackling a matter which, I nevertheless confess, only marginally appeals and which I shall ultimately assume as some self-imposed final critical duty. Individuality, uniqueness, visceral and spiritual subjectivity, these are what has drawn me to offer these eleven studies of artists who, moreover, along with the many galleries and museums that reveal their work, have, over the past two or three years, shown me great generosities, even friendships, as well as considerable patience. Without such extensive and continuing help, this book could not have been written and my gratitude to all those who have so freely offered it is correspondingly great. It is a book whose several studies, despite their compactness, thus seek to do justice to such gestures of confidence and exchange, delving, beyond yet essential evocation of the what of surface and form, into the dramas of process, production, the how of art, but, still more significantly by far, the swirling ontologies underpinning such doing, such stunningly personally lived, felt and conceived poiein. In this, I have sought no reductive theorems or stable equations, whilst remaining ever sensitive to Yves Bonnefoy’s for me, fundamental cautionary self-querying: “Why write? Why paint?” It is hoped that the pages that follow can help the reader, as they have helped me, to sense the vast complexities and, at times, paradoxes to which such questioning may alert us, thereby ever opening our meditative parentheses rather than closing them. Michael Bishop Halifax, Nova Scotia November, 2007

TRUTH AND INFINITY: BEN VAUTIER To look at, and even briefly explore, the extraordinary website of Ben Vautier, a work of art in itself, both compositionally and with respect to its capacity to encourage an ever newly burgeoning appreciation of the self’s gently anarchical consciousness, is to realise immediately something of the endlessly deferred and becoming truth such (self-)consciousness can lay before us. The École de Nice, Psy, Fluxus, The Incredible Catalogue raisonné, Radio Disinformation, Daily Joke, Ben Poet, Unlimited Projects, Found Images, Bazart Photos, Other People’s Archives, Ethnic Matters by Ben, Ben, Foreign Affairs Minister, Contemporary Art and Theory, The Ivory Coast, Ben Angry, My Journal, Become an Artist: such are a few of the hundreds of microsites on offer, each containing teeming images and thoughts, all creations, provocative and/or serious, ironic and/or funky, poetic and/or kitschy, a stunning cascade of elements all testifying to a life-long and lived desire to know the truth of an individual freedom experienced in relation to what we choose to call the world, others – and, most centrally, self. Did not Pierre Reverdy, revered by those who may be less inclined to savour the quirky, ludic pushiness of Ben Vautier, not write that his most crucial encounter by far was that, ever ongoing, with himself? Such an encounter with the truth of self Vautier seeks from the earliest moments, in the 1950’s, with his painted writings that continue today to play a major role in his poietic endeavours – poiein: to do, make, without pre-established criteria or perspectives: “they were objective truths, subjective truths, etc”, he comments with characteristically serious off-handedness, adding, at once soberly and undauntedly, that “truth is not easy to find” (CV, 50).1 This is not too surprising, in effect, given Vautier’s own ongoing hesitations in regard to what truth is, can be, whether it can be, whether what he is doing, namely art, or being, namely himself, can be deemed truth or untruth. Pas d’art sans vérité one of his often, and consciously, purposedly, undated word-paintings tells us,2 just as To Tell the Truth argues his own determination to do so, be “truthful” – “natural” (Etre 1

CV: Je cherche la vérité. See the Selected Bibliography for full details of references. 2 Tongue-in-cheek dates are often given in catalogues: cf. Pas datée (1965) despite, elsewhere, the injunction: anti-dater.

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naturel, 1974), as he puts it elsewhere, simply “self”, who he is, what he does, thinks, feels, writes. Things, however, are never so simple – how could they be when we know language is but a means not an end, and when we sense our infinite emotional, notional, even ethical diversity, the spinning relativity of the “contents” of our being? Thus can Ben Vautier turn on himself, and us, and string together a set of word-works which, despite their modal simplicity – a few words on canvas or paper or wood, usually –, emblematise dilemmas we all can surely admit to experiencing, though perhaps, and hopefully, with that smile or wry grin never far from Ben’s own memorable face: Il n’y a pas de vérité, Il faut se méfier des mots (1986), or worse: Je suis un menteur (1959) and Le Jour où je m’arrêterai de mentir, je ne ferai plus d’art. The fact is, truth is endlessly becoming, ceaselessly reconceptualisable. It thus has absoluteness only in the totality of its articulations. It is quirky, spontaneous, combustible; it roars or sputters at the tiny or huge bonfires that warm our hands, mind and heart. Art may, traditionally, have sought to argue an ideal equivalence of Truth, Beauty, and the Good, and though in radically inverted and renewed terms, Fluxus, not unlike Dada, may be deemed not to subvert this equation, Fluxus art, doing, making, being clearly disengaged from any discourse of moral and aesthetic, indeed, ontological (self-)limitation. If art and life fuse and create the stage for new (self-) perception and (self-)truth, this same stage also can become the place of artifice, feux d’artifice a (self-)theatricisation whereby envisioned simplicity of (self-)truth can fall prey to the complexities that risk betraying and masking the earlier visions. Of course, if Spinoza is right in suggesting that reality must be perfection, and vice versa, then the entire circus dance of the real must be as perfectly true as it can get. One may argue that art is less true, more contrived, mere “image” (Yves Bonnefoy), “unspace” (Gérard Titus-Carmel), a nonlieu offering but mots-morts (Bernard Noël), but it is hard to escape the fact that all that is (produced/created) remains an essential, authentic part of what is, of Creation. The truth of our being and doing, our poiein, is in their totality, their unending deployment and the characterisations, however conflicting, we may give this totality. To enter Ben Vautier’s world is to enter into the play of what one 1990 set of word canvases calls Le Jeu de la vie. Partout / dans / la chambre…, as three of these canvases suggest: this totality is always, actually or potentially, at play in (the) play (of truth’s infinity).

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Long enough before Ben Vautier couples his energies to those of the Fluxus movement, those energies reveal themselves as free-flowing, adventurous, “self-appropriating”, as he puts it (cf. CV, 11), provocative, tongue-in-cheek, divinely creative – Je suis Dieu, he concludes, not far from Trungpa’s unconstrained new-world Buddhism, in his 1958(?) Etat moral. There is a fancifulness about his early work, a rawly, but often delicately, unpretentious pretension as he pushes any envelope he comes across. “Slogans, aphorisms, confessions” (cf. CV. 90) already abound, mocking, self-mocking, probing always, buoyed and deflated by paradox, contradiction, a fabulous hybridity at the centre of (his) being and making. A mere glance at creations such as the delightful 1958 Sculpture objet or the aesthetically contentious 1956 Bac à cracher or the 1958 pseudo found object painting Fense Fficher or the stark and painted 1959 oil on canvas Je Suis noir et beau confirms this bubbling forth of diverse and ever newly thought energies. All of this activity and production, both Fluxus and pre-Fluxus, to be sure, but it is a logic that continues to this day, is predicated on assuming fully, unashamedly – why would shame enter the equation (despite Ben’s own occasional blithe selfaccusation)? –, easily and excitedly, an existence, unabstract, free, absolute though lived beyond firm criteria: his existence, sensed to be stunningly particular – like all existences, in principle, of course, though Ben Vautier gives himself over to a consciousness of its vast and strange and assumable dérive. 3 Je speaks the first panel of his 1965 acrylic on canvas triptych; Suis affirms the central volet; Seul soberly concludes the third panel: an art of being, of the self’s being, a kind of inevitably solitary act of creation predicated on devouring the resources of self – but offering them up, “vomiting” them up (: see the 1958 Gestes: vomir), for the other’s consumption – pleasure or disgust at this thrusting of “a cactus in[to] the arse of art” (CV, 1947).4 3

Ben’s art is hyper-self-conscious, so that this dérive of being is always assumed, never lived by default. 4 Whilst lived in the specifics of the events and gestures of the movement called Fluxus, “fluxus” is a generalisable precept for Ben Vautier. The 2003 Festival Fluxus et Neo-Fluxus, held in Nice, demonstrates both a continuing imaginative rootedness in such a precept, yet a perpetual movement of self-liberation from all ideational fixity. Thus can Marc Brackmann, in Ben (2000), speak of Vautier’s making of “selfcontradiction a creative principle”, thus developing an ontology-cum-aesthetics “without boundaries” (9).

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Critical writings devoted to Vautier’s work are, unsurprisingly, varied, ranging from the outrage of bourgeois or aesthete, to the amicable “doubt” of a Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, to Pierre Tilman’s sense of an offering of paranoid, political, dialectical, antielitist tonic “truth”, to Vicki Goldberg’s view that his oeuvre is that of a “[devoted and thoughtful] clown prince”, to Catherine Millet’s appreciation of “his nihilistic efficaciousness” and the degree to which that arguable post-Duchampian “pictorial bankruptcy” is compensated by factors of an “extra-pictorial” dimension; and then there are those that, generously, and rightly, I feel, see Vautier’s work as consciously and seriously founded upon, not just the desire to shock, to produce “newness” regardless of style and in the face of a “disabused telos” (Nicolas Bourriaud), but also the search for self-amusement, laughter, sheer fun (Raoul Mille), that pedagogically scandalous doing, free, unhesitating, softly disruptive, of a contemporary Diogenes (Philippe Vergne). To gaze upon the large 1985 acrylic C’est pas beau is to offer oneself, in effect, the most charming catalogue of criticisms conceivably levellable at Ben Vautier’s art – “Anyone can do that”, “It’s shameful”, “Full of mistakes”, “It stinks”, “Insipid dirty awful”, “You’ll have to pay me a lot to put that in my living room”, etc, etc5 –, criticisms boldly assumed but subverted at once by their unabashed, joyous articulation and by the sheer aesthetic extravagance of the orchestration of form and colour the canvas deploys, and to which no critic or artist could be insensitive: we are far beyond nihilism, here, beyond any bankruptcy too, and I should go so far as to say that a telos of exhilaration and joyous, smiling irony is amply recovered in this piece. Ben’s early film, Cannes Ville 1963, is centred upon the “intention of a total reality”, that artistico-ontological totality which, as we see throughout his work to this day, of necessity includes, indeed generates, paradox, contradiction, contrast, the relaying of being as what it is, with but also beyond language applied to it. Naming, writing, may be central to Ben Vautier’s work and vision, but he accepts that it is a tensional phenomenon, utterly caught up in provisionality, affectivity, time. The dynamics of self and all others, all otherness, is thus ambiguous and frank at the same time, ever embroiled in selfrevision, i.e. the revision of one’s being and doing and thinking. Self 5

All translations are mine throughout the book, including of Ben Vautier’s web miscrosites – although an English version is available.

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remains self, remains absolute, but in its freedom, its endless becoming, its way of not being defined, definitively definable, by the very utterances it yet makes. Ben Vautier’s art, his doingness-andbeingness-as-art, is simple, unapologetic; its self-embrace, its selfquerying and its self-revision are identical processes. It can offer, make or be, in principle, anything, infinitely any thing: L’Art c’est n’importe quoi, as one of Ben’s pieces asserts – thus miming the logic of all createdness – and he will pursue this logic from the congenial 1963 banner J’ai mangé un oeuf dur hier à 12h32 to the 1998 happening or art-as-being-self moment Pendant le vernissage [à la galerie Brigitte Seinsoth, Bremen], je prends un bain et je reçois les gens. All has validity: what we like, don’t like, what others love but we don’t: in this way, as some philosophers and mystics would argue, you can’t get it wrong (regardless of your thinking or feeling). Il n’y a pas de photos ratées (1990) is not a piece bent on pure aesthetic argument: it is that, of course, but more importantly by far it argues that being contains no errors, being is what it is, and there is, Vautier’s work ceaselessly suggests, no one thing, state, form of being, precisely privileged over the rest. All is “privileged”, by virtue of its being (there), by virtue of its being staged as one of the infinite modes of beingness. Il n’y a pas de centre du monde (1994) beautifully and in camp fashion emphasizes such thinking and clamours for an art – and a being – without “imperialism”, where Ionesco’s view of the “royalty” of each individual can be acknowledged,6 and, just as Ben Vautier will understand the need for, and the beauty of, our embrace of difference, multiplicity, a liberation of self and other from the equations of what Michel Deguy will call “worldisation”. A Oneness, such as Yves Bonnefoy will encourage us to sense in our experience of presence, but a oneness ever featuring “free figuration” (cf. CV, 106) and the legitimacy of the other’s self-deployment and self-expression. 7 Multiplicity, gathering of the gloriously diverse – “a matchstick was as beautiful as the Mona Lisa” as Vautier wrote in 1976 (CV, 69) – , classifying, orchestration of the seemingly hopelessly 6

An argument Ionesco puts forward in an English edition of his Le roi se meurt. Whilst the underlying ontology here would lead implicitly, and ideally, to high spiritual non-judgement and a total embrace of the other, Ben does not argue for some utter ethical laisser faire: he is but human, and has agendas that, whilst predicated on freedom, perceive its problematising absence. 7

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disparate and unorchestratable: these are principles – better, impulses, instincts – that drive much of the work we are looking at, from the outset, with the celebrated Magasin, through the delightfully pseudofetishistic 1967 Armoire d’Arman, to the slightly more sober though still sweetly idiosyncratic La Cambra (now at the MAMAC, Nice). And then, of course, from 1976, a work of art ever in progress and the ultimate act and place of assembly, of a collecting and display of the objects of one’s attention, one’s doing, one’s reinvention and honouring of the world: Ben Vautier’s own house in Saint Pancrace, La Maison. Nothing is uninteresting for such a poet-gatherer: the discarded, the rusted, the broken, the seemingly no longer rationally applicable – all may be taken up, given a home, a being-in-and-as-art. Gathering requires a touching, a caressing, not in nostalgia but for the improbable, but ever available exhilaration of its being, here and now. Recycling, recovery, demands seeing things anew, a re-vision or revising of our perception of worth, of beauty, of function. All these creations involve the reinstallation of the disinstalled in space essentially compact, finite, even cramped, yet a space as elastic, as accommodating, as that 137 x 152 cm piece of wood “housing” the teeming bits and pieces (and words) that make up the very fine 1986 Portrait de Duchamp. Space appears to expand indefinitely, and one thinks of La Maison being added to at the Beaubourg or of the nearinfinity, the inexhaustible gatheredness, in the yet necessarily confined space of La Maison à Saint Pancrace. Art thus invades life, just as the latter embraces, hugs to it and holds fast to the sacred, beloved clutter and junk of its own artifacts, re-membered, perhaps touched up, rescued and preserved in the micro-museum an artwork is. The left-for-dead arisen, placed back upon the bizarre, funky, unpretentious and fascinating pedestal of its being-what-it-is in the midst of the transmutations all poiein, all poietic doing, brings to it… Yves Bonnefoy has spoken of the need for our will to intervene if we desire that being truly attain to what it is. Such gathering and remaking of the thing-already-in-being-but-parenthesised involves such a willing and allows for being to flower afresh and with that surprising fragrance, that jocund beingness Vautier’s matchstick somehow stole from the Mona Lisa. If the implication of such multiple, quasi-infinite gathering and showing and reinvention seems to be that all, at root, is beautiful and that art, like life itself, cannot fail to be beautiful – c’est pas beau,

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as we have seen, is a good-humoured repost to aesthetic elitists – Ben Vautier’s work yet remains conscious of the complexities and arguable pitfalls of all self-positioning, all use of that language he himself never stops using. “Can the awful be beautiful” he asks from the outset (1956: see CV, 15), and, if this initial context is not overly problematic (: spitting: is there anyone who hasn’t?: truth=beauty), and if the Fluxus events and creations cannot be said ever to be behaviourly abhorrent – “mad”, wild, zany, provocative, yes, but truly aggressive, not at all – we may ask ourselves, as did Baudelaire, what about suffering, injustice, death, violence? Are such “uglinesses” recuperable; does Ben’s work, in effect, go to the extreme limit of the question of beauty? To hope to deal reasonably with such matters, one needs, I feel, to bear in mind factors such as the varying modes of humour that proliferate in an oeuvre, a life-work, that remains always at its core and very largely on its many surfaces affable, good-natured; the desires that underpin the entirety of Vautier’s démarche, from his will to establish and ever renew aesthetic freedom to his growing political and ethno-cultural visions which, too, are predicated upon emancipated and emancipating action, an ethos of acceptance and love of difference, a frank advocacy of free-spirited individual and grouped choice. Of course, all dilemmas are not thereby resolved by virtue of such an aesthetico-existential self-positioning, but laughter and smile do bring some harmony to Ben en colère (see his website); self-doubt does attenuate absolute claims; the power of a piece such as the 1983 L’Art est inutile is balanced both by his knowledge of the precise reversibility of the equation of art and its non-utilitarianism: smiling, wit, joy, simple embrace of the only apparently marginal, endless engagement with the other , the undying quest for forthrightness, ease and unboundedness – all risk generating upliftment, affective and ethical fervour and “progress”, forms of what I term beauty. In life, and its doppelgänger, art. And all of this, poignantly, in the light of Vautier’s own awareness that “any point of view [– even his own, or, naturally, mine] is [in the face of eternity] a form of disinformation” (cf. CV, 131). To “sign” what Ben Vautier signs, then, is to understand and accept, with a mixture of exhilaration and misgiving, the allness – Je signe tout, he will “write” in 1960 – implicit in a work appreciating to what stunning extent it is true that Rien n’existe pas (the title of his 1991 acrylic on wood). If art is to embrace and “sign” life – truly

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enter its strangeness and live its profoundly contrastive modes of selfenactment – then, as his 1972 collage on wood, Moi Ben je signe, suggests, art must be prepared, not much differently even from Hugo’s “swallowing of the dictionary of the French language” in his understanding that poiesis need not refuse the naming of any thing – art must be prepared, then, to ink, inscribe, bear witness to “stains”, “lack”, “illnesses”, “living sculptures”, “others”, “pastiches”, “God”, “my urine”, “the atomic bomb”, “hen’s eggs”, “puddles”, “sleeping”, “a bit of clutter”, “souls”, “lies”, etc, etc. To append one’s signature to what Jean-Paul Michel calls “the inimitable music of what is” constitutes a gesture of passionate yet playful, at once serious and ironic, knowing and unknowing (see the 1994 Je ne sais pas qui je suis) abandonment of self to the “(inter)play of life” (1990: cf. CV, 90): an abandonment whereby the self becomes a conduit for uncertainties and insights, chant and contre-chant or déchant Bernard Noël might say, enthusiasms and reservations. So that one may see in Ben’s work the signing of an at times easeful, at other times difficult, perhaps impossible love that, in principle, loves to love (: J’aime aimer, 1998) but has long avowed it is not always a task for the unsaintly: C’est difficile d’aimer (1972). In a strange way such appropriative signing of the “universe” (cf. Moi Ben je signe) founds an art whose locus is simultaneously positively and negatively charged – like existence itself. It plays (with) the music of “good” and “bad”, “lovable” and “unlovable”, “beautiful” and “unbeautiful”, often blurring totally their frontiers, but not always. In this Ben Vautier’s work establishes an open space, a vast continuum, not just of aesthetic feasibility but of our ethical and spiritual (in the broadest sense of the term) self-conception. The judgemental melds with the unjudgemental, the constructed with the deconstructed – see L’Art et l’idéologie (1973) – , just as Vautier’s aesthetics of required newness blends seamlessly with “copying” (J’aime copier, 1978), and just as his “egoism” is indistinguishable from his expressed sense of inadequacy and self-doubt, even “anguish” (: Mon Angoisse de laisser indifférent, 1977), fully embracing the energy of his aesthetics-cum-ontology of laughter and joy. Art thus takes in, and on, the full gamut of existence’s tensions. It is the place – as, indeed, must each person’s life be – where therapy, the highest, most buoyant resolution, is sought for the very totality of phenomena, acts, thoughts, feelings which one has, wittingly or un-

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wittingly, invited into its sanctum. The 1994 Tour de Babel, a huge (475 x 220 cm) mixed media creation, does not just offer a rationalized discourse on the “relationship between peoples and avantgardes” (cf. CV, 94) – a discourse Ben Vautier’s website can in fact offer in one of its numerous corners/centres. Rather does it enact, by drawing into its plastico-mental space, a diversification of notion, tone, manner, doing and being that is in perfect correspondence with the principle of liberated uniqueness. Difference, and its Derridian extension, différance, endless deferral and supplementarity of truth, meaning, “rightness”, is what is emblematically gathered, sucked into this figural locus of life. And it is a difference, a deferral, signed gleefully by Ben at the “gate of God” (bab-ilu). A long terminal gaze directed towards a range of Ben Vautier’s recent and current work confirms the swirling hybridity of desire and modality that remains the principal constant of an aesthetics that equates as intimately as possible with at once raw, extemporaneous, and yet meditated and weighed existence. The 1995 Plaques émaillées that covered the façade of the Musée de l’objet in Blois seems wonderfully to capture certain elements of constancy: the display of thought, art-as-writing, quasi didactic with its air of chalk-onblackboard lessons, the utter simplicity of many individual pieces that yet provoke a contemplation of fundamental, daily experience, the wit that is barely separable from a seriousness easily underestimated in artists like Ben or Duchamp or Picabia due to their boisterous ludic, ironic turns. The 1999 Les Temps sont venus generates, too, such tensional energies, energies yet traversed the way clouds pass across the heavens, forming, dissipating, others surging forth, some high, some low, some moving faster than others, all in, as, a massive flux of (self-)creation we can be tempted to take to be (our) reality – but which is but the ephemeralness of our traversal of self and world. The 2000 series of Personnages et écritures Ben describes as “an excuse for justifying my taste for crap and the pleasure I have in buying cheap little figurines in discount stores” (CV, 135). But it is more: an occasion for self-renewal, for sheer absurdist but innocent play, a play which “renders my language [accompanying each little person] less pontificating” (ibid.), an occasion allowing the display of the self’s brashness and its vulnerability, the self’s truth in all of its, some will think, tackiness, yet, too, its inalienable benignity and ironically perfect lack of any need to justify itself, and its faire, its art. If the

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2000 Ego encadré seems to encapsulate a gesture and a manner focused again, for some, no doubt, too narcissistically, where, one may ask, is any self, any experience of self’s being-in-the-world, to reveal itself unless in its actions (as existentialists would have us understand) or/and its thoughts (as those believing rather in the virtues of an inner poetico-philosophico-spiritual life would have us believe is more essential, raw doing being deemed less revealing of our deep truths)? Ben Vautier, as we have seen, gives himself over, simultaneously, to both modes of self-framing, at once vigorously, provocatively, smilingly – and apologetically, even though, manifestly, all revelation of life experience is fatally – and wondrously – subjective, a unique staging, in multiple scenes/frames, of what Vautier straightforwardly, though also comically, terms the ego. To look at his work is nevertheless to appreciate that its pertinence is immensely shareable: the 1995 Blois outdoor, deliberately very public installation, for example, invites us to contemplate what Solitude, Ciel, Amour or Silence can be, and, in the midst of throwaway witticism and humour (– but what could be more uplifting?), urges us to think about the nature of love, happiness, fear, sadness, individuality and collective consciousness. L’Art c’est la pagaille one of the “plates” suggests, and in 2001 the large white on black ensemble entitled La Pagaille gagne du terrain reaffirms, in case it remained unclear, that what Vautier calls here disorder, anarchy, increasingly messy and seemingly uncontrollable, is not just a commentary on world perception (: global warming, mad cow disease, the mafia, viruses, cloning, police secrecy, etc.), but, equally, a double-edged commentary on what (his) art is and isn’t: an act and place of expression of the affects and conceptualisations of self (and others), a pouring forth of such teeming, vaguely chaotic multifariousness, and, simultaneously, a putting into artistic order of such “disorder”, even though art – and certainly Ben’s particularly – is an act and place of gathering and displaying (openly, straightforwardly, or secretly, more metaphorically or obscurely) that swirling mass of factors André Frénaud argued were always at play just below the surface of any poiein. In 2004-2005, at Saint Paul de Vence, Ben Vautier mounts, in effect, a tellingly named exhibition: La Partie immergée de l’iceberg. If it speaks, too, of that spinning, erupting energy that produced the Le Magasin, the Armoire d’Arman, La Cambra or the recently “refurbished”, now two-floor Baz’art exhibited in 2004 at the Musée

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d’art contemporain de Lyon, the Vence work seeks in principle to show something of that Frénaldian “magma of multiple, contrary forces that churn about, come up against one another, violently even, seeking to escape [and that are at the heart of the creation, beneath it, revealed by it]”. 8 Ben is rather more exuberant and yet low-key in his commentary, but no less conscious of the tumbling, disjointed yet constantly fusing energies that lie below, whilst ever bubbling onto, the surface of all art and all consciousness. “THE SUBMERGED PART OF THE ICEBERG”, he writes: That is to say how to reveal how My Non-Self, who is fed up with my Super-Ego Hides-notes-censures-classifies-throws out-transforms-filches ideas To make them, or not, into said works of art In short the opportunity to unpack everything My shopping lists My mail I have not attended to My impotent petty-bourgeois fantasms My boxes full to bursting with words crossed through scratched out Scribbled down so I can’t read them myself Something of everything – images – words – sentences9

Two even more recent exhibitions, the 2005 Chance does not exist at Cologne and the 2006 Le Hasard est partout in Genoa, dramatise, ever wittily and with purpose, the conflictual yet complimentary nature of consciousness and what we (can) do with it, revealing self as a totality, an infinite, ever expanding space and gesture of selfgenerated truths – “images – words – sentences” – that can only be deemed to constitute some larger, more absolute Truth, in their swarming, unfinished provisionality. Moreover, these two exhibitions remind us of the, at bottom, unspeakable nature of being and (the artist’s) doing, his faire, his configuring of the ever emerging microframes of selfness. We are somewhere between Yves Bonnefoy’s consent to the contingency of what is and an underpinning sense of Oneness that accounts for this consent; between, if you like, Buddhism’s sense of life’s exposure to difficulty and even great suffering, and the capacity that remains to the self for choosing, and thereby freeing, the self, via a strategy of “joyous willing”, a self-creation 8

Cf. André Frénaud, Nul ne s’égare, précédé de Haeres, Gallimard, Poésie, 2006, 58. 9 See Ben Vautier’s website: Mes expositions.

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defying any fatal, pre-established ontology. Réveillez-vous is one of the “plates” exhibited in the façade of the Musée de Blois in 1995: let us see Ben Vautier’s art as a pushing and maintaining open of the ontic (and, of course, aesthetic: no difference!) envelope; a refusal, precisely, of self-limitation, a moving ever further on of what his 2006 Mougins exhibition calls Les Limites de la photo.10 Art as a theatre in which to reawaken the self, humorously, seriously, to its unboundedness, its strange and simple infinite beauty, an endless sayableness that speaks of its funny unsayableness in which we can yet trust.

10

The powerful 1999 exhibition, Ben et Combas entre deux guerres, held at the Historial de la Grande Guerre de Péronne (Somme), urges, provokes such awakening: choice, rights, liberty are thrust up against war’s justifications, and above all, as Robert Fillion remarks, adding to Norbert Duffort’s analysis, “art [succeeds in] making life/war more important than art”. Anne Vautier, in the catalogue to the 1997 exhibition at the Palais des Congrès de Paris, similarly argues that Ben’s deconstructions and decortications question, far beyond art, the very “becoming of the human”.

SHOOTING FOR TRANSCENDENCE: NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE Let us begin in medias res, in 1966, the year in which Niki de Saint Phalle creates, for its exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, one of her most celebrated sculptures, Hon – or, to give it its full title, Hon - en Katedral. The sculpture, the emblem of She, of the feminine principle and being, constitutes the remaking and displaying, indeed the splaying forth, of woman, the woman Niki de Saint Phalle now feels herself in particular to be, fully. That is, a woman full-blown, for Hon is massive, gigantic, fantastical yet real – for there, before all to see –, the largest of those numerous Nanas Niki de Saint Phalle will ever make. And She is, has become, a true cathedral, modern, only profane for those inclined to see woman’s total self-exposure so, and rather, indeed, sacred, offered to our reverence, our valuing, our love of the profound mystery of being, and, here, difference. And, moreover, as Pierre Restany has argued, Hon is created “in a position of parturition”1: She becomes the image of the beauty of natural birth, of artistic creation, too, and, in the broadest way, of the mystery of the Creation. When Saint Phalle boisterously calls her work, created in collaboration with Per Olaf Ultvedt and her then partner and future second husband Jean Tinguely, “the greatest whore in the world”, this implies no degradation, no moral judgement, but rather a provocative, bold playfulness and irony no doubt too, but most importantly a capacity for transcendence that is truly (self-) uplifting: She, legs apart, seemingly as vulnerable as the twelve-year-old daughter sexually abused by her father, but now, here, astonishingly beyond such trauma to the point of extending a joyous invitation to a huge public not only to admire the raw but real beauty of woman, all women, but to revel in the improbable exhilaration of entering, through the vulva of this fantastical architecturesculpture, into the cinema, bar and other inner environmental spaces of what Alicia Paz-Solis has termed this “first dwelling place [of every human being]” (FN, 2). Hon, both discreetly – Saint Phalle does not overtly publicise the above viscerally lived connection – and flagrantly, represents a very great emotional and psychical achievement: it becomes the “act and place”, as Yves Bonnefoy might say, of an accomplished ease, a deep ludic capacity, and an aesthetic innova1

In various essays, see Bibliography.

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Shooting for Transcendence: Niki de Saint Phalle

tion that yet is a means of definitive self-transformation. Knowingly provocative yet gleefully and defiantly celebratory, Hon reveals the full measure of Niki de Saint Phalle’s genial capacity to assume the exhilarating and (self-)liberating hic et nunc of her being and her doing. The Shooting Paintings, the Tirs, which date from 1961 but which are predated by the Target pieces, are intimately related to Hon-en Katedral, though in no way modally, in plastic and aesthetic terms. Examples of this work, this dramatically exorcising gesture, can be seen at the Tate in London, at the MAMAC in Nice and elsewhere: variously assembled objects strung or wired onto plastered wood, sometimes incorporating other materials such as polythene, and, always, with containers of paint lodged in the assemblage – plus the one ingredient required to “activate” the work, to give it sense and crowing accomplishment: a gun (pistols, rifles of varying models), fired at the assemblage and engendering a live action painting, the entire gesture becoming, of course, when staged in public (in a gallery), spectacle and performance: a theatre of art, art seen both as a pure doing and as the dripping, streaming, slowly congealing end product of this doing. Some of the visual effects thus produced are more striking, though the pure aestheticalness of such work is inextricably linked to the power of the conception and gesture themselves. Here, beauty, form, produce themselves spontaneously, they selfgenerate upon a prepared base – rather like Christian Jaccard’s fire art. Long Shot (1961), and Tir (première séance, seconde séance) (1961), both held at the MAMAC in Nice, are instructive in various ways: their size is quite variable: Long Shot is 300 x 145 cm, whereas Tir is 130 x 73 x 28 cm, the third dimension given showing the sheer depth of the piece set to receive the violent impact of the bullets (fired, one guesses, at two “sittings”); the global aesthetic effects can be not altogether unlike non-shooting paintings such as Sans titre (Ace of Spades) (1960-61) or, particularly, Saint Phalle’s 1961 Tempête (fragments de Dracula 1), the latter painting with its drawn, centrally figuring pistol, moreover. Most impressive, however, to my mind, is the psychological, affective dimension of such Tirs: the release they would seem to offer, viscerally and emblematically, the symbolic exorcising and killing of (unspoken) demons – Pierre Restany writes that he knows “few artists of her generation in whom life and work are so indissociably bound together” (UOI, 1); but, too, the

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sheer exhilaration, the fun even, of such action-as-work, though these are energies embedded in the “poetics”, the ontology, of selfliberation and self-repossession of a young woman.2 Before looking closely at, initially, the mid-career works of Niki de Saint Phalle with, in particular the proliferation of the Nanas, and, finally, the late production of the 1990’s and beyond up to her death in 2002, I should like to back up briefly to the production preceding the Shooting Paintings and take stock of four, in many ways already exemplary, creations: Scorpion and Stag (1956-58), Assemblage Painting (1958), the Sans titre piece (1959-60) at the MAMAC, Nice, and the Sans titre (Paper Snake) (1960-61) that almost overlaps with Tirs. The first of these four pieces is a large oil painting (140 x 200 cm) with various objects, coffee beans, bits of china, on plywood. The colours are brilliant as they will remain throughout Saint Phalle’s work, the materials delightfully idiosyncratic and capricious, the landscape evoked almost Van Gogh-like, between the cosmic and the earthy, a kind of visionary wonderment, perhaps even yearning, and a fleshly boundness – which stages the allegorical encounter, the title confirms, of a scorpion (Niki de Saint Phalle’s birthday is the 29th October) and a stag: father?, then husband, Harry Mathews? – at all events, a legendary emblem of male virility and, just possibly, more. The Assemblage Painting dispenses with the human and opts for, again, a landscape practically as surreal as some of Yves Tanguy’s, yet is quirkier in its use of a large blue and white-speckled painted metal object to (un)represent the sun or the moon stuck in a sky above a half-lunar scene. The title, on the other hand, orients us more firmly towards a sense of this painting’s paintedness, its mode of composition, the process behind its poiein – this, despite its clearly conscious rootedness in a time-space caught between an intuitable concreteness and a surreality – dream, fantasticalness, the “marvellous”, the distinctly “other” – to which Niki de Saint Phalle will always remain most sensitive. The first of the two Sans titre works is, in fact, parenthetically described as an assemblage. It eschews paint and, instead, 2

We may see here not just an exorcising of the demons of incest, but, too, selfreleasing from the depression Saint Phalle lived through in finding herself embourgeoisée in the 1950’s with the demands of her marriage to Harry Mathews and those of the raising of her two very young children. Traces/Remembering 1930-1949 (1999) allows Saint Phalle to express in characteristically poetical and unaffected manner something of the emotions of the period predating her first marriage.

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embeds some fifteen or more metallic objects onto plaster on plywood: we cannot be sure of them all, for some, or parts of some, are buried under the plaster, their form only spectral and indeterminate. Neither precisely surrealising nor evidently nostalgic of Dada, work such as this makes its own hazy, mercurial way into art’s infinity whilst sensing, feeling, ever appreciating the amazing diversity of real things, whether manufactured, found, ready-made or natural. The second of the two untitled pieces confirms this clearly joyous melding of the discovery of art’s endless feasibilities and the equally significant, ever essential, ever renewed and loving discovery of the things that allow art to be: here, paint, wood, plaster, paper, natural and premade objects: i.e. the things of the world, the earth. And Sans titre (Paper Snake) also confirms the degree to which, for Saint Phalle, art’s doings, makings and products can be freely chosen, need no intellectualised agenda, may toy, play, frolic and frisk with the spontaneously adaptable elements of existence, material and psychic3 –and this, moreover, will be the highest of serious self-projects: an upliftment and a joy that, additionally, can manifest themselves on a more purely aesthetic plane: here, via the many virtues of the framing, the contrastive-complementary colours both with each frame and from one to the other, the echoing of the serpentine forms in each volet of the diptych – forms, moreover, that are intensely characteristic of the oeuvre to come, anything but rectilinear, ever curvaceous, sinuous, sensual, filled with the rondures and parabolas of nature, whether they be “monstrous” or Nanaesque. The first Nana drawings begin in 1965, but the development into full-scale sculpture and even architecture (as with Hon) is very rapid. Saint Phalle tells of their initial creation coming about “in great agony”, until a sudden psychic and affective liberation occurs as she witnesses her artist-friend’s evolving pregnancy. Yoko Shizue Masadu, Director of the Niki Museum in Nasu, Japan, has spoken eloquently of the rooting of the Nanas in the ancient myths and names of Egyptian and other oriental goddesses. We are not dealing here with “chicks” and “babes” except via a gesture of ironic counter3

Eimear McNally has suggested Saint Phalle’s links to art brut, but, although there is deep, visceral and psychic instinctiveness at work, Saint Phalle is ever conscious of the cultural climate into which her gesture is inserted. Rogel Cardinal’s writing on Outsider Art ever reminds us of the tensional line separating/joining “outside” and “inside” in aesthetic consciousness.

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provocation and reclamation not unlike Mary Daly’s delightfully militant reclaiming of terms of abuse directed as women over the years. Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nanas are sacred, ebullient, festive figures, powerful, full, pregnant, maternal, spryly grandmotherly even (: nana is the English used by very young children for grandmother). Masadu, rightly to my mind, argues the degree to which the Nana figures jubilantly replace the figure of Eve and thus seek not just to reverse the representation of the female as locus of temptation, sin and degradation, but to raise up a new bold and buoyant representation whereby the female re-assumes her innocence, joyousness and vital energy. Gwendolyn (1966®) is a larger-than-life multicoloured figure of vastly plump proportions, her breasts and belly superbly and unhesitatingly displaying the symbolically brilliant and radiant inherency of “the glory of women [and the greatness of motherhood]”, as Saint Phalle has put it. The 1967 Upside-down Nana reveals similar ampleness, the accent laid upon legs and hips and breasts, the head a mere faceless sculptural support, like the unmimetic arms. And, of course, we are inclined to read this piece at once as a statement of woman’s athleticism and physical exuberance, and as an allegory of the standing on their head of conventional conceptions and perceptions of the feminine. 4 Of works like Big Lady (1968®) (250 x 157 x 80 cm) – but others can reach much more impressive dimensions –, Saint Phalle has said that “I made a few very big so that men would look small next to them”. Big Lady is, indeed, an imposing creation, her great, powerful black body clothed in a dazzling afrophile outfit that shows the strength of her physique and the easeful selfassertiveness of her emotional and mental being. “They were very joyous creatures”, writes Niki de Saint Phalle, “Totally without pain. They were dancing, they were dancing to the world of music… They were dancing to joy”.5 And, indeed, of so very many Nanas this is visibly so: the Nana danseuse (1972), now at the Courtauld Institute, London, lightly and improbably and exaltedly poised on one foot, no, one toe, her seemingly thalidomide limbs sturdy, solid, utterly reliable, her breasts flowered and circled 4

See also the Nana noire upside-down, 1966, or, again, the 1969 Nana upside-down. Ulrich Krempel has spoken of the political implications of Saint Phalle’s work, while other critics, such as Michel de Grèce, privilege its broader ethico-spiritual nature: creation as gift. 5 See Niki de Saint Phalle: My Art, my Dreams, 2003.

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like targets or rings of Venus focussed yet on the feeding nipple, her vulva heart-painted, a true dream-place of flagrant authentic love; the California Nana (ou Nana Soleil) of 1970 – there will be various other, equally gladdening and tonic, California Nanas in Niki de Saint Phalle’s late years (1999-2000) – which, though static, is the very image of the plenitude and promise of the female, pregnant with the dancing secrets of creation, the ever surging beauties of woman’s être and her infinitely colourful paraître; the Leaping Nana (1970), made of oil-painted resin on a spiralled iron base fabricated by Jean Tinguely, offers her improbable athleticism, a faceless Everywoman clad in her multicoloured costume fit for high celebration and movements of the heart (that is pure and white for all to see); or La Sirène (1982), part of the Fontaine Stravinsky commissioned (from Saint Phalle and her, by now, ex-husband, Jean Tinguely, with whom she will collaborate until his death) by the then Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, with the encouragement of Pierre Boulez: no dancing here, but a luxuriating and intrinsically (– for Niki de Saint Phalle’s woman is inherently right, alright, basking in who she is, beyond discrimination and judgement), beautifully easeful being, vibrant, simultaneously boogieing and waltzing within. Many are the works that may be said to draw upon the early influences, impressions and exchanges that impact on the budding aesthetics and techniques of the young Niki de Saint Phalle, though it is essential to remember that she remains a self-taught artist, developing freely, spontaneously her modes of (self-)discovery and, at particular times of crisis, self-therapy. Certainly, Barcelona’s Gaudi will leave a mark on her imagination, as we shall see in looking at the Tuscan Tarot Garden; certainly Cheval’s Palais idéal in Hauterives, north of Valence, will not fail to appeal to her marked sensitivity to the magical, the phantasmagorical, the bizarrely marvellous; and undoubtedly Pierre Restany’s invitation to associate with Nouveaux réalistes such as Yves Klein and Arman, Martial Raysse and Spoerri, will have further confirmed her already sure sense that art is only constrained, or authentically liberated, by one’s desire and one’s will, a sense no doubt strengthened by her discoveries of the creative manners of Kooning (ever between “legend and fact”, as his 1971 piece suggests), of Rauschenberg and his quirky, modally multifaceted aesthetics (: the 1955 Bed is a lovely example), of Jasper John and his now raw, now refining, ever self-renewing inventivity. And then

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there was Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dadi, and, last but perhaps foremost, Jean Tinguely, with whom she will soon cohabit, having collaborated from as early as 1956 (: he builds her first iron frame, ready to take the plaster and, later, polyester that, with the support, will be the basis of her Nanas and other large sculptures to come). That the total effect of these teeming major encounters is, far from any limp mimesis, the assent to her own vigorous originality, will remain clear whether we are looking at the Shooting Paintings, the Nanas, the Tableaux éclatés as Pontus Hulten will term those explosively energised paintings-plus designed to “incline the forces of the world in [her] favour” (TE, 7), or the endless other forms Saint Phalle will produce over the next thirty-six years after her remarkable Hon. The Nanas mutate into multiple and proliferating affinitary forms: the various Couples, for example, with their often electric components adding to the charm eked out from wood, metal and plastic; the Nana et chien (1986), gorgeously, royally and funkily coloured reminding us of the feminine capacity to befriend, to care for, to cherish, the earthy, animal companionship she can foster, the sheer simplicity and joy of being-with-the-other she so broadly emblematises; or, beyond La Sirène, the many baroque, capricious and ever uplifting other pieces the Fontaine Stravinsky offers the swarming passers-by or visitors to the Beaubourg: the great Red Lips (reference to Stravinsky’s L’Amour perhaps), the Elephant (again perhaps inspired by the 1942 Circus Polka, pour un jeune éléphant), the Firebird, Nightingale, Frog, Snake and so on, all polyester on steel, all set off by Tinguely’s own equally delightful and characteristic interventions, as delicate and as mechanically quizzical as, for example, his Petite Rose. The blossoming and amplification of the Nana “principle” or model is, indeed, astonishing. It embraces the various Mariées in their perhaps simultaneously ironised white gown purity and virginity and their dreamed innocence and promise of true amorous reciprocity, the beautiful horse, besides the equally beautiful spreading tree, seen in photographs of Niki de Saint Phalle’s studio, with its large head sculpture and a large sprawling Mariée, her whiteness contrasting with the fabulous, truly fabled presence of horse and tree, now housed at the MAMAC, Nice, with their brilliantly hued and characteristically novel material fabrication. And one might be tempted even to trace the Nanas back to more curiously ambivalent

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early works such as the 1963-64 White Gremlin with its ever fascinating hybrid sculptural composition. But the Nana can be transformed in even more baroque and fantastical ways as Niki de Saint Phalle’s imagination ever broadens its scope and pushes the limits of its modes and contents. The wonderful Golem, for example, constructed in 1972 in Jerusalem, allows children to emerge from the huge red-lipped mouth of the “monster” and slide joyously and in their safety down its great three-track scarlet tongue. 6 Then, in 1975, she builds The Dragon, for the Nellens family in Knokke, Belgium: a great, sprawling white children’s playhouse creature, forty metres in length, lit with characteristic fancifully drawn and coloured decoration.7 Or, on a smaller, more delicately orchestrated scale, there is her 1982 Big Bird, now to be seen at the Dublin City Gallery, brilliantly hued like some gigantic exotic parrot, made, as so frequently, of that polyester which will end up seriously affecting Saint Phalle’s lungs, moulded into a metal frame which twirls down from the sculpture to support it like a coiled rope; or the green, lightbulb-spiked head of the 1993 Ganesh with its purple torso, multicoloured pipe-like snout, its dancing, ever upliftingly painted legs, a creature of myth remythified, embraced and liberated as a hypercontemporary and not just Hindu god of the arts and sciences; 8 or – a final example – the Arbre et dragon, also made in 1993, a finespun smaller sculptural ensemble, mounted on a mirror, revealing those tensional, contrastive forces at play in the world and the human psyche: the menace of the white-spotted and horned green dragon, its teeth bared, and the tree in whose topmost branches arched like a rearing steed sits, rather oddly clothed, a small human, perhaps fearful, perhaps surprisingly confident (though unarmed), like a faceless St. Georges not needing (as yet) to slay the monster at (well below) his feet. Play, fun, yes, but, too, a mini-theatre of the psychic condition of us all, no doubt. The Tableaux éclatés, as we have seen Pontus Hulten call them – what are they, precisely, and how original are they, how do 6

There are, too, at the Tisch Gardens in Jerusalem, twenty-three other pieces created in the 1990’s. 7 San Diego is equally home, though in a private residence, to Gila (1996), a children’s playhouse. 8 A Big Ganesh (1998) can also be seen at the La Jolla Sculpture Garden, MCA, San Diego.

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they add to Niki de Saint Phalle’s already considerable creative range? Painting-plus is very much at stake, as I have suggested, for, if painting persists, it melds with sculptural and other materials and processes, to produce what some have named “kinetic reliefs” – and Saint Phalle’s adjective, éclatants rather than éclatés, better evokes this continuous, bursting and brilliant, dynamism invading the stasis of modern painting’s flattenedness. These works she describes as “intuitive”, for they spontaneously develop, founded not upon a preconceived rational agenda, but a fond of gushing exuberance instinctively finding its forme(s) swirling about in that space of what she calls “eternal return”, where chaos and order, abstraction and concreteness, composition and decomposition – all her notions – find harmony in the “mystery” of a kind of ongoing, never-ending origination: “Everything is starting over”, she writes (TE, np). The 1991 Ganesh pieces, increasingly fish- and bird-like, kickstart these paintings, which can offer Couples and works of love and gratitude such as the 1992 Jean II (Méta-Tinguely) or pieces such as the 1992 Horloge, as ever kinetic, as dancing in its own way as La Danse and other pieces playing with quirky dismemberment and elated blending and gathering where Nana- and pseudo-Nana figures are bathed in rhythm and, as always, ecstatic coloration. The Skinnys, which emerge in the 1978-9 period, do not lose the energy either of the Nanas or the various Tableaux éclatés, but they do offer a time and mode of relief from the constant use of polyester which had affected Niki de Saint Phalle’s health. The Skinnys provide, and are predicated on, aeration, a dynamic sculptural minimality meant to interact with its environment: “air sculptures with mythological subjects”, she observes, adding “you can see the sky or a plant through them”. Driven, then, as usual, by a logic of connection to the self’s body, and the latter’s insertion in its own connection to the earth, this is an art of continuing but changing self-therapy and -transcendence. The 1982 Big Bird, now in the Dublin City Gallery, is a charmingly complex polychromatic polyester piece, at once bird and snake, perched on a simple rope-like iron base. Such Skinnys will persist until the end of Saint Phalle’s creative life: one thinks of the beautiful Lune, 10-feet high, to be seen in Freiburg in all the wit and emotional purpose of its painted polyester and glass or mirror tile offering a slim lunar face above an ensemble of animal forms. The year 2000 will give various differently totemic sculptures, not perhaps as “aerated” as the Skinnys

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proper, but related to them in their relative sveltness and thrusting verticality: Eagle Head or Lucky Totem or the exceptionally elegant Bull-Head tree-totem finely develop the renewed ludic and yet spiritual quest the Skinnys launch in the late 1970’s. The last ten years or so of Niki de Saint Phalle’s life are remarkably charged with an unflagging creative energy that will see continuity of desire and ever spurting newness of vision fuse with a special ease that is hers. The Nanas continue and diversify. Architecture and art persist in their merry marriage. No distinctions are needed between the value and purpose of lithograph, small or massive sculpture, a line of perfume or small vases, the slow but sure creation (and final opening) of the Giardino dei Tarocchi in Tuscany (which such lines help finance), “illuminated” writings, autobiographical, personal in their focus, or centred upon the issue of Aids, public or private commissions. How can we deem repetitive the three splendid Silver Nanas (1999), for example, when we understand that none is identical with the others, and that art is predicated on a principle of endless obsession with certain forms or ideas (cf. Cézanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire, Monet’s Nymphéas, or Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin) and, simultaneously, an endless, never reified, impossibly reified, variation upon such obsession, an Aufhebung ever, of necessity, original? Thus does the Grande Tempérance, installed in the centre of Luxembourg in l995, offer us the shining newness of its blue Nana with aerated wings, a solid emblem of forbearance and measure in the midst of its own “meloned [excessiveness]”, as a poem of Szymborska writes of Rubens’ women. Not dissimilarly does the 1997 Ange protecteur float high and vigilant above travellers in Zurich’s Train Station, blue once again, but its wings now gilded, its (swimming) outfit changed, its odd magic wand (?) equally effective, though modified. “I was just doing as I always did”, Saint Phalle says of her 1997 Red Skull, a smallish (56 x 65 x 40 cm) and at once ghoulish and spell-binding sculpture, 9 “I don’t think when I work. I feel. I work by instinct. I work by what I have to do”. If we compare it with the five-metre high Skull built in San Diego in 2000, with an interior meditation room –, its walls covered with a mosaic of mirrors, we see further just how extemporaneous and free-spirited Niki de Saint Phalle’s manner and process are: the arguably same point of 9

Cf. Yoko Masuda’s comment that Saint Phalle is that “eternal rambler between two poles, Heaven and Hell”: see the website of the Niki Museum, Nasu, Japan.

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departure, but one that turns out to be multi-form, sprouting in potentially infinite ways – a démarche for which the skull seems happily and ambiguously apt: “container” of psychic, both conscious and unconscious, capacity, and a reminder of human mystery: fragility and mortality, vitality, and generativity. Works, too, like the sculptures in the Black Heroes series – by way of example, Josephine Baker (1999) now in the MAMAC, Nice – seek to emphasise the human creative potential bubbling forth and swelling to a fabled originality not phased by difficulty nor lost in death: the imaginative, visceral and affective flowering of artists like Baker or Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis thus emblematises forces much vaster than itself, and fuses with that conception central to Saint Phalle’s own creative gesture: a free giving of the self in the self’s magical, marvellous fund of joyous self-actualisation, no matter what. It is at the very pinnacle of her own exuberant selfdeployment, on the 15th May, 1998, that Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden officially opens its doors in Garavicchio, Tuscany. “A garden of joy”, she had wanted it to be from, not just the first days of its creation, back in 1978, but also, no doubt from its first conception, in itself half-nostalgic for the Gaudi creation she had seen years ago, 10 but also half-visionary as ever, dreaming of upliftments and offerings promising a coincidence of personal fascination and shareable wonders. All of the sculptures are of Saint Phalle’s design, the relatively smaller ones of her own fabrication, but her aesthetics, like a mistress architect, does not require absolute domination over all materials, effects, processes: she is wonderfully acknowledging of the various collaborations and contributions involved, whether to do with the metal frames, the layering on of cement onto the frame, the making of ceramics or glass mosaics, the work of Ugo, “poet of putting on mirrors”, or the laying of stone paths. The Tarot Garden theatricises our insertion into life on Earth, it gives us, as Niki de Saint Phalle tells us, a “dialogue between nature and sculpture”, Creation and creation. But, too, with its Tarot figures, at once modern and ancient,11 it opens up, ludicly and with a purposeful nod to the strangeness of human 10

The Parque Güell, in particular, in Barcelona. For example, the Sphinx, the High Priestess, the Magician, the Pope, the Emperor’s Castle, the Tree of Life (The Hanged Man), etc. Le Jardin des Tarots (1997) contains abundant photographs taken by Giulio Pietromarchi as well as Saint Phalle’s handwritten text pertaining to the conception of realization of this Tuscan marvel. 11

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incarnation, avenues of self-knowledge, symbolic, divinatory, intuitive, perhaps beautifully “convulsive”, as Breton suggested in Nadja: the other, surreal side of the mind’s cofunctioning with world, cosmos, being. Niki de Saint Phalle, the 2000 recipient of the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo gives us, in 2003, her finely illuminated book My Art, my Dreams, and it is to this that I shall turn to make a number of concluding observations with respect to the singularities and the special genius that marks her work from the earliest moments and oils like Between the City and the Flower (1955), Scorpion and Stag (1956), or Journeying into the Unknown (1956) to final creations such as the Noah’s Ark sculpture garden in Jerusalem, her last Nanas or the full opening of the Giardino dei Tarocchi. I offer eight compact remarks: 1: in some ways Niki de Saint Phalle deems herself to be an “outsider”: she is sensitive to her autodidactic manner, an affective and psychic “rawness” which brushed against “madness” whilst, as with Sophie Calle, art’s gesture restored balance through release of tensional energies. 2: like many artists and writers, she knows her work to manifest an obsessional constancy , alive both with ancient myths and symbols, and ceaselessly diversified via her own probing, self-multiplication and insertion into teeming (post)modernity. 3: whilst many critics would see the Nanas as the most defining element of Saint Phalle’s aesthetic evolution, she argues, rightly I should say – careful analysis of the early drawings, oils and works such as Heart with Monster (1962), Pink Heart (1962), White Witch (1963) or Pink Birth (1963-64) give ample evidence – that the early paintings and graphics and what she terms her “Romantic, tormented period of the white hearts, the brides, the women giving birth” remain “the most important [period for me]”. 4: whilst one is inclined to link her work to the varyingly new manners and visions of artists such as Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Johns and others I have mentioned above, she herself will tend, rather, to speak of being the “devouring mother” of Giotto, or of a residual debt to le douanier Rousseau or Bosch or Indian, Mexican or early Siennese creativity. 5: she is alert to a kind of radical but recognised otherness animating her every gesture: other selves, other incarnations of self, “visions

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from some other place” (MA, 33) – so that the idea of her work being some rather gratuitously “Pop” construction is quite alien to her. 6: hence, although we could give weight to her art’s final products – and this is utterly natural for all, including Niki de Saint Phalle herself –, she remains inclined to privilege production as a spiritual process, a journey of unfinishable, ontological discovery: “the search itself is the treasure”, she writes (MA, 98), thus seeing the endless poiein which “jealously” takes up her life as quest rather than definitive achievement. 7: the Tarot, for Saint Phalle, may result in the creation of a locus of play and pleasure, but it retains deep archetypal significance for her, “giv[ing] me a greater understanding of the spiritual world and of life’s problems and also the awareness that each difficulty must be overcome before one can go on to yet another hurdle until we finally reach inner unity and the garden of paradise” (MA, 136). 8: if the Tirs constitute a gesture that shoots against, shoots to “kill (painting)”, it is, too an act and a place of rebirth, “war with no victims”, Saint Phalle will call it (MA, 41), a shooting “for that moment of magic [or] Ecstasy” her entire oeuvre will seek to render incarnate. 12

12

John Ashbery’s 1962 text on Niki de Saint Phalle’s work of the time already senses what he terms the “religious” dimension of her gestures: cf. Niki de Saint Phalle (1980).

BAROQUE MINIMALIST?: FRANÇOIS MORELLET The work of François Morellet has elicited many and varying responses. Thomas McEvilley has recently termed him a “postmodern Pythagorician” (M, 11), Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Jean-François Groulier have privileged his “powers of neutralness” (M, 29), Pierre Descargues insisting on the combinatory, statistical, “probable” yet aleatory and experimental dimension of Morellet’s manner and process (cf. M, 156). Evaluations such as these, which any even cursory examination of an oeuvre going back beyond 1950 will broadly seem to confirm, suggest the extent to which we may be said to be dealing with an art fascinated with form, geometry, the mathematics of line and, indeed, colour, the “logic” of the disposition and orchestration of the demystified and “pure-hard” (as Morellet himself puts it) elements of thoroughly self-conscious and systematised painting and sculpture beyond any metaphysics of meaning. This said, and as the years go by and nothing ever remains the same, various critics and Morellet himself sense that more is going on, that the aesthetics and indeed what it is not unreasonable to call the ontology, the ontic, existential purpose, at play from, even, the 1955 Tiret 0°-90° or the 1961 Répartition aléatoire de 40,000 carrés down to the Géométrees (1984) or the 2006 Pi 12, reveal factors not so drily impersonally, hygienically articulated and receivable as may have been at first imagined. Thus will Maurice Besset see in Morellet’s evolving démarche links to a whole range of modern and contemporary manners. Thus can Werner Rhode view Morellet as “homo ludens, an intellectual player who links rationality, law, calculation on the one hand, and sensuality, fantasy and pleasure on the other hand” (M, 180). “An artist-philosopher”, Walter Thompson will call him in Art in America (M, 193); whereas Bernard Marcadé can go farther still, seeing in François Morellet’s gesture a polemical, ethical, even political mode, where “order, marrying excessive preciseness to elegant offhandedness, shortcircuits itself” (M, 199). Assessments such as these raise a whole series of questions, which I shall note from the outset and which we shall progressively look at as we examine François Morellet’s early work, then a number of influences that have impacted on his growing consciousness and practice, and finally proceed to more detailed discussion of works from both his middle period and the last few years: How shall we

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reconcile the rational rigour of Pythagoras with the deconstruction and endless supplementarity of the postmodern? How will we seek to embed “neutrality” into the fact, the ontological urgency of desire and passionate doing, poiein? Can the equations of chance and control be finally established, credibly? Can remoteness and “purity” reach an understanding with “play” and the pleasure thereof? Is there, at root, such a thing as non-meaning, the evacuation of the meta-physical in the broadest sense of this latter term? And so on. Morellet’s work, perhaps like all powerfully probing and original work, sparks off considerable debate and these and other questions we shall look at will prove to be not necessarily amenable to neat reductive hermeneutic theorems. The paintings François Morellet will produce in mid- to late adolescence are essentially realist in manner by his own evaluation – the 1945 Paysage has elements of a starker Sisley and certainly nothing of, say, Braque’s harmonious synthesising of the, as Reverdy would write, transmuted heterocosm the 1908 canvas of the same title offers. It is not long (1951), however, before the first geometric paintings appear and the period 1952-53 reveals intense aesthetic reorientation and exploration of new affinities and instinctively appreciated promise. Various 1952 pieces bare the generic title of Peinture. The oil on wood presented in Lynn Zelevansky’s 2006 essay,1 whilst prophetically conscious of its relation to work by Frank Stella, perhaps specifically the 1959 Bethlehem’s Hospital, transgresses and simplifies and clarifies the latter’s configurations and cocks a snoot at absolute equilibrium whilst creating Vasarely-like kinetic illusion. The Peinture (1952) shown with Erich Franz’s equally recent commentary (FMRF, 26) reveal a more complex uniformisation, both with regard to form and colour, experimenting with the connective and compartmentalising tradition of painted panels. If it is true, as Franz suggests, that “the frontiers of [traditional] painting are abolished” here – I should be inclined to say that all painting involves closure and the infinity its closure excludes –, this would certainly not be an innovation: work from, say, Degas or Cézanne or Matisse offer an implicit rupturing of their own containments. The 1953 16 carrés, “the most minimalist [work] I have ever done”, writes Morellet, perhaps suggests, moreover, that such implicit defiance of the finiteness of the 1

See François Morellet 1926-2006 etc… récentes fantaisies: FMRF, 14-25.

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frame may not be a special priority – or may merely be understood to be a natural mathematical virtuality. Challenging of largely existing orders – though artists such as Malevich, Mondrian or Van Doesburg had offered parameters of such disobedience – 16 carrés achieves an excessiveness where we thought little was going on. The 1952 Dessins that Zelevansky compares to Stella’s of 1977 (cf. FMRF, 23) demonstrate Morellet’s surging need to venture simultaneously into systems and symmetries whilst not necessarily seeking to seal their functioning into some tight, self-contained and absolute space. The concept of the all-over, which greatly pleased Morellet, thus allows for the generation a kind dynamic stillness or staticness, whose dynamics yet remain implicitly infinite and hint at an “all-overness” far beyond the created piece, which thus functions metonymically, its partialness always winking at an (un)imaginable whole. Parallèles jaunes et noires (1952) may be said to function in this way, as well as showing the desire to offer subtle variation where we perhaps initially perceive monotonous reification. This embedding of a mathematical complexification into a “system” we may have presumed to be simple, artless, can be superbly seen in the 1953 Peinture or the 1954 Peinture, the first held in Otterlo, the second in Amsterdam. Forms we thought were repetitive, indeed must have been based on repetition, turn out to lay bare tiny geometric-mathematical modulations that once again speak more of infinity than formal platitude, more of the vibrancy, the ontic energy of form, than its flat, material, resolved givenness.2 It is true that a piece like that 1953, still oil on wood 32 rectangles may excite less, but Morellet’s 1954 Arc de cercle brisé, his first “fragmented” work, despite its apparent simplicity, draws from precisely the latter a strange, so easily forgotten elegance – but, then, who ever thought that a pure blue sky or yet another pebble on a beach were not beautiful, even extraordinarily so, in their “apparent simplicity”? It is, in effect, the very brokenness of the arc, its staggered redistribution over four panels, even the fact that no complete even though broken circle is represented – these are elements that combine to allow for a meditation of the implicit mystery of all “simplicities” taken for granted. Not dissimilar, arguably, is Morellet’s first “dash” or short-line work 2

The 1967 Peinture shows similar destabilizing of the system which becomes infinitely complex. See Morellet: M, 56-7.

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Tiret 0°-90° (1955), and this, despite the principal resemblance to 32 rectangles: a relative visual uneventfulness, one might say, but the implication of an endlessness art can only pursue symbolically, caught as it is in time and space. The next few years, 1956-60, see the multiplying of titles that are explicit with respect to the systematic and geometrical exploration and intrication of “simple” forms and, to a lesser extent, colours (to the extent that form and colour may be differentiated): Du jaune au violet (1956), with its contrapuntal gamuts, its “lining” of the squares, each set of seven against a white background or “origin”; Bleu, jaune, rouge (1956), a variation of the “dash” tactic, with thick short lines or blocks forming two elementary colour symmetries against white; Tirets jaunes, roses, bleus, verts sur blanc (1956), a large oil canvas (145 x 235 cm) very subtle in both its coloration and its delineation of the tirets themselves: the yellows dominate to a point where one barely perceives that the other colours equally form lines or vertical “dashes” of the same dimension as the yellows; the 1957 Répartition de 16 formes identiques n° 1 à n° 6, which offers six oil on wood panels, each 80 cm squares, each composed of 16 cloned L-shaped blocks geometrically orchestrated in dissimilar ways and, apart from such simple mathematicised intricacy, providing nothing but pale black lines on grey: an exercise at once in simplification and amplification and as seemingly alyrical, emotionally sterile some might argue, as one might imagine – this, whilst still speaking, implicitly, of that infinity at the heart of every snowflake. And then, to crown these early adventures and amply prophesy so much more to come, we are given, in 1959 and 1960, the fairly astonishing woofs and weavings, grids and double woofs, so elementary in conception, so delicate in their execution (: can they really have been painted?), so architecturally disciplined, so apparently depersonalised, yet, again, to the point where we experience that incipient eery sense of something cosmic in the bosom of the miniaturised: 4 doubles trames 0°-22°5-45°-67°5 thus presents us with a mosaic to dazzle any applier of azulejos; 22 trames 0°-8°-16°-24°-32°-41°-50°-58°-66°-74°-82°-90°-98°-106°-14°122°-131°-140°-148°-156°-164°-172° gives us a mesmerizing display of oil applied as never before to wood, a kind of supermathematicising of a Van Gogh night sky, the geometry being consciously skewed by the 41° and 131° trames; 3 grillages 0°-30°-60°, like the 4 doubles trames just mentioned, also complexifies its own

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orchestration by having the horizontal trames or lines ever so slightly tilted, so that there is, as with other François Morellet creations, an opening onto the infinity as it were “hanging off” the edge of painting: a lyricism of the ineffable, perhaps, though surely via some illusionist trick, for if the vertical trames are true, so should the horizontal lines be to complete a symmetrical grid. To seek to trace those factors that influence an artist’s work is a feasible task only to some highly relative degree and I endeavour here merely to dwell compactly upon a number of artistic oeuvres whose aesthetic pertinency François Morellet has himself, with characteristic straightforwardness and a desire for a contextualised selfawareness, often sought to privilege. With respect to his own earliest work, he has thus spoken of the second manner of Derain, perhaps thinking of works such as The Road to Castel Gandolfo (1921) or still Life with Apples (1921), the former revealing a grand and free stylised ease with landscape painting, the second utterly minimal, bare, rather colourless, not unreminiscent of Cézanne; and he has equally lauded the work of Roger Chapelain-Midy, an artist resistant as was very quickly the young Morellet to academic correctness, a recalcitrance that reveals broad similitude of colour tone and treatment of the real between, say, Chapelain-Midy’s Vue du port de Saint-Martin de Ré or Paysage de neige and Morellet’s Paysage of which we have spoken. The kind of streamlining to the point of disappearance of all visual reference to the real that will soon draw Morellet can be seen in the work of various artists he will soon discover, though there is no evidence whatsoever of following their precise aesthetic modulations: Jacques Busse, for example, with his Hommage à Ledoux offers large unidentifiable forms, one on top of the other, in an irregular piling that is not characteristic of the controlled mathematicising compositions of the young Morellet; Pierre Dmitrienko’s Présence: celui qui racontera (1966) or Le Voyant 3 (1967) may undoubtedly have revealed new formal options and new discreetly stylised manners of aesthetically relating to the real, but ultimately Morellet’s path is one of much less flagrantly exhibited (self-)narrativity, less displayed raw, primary emotion, however exquisite and liberating Dmitrienko’s gesture may have been; Serge Charcoune’s work, beyond its ornamental abstractionism with its flavours of the Moorish and the Russian, and perhaps rather pieces such as L’Abysse (1949) and, even more so, his Beethoven, 3e sonate or his Schubert, Messe 6 (1966) –

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these may have been broadly, symbolically as it were, encouraging, demonstrating that swirling quasi-monochromes with strong brushstrokes constituting form could establish a self-supporting, antianecdotal aesthetic space that only the titles revealed as being lyrical homages. Still, once again, no imitation ensues, the “influence” finally most indirect, emblematic simply of radical new feasibilities. Of other work Morellet tells us drew his attention – many are the artists met in these formative times and I mention only in passing Max Bill, member of the Zürich Concrete Group, the Molnars (“champions of the pur-dur toutes catégories”), Vasarely, all the artist companions of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), and why forget Morellet’s wife, Danielle, a very fine professional pianist whose sensibilities and competencies one suspects must have impacted upon her husband’s own mathematicised “partitions” –, I shall look, before moving on to a discussion of various general issues and, then, specific major works where the latter act themselves out, at that of Jack Youngerman, of Alexander Rodchenko, of the anonymous artists of the Alhambra – “I have never received, before or after, a shock to compare with it”. One readily appreciates the sensed affinity with the aesthetics of Youngerman. His Untitled (White Form on Blue + Red Field) of 1966 or, again, the 1968 Untitled (Black/Green) give sharp emphasis to the autonomy of form and colour functionally fused, abstractions cut loose from the not at times dissimilar forms Braque might give in, say, Paysage de l’Estaque (1906), or Juan Gris in Guitare & musique (1919), forms powerfully transmuted but still yet manifestly clinging to and in “consubstantiation” with the real (as Reverdy writes). The decision to “untitle” and yet insist via this untitling on the purity of deployment of colour and form may not take the steps Morellet’s geometricising and experimental mathematicising involve, yet the global appeal of Youngerman’s gestures is utterly comprehensible. Alexander Rodchenko died in 1956 but had long been a major figure of the Russian avant-garde. Extraordinarily versatile, moving with ease from the “death” of painting (with his three 1921 monochrome canvases) to his various Spatial Constructions where we can see the connection with his constructivist mentor Tatlin (and perhaps one foreshadowed to Morellet’s 2002 Beaming π 300), Rodchenko then moves on from such “pure” sculpture to photography, photomontage, graphic design, work in film and theatre. As for François Morellet’s visit to the Alhambra, as early as

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1952, it clearly provides an impetus that will not be forgotten or wasted: “This is”, he writes, “the most precise, the most refined and the most symmetric art that ever has been” (MCT, 57). And if this assessment may seem a trifle oblivious of architectural accomplishments in many other places, it is surely true that Alhambra’s Sala de Dos Hermanas or its Patio de los Arrayanes and the remarkable ornamental reliefs and mosaics offer a mathematically sophisticated aesthetics to amaze the most discriminating eye. To look at François Morellet’s work is to imagine that it is an art in which many things are missing, this given its clinicalness, its relative bareness, its conscious evacuation of a host of elements we may associate with art of both distinctly earlier periods and the very recent and continuing times of surrealism, cubism, expressionism and so on. Gone, certainly, are portraiture, landscapes, the scenes of the dreamer or seer surging forth from the unconscious or the realm of phantasms. Nothing esoteric lurks behind hermetically sealed doors. Simple impressionism no longer suffices, as will no longer the loosely lyrical expression of those uncertain emotional states in work as varied as Van Gogh’s, Munch’s or Kokoschka’s. And if cubism’s new harmonies and equilibriums, at once analytic and synthetic, may offer the attraction of their transvasement of the new, they yet retain that osmotic relationship with identifiable things that Morellet is seemingly intent on eliminating. Even Dada’s often witty provocations – Duchamp’s Fontaine, Picabia’s Esprit de jeune fille, Manzoni’s Merda d’artista, for example –, whilst no doubt much appreciated by the author of Comment taire mes commentaires with its opening reproduction of the text of his 1949 polychromed wood Sculpture à lire, will not offer the sufficiently productive aesthetic vistas he seeks to render concrete. No, the sociological, the political, all that is flagrantly rooted in historical or geographical realism, all would appear to have disappeared, along with the ethical, moralising temptations of art’s representations or those that convey overt psychological or emotive preoccupations, as in the swirling incoherencies of a Twombly or the informalities of a Hartung. What, then, if such dismissals and evacuations are at play, remains at the heart of François Morellet’s work, constituting it, defining it, counter-defining it in tensional ways? I shall offer in telescoped fashion three sets of remarks, picking up on on the questions posed earlier, but beginning with a further central issue:

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Baroque Minimalist?: François Morellet

1: Art and nature: it was Pierre Reverdy who, long before Clément Rosset, spoke of the crucial distinction – and porous relationship – between nature, the given, the already presented, and art, which he deemed, precisely, an antinature: a transmuted, transfigured state of the given, its humanised mode allowing for a reversal of the “domination” of a potentially alienating world, and a reappropriation thereof offering ontological “consubstantiation”, a reharmonisation of self and world via the process – rather, even, than the product – of art. Whilst Reverdy’s writings privileged the cubist work of Matisse, Braque, Gris, Gargallo, Picasso and others, his argument re the antinatural reality of art is of a generalising nature: it would apply to David, to Piero, to Monet, and not just to Malevich, Vasarely and Newman. The difference, thus, between art and nature may be deemed rather a deferral: antinature is in a deferred, oblique and critical relation with nature, the real: it is one of its forms, in effect, no more, no less, and a crucially ontologically energising one at that. 2: Rational rigour and postmodernism: one experiences no difficulty in appreciating the rationalising, deliberately orchestrating gestures that produce works such as the 1968 6 trames 0°-30°-60°-90°-120°150° with its adhesive tape on lacquered sheet-metal, the 1978 Seule droite (cornière métallique) passant dans 2 carrés (toiles) ayant le milieu d’un de leurs côtés en contact, or, again, the 1962 Relâche n° 4 with its complex deployment of right-angled forms involving acrylics and oils on canvas, lacquered aluminium, neon tubes, wall penciling and so on. Such “systems” are everywhere in evidence in François Morellet’s work, which seems to firmly anchor itself in the pragmatic, the concrete, a purity of formal “logic” that is its own, autotelic vindication. Yet the postmodern, if it may be said to opt for the anobjective, the a-rational, also aligns itself with the signifier rather than the signified, the fluidity of knowing more undeterminable and ironic than realizable, a liberated playing with the forms of being rather than their decrypting. And, despite the dreams of an ever increased scientific sense of the aesthetic, Morellet’s work tilts slowly but surely, it may be argued, to a ludic, parodic fictionalisation of form’s meaning, a postmodern tilting yet grounding its deconstructions and “disfigurations” in conscious, finely considered construction. 3: Neutrality and desire: GRAV’s tract, Assez de mystifications, published on the occasion of the 1961 2nd Biennale in Paris, seeks to be

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explicit on a wide range of matters with which Morellet’s own desire for an art of anonymity, neutrality, abstraction and minimal intervention is in clear sympathy. Lichtenstein and Groulier have ably argued the logic of such a self-positioning in relation to poiein and its products which would reveal but their “factualness” (M, 29), a kind of inherency of physical form that is yet but pure surface, work which, as Adorno suggests, strangely may be said to be beyond aesthetics and thus not really produce oeuvres at all. Pure “syntax”, Lichtenstein and Groulier encourage us to believe, a-sensual, in-significant, “banal”. To read GRAV’s tract, however, and indeed Morellet’s own statements, is to understand that a) paradox is rife in such arguments or declarations, and b) desire is fatally at the heart of all doing, making, writing, thinking. Abstention, independence, disconnectedness are fervent desires, they require a self, an intervention of its power and its vision, its project. The 1980 Tableau 5°-95°, angle néon (sur mur) 0°-90°, the 1994 Rotesque or the 1998 π rococo rouge n° 11, 1=30° (14 décimales), it is true, eschew all mystification; but, ultimately, their creation is far from any (in effect, impossible, merely illusory) evacuation of self, its programmes, its passions, even its “personality”. Not only can the eye of the other not be coerced out of its natural inclinations (cf. Assez de mystifications: GRAV “affirme que […] doit cesser…”) in accordance with the Group’s poietic desire, but nor can the making engineered by the eye, hand and mind of the doer-artist be truly deemed a neutral functioning. There is not space here adequately to “deconstruct” – in the most positive, Derridian way, seeking merely to show the endless arguableness, supplementarity, différance at play in the aesthetics of François Morellet’s pur-dur gestures – the equation of control and chance, quasi non-involvement (: I wish to do the “least possible”, Morellet often writes or implies) and play/gesture, the tensions of nomeaning and the so-called meta-physical. Suffice it to say, as we now move to examine an array of major pieces, that 1) without going into a discussion of the admissibility of the very notion of contingency and randomness, Morellet’s démarche demands governance and discipline – even though the deep nature of rational control may be said to be ever plunged into the strange waters of a spontaneity of intuitive, almost visceral unfoldment; 2) the “logic” and aesthetics (which is evidently an ethics, too) of “dehumanised” pure hardness finds a curious – but happy – bedfellow in the “logic” of the ludic and the

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resulting “pleasure of the purely plastic”, as Barthes might have said; 3) if one can argue the demerits of a certain conception of the metaphysical, it remains that the evacuation of meaning from the plastic would tend to equate to a mode of nihilism, and therefore chaos and anarchy, elements – ideas, sentiments – which do not jive either with the purposeful concentratedness of productive energy each of Morellet’s works deploys, or with the effervescence and, again, productive, creative smile, irony even, which, if it slackens the reins of “ideological” gravity, equally allows the self to ride more freely in the paths of mathematics’ deep but extraordinary ontological determinacy – or mystery. “Baroque minimalist”, indeed. 3 One of François Morellet's most impressive series is that of the 1961 Répartition aléatoire de 40,000 carrés suivant les chiffres pairs et impairs d’un annuaire de téléphone, which constitutes an experiment in colour, surprisingly erasing “all interest in form and structure”, a 1971 text would have us believe (cf. MCT, 40-41), though the same text insists greatly on the mathematicisation of the piece (200 horizontal and 200 vertical lines being drawn on the square base, the consequent 30,000 tiny squares being marked with a cross or not according to the evenness or unevenness of the phone number read out by the artist’s wife or children, and subsequently painted red for uneven or blue for even. Although arbitrariness seems present in this process and in both the subsequent serigraphic procedure from the original and the final selection for exhibition purposes of eight of the approximately 100 serigraphs produced, choice remains an ever present factor, conscious or unconscious: choice of experiment, choice of material, choice of suppression of personal taste, etc. For the viewer, all of this both matters and is of little interest: s/he will, as Morellet has often maintained, “unpack his or her picnic” in “consuming” a given piece (cf. MCT, 44-54): how can one, for example, not admire the sheer quirkiness combined with the sheer discipline of the fabrication; how can one not move from one colour combination to another without sensing the mystery, at once sensual, aesthetic and, if I may put so oddly, mathematically spiritual, of the various effects produced; how can one resist that rapid slippage through the mind’s eye of so many other paintings one has seen and which, instantaneously, reveal the vibratory interference and unique3

The designation Morellet ideally aspires to, he tells Alexandra Reininghaus in a 1989 interview. Cf. M, 197.

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ness at play as one “unpacks” the given Répartition aléatoire and, say, Corot’s Chevrière dans les Alpes, Vieira da Silva’s Échec et mat or Gustav Klimt’s Le Baiser. The wonderful 1962 aluminium sculpture Sphère-trames could be viewed in the context of Morellet’s short piece for the catalogue for his 1990 exhibition, Hommage aux Tilleuls et à Rodin, where smilingly he rails against the tiresome spatial and/or temporal demands on the only moderately attentive consumer of art – music, literature, sculpture – and recommends perspectival, ideally “unidimensional”, simplicity for the latter – even “a sculpture having no point of view and so no dimension”, giving his own Arc de cercle brisé by way of example. The 1974 oil on canvas Tirets de 2 cm dont l’espace augmente à chaque rangée de 2 mm. Alignement côté droit décalé à chaque rangée d’un espace seems to dispense with all need for further explication: it is a system revealed, a formula laid before us, a theorem whose truth is concretely proven (: if x is done, y will result) in a limited space, whilst remaining dizzyingly conjecturable into infinity. “No representation, no message”, Morellet ever insists, though he knows that where there is sign and signature, meaning, too, becomes infinite, endlessly labyrinthine, webbed. What Morellet terms the “Geometry of Constraints” (cf. MCT, 94-5) shifts his attention in the late 1970’s from what he now seems to regard as a somewhat illusory or blind-sided plane geometry unconscious of the matter and form lying in excess of the work’s strict interiority (: museal space and the concrete conditions of, say, hanging a painting, the very thickness of a support or the lines of the painting itself, etc.), to works where such factors are privileged, played with, become “the main subject of the painting” (cf. MCT, 94-5). Seule droite (cornière métallique passant dans 2 carrés (toiles) ayant le milieu d’un de leurs côtés en contact (1978) thus offers a dynamic geometry functioning, speaking itself in, with and against the geometry, matter and mathematics of the space from which it is, in a sense, inseparable – even whilst via this very insertion, it displays its difference. 4 Superposition et transparence (1980) explores in its own way such implicit complexification, though retaining the asceticism that marks all of Morellet's work. The Géométree series of 1983-85 pushes still further this consciousness of the extra-geometrical pseudo-incorporated into a 4

Such works frequently cease to be paintings as we have understood the term, but transmute into hybrid creations, sculptural assemblages involving painted canvases.

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geometrical system that knows it has now lost all tight integrity, but via this same loss has gained wit and freshness, a certain “absurdity” he himself suggests (cf. M, 187), but for Catherine Francblin a beauty emanating from the “discreet mingling of referential registers”. Moreover, if it is true that the branches and twigs of the Géométree series are “justified”, “prolonged”, as Serge Lemoine has suggested (cf. M, 187), it is clear that such a venturing forth into the inherently infinite, barely controllable world of a mathematics and a meaning will not remain Morellet’s cup of tea: hygiene, asepticalness, circumscription, austerity and depersonalisation will continue to win out, easily, over contamination with the swirling messy unpredictabilities of pure, hard elemental nature. Wit, play and sheer persistence with the infinity of a creative impulse only reluctantly viewed as belonging to a self: these are the spins put on antinatural activity. Most recently Morellet’s 1952 x 4 nº 1, Quand j’étais petit je ne faisais pas grand (2006) finds diversion in taking the 1997 oil on wood Parallèles 0º-12º, itself a reconstruction of a 1952 work now lost, quadrupling its dimensions and playing with the idea of transformation, becoming and continuity, yet with the utmost remoteness from anything we may have thought to be possibly emerging from youthful memories: somewhat as with Robbe-Grillet’s Romanesques, this “autofictional fragment” remains, however, a sure sign of Morellet’s inner world. Après réflexion nº 13 (2006) perhaps not dissimilarly finds its source in a lived moment that yet gives birth not to anecdotalness, “self-story”, but rather to conceptualisation and intricate fabrication topped off with the humorousness of a title that, in fact, does evoke the ephemeralness and the strange unexpectedness out of which art emerges… “after reflection”. The 2006 Débandade, composed of four conjoined canvases, each 150 cm x 150 cm, whilst, like the above 1952 x 4 nº 1, taking as its point of departure a 1957 acrylic (10 lignes au hasard), reveals only a loose resemblance to the latter: transmutation, amplification, suppression, erasure and yet echoing are at play in a bold piece that allows the eye’s mind, as so very often, to wander and wonder, mathematically, ontologically. The 2005 Striptyque nº 1 again draws on past fascination (the 1971 40 lignes au hasard) and offers a huge acrylic and pencil square triptych, each panel providing what we might think of as examples of the endlessly extendable mathematical, formal conceptualisableness of what

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is/what may be.5 And if painted sculptural works like Répartition de 6 quarts de cercle au hasard and Répartition de 16 quarts de cercle au hasard take us back to long-standing fascinations whilst, as ever, exploring their vast potential which can be extended into the realm of the neon, of a “light art” yet very different from, say, that of Brigitte Kowanz or a piece such as Mona Hatoum’s Light Sentence, other neon works such as Lamentable nº 1, rouge (2005) establish yet more flagrant liberty in the infinity of deployment they permit6: here, the eight neon tubes (each one 1/8th of a circle) may be varyingly installed according to ambient architecture. Born endlessly from that seemingly spartan minimality, a dreamed idiosyncratic and smilingly capricious baroqueness sprouts forth – like infinity ever bursting the impossible sterility of a vacuum. François Morellet: the elegant patience of a minimality never espousing the rawness of some arte povera, seduced by the faceless, discreet beauties of a mathematical celebration of an intelligibleness the mischievous mind can only, finally, play with.

5

A whole 2005 series π stripteasing 1 combines elements of Débandade and Striptyque whilst deploying form according to controlled geometries. 6 Cf. Lunatique neonly – 16 quarts de cercle no 6 (2005), for example.

SUBLIMATION, THE IRREDUCIBLE AND THE SACRED: LOUISE BOURGEOIS “A phenomenon, a special case in the history of art”: thus does Marie-Laure Bernadac mark the originality of an artist working already for almost forty years though arguably barely known before 1982, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a retrospective that was to reveal Louise Bourgeois to the world. Hers is an oeuvre, a practice, built precisely on that subjectivity a François Morellet sought to evacuate, a profoundly inscribed subjective experience urgently requiring release, knowing instinctively the wisdom of such a mode of work, self-work, beyond the frivolities of aesthetics though caught up in the rigours of material form and whatever tense beauties the latter might afford. To look at the early drawings of He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1946 on) or the even earlier seven wooden stelae of Quarantania (1941), or recent work such as Ventouse (1990) or the large 1991 wall relief Mamelles with its female breasts forming a frieze or, yet again, the raw ink and crayon Untitled of 2000, with its seven pairs of eyes darting, crossed, and its necklaced neck – to look at such work is to appreciate its ever surging viscerality, its “intense emotional substance” as Nancy Spector has written, a primitive but aesthetically caressed representation of the psychic whereby fetishised objects offer themselves as a place wherein may be acted out bloody traumas and a symbolic coping with, if not resolution of, such obsessing and still proliferating disturbances. This said, however, Louise Bourgeois’ interwoven bodymind topologies draw their ongoing power not simply from private circumstance and a seemingly bottomless wellspring of personal, lived experience. Her work leaps beyond the autobiographical, buried deep as it is in the bios and the psyche of selfhood. It is immersed in humanity’s “great founding myths”, as Bernadac has suggested. Its power is transpersonal, universal beyond, though rooted in what Deborah Wye terms “a drama of the self”; it speaks to our fears and our desires, our repressed truths and our phantasms, our inadequacies and our solitarinesses; to our teeming stock of remaining feasibilities and our capacity for an often improbable self-creation. The material modes and idioms Louise Bourgeois has deployed over a period of some sixty years and more are as diverse, as intricate, as fundamental too, as the complex yet somehow primaeval

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emotional magma from which her art emerges. Early work ranges from fine line black ink drawings and painted wood stelae or other standing constructions like C.O.Y.O.T.E., sometimes using plaster, to bronze pieces such as Brother or Sister (1949) or Portrait of C.Y. with its protruding “facial” nails or oils with ink on linen from the Femme Maison series. Penelope Vinding deems the work of the 1960’s and 1970’s to have accomplished major shifts in manner, but whilst one can appreciate something of this argument – density, solidity become more marked in pieces such as Lair (1961) or Labyrinthine Tower (1962) or the various Soft Landscapes, and bizarre organicity becomes noticeable, with marble emerging as a major material –, it is equally true that bronze continues to be commonly used, wood less so though spectacularly as in Partial Recall (1979), and that diverse phallic forms persist though radically mutating as in Sleep II (1967) or Noir veine (1968) or the large installation Number Seventy-Two (The No March) (1972). The 1990’s and work of the past ten or fifteen years generally has continued both to astonish in its sculptural and installational heterogeneity that yet bears an unmistakable authorial stamp. It is an immensely rich period of creativity that multiplies and combines material usages and the objects resulting therefrom. Cell (You better grow up) (1993), for example, gives us mirrors, exquisite marble hands à la Rodin emerging from a huge block yet sawn off, a small wooden table with glass perfume vials and an oddly lumpy and contorted ceramic stela-like figure oozing upwards from its base and as unidentifiable as the other large glass bulbous lamp-like object sitting on another low wooden table, all of these disparate creations housed in their cell with those complex connotations I shall look at later, and then this particular cell being part of the much larger installational conglomerate as it will gradually develop from 1986 on. Arguably, any of Bourgeois’ many other creations of recent years, from, say, the various 2004 sculpted Couples or the three 2005 equally sculpted pieces all titled simply Femme, could be incorporated into massive, modally and psychically complex installations such as the Cells. The combinatory logic pushing creations into intimate assembly rather than favouring their isolation and individualising intensification is one that no doubt will remain beyond any firmly rational unravelling. Le Défi (1991), with its painted wooden cupboard and mass of glass jars, vases and other objects might easily have found a place, one might believe, in one of the

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cages or partitions of the Cells. If we may tentatively suggest that this stand-alone creation is slightly less intensely motivated, we surely are disinclined to argue this with respect to, by way of example, recent “individual” pieces such as Granite Eyes (1997) or Toi et moi (1997) or Femme couteau (2002). No, groupings and installations, like all else, would seem to be viscerally, unconsciously, instinctually orchestrated. Images, Louise Bourgeois will tell us, are “blindly followed [because] I am exclusively concerned, at least consciously, with formal perfection” (LBLA, 47). This does not imply a preoccupation with aesthetic niceties, nor does it, therefore, imply a desire for style. Psychic, emotional urgency shortcircuits mannerism. It does not, however, lessen that driving concern with “absolutely strict and pure [form]”: Louise Bourgeois’ eccentric processual gesture may not, as Vinding writes, make form “her first priority” (LBLA, 8), but once the “image” has flashed across the artist’s psychic screen and its strange symbolic relevancy is sensed, then what preoccupies totally – and no doubt takes her art out of any temptation to dwell upon selfness and moves it towards the transpersonal – are materials, their choice, their manipulation, their testing and caressing, their often endlessly repeated, “serial”, she can even write, reworking. Form, then, at this point, is an absolute concern, for it must be in total harmony with that swirling pool of affective energy on which it now rides. But it is a form inseparable too from the paper, the wood, the marble or glass, the paint or bronze, the implements that shape, the installing of space, the concrete, physical gestures that create it. The art of Louise Bourgeois is one of violence and counterviolence. Cruelties are felt, lived, and they are thrust back upon the world’s hurtfulness in a vast series of gestures seeking, as she herself argues at times, to destroy the past in order to exist now, in the brief present of some self-exorcism. Dagger Child (1947-49) bears forceful witness to such violence, perpetrated through the self, in a sense upon the body-mind of self, even though upon the other. La Destruction du père (1974) is, of course, one of Louise Bourgeois’ most celebrated and striking expressions of an angst both visceral and psychic, but it has raw antecedents, such as her adolescent cutting up of a bread father figure, just as it will have a full range of symbolic follow-ups: the 1988 orange peel figure, an elementary, even discreet yet deeply lived stab at her father’s cruel public sexual diminishment of his young daughter; the 1990 Rabbit, eviscerated, hanging, personal,

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mythical, self and other merged; the strange 1998 Le Père, at once abstract, uncontextualised beyond its title, yet hinting simultaneously at patriarchal power and, perhaps, its ultimate judgement by a force higher-seated, higher-situated. “In my world, Bourgeois will tell Jacqueline Caux, violence is everywhere” (TT, 124). But, just as the “destruction of the father” merges with a tentative, precarious but ideal “reconstruction of the father”, so does all violence perpetuated against the other – which, fatally, involves the self: Bourgeois will insist upon the degree to which sadism and masochism are inevitable bedfellows (cf. LBF, 160) – seek resolution, a visible evacuation of demons, a liberation from the constraining, binding obsessions that render the self reciprocally “cruel, destructive, violent” before the other (cf. LBF, 157). Forgiving searches for its place in these difficult emotional equations, for, as Louise Bourgeois is fully aware, the “murders” one commits are so often inflicted upon “the one most loved” (cf. the exchanges with Marie-Laure Bernadac). The 1978 Banquet, a Fashion Show of Body Parts, perhaps seemed capable of catapulting the self out of such intensities, but the laughter released remains admittedly aggressive, its intention to “ridicule” (cf. TT, 180) remaining far from that distanced yet compassionate, even empathetic logic of the smile that a Stendhal saw and lived in counter-distinction to the hostility at the heart of le rire. At best, art’s dance of violence and counter-violence allows for an “analysis of daily fears” and some provisional exorcism thereof – for they are quotidian, ever selfrenewing, mutating. To sculpt – and rapidly Bourgeois privileges sculpture over all other plastic modes – is to cut and to shape, to slice deeply or shallowly so that desired form may emerge. And in sculpting the matter of one’s psyche, one is inevitably sculpting – like a topiarist, Bourgeois can suggest – not merely some “nature” out there, stone, wood, steel, etc., but an inner “nature”, a mental landscape, art’s anti-nature as we have seen Pierre Reverdy call it, being that symbolic non-place mirroring back a real place with its inner turmoils that may briefly unravel and subside as their “truth” is known, acknowledged. I Have been to Hell and back is a 1996 tapestry that would seem to evoke unambiguously that suffering lying at the root of Louise Bourgeois’s life and her art. “The subject of pain, she will relate in her conversations with Bernadac, is the area of my activity”. Pain is construed as chaos, disorder, dis-ease, that phenomenon ap-

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parently beyond control, subjecting the vulnerable self to its randomness and whimsicality. Art, its process perhaps most importantly rather than the monolithic resultant object of plastic process, is conceived of, and lived, as “a guarantee of mental health”, the same conversations affirm. Art’s gesture is, in this sense, a taking of control, a doing where only being done to seemed feasible. It “conquers” chaos, offers an order – that of the creative gesture and its product’s form – where derangement and anarchy held sway. Art is a way back, precisely. And, even more, as the tapestry goes on perhaps surprisingly to tell us, this journeying back – but no doubt too the entire journey, for it is implied that going there, revisiting, recovering and fully admitting the reality of one’s hell is a precondition of returning, of being here – “was wonderful”. To create, then, a work such as the 1995 Insomnia, is not to seek to memorialise the pain and trauma of one’s incapacities. Rather does it launch a process of transfer and transposition, better what, talking with Jacqueline Caux, Louise Bourgeois terms sublimation (cf. TT, 153). The harrowing experience of sleeplessness, with its often accompanying compulsive and obsessing mental images, can thus, via art’s poiein, be deflected, transmuted, can assume an other form and be projected out there, expunged, or purified, rid – at least temporarily – of its power. Mind over matter, Bourgeois can sometimes say, though the body’s involvement in this cathartic transferral must be critical also. No doubt this is why Louise Bourgeois says that her only real concern, once embarked on plastic creation, suddenly and miraculously becomes form. The “subject” of pain ceases to be pain as art’s therapeutic, drug-like action kicks in. Poul Erik Toiner is right to speak of Bourgeois’ art as an act and a place not of the object per se, but of its “metabolisation” (cf. LBLA, 64). This said, as the artist will insist, everything finally depends not only on one’s “capacity to sublimate” but, too, crucially, on “the quality of one’s sublimation” (LBF, 160). Hence, always, once again, the desire for perfection, no matter what degree of reworking and recommencement this may require. A powerful metaphor in Louise Bourgeois’ art, one that has both strong, lived gender associations and, beyond such limits, broad archetypical implications – Robert Storr deems the latter drive more significant than any autobiographical thrust (cf. LBP, 33) –, is that of blindness and seeing. One only need look at the early bare enigmatic

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portrayal of C.O.Y.O.T.E. (The Blind leading the Blind) (1947-8)1 or weigh the young artist’s criticism of surrealism, deemed far too theory-inspired (cf. LBF, 161) and thus distanced from that, for her, essential “responsibility to be absolutely truthful to the self” (SC, 12), i.e. to self’s actual experience. Thus, over the years, will Bourgeois offer piece after piece reminding herself and us of the need for lucidness, clear-eyed recognition. The painted bronze “clothespin doll”, Observer, equally early (1947-9), and the 1950 ink and charcoal intent, voyeuristic Untitled both point vigorously to such preoccupations, but so too, with different manners and insistencies, will works like the 1984 Nature Study: Eyes with its pink and white marble on steel and wood base, a recumbent piece (unlike the 1982 Eyes, six feet high, bulky, bleak, haunting, though perhaps transcendently humorous too) with its eyes popping, perhaps even popped and thus at that terrible or perhaps merely ironic intersection of sight and its loss. The 1997 Granite Eyes still echoes such tensions, as do, for example, the 2002 tapestry and aluminium heads, Untitled, now with steady though glazed gaze, now the gaze curtained, occluded, recessed (cf. LBP, 90-1). This brings us to the question of gender in association with the above, where – over and above the conceivable residual ambivalences: mother turning a blind eye to the husband-father’s gross actions, though seeing all, for example – it is not unreasonable to align blindness with male intellectualism, male insensitivity to broader sensibilities, male power masking the truths of self, etc., and seeing with Bourgeois’ and perhaps more broadly female desire for clear, honest knowing, the privileging of affective and spiritual experience over dry, limited and easily perverted rationality, a self-assumption beyond masks and pure aesthetics. Certainly Bourgeois’ early gaze does not flinch from what it encounters; its purpose is inner clarity with respect to outer images; its “creations” are based upon her sense of responsibility to lived experience and its psychic and physiological truths. Art allows for the assumption of the other’s absolute realness in relation to the self’s, and vice versa. Robert Storr remarks that if the earlier years into the 1970’s favour the father archetype, the mother has emerged more recently in greater focus. But, if the gaze has somewhat shifted its orientation, it has retained the qualities and 1

C.O.Y.O.T.E is an acronym for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, the title of a tract Bourgeois wrote arguing for the basic rights of prostitutes.

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values the gazer has always espoused. Of course, with major early works such as Femme Maison, the power of female seeing directed towards the feminine has always been in ample evidence. And there can be those revised insights, often, one feels, witty and grinning despite so much else around the gaze into the heart of the malefemale knot: Fillette (1968-69), for example, with its phallic latex over plaster form, the androgynous testicles/breasts, and, not the least that 1982 Robert Mapplethorpe photograph (cf. LBP, 131) showing the artist with Fillette under her arm, this twinned with her tender, at once material and ironically re-empowered appreciation of the need to protect a phallus now understood to be pretty delicate, fragile even. Bourgeois’ gaze upon the female continues in effect to bear, and to bare, the signs of woman’s long historic and still so often manifest hurt – Sainte Sébastienne (1992) shows the female body pierced by arrows –, but works like the large mural relief Mamelles (1991), echoing the 1967 Tits whilst arguably revealing the objectifying male gaze upon woman’s body parts, also seem to possess recalcitrant feminist energy in the face of such a possible gaze: the nurturing breasts provide; the female body is repossessed by its sole owner; the provocative wittiness turns lewdness and lust on its head. And of course, with Spider (1997), already seen as a heroinic figure honouring the mother, as with the explicitly titled Maman (1999), Louise Bourgeois’ gaze finds its perfect visionary metaphor: woman at the centre of her web, ever weaving the habitat of her power and selfreliance, determined, unendingly patient, at once thinking generously of her others, but with a sting in her tail, but only when necessary for self-preservation. We have seen Louise Bourgeois maintain that her art is a gesture allowing survival, a fundamental existing, where, presumably, some collapse into madness and relative non-being might otherwise have occurred. This, of course, constitutes a significant accomplishment operated on body and mind. And yet she herself can also invite us to see its utter relativity, even a certain failure haunting it: “I bet, she tells Marie-Laure Bernadac, on art rather than on life” (LBF, 158). Art, as for Pierre Reverdy, a bouche-abîme, a pis-aller, a loose plugging of holes, those in the body-mind of self. Art, in effect, may be alleviative, tonic, but it provides no absolute remedy, its curative powers offer no final cure: like Sisyphus, whom Louise Bourgeois evokes in this context, repetition, beginning over, is what the doctor

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she becomes to herself orders (cf. LBF, 160). “The artist sacrifices life to art, she will affirm, not because [s]he wants to but because [s]he cannot do anything else” (LBLA, 47). Art may be selfempowerment viewed from one angle; but from another it implies an ontology of incapacity, impotence. It enacts a (sacred) sacrifice of one’s capacity to live fully, presumably, in joy and love – I shall return finally to this –, an acceptance of that death-to-life but tombalrebirth-to-art Mallarmé speaks of, as of an anguishing ideal – but a trajectory for him too involving failure. No doubt this may seem like an over-dramatisation of any Bourgeoisian ontology, though she is quite lucid, “seeing”, enough to point to its elements of truth. Yet rebirth in art’s “minute tomb of the soul” is no small thing. Fullness of being may be indefinitively deferred, but each creation constitutes an ephemeral act and place of that being, that existingness, which Braque felt only could be found in his painting. Resolution of the “problems” of one’s being are in effect, “daily”, for so are the “problems” arising (cf. TT, 109). Bourgeois will speak, moreover, of the strength paradoxically stemming from what seems to be the weakness or error of declaring one’s unhappiness (cf. TT, 64). A work such as J’y suis, j’y reste (1990) with its sawn-off marble feet encased in a glass house on a denuded rock would seem to suggest that this strength of affirmation does not alter the ongoing dilemma of being Bourgeois lives. She is caught in one of those webs or spirals or weavings her art has persistently depicted, caught in that, for her, feminine mode of “passiveness” and “waiting” (cf. TT, 72-4) that, whilst the scene of an intense aesthetic activity, as Jacqueline Caux is quick to remind her, remains in a sense insufficient to dislodge from her being the traumas and fears ever weighing down upon it. “Learning is your secret”, Louise Bourgeois has somewhat cryptically said of her own creative enterprise. To look at, say, her celebrated 1963 sculpture Torso, self-portrait or her 1982 marble Female Portrait does not, in effect, allow the viewer a rational decoding of these complex yet supremely and “simply” elegant pieces. The learning of whatever lessons they may contain remains, indeed, ultimately, Louise Bourgeois’ secret. Her discernment may be intellectualisable, should she care to take that route, but the aesthetic hands-on sculptural route is the one she has preferred and, despite all she has said about her work, its processes and meanings in the context of her life, this route leads to privacy, intimacy, secrecy – that archetypal-

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ness cloaking the autobiographical, as Storr has argued, and an archetypalness that, finally, does admit us all to gaze into the “aesthetic evidence”, as Rainer Crone and Petrus Graf Schaesberg have written, of this unsayableness. Such secret yet emblematically revealed “evidence” of, to refer back to the last-mentioned two sculptures, the self and the female, bears no element, moreover – Bourgeois can often insist upon this –, of theatricality: hers is not a staged, calculatedly orchestrated secrecy, a constructed hermeticism. Rather, as we have seen, her works are emblems, devices, of truth. “Our whole purpose is to try to understand what we are about”, she characteristically declares (SC, 15), this in the context precisely of what Crone and Schaesberg term “the secret of the Cells”, and on the assumption we share her purpose and desire. Art, if it might in any way at all then be deemed a stage, is one upon which clarity and consciousness will be sought. That such self-analysis, undertaken as she can argue to Bernadac “like a treatment for a sick person” (LBF, 158), can be accomplished in the mode of art’s taciturnity and reconditeness, alters nothing of the truth of its learned lessons. Such lessons and the various truths they secretly though visibly convey are in a sense always the property of the strange, the irreducible, the bewitching. “If the work secretly reveals something magical, Louise Bourgeois will tell Marie-Laure Bernadac, I deem it a success” (LBF, 156) – a formula where the fusion of the revealed and the mysterious depends upon inexplicable enchantment. The 1991 Le Défi, with its painted wood, masses of glass, and electric lights, thus leaves us guessing in all respects and yet we can immediately sense its obscure illumination; and the 1953 Drawing Untitled, with its “hair”, its “thread”, floating free, uncontextualisable, unstabilisable, yet manages to offer the flickering lessons of its magical beauties. “A work of art, Bourgeois will seemingly paradoxically remark, does not need an explanation” (SC, 12): what understanding, what learning, we may ask, can then come about without explanation? The answer to this question is clear: art’s profferments, its unabridgeable, incontractable metaphors and emblems, that secretly reveal. What is learned and becomes discernable, imaged, formed, is thus deployed at the crossroads of ambiguity and clarity, polyvalence and compacted “simplicity”; its meaning is a meaning beyond fixable meaning, but rich in its very rational unlocatableness, a teeming irreducibleness filled with recognisable emotional, spiritual, ontological

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emblematicalness. Toiner’s equation (cf. LBLA, 66) suggesting the transformation in Louise Bourgeois’ gesture of the I to a She is the equation of life’s metamorphosis into art: the latter’s swarming sens ever in excess of its signes, as Yves Bonnefoy has written, multiplies exponentially the available understanding we may hope to obtain of self and other. The 1968 bronze with gold patina Janus fleuri or the 2000 tapestry and steel stela, Untitled, with its multiple recycled images and pseudo “soft-phallic” design, or, again, the bizarre but flagrant blue fabric bulbous concoction, Endless Pursuits – all illustrate beautifully, magically, the enacted power of such an equation of irreducible but available metaphoricity of secretly learnable meaning. The inextricable merging in Louise Bourgeois’ work of the rationally unfathomable and the instinctually and furtively comprehensible is intimately linked with what Nancy Spector has termed the artist’s “dismantling of Western dualistic thought”.2 If this is true of the above indistinction of obscurity and truth, strangeness and recognisableness, it is equally so of our own sense, and so frequently Bourgeois’ expressed sense, of the teeming factors visibly though largely opaquely, potentially, at play in a given piece: it is the almost inevitable result of dipping into the unconscious and molten emotional magma: fluidity, multiplicity, complication. Take the various Cells or Lairs, for example, at once refuge and trap, we are told, the Lair’s twin doors allowing entrance and escape (cf. SC, 13), inviting the self into its “beautiful place”, where it may lie low and keep watch, and, if the lair is an Articulated Lair, such “articulation” may imply “relationship that can change and improve” (ibid.). The Cells themselves are similarly intricate and paradoxical in their implications, their secret enfoldments: connected with fear and pain, they yet are the space, Bourgeois unblinkingly maintains, of that pleasure of the voyeur[e], the thrill of gazing and being gazed upon”. All Bourgeois’ houses or pseudo-houses are “spaces for emotions” Toiner rightly argues (LBLA, 68), emotions, however, infinitely complexified by the fact that they surge forth intact and dripping from memories, those “needed documents” Bourgeois tells Bernadac (LBF, 157), yet, in the moment of their surging, this intactness fuses with the equally powerful emotions, at once life-distanced, renewed and matured, and aesthetic, poetic. Houses, cells, lairs and other enfolding or 2

See the Guggenheim Museum website and Nancy Spector’s remarks in the context of Le Défi (1991).

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embracing, ordering structures, including of course the space of a drawing or an installation – all may protect or threaten, energise or imprison, offer “monastic” quietude or screaming terror. They are precisely the spaces of the self’s swirling, Shakespearian dramas where the mind and the heart, the body and the soul can run endlessly the gamut of their infinite imaginableness – that is to say, their reality. “I do not dream”, Louise Bourgeois will tell Penelope Vinding (LBLA, 9), a statement undoubtedly, like others, anti-surrealist, but one that underlines the deep livedness of psychic existence, of what Mignon Nixon has termed Bourgeois’ “fantastic reality”. Certainly an artist such as Bourgeois is aware of what one might think of as her vulnerability as she continuously plunges into long-past or newspurting traumas or fears: the title given to Cell (You better grow up) (1993) spunkily and wittily reveals such self-consciousness. Happily, the choice to deal with such matters via art may be said precisely to be the artist’s way of “growing up”, once more, as with the tactic of irony, a non-dualistic mode of proceeding. Her “fantastic reality” synthesises hurt and delectation, fear and love; it is syncretic and synchronic; it is that place, private and shareable, secret and proffered, where metaphor exquisitely transcends the difference between A and B, offering C, or, as Mallarmé once called it, that “third element, fusible and clear”. Crone and Schaesberg consider Louise Bourgeois’ use of metaphor as implying a “disinhibiting licence for applied ambiguity” (SC, 111), but, beyond self-liberation and that necessary opaqueness of any oeuvre ouverte, it is important also so stress a broad but profound spirituality at the heart of a life’s work involving sacrifice, totemic figuration and a self-expression Bourgeois deems “sacred”. Metaphor, for the André Bréton she may have not overly liked, yet whom, as with others such as Duchamp, she defended, implied, as no doubt for Louise Bourgeois herself, a consciousness of “a certain point in the mind/spirit where life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low cease to be perceived in contradiction”. A non-dualism, indeed, a Baudelairian ontic unity, catapulting self out of its oppositions and antagonisms, its judgements and its differentiations. A sacredness, indeed, of union, communion, of that love Louise Bourgeois’ work persistently, quirkily, troubledly and ever desiringly emblematises in works as diverse as the 2001 pale blue fabric copulating

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Couple, the fearsome and massive (203 x 1158 x 203 cm) painted steel penis-vulva engine titled Twosome (1991), or the 1997 Toi et moi with its towering 14 metres-long and 4 metres-high polished aluminium teeth-like structure. “As long as one loves, one is growing”, she will maintain (TT, 63), her own mode of growth being art, as we have seen, and thus the equation widens to include love: growth=art=love. “Fear for one’s life sparks off erotic pulsion”, Bourgeois perhaps somewhat over-generalisingly further remarks (LBV, 160) – although desire will be strong, certainly, and the erotic can never be far behind, and in her own case is most manifestly synonymous: fear→ desire/love→ art= growth. Not that such an equation always runs smoothly; hence endless recommencement, a rewriting in every creation of the specifics of the equation. “I am unable to make people love me” is a statement which shows that raw life continually can thwart, hence, once more, the arising of further desire, a further “eroticisation of life”, as Bourgeois puts it, and a ceaselessly looping return to art’s transferences and sublime-ations, if I may put it that way. The 1989 Untitled (with foot), that Terrie Sultan examines for Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art,3 offers around its base the inscription “Do you love me?”, highlighting desire, uncertainty, lack, but an understanding too of the ineffable beauties and harmonies beyond reason of eros and, beyond eros no doubt, of agape. The 200 lines of the 1977 Je t’aime, written out like a self-imposed schoolgirl punishment or perhaps an initiatory affirmation, make clear the central, inalienable consciousness of the need for love, for love’s ultimately overriding logic and value. The 1992-93 Cell (Arch of hysteria) offers the male figure we shall see further, indeed almost impossibly arched over in the small 1993 Arch of Hysteria figure, the Cell piece stretched, however, full-length across a fabric base painted with the same inscription, painted now, je t’aime, row upon row. No wonder the full metaphoric expression of the self is considered a sacred gesture by Louise Bourgeois: it brings to the forefront of her spirit, her deep sense of being’s ultimate pertinence, the mysterious solemnity of love, its penetration of her entire being and, implicitly or explicitly, the entirety of her oeuvre.4 If, as she suggests to MarieLaure Bernadac, all of her life experience is rooted in a fear of fall from Grace, she recognises equally, and savingly, that her life’s prin3 4

See also her Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993. “I have a religious temperament”, Louise Bourgeois will maintain (LBP, 138).

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cipal act, her doing, her poiein, has allowed for that critical transposition whereby she lives an art of the fall from Grace (cf. LBF, 156). It is a transmutation of terror into beauty, of lack into a real love, ever deferred though it may be, deflected from its dreamed absoluteness. The last five or six years of Louise Bourgeois’ “multifarious [artistic] creation” (Linda Nochlin) with its “exquisite complexity and elegant wit” (Ewa Lajer-Burchart)5 reveal a practice at once ever selfdiversifying, self-reinventing, and constant in its fidelity to instinct, emotion and the truths they lay before the self. The 2000 ink and crayon Untitled with its seven sets of eyes and two tiny ears on a mouthless and noseless head balanced on an equally crude though necklaced neck, would seem to reveal still that raw obsession with seeing, its franticness, its anormality, its absence of ease and naturalness. Femme couteau (2002) offers a rather terrifying, and large (788 x 702 cm), dramatization of woman’s vulnerability, with its pink fabric naked female figure, one leg already seemingly truncated, prostrate beneath a guillotine-knife primed to slice into the headless body – but, suddenly, we ask ourselves, is the knife the woman’s own head, the figure in effect poised for violent self-destruction? And all of those archetypal ambivalences Bourgeois has lived and struggled with surge once more to the forefront of the mind. The Cells, of course, continue to pulsate and pullulate with enigma and ambiguity, though Bourgeois’ own scenarios can often cut through the onlooker’s uncertainties to purvey a full range of emotion, from horror to compassion (cf. LBP, 137). Cell XIX (Portrait) or Cells XIV, XI and XXIII, all created in 2000, all reveal steel cages with various fabric heads or head-like shapes, now hanging, now laid out and severed, now grown into a nightmarish tripartite mutation. No comfort seems available, no humour, at best the gaping serenity of the single pink face of death on its low funereal display table. The blue fabric 2000 Endless Pursuit showing a legless sewn ball of what we take to be a female figure may be perhaps seen as vaguely comical in its whimsical shape and its sewn-on breasts, but we are sobered by the facial expression, half reminiscent of Munch’s scream, and by the limblessness of the figure, stuck, stranded like Beckett’s Winnie in Oh les beaux jours, but revolverless and Willie-less. Perhaps not too dissimilarly we may view Bourgeois’ striking 2001 Seven in Bed, 5

Reviews offered on the cover of Mignon Nixon’s Fantastic Reality. Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art.

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with its once again pink fabric human figures all cuddled up, as an amused play on the children’s song whereby “one rolls over and another falls out”. And, of course, the embracing and love-making portrayed here shows us all in our elemental, primal gestures, sans quoi rien, we might smilingly argue. But then a closer count reveals nine heads and a certain amount of amorous double-dealing, in consequence. It is all raw, masque-like, even a scene from a Bosch or a Hogarth; if human love is theatricised, it is in the mode of the absurd as much as the ecstatic, and laughter is tensional, perhaps never far from tears. And, then, why seven, we ask: magic become unbewitched? Specific familial mathematics? The blue fabric Couple, also of 2001, is equally overtly erotic, again raw, primitive, and, although it figures implicitly the full depth of amorousness, and fidelity too, the facial expressions hardly reassure and do not convey, are no doubt not intended to convey, dimensions of relationship beyond primordial animal passion that may underpin the latter. The 2002 watercolour and pencil Let the Little Children Come Unto Me one might be inclined to view a little skeptically, given the apprehensions and crises that steal so easily into Louise Bourgeois’ work. And, of course, in this light, we might sense a portrayal of the seduction of the young, the innocent, a terrible contradiction of the ideal adult-child relationship. The biblical allusion is, however, equally forceful and Bourgeois’ art is rife with deep ethical and spiritual desire centred around the ineffable potential and deeply mysterious beauty of loving and relationship. That this delicate piece should evoke such desire should not surprise us in any way. The popping up – and out – of yet another pair of Eyes, in 2001, at Williams College, Massachusetts, is emblematic of that living and plastic gaze ever searching for the kind of ideality and sublimation, sublime-ation, which Let the Little Children Come Unto Me does succeed in bringing into the bright glade of Bourgeois’ consciousness, no matter the fears – hers, ours – that may persist and conceivably deflate such beauty, such truth, such eros become pure agape. So much more could be said, of course, for the creative wellspring of Louise Bourgeois continues to offer its astonishing, ever spurting and merged violences and gentlenesses. If the 2005 Topiary seems to attain to a form of serenity the 2001 Hysterical appeared to disallow, the 2004 set of three prints titled The Reticent Child plunges us back into that matricial vortex of swirling and ultra-tensional and raw energies ever at play in this art. Day and

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Night Louise Bourgeois names two 2007 paintings, one diurnal, the other nocturnal: such dualities persist only in language and our paraître: their deep reality, their true être, transcends them, yearningly.

SEEING BEING: ALEXANDRE HOLLAN To turn our attention now, away from the unique worlds of Saint Phalle and Vautier, Bourgeois and Morellet, towards the work of Alexandre Hollan is, first of all, to realise the stunningly infinite space occupied by plastic feasibility and its alter ego, ontological desire, that unceasing urge at the heart of all doing, all poiein, to find or at least to seek and question the nature – the flavour, the texture, the consistency – of what Gérard Titus-Carmel has recently called one’s “presence to the world”.1 To look at the oeuvre Hollan offers us, from the very early Devant l’arbre (1964) or the 1982 Lauret s’endort or, again, the 1983 Clairière d’Aumelas, down to his most recent charcoals, paintings and washes such as Le Glorieux, chêne vert (2001), Le Gardien d’en haut (2004) or one of the 2005 canvases titled Vie silencieuse, is to appreciate – his own writings urge us in this direction – the extent to which, if “the power of plastic beauty is a strength of the world” (JS2, 33), it remains that the experience of presence, of one’s being plunged into the oneness of what is, is of overriding urgency and significance. Art, thus, does not seek some aloof, hermetic autonomy; its purpose becomes a reconnection with an ontic vastness the eye endeavours to locate in the world observed yet understands as having its roots in the inner world of the observer. “I am what I see” Hollan’s two books of notes covering a period of meditation of over twenty-five years insist. One’s being thus would seem to be equated to the object of one’s seeing. Fusion of being and doing come about, though the doing is not the act of painting per se, but rather the gesture on which, for Hollan, this act critically depends. It is a gesture perhaps less Cartesian than at might first appear to be the case in that it does not suggest a causal, rationalised logic, but rather an improbable definitory statement, even though Hollan’s opting for language reveals the temptation of conceptualisation, and a conceptualisation of elements of experience, “being” and “seeing”, clearly not offering themselves as amenable to anything but that endless supplementarity and analysis language, as Derrida argues, implacably generates. This said, to look at the various Vies silencieuses of, say, the 1995-1999 period (see the reproductions in À l’écoute du visible) or, 1

See Aujourd’hui, poème, October, 2006. 20.

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again, works such as the 1992 Vieil Olivier au Bosc Viel, soirs d’été or the 1996 Le Foudroyé, deux perceptions, is to appreciate a critical reciprocity felt to exist at the heart of the notions, and above all the experiences, of being and seeing: I am what I see/what I see I am: the seen founding the self’s being, in a sense allowing the sight, the vision of a melded onticity. Via the 1996 charcoal Vastitude we gain some sense of that unified field of energy and being Hollan’s declaration je suis ce que je vois represents for him: what is, what is seen – the supposedly separate life-energies of self and other, inner and outer worlds – are lived and revealed as a kind of faceless immensity, yet one that is there, physically and physiologically staged, “material” as the painter says in 2004 (JS2, 78), even though something bordering on the meta-physical, the meta-sensory (cf. ibid.), seems to be at stake as self peers into the obscure yet illumined, offered realm of a being, a presence, visible only in its shimmering near-invisibility. No wonder looking is never equivalent, in Hollan’s lexicon, to seeing: “I do not see what I am looking at”, he writes (JS2, 10), setting up a puzzle only solvable if we can come to appreciate that the focus of Hollan’s gaze requires, critically, a “being with self” (ibid.). Seeing is not so much recognition of external form, as a “recognition of self in perception” (JS2, 18), a recovery – which is at once a fullness and a voidedness (of mental, emotional clutter) – in order that the object of one’s gaze may be seen with this/in its same conjoined plenitude and emptiness. In this way, “painting takes me, Hollan affirms, where I am already” (JS2, 30): being in the mystery of the zen-like experience of presence/absence is a prior condition of the success of the plasticising gesture. It confirms and merges with a pre-established ontic vibration. Only then may plastic beauty become that strength, that force in and of the world Hollan speaks of (cf. JS2, 33). Although we may read his later pseudo-Cartesian statement, “I create because I am” (JS2, 57), as a rather simple affirmation of his instinct for painting’s creativeness, it is important also, I feel, to sense the degree to which it confirms Hollan’s art’s dependency on generating a prior mode of being, a self-creation, that, only, can allow plastic creation to find its true ontic pertinence and value. “Being with oneself. With myself”, a 2002 note insists, “my head emptied. The time of nothingness” (JS2, 75) – and yet it is a nothingness filled with self’s beingness, just as closing one’s eyes, as Hollan writes in 2005 (cf. JS2, 80), allows entry into a presence other than that afforded by the gaze seeking, per-

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haps hurriedly, perhaps anxiously, to latch, analytically, intellectually, on to external detail of trees, objects, faces. Seeing, that goingbeyond-looking, whilst giving rise to plastic forms that the world needs, yet remains, for Alexandre Hollan, in a crucial synonymity with the experience of invisibility, of inner ontic states of something far in excess of the signs art finally produces. This something we have seen Hollan term presence, and his conception and experience of what he calls vastness, that oneness Bonnefoy argues form and its analysis risk obscuring, are central to the equations seeing generates. “In visual dissatisfaction, Hollan writes, is hidden the need for unity” (JS2, 108). But let us look more pointedly at the creations Hollan has given himself to for some forty years, and, to begin with, some earlier work. Lauret s’endort (cf. JS1, 25),2 a 1982 charcoal of reasonably significant proportions (65 x 100 cm), is an exquisitely delicate piece, far beyond conventional impressionism, fleeing the abstract equally, yet floating in a space of perception that, in its desire to enter the field of energy constituted by place falling into its own deep interior mystery sensed by the seeing/unseeing gaze of the artist’s inner vibrational serenity, offers, can offer, neither what we think of as firm delineated form, nor a form evacuating the shimmering, hazy yet recognisable depth of the real’s presence in favour of some abstractive mathematicising. Another somewhat smaller charcoal of the same period is the 1983 Clairière d’Aumelas (cf. JS2, 27). Here too we witness Hollan’s simultaneous focus and unfocussing with regard to lived, and loved, affinitary, chosen, place3: the title is explicit but we can appreciate the subtle nature of a gesture of being and doing that volatilises not to destroy but to recompose according to the expanded, wide-embracing vision of one seeing and searching through form for the deep energies the latter both masks and reveals. The beautiful watercolour of a year later, La Maison cachée (cf. JS1, 90) is no doubt predicated on the same principle serving a similar ontic experience. Far from the realism of a Corot or a Courbet, we yet are equally far from those varyingly abstract and geometric offerings of a Newman, a Reinhardt or a Morellet. An “initiatory realism”, as Yves Bonnefoy once wrote, yes, however, for taking us to the lived, sensed – and not intellectually recorded or rationally experimental – heart of 2 3

Lauret is a small village in L’Hérault. Aumelas is an area in the Languedoc-Roussillon region, also in L’Hérault.

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self’s spiritual experience of presence; and, yes, a very particularised abstraction in the sense only that the artist Hollan is alert to his beingin-the-world and thus the shapes and colours of the latter, yet ever endeavours to paint – and see – the real at the intersection of its ephemerality and its continuity, its manifestation and that trembling, flickering epiphany which is near-synonymous with dis-appearance, formlessness, pure non-material energy. In different ways Hollan’s early work already seeks to bear witness to this interstitial experience. Vieux Chêne vert d’Aumelas (1989, JS1, 84) is a small charcoal depicting not the precise form, texture or detailed composition of the oak’s branches and foliage, but the broad energy field the tree deploys and moves, lives, in. Not dissimilarly, though the manner and technique are utterly changed, the 1971 wash, Disparition du peuplier (cf. JS1, 45), provides no rationally coherent, mathematically definitive portrayal of visible realness, but rather an image deconstructing its own flat intelligibility and opting instead for a vision of presence merged with its own “disappearance”, its intangibleness, its ineffableness. And, going back as far as 1964, Devant l’arbre (cf. EV, 71) reveals, via the bold and raw power of its thick black strokes that may seem to possess something of the abstract expressiveness of various works of a Bram van Velde or a Raoul Ubac, a nevertheless firm intention to relate strongly and clearly the emotion and sensation of an inner world penetrating that of a phenomenon whose deep beingness-in-relation-to-the-self is felt to be conveyable only in primal, organic, unrefined form. The 2001 acrylic and watercolour « Le Glorieux », chêne vert may serve to push further our understanding of what for Hollan is the crucial intersecting of self and world that art occasions, and the vital role form plays in this intersecting. “I have within myself, he writes in Je suis ce que je vois (46), worlds that need impressions, blind worlds, that seek to feel out a tree, be warmed by light, breathe”. Art’s point of departure is only secondarily, though critically, connected to what we think of as outer reality, but it remains “the experience of inner life” (JS1, 40). All “image”, as Hollan most insightfully remarks, is first and foremost lived within (cf. JS1, 13): what is found “outside”, in a clearing in Aumelas, in the “sleep” of Lauret, in the endlessly portrayed trees of Hollan’s oeuvre, is thus not a mimetic reproduction of given externalness but a patiently, and at times impatiently, matured reflection of the harmonies and turbulences of a vast,

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obscure, transpersonal incarnateness requiring a “descent into myself” (JS1, 36) in order to trigger this birth. A birth whereby “living form” – for all, in Hollan, is crucially focussed upon life: inner states of being and sensing and those of known, long-caressed external things and states – can attain to some coincidence with an “invisibleness” buoying it up, yet without yielding to esotericism or some pseudo-Platonic essentialism… Hollan’s inner need reveals an instinctive desire for that “truth” (cf. ibid.), that grounding, that the living forms of the world can provide: “then only, through [such experience of] form, can one become sensitive to the flow of time, to space, to the void” (JS1, 12). Of course Hollan’s equations are complex and paradoxical: they seek not to speak surface experience, our daily chatter, but to articulate deep ontic drives, to discover paths of being capable of opening himself, and us, to realms of highly energised harmony and serenity we may have thought both self and world unable to see, to truly know, in the midst of the bustle and turmoil of the quotidian. Plastic form thus can become that place where the barely thinkable depth of being may be “touched” (cf. JS1, 72). If, with Hollan, such form often seems to implode into what underpins it, it is because form, whilst remaining essential – and the titles serve greatly here –, seeks itself to know the energy that underpins and bears it up – that facelessness which authorises face, that seeming vacuousness from which all visibility emerges, that void overflowing with being. And it is in a not dissimilar way that the self-world equation plays out for Hollan: the emptiness of self’s desire seeking in the forms of trees or occasional other objects a material anchoring, a vital sensory, sensual filling, a “perfection of matter” that, yet, is ever perceived as imbricated with the “non-material world” (JS2, 21). “Presence needs forms”, Hollan will powerfully and simply write, an equation applying equally to direct self-world experience and to that intermediary we term art, scene of interdependency, interpenetration, the entering of the space of vastness where the breathing of the self (cf. JS2, 39) and what seems other fuse in a unity not disallowing a consciousness of difference, of separateness (cf. JS2, 28). Endless works testify to this experience and understanding: Vie silencieuse, 1997 (cf. EV, 91) or Vie silencieuse, 1994 (cf. EV, 77) or, again, the 1998 « Gardien d’en haut », chêne vert (cf. EV, 63). To gaze upon these three paintings, but many others too, is to become aware of a number of additional critically pertinent factors in

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Alexandre Hollan’s aesthetico-ontological démarche, factors I shall argue centre around questions of remaining, choosing/allowing, and the epiphanic. There are in Hollan’s oeuvre a very considerable number of paintings bearing the title Vie silencieuse and it is reasonable further to maintain that the above « Gardien d’en haut », chêne vert (1998) or the charcoal bearing the same title and from the same year (cf. EV, 62) or « L’Ancien », olivier de Montpeyroux, a small 1966 charcoal (cf. JS1, 75), or, again, the 1993 watercolour Espace lumineux (cf. JS1, 93) – that all such works could quite easily be offered the title of Vie silencieuse. Hollan’s work is undoubtedly obsessive, for it is affectively and existentially highly motivated and focused in its intention. This, however, without orchestrating itself according to some ostensible principle of seriality or experimentation. The adoration and wonderment before the things of the real, matched by the unceasing impulse to give oneself over to a doing, a making, that will moreover, allow access to a true, or truer, experience of presence, a deeper insertion of self into the mystery of being – such a project requires patience, the determination to wait, to remain before, and with, the real, “to remain before the tree, before a fruit, before objects” (JS1, 12), in an expectancy and a hope that seek to dwell within form in order to know and live the very alterity that buoys it up. The task of remaining is yet not finishable, for it engages with the ineffable, the silent, the exhausting but inexhaustible unspokenness of self-world presence. 4 Sameness here is but an illusion, for difference and, in a sense, endless deferral reign: the real – of the other and of the self – is becoming, ephemeral, vibrationally and energetically shifting, and remaining is that gesture that, rather than defying this, honours it, time and time again, living, in-dwelling as Hopkins might say, the logic of its beingness. To remain, and produce exquisite remainders of one’s presence to presence such as the 1996 charcoal Olivier, Aubes d’été (cf. JS1, 35), the 2003 acrylic « Le Glorieux », grand chêne vert le soir (cf. JS2, 120), or else the 1994 watercolour and acrylic Vie silencieuse (cf. JS1, 108), is to enter the dynamic equation Hollan himself at times alludes to, of choice and allowing, concerted action and absorption, acceptance, of the given. Certainly Hollan consciously se4

This tensional play between exhaustedness and unfinishableness is a potent factor in the poetics of Gérard Titus-Carmel, and, indeed, may be said to drive the engine of all powerful creative oeuvres. See also JS1, 34.

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lects where to place his attention. “A poorly chosen subject, one badly approached, poisons and deforms me”, he unambiguously declares (JS1, 14). This is most particularly the case with the natures mortes devoted to objects whose “relationships” he either “likes or seeks out” (JS1, 47). The movement towards the other, the real, is thus notably affinitary, psych(olog)ically charged, though it is perhaps less reasoned than instinctual, a choice impulsive, pulsional, yet not quite surreally “convulsive”. The movement may be perceived as “wild”, one of “attack” (cf. JS2, 59), but relaxation, calm are equally required, a kind of lightness of being actually negating this attacking lunge in order to “allow form to come”, to emerge. The balance is fine, one of “passive activity” Hollan suggests in a 1997 note (JS2, 14), a subtle, no doubt ever self-adjusting harmonisation of desire, intention, will to connect and interpenetrate, on the one hand, and, on the other, an opening of the self’s conscious and unconscious eye to allow, to give one’s assent to the unknown that “filters through” (JS, 44), colour that “emerges from everywhere” (JS2, 108), being that is offered and cannot be bullied or manhandled with impunity. In brief, Hollan desires the epiphanic, that which “appears” (JS1, 27) in its inner light yet shareable, silent life “recovered” (JS1, 13) from ambient sound and fury, being, a “space” of being, that surges forth via “effacement” (JS1, 27). Art: the love of the emergent, the epiphanic, the mysterious light-filled incarnation of a “presence” (JS1, 19) so easily missed if insistence is too flagrant, hasty, imitative, surfacedriven, rationally structured. What have Hollan’s critics privileged with regard to an oeuvre so focussed, so intense, so conscious of its own obsessive horizons of hope and accomplishment? Yves Bonnefoy’s second book devoted to a creative gesture and process that clearly deeply resonates with him, seeks to bring out the deep pertinence of an art moving through form to a quasi-mystical but spiritually anchored experience of “the tree beyond image”.5 His earlier essay on Morandi and Hollan insisted upon the latter’s non-mimetic manner, that “release from limit produced at the heart of perception” (EV, 13) allowing for an indistinction of reality’s “parts” to come about, and a consequent convergence re-establishing the oneness of presence. To thus experience and paint the silence of beingness is, for Bonnefoy, to have 5

L’Arbre au-delà des images, 2003, appearing after th 1995 La Journée d’Alexandre Hollan.

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moved beyond the temptations of the conceptual, reductive analysis of the world to a form of consent to its unnameable mystery. Louise Warren, in her various writings on Alexandre Hollan,6 dwells upon the intensity and intimacy of the artist’s relationship to the real. She sees him as engaged in an ongoing, unendable ontological pilgrimage taking him to the at once shifting, turbulent, and at times serene bosom of inner and outer worlds. Sameness and difference stem from both focus and struggle with the internal and external becomingness of states and moods, and the seeing attained occurs at the juncture of presence and absence, infiniteness and finitude. Pierre Wat looks initially at Hollan’s “predecessors”, from Poussin, Lorrain and Corot to Cézanne and Giacometti – a heritage that Judit Geskó also examines –, but also at the contemporary and avowed influences of Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Morandi, “a master for me” (EV, 71). “Seizing the infinite variety of sensations”, in the experience of otherness (EV, 72) – a tree, a face, a few objects – is to return to deep primordial, original relationship and mode of being: painting affords access to the latter’s forms but traverses them, seeks out harmonies they cannot provide in and of themselves and to which the suite of Vies silencieuses accompanying Wat’s essay bears beautiful witness (EV, 66-92). If an occasional commentator such as Felix Studinka chooses to dwell upon the rather more “technical aspects” of Alexandre Hollan’s plastic production, we should not be surprised: the artist himself commonly speaks in his notes of questions of colouring and blackness, spirallings and continuous line drawing, physical relation to the object under scrutiny and setting up a still life, and so on. Studinka’s essay privileges the particular significance of the immediate availability of all needed materials, the rigour of Hollan’s work habits, and his body position in relation to tree or pots and fruit. Pierre-Alain Tâche’s study, whilst discussing the central logic of Hollan’s art of the invisible, examines also, pointedly, the artist’s principal modes of execution: charcoal, paint, wash. Nevertheless, most critical work devoted to Hollan, though inevitably conscious of means and manners, tends to seek to articulate the global logic, the ontology, they 6

See the Selected Bibliography. Alexandre Hollan and Louise Warren have recently collaborated in the publication of Incertitudes (2007), this stemming from the exhibition at Trans-en-Provence and, less directly, from the 2006 exhibition of Hollan’s work at Joliette, Québec, which Warren curated.

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imply. This is true of Edit Sasvári’s essay, where Hollan’s poetics of seeing is thought through in relation to the various “stages” of his gesture: Le chêne qui s’envole, works I-III (2002), are adduced as evidence (cf., EV, 40-41); or, similarly, in connection with the different “states” Hollan can portray of the same phenomenon: L’Espace du silence, pieces I-II (2001), beautifully serve to illustrate the shifting how (Sasvári’s title is Voir l’arbre? Comment?) behind the vision (cf. HEV, 41). Michael Brophy’s study is closely interwoven with a reading of certain lines in Bonnefoy’s De grands blocs rouges and sees Hollan’s art as aspiring to, perhaps achieving, that “repose in dreaming manifestness, laying one’s head, eyes shut, upon the shoulder of things” that Bonnefoy’s text from La vie errante evokes, and that speaks of a vibrational unity of being beyond intelligibleness and the structures of rationalising perception. Marie-José Mondzain deals with the way in which a contemplative manner contends with the movement of the real through a creative process of composition-cumdecomposition, the purpose of such process being, it is again argued, the attainment of that serenity exemplified by the two superb 2001 acrylics « Le Glorieux », chêne, I-II. Andrea Verba has written of the tensions of a démarche that moves both towards the real and yet away from “marked evidence” in a gesture that might seem to leave presence “impoverished” (HEV, 26). Various Vies silencieuses (cf. HEV, 24-34) are clearly held to narrate these tensions which resolve themselves in the logic, and experience, of an “inner image”(HEV, 29) whereby the “object” finds itself transported into a larger ontic space and immanence. Helga Muth maintains that such transgression involves a dissolution of the usual “categories of reality and fiction, imitation and invention, of, too, depth and surface”, this resulting in “a spirituality of things”. It is no wonder that the poet, Jacques Ancet, has recently written, in Aujourd’hui, poème, that what is ultimately at stake in Hollan’s oeuvre is “the limitless, beginningless and endless latency of the indescribable, inexhaustible, unfathomable real”. A latency of “material ecstasy”, he suggests.7 Before moving to some concluding remarks centred on Hollan’s most recent canvases and drawings, I should like, of necessity, most compactly, to come to grips with three issues or “equations”: visibility and invisibility; comprehension and accompaniment; calm7

Other pertinent critical work by, for example, Éric Bonnet and Jean-Claude Desmergès, may be found in Alexandre Hollan: Temps et perception (2000).

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ness and movement. If the perceptible constitutes a vital, often longsought point de repère, it is clear that Hollan’s charcoals and acrylics and washes are far from representational: they can be vague, obscure, indecipherable to the point of near-absolute abstraction of form visible to the rational eye. It is unsurprising that Yves Bonnefoy, whilst appreciating the conceivable connections to Morandi, yet sees Hollan’s work in some important counter-distinction to the Italian artist’s naturas mortas and paesaggios. Without their titles, Hollan’s three 1998 charcoals all titled « Le Gardien d’en haut », chêne vert (cf. EV, 62-3) or his 2001 watercolour and acrylic « Le Glorieux », chêne vert (cf. EV, 65) – these, simply by way of example, for almost all pieces would serve as well – would become unsituatable, unidentifiable, lost, though yet visible as pure form, in the occultation of their precise perceptibleness. This “danger” Hollan is aware of (cf. JS1, 36): the shift from form to formlessness. But both the titles bestowed upon his work and the daily notes to himself, a selection of which we now can now read in his two volumes Je suis ce que je vois, thus move to counter this danger, perhaps even this temptation of pure, floating, aterrestrial invisibility. Blackness, Hollan acknowledges, is a mode of being, sensing and doing which is powerfully attractive for him (cf. JS2, 70-71). It can obliterate – as can pure light – all recognisable states and contextualisable, telluric modes of presence. Total voidedness yet remains that which Hollan’s art eschews. Just as the invisible is sought in and through the perceptible, so does Hollan ceaselessly strive to allow the perceptible, the sense of the things of the earth, to shine through even the greatest, most blinding – black or white – experience of invisibleness. Things, Hollan has written, not unlike a Francis Ponge or a Guillevic, “want to be understood” (JS1, 12). To understand, for Hollan, however, what does this imply? Not clear-cut explication, not the conveyance of information that may be rationally, scientifically laid out, nor the production of hard, definitive meaning. Rather does comprehension involve an intuitive sensing and journeying with, holding to, the other, the object of one’s attention. A painterly prehensile gesture connecting self with the other. The com- or cum is the sign of a merging, an accompaniment that is, as Hollan has recently suggested, “ecstatic”, “almost hysterical” even (JS2, 64). In brief, far beyond the realm of analysis and intelligibleness as we usually appreciate it. A comprehending that is of the order of sensation, rather (cf. ibid.),

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giving access to a presence “lived” (cf. ibid.) in a dazzlement that renders naming unfeasible whilst simultaneously allowing the experience of an ineffable mystery undividing outside and inside, other and self. Yves Bonnefoy has spoken on various occasions throughout his vast critical writings of the dangers of “repose”. Often he has in mind the symbolist temptations of aesthetic transcendence faced with the trials of the real, but it is a generalised ethical position, applicable to the image in its broadest sense: an intellectual construct that encourages the illusion of some stable, restful and ideal refuge from the ephemeral and the uncertain. There is no doubt that calm and serenity are high on Alexandre Hollan’s ontological agenda; and no doubt either that many canvases may readily be held to have achieved some satisfaction of the artist’s, and the man’s, desire. But in Hollan there is no retreat from, no evacuation of, the earth. And there is an immediate acceptance of the ceaseless “quivering” and dancing of the real (JS1, 63-4): “I sought calm and encountered movement”, he acknowledges (JS1, 67) – a “perpetual movement”, he adds, one not to be finessed, parenthesised, but, rather, embraced if the truth of presence is to be lived and known, “understood”. No doubt as for Bonnefoy – De grands blocs rouges, from La Vie errante, confirms this, as Michael Brophy has also argued – the serenity sought is one of assent to what is, a kind of self-immersion in the vibratory (and hence multiple, shifting, though totalised, “monochromatic” (cf. JS1, 101)) harmony of being. For Hollan, this vibratory calmness allows for the experience of depth, of a deep presence beyond categories of self and other even though flowing through their channels. Vibration mingles, fuses, makes music of being, restores oneness. “The need for repose, he writes, a vital need to return to darkness, to the tree’s mass, to sleep within it, to forget the outside” (JS2, 75). If we may read here a desire to recover some womb-like, undifferentiated, primal state, let us not forget that such an act and place continues to quiver and pulse with the energy of things of the earth, a serenity of self within the vibratory, breathing bosom of incarnateness, beyond gnosis, at the heart of a profound consent. What of the most recent work of Alexandre Hollan? If we have already sensed that it is unwavering in its purpose and faithful to the worth and meaning of a practice of some nearly forty years, we shall not be mistaken. Take, for example, the various pieces, all ti-

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tled « Le petit Poussin », chêne vert of 2000 (see EV, 49-51). All five offer the grace, the infinite delicacy of Hollan’s gesture, a subtleness that is in no way intellectual, cerebral, even aesthetically strategic, but conveying a subtleness at the heart of reality itself, now more transparent, now more opaque, as with the four acrylics on paper, whereas the charcoal manages to meld the evanescent wispiness of the beloved oak and its more secret recesses yet pierced by that same light that also frames its floating presence. As ever, these five little “Poussins”- one only need glance at works such as Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun or Summer by the painter of Les Andelys to appreciate Hollan’s intimate celebratory naming of the trees he loves and, like Poussin, chooses to honour – hover between the “absence” of a near-ineffableness and a clearly felt plenitude that induces Hollan’s insistent, though never serial, caress of things that are. As ever, too, art and life become essentially indistinguishable, and, though the artist’s many notes on this joinedness (and, inevitably, its tensions) might seem to risk over-conceptualisation, the mystery of experience – and doing, the artist’s plastic poiein – ever holds sway over the labyrinth of language. To produce these works, or the 2000 gouache, « Le Foudroyé », vieux chêne vert (cf. EV, 52), or the different, indeed very different, gouaches with charcoal of 2003-2004, all titled « Le Déchêné, grand chêne (cf. JS2, 12, 96, 103), returns the artist, firstly, to the place and phenomenon that have ceaselessly drawn him back for many summers, and, secondly, to a gesture that may be that of art but is simultaneously, and, I should argue, more importantly, a gesture of return to the enigmatic upliftment of self in the midst of earth’s incarnational secrecy yet livable. « Le Gardien d’en haut », chêne vert, another 2004 charcoal (cf. JS2, 42), superbly evokes this latter secrecy yet accessed via contemplation, a truly meditative state whereby reality reveals its nudity, its bare thereness, an “invisibility” that is yet filled with vision and the breadth of a deep realness. L’Autre Regard, yet another charcoal from 2004 (cf. JS2, 81), could incline us to think of, say, Redon’s Les Yeux clos, but we enter here, directly, into a shared and manifest experience of deep alterity, its tranquilly pulsating bare visibleness tenderly, almost mystically, embraced. The 2003 acrylic « Le Glorieux », grand chêne vers le soir, somewhat larger than most of Hollan’s works but compact nevertheless (56 x 76 cm), is a truly magnificent painting giving us a sense of the profound strangeness of

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presence – the world’s to us, ours to the world: the light that reveals, the darkness that hides yet, in this divine crepuscular glory, offer the experience of the shadowy centre of a being where self and other may join. Vie silencieuse, indeed, far beyond the grasp of language’s often noble reaching, yet towards which a little pigment or carbon, fired by a desire to be at the heart of being’s silent energy, may strangely succeed in pointing us.

SPIRALLING, INFINITY, TAUTOLOGY: CLAUDE VIALLAT One of the most noticeable features of the oeuvre of Claude Viallat as it may now be said to be constituted is the persistent, indeed near-ubiquitous refusal to offer individual pieces titles. This is largely evident from the earliest days of its production – I am thinking of, say, the 1966 diluted tar resin on stretched jute canvas, Sans titre (cf. CVDT, 74)1 or the 1976 Sans titre with its corrosive colourings on curtain hem (cf. ibid., 126) – down to recent work such as the 1995 acrylic on assembled tarpaulins Sans titre (cf. ibid., 248) or the very beautiful 1999 Sans titre, an 80-metre acrylic on tarpaulin pseudo-carpet commissioned by the City of Toulouse for the banks of the Garonne river (cf. ibid., 280-81). Other artists, of course, resort to the tactic of untitling, but not to the extent Viallat does. To untitle is to unsituate, in a sense to de-signify, to disentitle meaning as we might understand it to be varyingly attached to, say, Beuys’ The Pack or Kabakov’s Fête no. 4 or, again, Broodthaers’ Le Problème noir en Belgique. Untitling art is to push it towards its intrinsicalness, towards a kind of strange anonymity of action and product stemming from their de-individualising. Alertness, whether direct or symbolic, to the flagrancy of the socio-politico-philosophical world is thus disengaged, and the viewer finds himself or herself plunged into an experience of difference and yet sameness or continuity, floating on a sea of colour and form without the usual paddles with which to provide the self with orientation. This said, no aggression is sensed, nor really anything that could be thought of as provocation – this, despite Viallat’s finally developed “deconstructive” programme to which I shall soon return. No, rather the unnaming of what is offered releases us into that unnameable sensual and most broadly spiritual caress of the activity and the resulting product we term the work of art, with its sameness and its never-sameness. And, indeed, the other extremely noticeable feature of Viallat’s work is – beyond very early pieces of the late 1950’s such as his Portrait de mon père (1957) or his Nature morte (1957) (cf. CVDT, 286); beyond his various knottings and nettings which will continue into the 1970’s (cf. ibid., 98-99, 290-91); beyond, too, the early fascination with “objects”, found wood and stone, for example, minimally 1

See Claude Viallat, Galerie Daniel Templon, 2000, with its thoughtful studies by Alfred Pacquement, Bernard Ceysson and Raphael Rubinstein.

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transmuted or interwoven with various materials (cf. ibid., 56-7, 6670, 244-7), a fascination that has never dwindled; beyond, finally, Viallat’s life-long instinctive and passionate play with the realities and the forms of fighting and wild bulls (cf. ibid., 8-9, 32-3) – beyond, then, these significant and largely formative though evolving modes of his art (which I shall intermittently examine), what strikes us as inalienable, absolute and original, is the seemingly obsessive recurrence of that signature motif, singly offered upon occasion, but ordinarily in multiple, profuse rank upon rank providing what initially appears to be a teeming constancy, a constancy yet illusory in its ever so slightly shifting hand-painted form and, so frequently, in its stunning myriad of bold or faded, harmonious or contrastive colourings. “Small differences make newness each time”, Viallat will affirm (CVEL, 7), and, it is true, Viallat’s work is predicated on the subtle uniqueness of ever surging near-same, self-echoing and near-clonal form. If we take, for example, the vast 1995 suspended ceiling tapestry for the Hôtel Dieu in Paris (cf. ibid., 242-3), we have something of the classical mosaicalness Viallat’s gesture can produce, with its hundreds of “bean” motifs shimmering in their nuanced yellowness upon blue and green yellow-flecked backgrounds. Yet to look at the 1966 Sans titre (cf. ibid., 75) with its gelatine and colourings on stretched canvas is to appreciate the nucleus from which such immense multiplication springs: one single “bean”, but exquisite in the difference not only of its colour, but also of its context, its support, its materiality, and thus, too, the difference of its place upon the aestheticoemotional gamut Viallat’s work ceaselessly explores. The Hôtel Dieu creation may thus involve a kind of self-pastiching or self-parodying, as Michel Griscelli has written (CVEL, 14), but the “palindrome” such self-exploration produces is ever one of freshness, an inimitableness spurting forth from a fountain of given oneness. “Advances are tiny displacements, Viallat will tell Griscelli, large displacements very small shifts” (CVEL, 21): it is a most modest way of expressing the infinitely elastic nature of creativity, that multifarious, kaleidoscopic blossoming of the small original bud of feasibility. That the 1966 “model” above or the diluted tar resin on canvas of the same year, equally titled Sans titre, can mutate, variegate and constantly rediscover a potential for that fresh beauty and energy, visible, livable in, let us say, the 1978 Sans titre with its acrylic luxuriance on assembled tarpaulins (cf. CVDT, 138) or the 1994 Sans titre with its

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more modest and sober acrylics on a bed sheet (cf. ibid., 240) – this is, in effect, cause for very great celebration. Yves Michaud has quite rightly spoken of Viallat’s work as one “without a masterpiece” (VHM, 17)2 – as, that is, we normally understand this term –, for the masterliness is spread everywhere, it lies in the totality of Viallat’s work which operates a kind of endless mise en abyme of itself, something Viallat is, unsurprisingly, quite conscious of (cf. VHM, 38). For him, what is at stake is not this or that specific product or aesthetically individualised painting (even though certain pieces we may deem more achieved than others), but, rather, painting as a vast ongoing practice, art as life, as it were, where all instants and instances, however miscellaneous, constitute a unified flow. “An art in which prodigalness is law” Michel Griscelli writes of Viallat (CVEL, 11),3 and the truth of this is fairly defensible if we look at the degree of saturation of Viallat’s varyingly definable “canvases”, that bounteous application of form and colour emphasised, however, paradoxically, by the seemingly limited and even oddly frugal means and components underpinning such profusion and lavish multiplication. If then, Viallat himself will speak of the way (his) painting “proliferates, bursts open [and] moves in all directions” (ibid., 9), this may be understood both as a general statement: all painting is the explosive, copious distribution of paint(ing); and as a reference to his own work-as-a-continuous-gesture-and-phenomenon: his oeuvre is seen as what Yves Michaud terms “a veritable flood of painting” disallowing concentration upon particular works (cf., VHM, 16). The latter point is, of course, countered by the division of this flow into specific pieces, but the argument is not thereby invalidated, as we have already suggested. The baroqueness of Viallat’s work, however, its lush superabundance, its munificent self-expenditure, remains in tensional relation to the simplicities and reduced criteria out of which it pours itself “prodigally” forth. Emilie Ovaere deems Viallat’s work to be “baroque pop art” and, although we are far from a Richard Hamilton or an Andy Warhol or a Roy Lichtenstein, it is a designation capturing something of what can take place at the intersection of aggregation and reduction, the prolific and the telescoped, maximum and minimum. If there is baroqueness in Viallat it comes about via a generous, ever self-recycling gesture fusing pleonasm, 2 3

See Viallat. Hommage(s) à Matisse, 2005. See Claude Viallat, espaces limitrophes, 1997.

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self-paraphrasing, and reinvention, self-renewal. Proliferation of tangible difference is, in a sense, ever synonymous with the proliferation of residual sameness. Then there is a secondary baroqueness in Viallat which urges us to push still further our discussion of the fundamental character of his art, a character teemingly plural in its uniqueness: classical, certainly, in both its concentration of means and objects of attention, and in its spontaneous self-orchestration that ever imposes order over chaos in the midst, so often, of proliferation: amonst so many works one might point, almost at random, to the 1987 diptych Sans titre with its chromatic and geometric echoes (cf. CVDT, 195), or to the elegant gathering of the 1974 Galet et bois avec empreintes (ibid., 295); oriental, too, in the mosaical design and assembly of many pieces, large and small, on diversified supports, this at once simple and complex checkering spontaneously stemming from Viallat’s fascination with Islamic compositional traditions: the 1993 Nevers Cathedral stained class windows constitute a telling testimony to such aesthetic orientation; primitive, furthermore, in the use of nonconventional surface materials and supports as well as a certain conceptualisation linking his gestures to those characteristic of both primitive art and prehistoric cave art. If Diego Callovini (cf. CVEP) 4 can understandably suggest that Viallat’s work implies “some sort of tabula rasa”, thinking no doubt of his avowedly deconstructive (but also reconstructive) project, it is thus essential to recognise the consciousness Viallat has of this project’s insertion within larger historical and cultural patterns. The various acknowledged hommages Viallat has offered us over very many years – homages to Matisse’s sensitivity to colour and decorativity, to Pollock’s automatism and his allover method, to Parmentier’s neutrality, and so on, for the list of admirations is long: Picasso, Cézanne, Chabaud, Veronese, Giorgione, etc. –, all such deferent but free-wheeling works reveal simultaneously connections and disconnectings, and it is in this regard no doubt important to note Viallat’s insistence upon the fact that all homage is after-the-fact: the self’s independent painterly activity is suddenly perceived as delicately, unconsciously woven into the fabric of the other. No imitation, no pursuit of the other; on the contrary, as with Pop Art, that permanent and natural, automatic need for the self’s art 4

Cf. Claude Viallat, Edizioni Peccolo, 2000.

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“to be itself”, as Viallat tells Michel Griscelli (cf. CVEL, 17). NeoDada and Fluxus will not draw his inclination, despite friendships with artists such as Ben Vautier, nor in any reasonable way, despite that kind of paradoxical minimality I have argued lies at the heart of Viallat’s rich and swarming ampleness, can we attach his gesture to that of some arte povera, Manzoni’s for example, or Mario Merz’s. Even though a major founder of the Supports/Surfaces group, which clearly constituted a vital locus of meditation and exchange with regard to the material and conceptual rudiments of art, Viallat soon takes his distance. Ultimately, recognition of father figures or adhering to contemporary collectives is not central to his own doing, his own poiein: “Painting is for me a matter of transgression, not filiation”, he will declare in 1997 (CVEL, 18): congenial disobedience to conceivable fixities, constraining conceptualisations, possible manners. Rather, art as endless, daily, momentary self-discovering, painting not as a fetish, a congealment, but as an object of knowledge, as Christian Prigent senses too (cf. VMP, 58). The history of art is, for Viallat, essentially a reservoir of fluvial, ever flowing, becoming knowledge of our being and our doing. Viallat’s art, like all art, arguably, thus offers a mosaic of cultural divergence and convergence, but its primordial mode of baroqueness, of “pearly irregularity”, distinction, originality, lies, I should argue, in its practice of a ceaseless primordial gesture of painting, almost faceless, yet of overriding ontological, rather than aesthetic, significance for the self. It is important not to lose sight of the delicacy and deep pertinence of this latter equation as we move to a consideration of what, in most practical terms – but, in effect, ever most urgently ontological terms, simultaneously –, the plastic gesture means to Claude Viallat. “Henceforth, he has long insisted, [one must] take as one’s subject matter […] painting itself” (VHM, 21) and Prigent quotes Viallat’s still more flagrant and radical declaration: “To think through painting in our time demands thinking it through in the materiality its history displays” (VMP, 57)5: painting’s materials, its matter, that is, along with its form, the role and nature of colour, and the broad context in which painting and art in general performs and shows itself. Painting, art, is primarily, primally, matter: in Viallat’s case this will involve wood, stone, cork, iron, glass, canvas, tarpaulin, bedsheets, parasols, 5

Cf. Viallat, la main perdue, 1996. Pierre Wat picks up upon this “terribly cultivated” quality of Viallat’s painting in a recent essay (Claude Viallat, 2005, 15).

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tent material, upholstery cloth, sacking, tablecloth, acrylic paint, dye, corrosive colouring, tar, gelatine, and so on. Painting’s frame has gone: painting now is supple, collapsible, newly mobile, adaptable to many surfaces indoors and outdoors, may take to the traditional wall or drape itself across floors or grass or river embankments, just as it is “done” on the floor or ground, “beneath me”, as Viallat smilingly and provocatively tells us – not only does painting lose its classical and rather grave frontality, but it is assimilated to defecation, and here, admittedly, we are in tune with Manzoni. And, furthermore, some work, mainly early pieces such as the 1971 Toile déposée dans la rue or other open-air work in Aubais, Argelès-sur-Plage or Coaraze, may be exposed to the effect of the elements, rain, sun, and thus involve a reinsertion of art in the world’s matter and light and a nondifferentiation of self’s work and nature’s. Traditional aesthetics of tight control, refinement, caressive beautification, give way to a much broader, freer conception and practice clearly both reminiscent of prehistoric art’s intimate imbrication with beauty or simple aesthetico-ontological pertinence and authenticity of the world’s capacity to create directly via its intrinsic physicality. We may note, too, Viallat’s not uncommon use of dirty cloth “supports”, a practice we may wish to associate with his aforementioned scatological remark, but which it is probably much more important to see in the context of factors such as his general devalorising of the accepted and his revaluing of the natural, the given; a desire for simplicity, unpretentiousness, ease, letting go of pointless criteria; the ancient artist’s habit, even, of reusing old canvases, and the modern’s of using whatever comes to hand. We have already seen something of Claude Viallat’s alertness to form which, on the one hand, reveals a fascination with its material intricacies, the mosaical, geometrical and depersonalised, in a sense, also, de-semanticised, profuse order of Islamic painting and ceramics, yet, on the other hand, shows an element of near-flippant disregard for the conceivable significance of form in his eternal recycling of the same bean-bone-chainlink-mesh-rear view of torso-Provençal carpentry motif, one that on larger creations Viallat paints with the aid of a cut-out and that, at all events, claim no representational value. Daniel Dobbels can thus speak of Viallat’s ethics of “modesty” (cf. CVCM, 14), for the exploration here of the “matter” of form pretends to no intellectualisation, no clever and finally calculated mathematicisation,

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each work, what Claude Minière calls each opni or objet poétique non identifié, aspires to nothing more than its inclusion in the endlessly unfurled materialness formed by that “single and immense ideal canvas” Viallat deems his entire oeuvre to be in the process of generating (cf. CVCM, 12, 15). This said, it is clear that form and what Viallat terms “interform”, all form impinging on the dominant motif in the all-over, formally interpertinent saturation of painting – a peinture, he will also remind Xavier Girard, that is never a tableau (VHM, 22) – preoccupies this “materialist”, one whose many hommages, Griscelli has rightly observed, paradoxically feature artistic “heritage running counter to the most sententious formalism” (CVEL, 15). Symmetry there is, and harmonies of many orders, in Viallat’s ceaseless “joinery”, as Marcelin Pleynet can call it (CVSP, np), 6 but what remains critical in this materialisation of form is the stratagem-free spontaneity of its conception and its execution – a capital factor in the understanding of the how of Viallat’s art and which I shall shortly examine in more detail. Suffice it here to say that geometricisation and configuration are ever inundated by the raw eruptive energy of Viallat’s démarche, by what Collovini refers to as that “impossibility of limiting the expressive force of colour, sign, gesture, material” (CVEP, np). Colour, of course, is an integral part of Viallat’s “material” adventure. A formidable array of colorations is offered the viewer, rich or sober, brilliant or washed out, loud or pallid, primary or nuanced. And then there are the endless combinations that emerge, not mathematically schemed, but spontaneously arising, giving those tonal relationships to which many critics have been sensitive, relationships that, as Viallat reminds us, are not those of light and shadow (cf. VHM, 37): they are strictly internally, self-reflexively chromatic – although, inevitably, they speak of the strange cosmic mystery of pigment and our perception thereof. To “accept colour in its materiality”, as Viallat urges us to do (cf. VMP, 91),7 is certainly not to deny its sensual and even spiritual potential – he is clear about this (cf. VHM, 13)8 – but it also means that its deployment is beyond symbolism or modernist expressionism: the chromatic tones and sensations 6

Claude Viallat: la scène primitive, 1975. Christian Prigent’s discussion of Viallat’s colour is valuable: see VMP, 91-4, for example. 8 “One has to press colour into sensuality and spirituality for something to happen”. 7

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or vibrations that may be said to be given off like gases from colour are simply what they are: appreciable in their at once deeply recessed and yet surfaced strangeness – a surfacing revealing yet unable and unwilling to rationalise (and thus reduce) such profound strangeness. Viallat’s colourings, undoubtedly the major element that renders them memorable, as Yves Michaud suggests (cf. VHM, 17), thus fascinate in a pure vibratory way, beyond optical machination, and such vibration is experienced simultaneously as a material and a spiritual dimension of colour perceptibleness. A work such as the 1988 Hommage aux façades de Venise et à la peinture de tradition française (cf. CVDT, 202-3) with its acrylic on 15 jute sacks, each 225 x 69 cm, thus becomes a vast appreciation of pigmentation, its capacity to work with a given support, our own power of entering this world of matter, appreciating the enigma, the privilege, the beauty of its shifting vibrational offering to an eye, a mind, a spirit gifted with the capacity to perceive, sense, freely live such material vibratoriness. The various 1999 Portes, acrylics of assembled fabric pieces (cf. ibid., 276-9), enchant, despite their many tonal and textural differences, in exactly the same way: colour leaps out at us, or subtly caresses our powers of perception and sensation, precisely by plunging us into the pure, symbolically unencumbered universe of colour’s physicality, the lovely oddity of its substance in contact with other matter (: various fabrics), its vibrational patterns translatable in equal mystery by the matter of the observing eye. It was evident to Claude Viallat from the outset that to think through the materiality of his gesture required, too, that a radical gaze be directed to the context in which painting’s “materiality” and broad pertinence may be revealed, the norm being gallery and museum. Early exhibitions and installations can, in effect, as we have noted, take place on the beach in Cannes, in the streets of Coaraze, on the grass or rocks of the countryside. To “resist” the gallery or museal space – a resistance not designed to last but rather to highlight art’s essential, inherent independence from them – may have socioeconomic and thus political implications and agendas, but, perhaps more importantly, art is placed either in the teeming space of daily life or in that of the silence of the earth, its unnamed, raw and unappropriatable material mystery. Viallat’s is, of course, not land art, nor body-earth art, nor ecologically oriented. But its deflation of painting’s literal and metaphorical starchiness – its stiff framedness and its

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salon-driven modus operandi – blends with its reinsertion of its own inherent materiality into that of the outside world, exposed further to the “matter” of its elements. The gallery is seen as du sur-tableau, that forgotten framing of painting with its own multiple materialities. Viallat’s exhibitions will always remain alert to the latter, and it is for this reason no doubt that his painting will never hesitate to install itself outdoors, in rain and sun and wind: the exhilarating 1999 Sans titre on the banks of Toulouse’s Garonne river is once more exemplary. Two major aspects of Claude Viallat’s work I should like to examine more pointedly before moving to a few compact concluding remarks: its how, and its why. The advantage of Viallat’s curious decision to opt more or less definitively for the use in his painting of the “bean” (etc.) motif – some see it as a painter’s palette – is that the what of painting becomes forever a non-issue: painting can proceed, instinctually, beyond debate. It can simply offer itself. The only decision now required is the decision to paint. In a sense, to use a term Viallat favours, a “system” suddenly is in place: its name is painting. The how of painting is thus become, as Collovini suggests, an “autonomous rational process” (CVEP, np). A delightful paradox, of course, whereby the rational and the no-longer-rational, the beyondrational, happily fuse, rendering the how immediately available, simplified, purely materially focussed: Viallat will paint with the cloths and pigments at hand, surface on support, with “no preexisting structure”, he adds (CVEL, 22), no aesthetic intention weighing upon him à la Chaissac (cf. ibid., 23), just the orientation the support gives to its surface treatment (cf. ibid., 21) – a treatment, once more, already containing the principle of an automatic signature motif.9 Autonomy, of course, remains illusory, or, better put, draws its order, its rationality, its self-development and self-orchestration, from a reason that has become instantaneous intuition. The two 1984 Sans titre, both acrylics on Vlieseline and net made from fabric strips (cf. CVDT, 180-81), points up the fine convergence of the extemporaneous, the uncontrived and the processual, the freely patternable, the potentially associatable. Viallat’s deconstructive stance with regard to painting does not set up a list of alternative strategies, but provides the basis for a how ever newly poised, virtual, possible. Theory is not enough, how9

Viallat ceases to sign other than via his ubiquitous motif.

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ever, self-validation demands a giving over of self’s gesture to the materiality proper of art’s constant in situ self-orientation beyond knowable agenda. Put otherwise the agenda is the act of painting. Its how is not inspirational, Viallat rather precariously argues. It is kneedeep in the unconscious, no doubt, for it is predicated on no preordained savoir – ideally, at least: the act, the process, is willed rather to be an “adventure”, a pulsional undertaking, a journey into the unknown (cf. CVEL, 21). Griscelli speaks of a kind of pure “immanence” of production (cf. ibid., 13), whereby, one supposes, given paints and given cloths in contact with the pulsing visceral rhythms of the artist produce, sur place, a material result whose emergence has been constantly and intuitively monitored in microseconds. The inventivity commonly spoken of is a finding on the spot of what one was not consciously looking for. The lovely 1982 Sans titre with its white, pink, black and purplish black acrylics on bedsheet surely betrays such a process with its rapid, unfussy brushstrokes, its bizarre unshaped large dark patch in the bottom middle where a splodgy carefree pink “interform” otherwise might have been expected to dominate. If Viallet’s notes are deemed “an integral part of his work” by Christian Prigent (VMP, 40), and if they reveal a desire to track his own or other aesthetic practices (in relation to the history of art, and culture at large, as we have seen), Viallat himself does not seek to “impose” them on the installations to which he gives himself: the works stand alone, without cards, unsigned, uncommented, uncontextualised (cf. CVDT, 170-73, 180-5), just as they do in his own studio or, for that matter, in the Nevers Cathedral Stained-Glass Windows (cf. ibid., 232-3) or the Annecy Ceiling of the Passage of the Bishop’s Palace (cf. ibid., 216-17). All discourse is superseded by the adventure of that ever re-self-constituting-and-deploying energy of intuitive mind’s fusion with matter’s infinities. A fusion beyond chance, perhaps needless to say, for mind (and body) and matter have their deep blinding logics, ever, ever shifting, logics which the large 1988 acrylic on tarpaulin Sans titre (cf. ibid., 205) or the very beautifully baroque 2003 acrylic on assembled striped and joined canvases Sans titre (VHM, 100-101) or, yet again, the splendidly diverse 2003 revisitings of La Vague (cf. ibid., 94-5), reveal with the utmost nonchalant mastery. A how no pure theory could enable. A how of delicate and solid human presence, rather, to the world’s matter, and the latter’s unending potentialities, ineffable though realisable.

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That why of painting or writing Yves Bonnefoy urges us to interrogate in any artist or writer is at once multifaceted and exhilaratingly unified, compact, primal even, one might say. We have already seen a first and seemingly paradoxical motivation in Claude Viallat’s desire to avoid anecdotalness in art, to get around the issue of what to paint, art’s “subject” being thus pulled towards the very intrinsicalness of its own gesture and materiality, and thus a certain anonymity in relation to the doer, the creator, with the concomitant “myth of the artist”. This motivation, however, is equilibrated by its seeming contrary, the desire to commit to an original doing, indeed an inevitable drawing upon subjective resources – impulse, instinct, the unconscious. A motivation, moreover, strongly urged upon Viallat’s students in whom he “encourage[s] the personal act” (cf. CVEL, 18). To look at work such as the unusually titled 1985 Le Perroquet, with its acrylic on fringed curtain material with an embroidered parrot design (cf. VHM, 76), shows just how such a melding of the anonymous and the personal can function: the support material is a given, one simply of many Viallat makes a point of gathering and spontaneously putting to use; the signature motif is there, as ever, erasing any narrative other than that of the piece’s material history (reused curtain material + paint); the particularities of the deployment of the “signature” yet are specific, ever new, not to be found in that precise form anywhere else in Viallat’s entire oeuvre. No flagrancy, then, of personality or lived experience brought in from the outside of art as an agenda for representation, but a classic example of that “linking” – of surface motif and other painted forms and support – which Pleynet examines and which Viallat himself describes as “an art destined to prepare and strengthen the dominance of the principle of pleasure” (cf. CVSP) – and we can see here, in amplified mode, the deeper motivation of the “personal act” that yet eludes what Michel Deguy called the artist’s temptation: the narcissistic “self-story”. Viallat’s purpose is thus, via the neutrality of painterly materiality, to engender, for himself, for the other, the experience of emotion, that Reverdyan “emotion called poetry” no doubt, that jouissance at once aesthetic, formal, sensual and spiritual. For who will deny, gazing upon yet another a posteriori homage to Matisse, the 1993 La Vague (VHM, 86-7), that such emotion is at the heart of the huge, back-and-front-painted piece’s essential why? The kind of jubilation emanating from La Vague’s pure material intrinsicalness – for if, here, there is an outside, it is again

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that of the history of painting and the knowledge of ourselves in relation to the latter, all of this intuited by Viallat after the fact – stems, Yves Michaud maintains, from that pseudo-seriality at the centre of Viallat’s gesture (cf. CVEL, 17). It is a pseudo-automaticalness, a constant self-immersion in painting’s process and matter, that, moreover, is not essentially concerned with truth, moral truth, just as it is not (therefore) concerned with suasion, the contrivances of argument: the only “truth” that could possibly motivate Viallat would naturally be that authenticity at a deep personal level of the artist’s action: “every painter is true, he affirms as a self-evidence, if s/he is physically and morally implicated in what s/he is doing, [in] the simplicity, the manifestness, nudity, modesty, that I should like to find and place everywhere, far from contrivance and showiness” (cf. CVEL, 20). Elementariness, elementalness, the simple bareness of who one is and what it is one is working with… I shall call it freedom, the desire to free the self from agendas other than those that innocently spurt forth from unforced, unforcing realms of the self’s being; and, simultaneously, the desire to free the matter, the subject-object, and the materiality of art from, precisely, those many agendas external to it but weighing down upon it: Christian Prigent is eloquent on this latter point (cf. VMP, 75). Freedom, then; and the adventure it engenders, that venturing into the unknown, that ever fresh connaissance removed from ordained savoir which we can see actively at work as Viallat moves from, say, the 1999 Hommage à Matisse, with its acrylic on tarp and flounce, to the 2004 Sans titre, acrylic again on a striped tarpaulin support (cf. VHM, 102, 97). The why of Viallat’s painting – and other work –, then: anonymity, emotion, a natural truth, freedom, adventure. And, critically, the relation of such motivation to recurring questions of void and being. “To speak the void within and all around in some tangible reality” (cf. VHM, 37): thus does Claude Viallat describe in fundamental terms his plastic ambition, where, as with Pierre Reverdy and René Char, the point of departure of all doing is emptiness, absence, and yet the instinctive drive to fill the voidedness – which is equally an infinite potentiality – of self and world, to provide something, some beingness, where “nothingness” could be said to reign: the uncreatedness, the unfulfilledness, of self and (its relation to the) world. To speak the “void” is thus certainly to fill it, to create where given createdness seems both to be a bizarre fusion of presence and ab-

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sence, to offer the very matter (self and world) needed to kick start the process of creation. But it is no doubt important, too, to appreciate, in Viallat’s wording, that sense he has of the ongoing voidedness of what is “within and all around”, the ever reopened “kernel of absence” of being, as Bonnefoy writes, this voidedness yet remaining the mechanism urging “speaking”, “filling”, seriality, the endless doing that, precisely, constitutes Viallat’s gesture – a speaking, moreover, and critically, without a naming. To saturate the canvas, no matter its size – take, say, yet another La Vague (2003), 59 x 495 cm, or perhaps the 1995 Les Aubergines, 355 x 301 cm (cf. VHM, 53, 48) – neither prevents it from returning self and world and process to the “zero” of required recommencement, nor from speaking the “void” of its own refusal to “mean” anything other than itself, a refusal, however, twinned precisely with an embrace of the totality of itself, process and product. To paint, to do, to create, thus constitutes a simultaneous act and place of presence and absence. It offers the experience of an exchange of energy, and consciousness, of these two emotions. Viallat speaks strongly of the ontology thus involved when he alludes to “being the fluidness of the colour slipping across the canvas, the paper, the support which it confirms […]. Being this relationship” (VHM, 41, my emphasis). But, once more, it is of capital importance, in the context of an aesthetics of neutrality, non-meaning, unnaming, an art evacuated of any what other than the strangeness of its materiality and the visceral, unknowing gesture that pulsionally works it, to equate this beingness with the voidedness of its unnameableness – that, yet, is fullness, fulfilment.10 When Viallat speaks of the unceasing need to “open, open and never justify” (cf. VHM, 45), it is a need he knows will expose him to this simultaneity, this synonymousness, I should even call it. Viallat’s bulls and dancers – see, for example, the Scènes de tauromachie which can date back as far as 1963 (cf. CVDT, 8-9) or the beautiful 1987 acrylic on cardboard 5 passes tauromachie (cf. VHM, 40) – are the closest he comes to representation, yet even here no bulls prance in the dust, only “in my head” (cf. VHM, 56), and no dancers dance, but merely colour and form on a support: the essential ontological equation remains. The ultimate 10

Alfred Pacquement also reminds us that Viallat’s supports are in a sense never initially void, starting as they do “from a space with its history” (CVDT, 16): bedsheet, tent material, curtains, etc. This of course is even more manifest with his objects. (It is, too, in the deepest way, a logic applying to all of art’s materials.)

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motivation, the founding why, of Viallat’s art, may be said to reside in a desire to “live every moment in its fullness” (VHM 59), but this fullness is expressible only in the terms of art’s materio-spiritual nonlanguage. And, further, “living in the moment”, as Claude Minière hints (CVCM, 51), is to live on the cusp of nothing and feasibility, absence and arisingness, the sheer cliff-edge of that enigmatic, ever astonishing Zen Now. “I think we’ve invented nothing, Viallat says of aesthetic modernity, everything was there. Since then we’ve just perfected techniques” (cf. VHM, 20). Art, thus, for Viallat, plays modestly, unpretentiously, with this “nothing” in an endless différance of (art’s) ultimate being, a dance of its indefinable, elusive but unlimited immanence, a tireless play staging the “principle of pleasure” allowing self unapologetically to “founder and repeat [itself]” – something we “don’t [do] enough”, Viallat maintains to Griscelli (cf. CVEL, 21). In an important way what is performed is “the gesture of our origins”, as he puts it (cf. VHM, 37), a gesture steeped in the strange fundamentalness of our doing, our poiein, of all time, all incarnatedness. It is a gesture of seeming and fused poverty and excess, not chasing after its own progress and evolution, for it is, rather, as Jean-François Mozziconacci quotes Viallat as saying, “the same thing spinning on its axis ever widening the circle” (cf. CVEL, 7). Alfred Pacquement talks well of this poetics and practice of spiralling in Viallat’s work (cf. CVDT, 22-4), and to pass from the various 1969 eosin and blue on canvas exposed to rain, each titled Pluie (cf. ibid., 106-7), to the 1977 Esquisse pour Fenêtre à Tahiti, a chromatically simple but beautiful acrylic and corrosive pigments on a fringed blind (cf. VHM, 6), and on to the 2000 Untitled No. 11 with its biomorphic “systematised” forms in acrylic on a bedsheet (cf. CVDT, 283), is to understand just how spiralling yet implies infinitely variant generation from a given “nucleus” (cf. VHM, 24) without what we normally deem to be progression. This spinning of the web of art’s materiality and concomitant production of emotion produces in the case of Viallat a nonchalant beauty: a beauty not set out as an objective with its consequent strategies of structuration, proportion, harmonies, but a beauty that can draw upon dirty cloth, the sun’s fading of applied colour, rain’s messy impact on form. It is a beauty Viallat knows to be “there” already, intrinsic to the world’s beingness/“nothingness”, a beauty ever

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urging Viallat to take that plunge into the latter, sensing its glorious beautifully unnameable “somethingness”. 11

11

Claude Minière has spoken of Viallat’s “variations on an absent theme”, a logic whereby art sheds interpretative, hermeneutic pretension and opts for worship of incarnation’s given feasibilities.

RITUAL, DESIRE, DYS-COVERING: SOPHIE CALLE Photographs and texts: such are the materials of the work of Sophie Calle – who, like various critics, doesn’t deem herself to be either much of a photographer or a writer of especial note. Indeed, in the New York Times (April 1999) she even tells us she is “not obsessed with whether it really is art and what will remain [of it]”. Certainly if we look at the intricacies and sheer expressive power, lexical, syntactic, rhetorical, metaphoric, of, say, a Nathalie Sarraute or a Pascal Quignard, the bare factual minimalism of Calle’s writings stands in marked contrast; just as the photography of an Atget or a Boubat or a Cordehard or a Faucon seems to involve a significantly more delicate and meditated aesthetic caress. Chris Ballon, writing in Circa (1994), can be unsubtly and quite inadequately categoric: “aesthetically speaking, the photographs [in the Houston exhibition of Autobiographical Stories] are downright boring”, adding “don’t confuse her for a writer either”. Such reservations in no way alter the fact that Sophie Calle’s work is widely held to be engaging, innovative, provocative, transcendent and transgressive of usual categories, aesthetic, ethical, motivational, and so on. Calle is an artist, whatever she or anyone else may argue: the museums and galleries say so and so do the quirkiness, the ambiguities, the endless questions raised by a work as unpretentious as it may be exhibitionist, as intimate as it may seem impersonal. Sophie Calle’s art belongs to no school, though it may ever tentatively be held to share characteristics of various, often postmodern creative gestures. She herself, admits to little knowledge of art’s long history and pays scant attention to other contemporary oeuvres, French or non-French. Certain critics view her work as markedly conceptual, maintaining there is always a major guiding idea at play, and although this would hardly be too surprising – we shall carefully examine Calle’s motivations in due course –, she herself often states that her work is not essentially meditated, and certainly it eschews self-theorisation, preferring direct immersion in experience to preconditioning abstraction or even a posteriori self-analysis and selfconceptualisation. It is true that works like L’Érouv de Jérusalem (1996) or Les Aveugles (1986) seem to have a sharper sociological, even socio-political focus, and, surely, her celebrated Suite vénitienne (1983) or the textless images of Les Tombes (1990) generate in dif-

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ferent ways anthropological discourse covering a very wide spectrum. Nevertheless, such art retains a dogged documentary stance which, though explorable in psychological or psychoanalytical mode, refuses to give itself over to any flagrant discursively self-examining indulgence. That other works such as La Garde-robe (1998) or Des histoires vraies (1988-2003) assume autobiographical, even confessional artistic postures, is readily appreciable, though, once more, compactness, a significant disinclination to develop, probe and comment, a strange pudeur in the midst of undressing the self – these are the “styles” of self-imaging and self-narrating that strike every bit as much as the implicit parameters of an art of self-exposure. The compression of text and the minimality of image involved in such work show precisely that “art” is at play: choices of inclusion and omission are being made, shaping and composition are everywhere implicit, behaviours are staged, performed via seemingly minimal traces that testify to yet maximal control. Sophie Calle’s situational, circumstantial art may play with itself, may allow humour or the tragic to seep into/out of the bare skin of its surface dramas, but all remains, despite the freedom of gaze and meditation it offers, in that tightly reining grasp of a woman sensing the rules and the limits of her aestheticobehavioural “game”. The global title given to the seven-volume set of books Actes Sud published in 1998 confirms the ludic nature of Sophie Calle’s artistic enterprise: La Règle du jeu. And, as with all games, there are rules, parameters of play, formal, structural, organisational, but rules, too, that are implicitly ethical even though freely conceived and, as with all ethics, open to debate by the other. Such play, which becomes a theatre of the behaviour-in-a-given-situation of self/or other, has elements about it of dance, ritualistic – yet spontaneously flowing and developing – deployment of the body in relation to the other, both person and matter, thing. If, as in Suite vénitienne, the other is tracked, observed, meditated and surmised according to the rules of the secretly observing self, Sophie Calle can in various ways invert the application of such rules: The Shadow casts her into the role of the tracked and observed, 1 even though Calle has orchestrated via her mother such an inversion – and, it is true, Calle manages, knowing of the situation she has requested be instituted, to turn the tables on the 1

The French title given this work is La Filature, commissioned in 1981 by the Centre Pompidou for an exhibition devoted to self-portraiture.

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detective at her heels, recognising his role and taking to discreetly imposing her observation on the observing other. In her work, too, with the novelist Paul Auster Calle goes further still in submitting to rules of conduct laid down by the (this time known) other, Auster, but it is essential to appreciate that the ensuing game, played out in the streets of New York, exposes the self, Calle, to quite uncontrollable circumstances and events – perhaps, but better, to the freely emerging and ever mutating exchange of energies between endless passers-by and a woman, Calle, now occupying a phone booth and obliged to/agreeing to interact spontaneously with strangers – albeit with the good advice of Auster, conscious of the conceivable perils of such ritualistic play. The Gotham Handbook (1998) tells all: Calle’s preparations (smile practice, useful phrases and vocabulary in addressing strangers, getting in supplies of food and cigarettes to offer the homeless, stocking things needed for her occupation of the phone booth: pencils, notebooks, Brasso, mirror, glue, paint, roses, chains, postcards, ashtray, folding chairs, copy of Glamour Magazine), her daily diarised stories, her daily summaries (21st September, 1994: “15 smiles given, 8 or 9 received / 2 sandwiches accepted / about 15 minutes of conversation” (GH, 29): slim pickings, Calle feels, and statistically inadequate, something she will remedy with clock and counter the next day. The game concludes at 1-30 on the afternoon of the 27th September, a grand total of 125 smiles having been recorded as given. The entire week’s narrative is amplified by a good number of photographic traces – which, moreover, affirms the degree to which this ritualised game remains a performance orchestrated so as to be ultimately publishable (four years later) and not just lived as pure existential event. Sophie Calle, in effect, is a gatherer of lived material, an archivist of experiences and the “things” that litter such experiences. La Garde-robe demonstrates the quirky triviality this may involve, despite the personal intensity lying, possibly, behind, here, the items of clothing offered a male object of the 33 year old Calle’s infatuation over a six-year period. Auster’s fictional Maria, of course, based on the real Sophie Calle, indulges in precisely such whims, “miniexperiences, Auster suggests in Léviathan (and Calle quotes the passage from his novel in La Garde-robe), on the theme of classification and habit” (GR, 9). Although Calle has referred to her work as a “joke”, its orchestration tends to the meticulous: her scrutiny, docu-

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mentation, archiving and final display of the elements of her attention reveal a woman conscious of the arguable relativity of such elements in the face of eternity, yet alert to the fact that, regardless of any characterisation of them from the outside, from you, from me, they retain a certain absoluteness of pertinence in her life, for her life. The Birthday Ceremony thus, bizarrely, constitutes a locus and a lived event of most authentic proportions: it gathers and reveals in compact, oddly timeless, aesthetically and ontologically revamped manner twenty years’ worth of human exchange and relationship.2 It is a work dramatising, both capriciously and with purpose, felt meaning, the factors of ordinariness and a sensed profundity – this is the always amazing “ordinariness” of a given woman’s life! – underpinning Calle’s (life’s) work, as they no doubt underpin all lives. Not dissimilarly, the 1992 film, No Sex Last Night, made with the filmmaker Greg Shephard whom she will tempt into a drive-in marriage on the road from New York to California, unveils with wit and narrativephotographic flair the now banal and flat, now, as Edouard Waintrop writes in Libération (1996), “crude and mean”, nature of human communication; beneath the film’s surface lies the story of unrequited emotion, bodies unmatched, psyches unsynchronised despite the rolling of the road movie’s candid camera. Throughout all Calle’s collecting and collaging, all her fetishistic reassembling of archived experience, there beams forth a deep fascination with the everyday and what we often deem to be its hackneyed, rather threadbare and trite character. Her work – Suite vénitienne would be a flagrant example here, but surely Les Dormeurs and even Les Tombes discreetly vie with it – thus tends to transform the normal into what Todd Alden has termed the “uncanny” (Arts Magazine, 1991). The “superficial” suddenly finds itself suspenseful, repotentiated; “melodrama” acquires a certain surrealness, as Ralph Rugoff has suggested (Financial Times, 1999); the “ersatz emotion” David Lillington believes Calle to “deal in” (cf. Independent, 1992) can oddly touch deeper psychological chords, yielding poignancy and pathos and raising issues we may not be inclined to dig into. Suite vénitienne once more, by way of example, we may feel to be remote from all reasonableness, improper even; yet, as Calle herself writes, who has not wanted to follow someone at some time, who has not felt 2

Le Rituel d’anniversaire is the title given to this yearly pseudo-festive happening and the finally emerging product.

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desire, the force of phantasm, as Baudelaire’s la passante or Breton’s wife-to-be walks by, real, tantalising, glanced back at, let go of, haunting? It is not just a question of “transgressive hunting down of the identity” (in its broadest terms) of the other, as Suite vénitienne might suggest: the alterity that fascinates and is pursued belongs, too, to the self: Calle tracks her own beingness, her “surveillance” watches over her own impulses and inclinations which she liberates from the fairly tight constraints we – and even Calle herself in most circumstances – impose upon them. The games Calle agrees or determines to play thus allow her to enter into a realm of experience of other and, above all, self, that lays bare some of the strange and deep simplicities that found our being and the desire and instincts, phantasms and emotions, that drive it. Surely, this is at the root of the creation of Les Dormeurs, just as it would have driven the selfinterrogative self-exposure of Le Striptease. And the earliest photographs of Sophie Calle, taken in California in 1978, Brother and Sister, just like the later extended series Les Tombes (1991), they too, surely, austere, bare, untouched, utterly unfussy, yet via this very denudation, this stark conveyance of guileless flagrancy, succeed in urging in us, in herself, a reflection on mortal ephemeralness, the possibly undramatic and unceremonious exiting of life perhaps never understood to contain the infinities it yet ceaselessly deploys. If Calle’s images and texts thus may often seem to show and speak the obvious, the commonplace, the hardly celebratable, yet they invite us to shake off the dust of our indifference or cynicism, to sense the depths of all doing and being, to read that complex unsayableness underlying all incarnation and which our at times glib analyses and conceptualisations of other or self inevitably and proudly pass by. The coldness and distance certain critics see in Sophie Calle’s work, with its relatively flat images and unsentimental texts, yet fuse with an intimacy and a penetration of the other or of the self that are exceptionally and paradoxically forceful. Clearly, any clinicalness and detachment that may be said to inform her gesture restore an element of discretion where little may at first appear to be in evidence, and it is this fine equilibrium that simultaneously draws attention, seduces, and yet permits an openness of meaning to reign, disallowing or at least discouraging reductive explication and theorisation – a self-positioning Calle will not relinquish when interviewed. Her work is often regarded as involving detective work, “espionage” as

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Hilka Sinning has written in Süddeutsche Zeitung, but the detection, the discovery, the unmasking Calle generates give access to an information about self and other – the teeming intimate selves of the other – that, whilst seen by some as an invasion, miming the process used by the police or undercover agents to obtain information, is, I should argue in the case of Calle, far better understood to pursue a knowing, an honest, innocent enlightenment as to the endlessly curious nature of human behaviour and emotional drive. If Sheena Wagstaff is right in stating that, in Calle’s universe, “selfhood [is] an empty noun” (Parkett, 1990), it seems to me that this can only be true if we accept that Calle’s creative gestures fill, with endlessly meditatable virtual forms, such vacancy. All of her works, from, say, Les Aveugles, or L’Érouv de Jérusalem to Fantômes or L’Homme au carnet, assist in filling in the gaps of our collective self-knowledge: the relation of the sighted to the blind / the latter’s sense of beauty / the prejudices and preconceptions that may be at play in relation to Calle’s intervention in Les Aveugles / the entire socio-political situation in Jerusalem and, implicitly, the Middle East / the tensions at the centre of our conception of public and private place / the human logic of the eruvim, of, implicitly, any religious delineation or marking out as Calle facelessly explores it in L’Érouv de Jérusalem; questions of memory and even pertinence in relation to celebrated art / the bizarre fictions spinnable around the latter / questions of absence, loss, and their (often pretty relative) significance when art stacks up against the everyday and its pressing agendas – all this in Fantômes; and so on: I shall soon look carefully at L’Homme au carnet. Yes, self-knowledge, visceral, affective, ethical, aesthetic, etc. – there are no evident limits set by Calle nor, surely, by that other observing-reading self, you or myself – is a major name of Sophie Calle’s game: this, of course, is extremely modern and even postmodern, though no doubt belongs to all human gesture of all times: Lamartine and Delacroix plunge deep into the self’s swirling vortices; Rimbaud pushes his own envelope still more vehemently; Breton and Giacometti converge only to radically diverge in their tireless pursuits of knowing and understanding; for Reverdy, only one true encounter ever occurred in all of his life and art: the encounter with self, in all of its imaged, metaphorised, and unwordable, mixture of the idiosyncratic and the humdrum. Take, chosen freely from amongst the many micronarratives-withaccompanying-visual-“proof” of Des histoires vraies:

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The Rival I wanted a letter from him but he wasn’t writing one. One day, I read my name: “Sophie”, written at the top of a blank page. It gave me hope. Two months after our marriage I noticed a sheet of paper sticking out from under his typewriter. Sliding it towards me, I discovered this sentence: “I have a confession to make, last night I kissed your letter and photo”. I went on, reading backwards: “One day you asked me if I believed in love at first sight. Did I ever answer you?” Only this note was not intended for me: at the top there was an H. I crossed out H and replaced it by S. That love letter became the one I had never received. (HV, 55)

A pathetic avowal, filled with pathos: Calle, so often accused of victimisation of the other, surely assumes the role of the targeted other here. Her doublings and reversals are, in effect, frequent, and, it is certain, all narratives of the other are synonymous with selfconfessions, more or less overt, more or less secret, parenthesised. A “helpless tyrant” Calle has been called, though I should argue it is exaggerated to speak of helplessness in the case of a woman exercising control, just as the idea of tyranny is hyperbolic, for no hurt is ever intended (and indeed the “dangers”, if existent, are rather du côté de Calle), nor do any real “victims” strew the pages and photographs of this artist of dys-covering. Sophie Calle’s work generates revelation that involves a layering over of lived reality, a discovery of the latter that is amnestic and memorial recovery become artistic recovering. But this, in the mode of dys: pulling apart (and repiecing) the elements of experience, but, as it were, abnormally, “poorly”, in art’s necessarily “impaired” relation to the lived and the observed. Here in The Rival, Calle gives us the mini photo-roman of an intimate moment archived as art years after the event. The banal masks, dyscovers, the intense; the melodramatic, the truly dramatic. No tears are visible where they may have welled up. Humour – distanced, retrospective emotion – dys-covers, reveals-and-veils, a confession barely confessable. How could language or image say all that underpins such a moment: better this flat articulation between avowal and its deep impossibility. What lies central to the above is that tension, so highlighted in Sophie Calle’s work between the search for truth and the opting for art and its chosen, personalised strategies as the channel for such searching. Anthony Aziz, in Artweek (1990), deems Calle’s search to be “compelling and satisfying”: he is thinking largely of Les Dor-

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meurs, and why indeed may we not see in these photographs and dry observations even that ancient synonymy of truth and the good and beauty – over and above the oddity of Calle’s enterprise, but in the raw revelation of elements of the human? If truth is a reality show, we have it here, in all its disarming candour and integrous ordinariness. Of course, art’s assembling implies an invisible dissembling: photographs freeze, “deaden”, being petites morts – in all senses of the expression –as Denis Roche has suggested: they cannot maintain the ongoing suppleness of human truth, any more than words in their similar breakage of the earth’s, of being’s, seamlessness. And then Calle can admit to an occasional contrivance, a “fanciful” embellishment, of truth, as when she invents one of the responses of the blind persons interviewed about their conception of the beautiful in Les Aveugles. But the “lie” is innocent, ingenuous; it intends no real deception; it offers the harmless, spontaneous truth of the invisible other. Sophie Calle’s more robust voyeurism, going beyond Les Dormeurs to the subterfuges engendering L’Hôtel, may certainly cause some to catch their indignant breath, but no stealing occurs, no actual disturbance disrupts or inconveniences the unwitting hotel guests. A “paper tigress”, Yves-Alain Bois gently prefers to call her. Some have seen here, as in Suite vénitienne, a psycho-sexual deviance of sorts, but like all judgements, this interpretation says a good deal about the person making it – but, then, all this shows is that phantasms, fears, endless subplots animate all human psyches. Is a “work” such as L’Hôtel or Suite vénitienne or L’Homme au carnet immoral or even amoral? Calle herself has, in the latter case, expressed the view that future interventions of that kind would request permission before proceeding, but it is important to remember that no public identification of the owner of the black book was involved, that Libération would have seen their month-long serialised publication of Calle’s “diaries” of the man’s relationships as a rare socioanthropological exploration. Clearly, we may ask questions about L’Homme au carnet; clearly, this art may imply a degree of “transgression”, as Patrick Roegiers writes in Le Monde (1991); clearly, such transgression may be held to represent an “abuse of power and indiscretion” – such is Yves-Alain Bois’ sense of Calle’s gesture, for he attributes to her the view that such qualities are “the marks of all photographs” (Artforum, 2000, my emphasis): if the latter view is worthy of support, as many would in fact agree, then all imaging of

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the other may be deemed to involve a desecration of the other’s integrity; but, here again, we slip from ease and confidence and an assumption of innocence into the quagmire of accusation, culpabilisation, a disaffection and alienation Calle’s work, if anything, works precisely to rid us of. The Evening Standard (1999) happily reminds us that “underneath the fragile shell, Calle has a magnificent sense of humour”. The implications of the search for truth, via image and word, but, too, via the lived projects – the scenarios into which Sophie Calle projects herself, with their “rules”, yes, but with their unforeseeable twists and turns also, that may test and warp intentions –, such implications, then, are numerous and not easy to qualify in some univocal, stable way. There can be no doubt that seriousness of intent is at stake, this in regard to the “truth” – and I stress again the potential, indeed, why not real, fusion with the “good” and the “beautiful” – of the observed other (person, object, phenomenon, gesture, etc., etc.) and in respect of the revealed “truth” of the observing self (its motivations, impulses, etc., confessed or unavowed). No doubt whatsoever either as to the playfulness, the flickering smile, the felt and implicitly half-mocked bizarreness the self is conscious of in gazing upon both the other’s behaviour and the artist-self’s. The boldness of many creations masks, too, a shyness: art’s probing of the truth of humans generates the energy of a (self-)control sufficient to push beyond danger: Le Striptease operates at their frontier, and certain other works – the 1999 Exquisite Pain, for example, with its 92 photographs underpinned by unhappiness, yet saved by time’s erasure and a profound sense Calle has of the strange and implicitly sacred beauty of all that is lived – manage to eke out the delicate merits of truths that might otherwise dismay and disillusion. If Michel Guerrin is right when he argues that Sophie Calle is a “fetishist of her own life” (Le Monde, 1998), this is precisely because her life and her work are obsessed with, and oriented towards, a contemplation of their own, her own, actuality, authenticity, their literalness and their factuality. In this sense, all of Calle’s diarising of self and self’s others becomes understandable as one long and simple, honest, unfeigned gaze upon the surface of the visible, the imageable. Of course, looking, as Alexandre Hollan pointed out, is not to be confused with seeing; but, for Sophie Calle, it is a bare but essential initial and initiating departure – whose ends are for each individual, including herself,

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to meditate: and this, no doubt, with that uniqueness of perspective only Calle’s “dull”, “flat” images and language can allow. If interference or at times brazen engagement with the other / the self there is, it is so that the liberation and the personal assumption of (our) truth may be available to each of us. Art’s truths, in this way, return us to our own, the realities of our beliefs and anxieties, our enthusiasms and our denials, the swarming complexities of our own agendas. In truth, Calle’s is an art of innocence and benignity, artful and theatrical though it may be. If the whole question of the tension between fiction and “reality”, appearance and “authentic” livedness is endlessly raised in Sophie Calle’s work, it is important to remember that this question, beyond reductive resolution, is always at the centre of the artistic gesture: art is neither outer reality, the “model” to be seized, represented, finally “given”, nor the place of the artist’s absolute beingness: it is intermediary, that “third element fusible and clear”, as Mallarmé argued, that place that, precisely in its surged independency and the form which is fatally of itself only, gives us what Gérard Titus-Carmel tells us, rightly, has only one name: “Beauty”. Where is the real Sophie Calle, asks Susannah Herbert in the Daily Telegraph (1999), and one understands why. But the fact remains that in Calle’s “superb story-tell[ing]” and her “mistress[ful] disguises”, as Sheena Wagstaff writes, the question and its answer have been finessed as life has elliptically transmuted into novel – in the etymological sense of the term: something quite new, and consciously understood to be launching self and all otherness into the “adventure”, the freewheeling, unpredictable advent, of the novelty. It is no doubt no simple coincidence that so much of Calle’s work centres on questions of fragile, uncertain presence and absence, seeing and non-seeing, a “thereness” which is already stunningly minimal or equivocal, glimpsable, trackable, half-sayable, but even then only obscurely so, artfully, theatrically: this very elusiveness and veiling allow for that freedom of truth that is art’s – beyond gnosis, beyond absolutes other than its own, performed through the experimental medium of Calle’s chameleon-like persona of herself. Calle’s art is the site of the pseudo-life and pseudo-death of its author. Think, in the context of the above, of works such as La Filature (where the detective is hired to “provide evidence of my [presumably utterly uncertain] existence”), Fantômes (where museum paintings that have been stolen or

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loaned or vandalised and removed are pulled back from their absence into a necessarily holed presence by the shakiness of the memory of museum employees), Souvenirs de Berlin-est (where Soviet-inspired monuments and memorials, removed after German reunification, are recalled and varyingly “restored” by affect and idea, or La Cravate (where the other is characteristically “approached”, rendered “real”, via pure phantasm and the tattered “presence” of a fetishised object). And, of course, Les Dormeurs or L’Hôtel or Les Aveugles could be similarly adduced to show, initially, Calle’s exemplary blurring of the issue of the equations of self and other in her establishment of art’s independence from both in a double disappearing act where the magician’s hat (which is the work itself) contains an “evidence” selfreferential, and, simultaneously, to reveal further the artistic obsession with an ontology of disappearance and discovery, uncertainty and search, absence and desire, blind unknowing and flawed memory. Les Tombes, with, too, the first two photgraphs Calle ever took, the 1978 Brother and Sister, constitute arguably a pure emblem of this entire ontology, as well as a perfect plastic materialisation of those ambiguities that lead Susannah Herbert and many others to lose themselves in the dizzying labyrinth of questions of “identity”, “fictionality”, “reality”, etc. Sophie Calle never accepts to engage in what would, at all events, be no more than language’s resolution of such matters: ambiguity is her zone of comfort and self-balancing. That what she does as art is “not an adventure and is one at the same time”, as she tells Jean-Max Colard in Les Inrockuptibles (1998), fits perfectly her instinctive feel for that infinite elasticity of meaning at the heart of all being and doing, no matter how seemingly banal, quickly reducible, given “samples” thereof may appear to some. Art does not require of us such reduction: indeed, it constitutes itself precisely to escape the inclination we may have to pin it on self or other, all of “reality”. Its freedom is its ambivalence, its metaphoricity, its recreative-recreational remaking of our presence-to-the-world; and this freedom is also its truth and its beauty. Sophie Calle at one time suggested that she became an artist – a photographer – to please her father, but she is quick to counterexplain that things aren’t quite ever “decided like that, it’s the sort of thing one thinks afterwards”. And, in effect, if ambiguities or, perhaps, better, teeming indeterminacies, characterise Calle’s relation to the real and, for want of a better word, what we may still term the

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thematics of her art, as I have just shown above, a more insistent examination of the motivation pushing her to create works as variable as No Sex Last Night, Suite vénitienne, Exquisite Pain, Des histoires vraies or L’Hôtel, reveals an equal inclination to multiply and complexify, and thus render theoretically indeterminate, a practice we may deem to be most simple in its process and component parts. Calle’s stated desire to avoid boredom clearly opens the way to the pseudo-adventurousness to which her early post-adolescent years already exposed her.3 There is a constant sense of wishing for energy, immersion of self in the ordinary but profoundly potentiating elements of existence: desire itself is an undoubtedly crucially, though open-endedly, almost blindly, determining factor at the heart of Calle’s poiein. Circumstances and impulse combine to give material and further energy off which desire feeds, for the latter is never programmed. Calle has spoken, too, of her fear of solitude, and, although art commonly requires self-isolation, Calle’s is so very often contrarily predicated upon connection with an other or others. This is clearly the case with works like Les Dormeurs or L’Homme au carnet or Souvenirs de Berlin-Est, but Alain Riding is also struck, writing in the New York Times, by Calle’s Freud Museum “intervention”, Appointment,4 whereby visitors could write their comments: exchange, emotional connection, what Calle will freely admit to being also a stratagem of self-indulgent pleasure – these are central purposes underpinning her creativeness. A work like Le Striptease could equally be seen in this light but is clearly more complex in its motivation (: there is the history of her childhood naked dash from the elevator to her grandparents’ apartment, for example), but self-revelation before the gaze of the other in, yet, the half-disguise of blond wig (: for the presumably improbable yet imagined arrival of the still living grandparents) is surely one of many Callian modes of venturing forth into the world of the stranger and, simultaneously, diminishing the possible stiflements of self’s aloneness. A self-exhibitionism of a particular order – where, once again, the tensions of absence and (pseudo?-) presence are performed –, and one that mimics beautifully the sociopsychology of museal exhibiting: as Michel Guerrin writes in Le Monde (1998), “everything ends up in the museum with Sophie”. The 3

Cf. the interview with Jean-Max Colard in Les Inrockuptibles (September 1998). This work was first created in London. See also the book with the expanded title: Appointment with Sigmund Freud, 2005. 4

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museum: a place of gathering, archiving, of the lived, but, synonymously, the dead, but, too, a place of showing-now, exchange-now, of exhibiting with the other the desires, seductions and loves of the self. The Financial Times (1998) speaks of her exhibited work as, precisely, “a simulation of love”, and what else could art hope to achieve other than a mask, a simulacrum, an imago of desire, of the living eros of the creating individual? The “transgression” Patrick Roegiers sees as the central force, in combination with “seduction”, of Sophie Calle’s (“self”-)exhibition(s), 5 is exactly that force that allows art to please and puzzle, seduce and leave perplexed. That, instinctively, a simple but deep sense of this transgressive power motivates Calle’s gestures can not be in doubt. But, I stress, instinct is at play, not sly or cynical contrivance. “I no longer ask myself what I’m doing”, Sophie Calle tells the New York Times in 1999, and although we may deem this an exaggeration it does reflect that disinclination to “analyse my reasons”, as she also put it to Jean-Max Colard in an interview for Les Inrockuptibles. The conscious, elaborated why of doing in Calle is not so much avoided as absorbed by the immediacy of giving oneself over to impulse and desire. Her preference for what appear to be “arbitrary things” (but which, in effect, are actions corresponding to spontaneously emerging psychological and physiological energies), would offer justification to Bernard Frank’s view that she “doesn’t know any more than we do what has pushed her [, for example,] to follow and photograph strangers”. What seems to fascinate and draw her on is “the way everything becomes obsessional”6: it is as if a lack of conscious purpose, plunged into raw circumstance and suddenly driven on by this engagement (and the spontaneously developed rules of the now game, the game-of-now, if I may call it that), becomes motivated, almost tautologically, by a sense of the self’s mushrooming obsessiveness: motivation is now the work-in-progress, the need not to let go of it until it has exhausted its own energy. As Calle says of writing, so, no doubt with all of her doing: it is done so as to be rid of it, ride it to its point of emptiness, recognised as a kind of completion, seemingly arbitrary also, but caught in the logic of energy’s dispersal. 5 6

See Le Monde, June 1991. See Art Press, September 1995.

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Sophie Calle can call such expenditure and volatilisation of obsessional energy by other names, too, and properly so: the desire to be happy in her life in general; work held to be “my own personal therapy”; work seen as being “linked to improving my life”; work allowing her to “ask questions from behind the shield of art”, and so on.7 In all instances a release comes about, a self-permission that authorises not just a doing, a poiein, of what we might expect to be aesthetic dimensions. What always is involved is a selftransformation and a self-resolution of a far vaster and more intimate nature. Suzanne Page, titling her piece “Sophie Calle and/or Beauty”, points to a function of creation that may entail the affirmation of a beauty perhaps only truly livable in the skin and the mind of Calle herself: that movement of the power of art out if its strict interiority, intellectual, rationalisable, mathematicisable, into the space of its most simple ontological value: a poiein as a humble trace or emblem of, here, one woman’s doings and makings to afford herself some well-being, some sense of her own and others’ so easily parenthesised loveliness, some experience of her innocent freedom and potential. The Santa Monica Bay News is not to be faulted for considering Les Aveugles to be “her most ambitious and poignant work” at the time of writing (1989), but, for all their arguable shimmer of theatricalness, earlier works such as Les Dormeurs or No Sex Last Night or L’Hôtel contain the subtle and tender marks of a gaze in search of some deep and genuine connection with other and self. Poignancy, in brief, probing affective and affecting intensity, underpins every creative gesture of what Anne Sauvageot has, as I write, termed Sophie Calle’s “chameleon art”. Of course, it is a poignancy some dispute, as I will not, preferring as do some others to privilege Calle’s equally powerful theatricality. The 2005 Exquisite Pain, leading, as so often, to its published trace, may find its origin in personal experience, but an experience ever feeding, as Nancy Princenthal writes in Art in America, “Calle’s appetite for other people’s intimacies”. 8 A romantic break-up in Calle’s life, a perfectly quotidian moment, in short, leads to its 7

See articles in the Financial Times (June, 1998) and the New York Times (April, 1999). 8 September 2005. Christine Macel emphasises this tension between self’s and others’ experience in regarding Calle’s work as precisely posing the question of authorship: see Sophie Calle: M’as-tu-vue (2003).

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transformation into what Michael Sheringham and Johnnie Gratton term a “project”, 9 of self projected onto and multiplied by the other, here, 107 others, women of every walk of life, delightfully and, of course, improbably asked to respond to the now widely publicised relationship-terminating email sent by the hapless male ex-lover. The 2007 Venice Biennale – leading to another book: Take Care of Yourself – installs the entire “project/ion” in splendid fashion, exceeding the already massively documented relational history (via tickets, letters, receipts, visa stubs, photos, etc.) and offering, further, a massive display of simultaneousy screened films of women precisely responding to the call of Calle to “analyse [the email], comment on it, dance it, sing it. Exhaust it. Understand for me. Answer for me”. Art, certainly, as exorcism, healing, a touching mode of self-reliance forced to externalise itself to obtain satisfaction, a conversation of sorts, a self-reassurance, a half-Beckettian passing of one’s time via vital, revitalising self-accompaniment, a (finally) smiling play, interplay, with her encouragingly willing alter egos. If, moreoever, other work of the last year or two – the Questionnaire, prepared with Grégoire Bouillier for Jacket10 on the self’s alternative identities, or Où et quand, the 2005 psychic experimentation equally querying the nature of our beingness, for example – does not have the ampleness of deployment the joint projects Exquisite Pain and Take Care of Yourself reveal, it nevertheless confirms Sophie Calle as an artist of the self’s onticity of considerable and ever surprisingly widening proportions.

9

See The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture, 2005. 10 Jacket, October 2005.

RAGGEDNESS, FUSION AND SILENCE: BERNARD PAGÈS From his 1969 Tas de bûches et briques, the 1973 Fil de fer or the Parcours coloré horizontal created in 1978 in Neuenkirchen, to his more recent sculptures such as Hommage à Gaston Bachelard (1986), La Matrone (2000), Les Cariatides (2006) or Le Dévers aux frisottis (2006), the work of Bernard Pagès has traced out a path of powerful originality, ever expanding within the open confines of its various constancies. Many critics relate Pagès connection with the Supports/Surfaces group, now deeming it critically formative, now dwelling upon the decision to break from a movement tending to privilege a mode of artistic poiein, painting, to which Pagès was already bidding a certain farewell, a movement no doubt, additionally, too conceptually preoccupied for his liking, with its emblematic review, Peinture - cahiers théoriques. Other critics, understandably, ponder the influence of exponents of arte povera or even the Anti Form group, but the unpretentious simplicities and hard-worked physicality of Pagès’ work, both early and recent, would seem not to be in any overt affinity with, say, the politically and morally tendentious work of Penone, Merz or Anselmo, or creations such as Beuys’ funkily articulate The Pack, Serra’s super-sleek column titled Vortex or Nauman’s neons and carousels with their at times psychological or sexual macabreness. Nor would Pagès concur with any idea of minimalism attaching to his démarche, this no doubt, despite the uncluttered self-evidence of Tas de bûches et briques or Parcours coloré horizontal, due to what Xavier Girard has termed “his taste for perpetual excess or overflowing” (BP81, 14) – the latter perhaps tangible in this early work via an implicit sense of the connection of materials to their origin, the process underpinning emergence into their current states, the relation of artistically appropriated matter to place and its given matter. Certainly, if minimalism implies a theorised program abstracting it from that immediate Pagesian working on the problematics of practice, then such works, like too the more recent Acrobates (1998) or Surgeons (1998) – distinct as is their outward appearance –, show that no minimalism à la Judd or Flavin is at stake. Simeon Hunter has nicely argued, in 1999, that Bernard Pagès’ work “is not at all reasonable, [being] too big, too lively, unsubduable and impure” (ISBP, np) and (thus) “refuses the Greenbergian modernist ‘voice’ of the avant-garde”.

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It is good to bear in mind Gilbert Lascault’s reminder that sculpture, from Phidias to Schwitters, has mapped out a heterogeneous tradition (cf. BPSEM, 7). Within this heterogeneity, however, Pagès has developed his own diverse, mongrel and polymorphic ways. It is therefore not surprising that critics observe interfigural elements allowing allusion to a Stella or a Carl Andre, a Flanagan or Richard Long, or indeed other artists mentioned above, but, if we understand Bernard Pagès’ own recognition of the genius of a Brancusi or the implication of his Hommage à Toni, and even let ourselves be tempted to dream of loose and diverse connections with work by Ubac, Giacometti or even the creators of Amerindian totems, vast areas of difference always persist: Andre’s 1966 The Bricks, purely by way of example, has nothing of the earthy rootedness of Pagès’ 1978 Lit de briques, and Stella’s Melville-inspired but controversial Town Ho’s Story lacks the witty imaginative jovialness of Pagès’ 1984 Chapeau de Venise. Denis Roche finds the work that confronts him pretty well “indescribable” – étrange mésange he settles for calling it, with particularly in mind the Acrobates and Surgeons sculptures. And it is true, the sheer harmoniously tinkered Chapeau de Venise is a strange bird indeed, slowly but spontaneously constructed out of its initially intended destination as capital of his Colonne aux bidons écrasés, consciously caressed into its expansive (300 x 300 x 300 cm) but rigorous, aerate but firm, burlesqueness that is a model of recycling and reinvention. And étrange mésange, too, the extraordinary, enormous (300 x 1500 x 600 cm), yet fleshless and see-through Arête ouverte of the same year, stretched across its museal space, a vast skeletal createdness, its backbone formed of quixotically painted and ceramically topped wooden chunks, its body sinews and fibres spreading their rusty or painted remainders in a chaos held in check by the sheer artfulness of their improbable and unparalleled delicate vigour. Of course, here, as more manifestly in earlier works like the 1979 Ensemble de 9 éléments (with its near sacred ritual deployment of stone, mortar and cement fragments) or the 1980 Trois ouvertures angulaires (with its special freely meditative space opened up, yet contained, by the strained and cut and grooved solid cypress trunks), the idiosyncratic and the extravagant are instinctively reined in by that structural(ist?) sense Philippe de Georges sees at work in Pagès’ seriations and articulations whereby a “systematic exploration of a field of possibilities [may be carried out]

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within a given structure” (RECBP, 30)1 – and Pagès himself is clearly alert to this instinct at play no doubt in all art, though tending to accentuate factors of segmentation, breakage of the structuring, this permitting openness, “development”, “broadening”, proliferation (cf. BPSR, 32).2 And it is largely such factors that prise and lever Bernard Pagès’ work, away from the ambient aesthetic and theoretical constraints and influences that might have weakened it, into that freedom that guarantees its uniqueness. Catherine Francblin, I believe, moreover, is right to maintain – and Pagès’ emblematic insistence, above, upon openness and proliferation, etc. confirms this, I should argue – that, in order truly to understand Pagès, we need appreciate to what degree his work is beyond “dealing with strictly sculptural problems” (BPSR, 7). There is sculpture as exhibitable, finished work, and there is all the rest, the remainder Derrida has called it, the ever-in-excessof-the-sculptural-object. It is something we shall slowly come to grips with and that, I suggest, precisely accounts for the originality of Pagès’ oeuvre/travail. It is time to look more attentively at the principle forms Pagès’ work elects, the materials used with a constancy surprising even their user (cf. RECBP, 10), and, to begin with, the foundational works of the 1960’s and, especially, the 1970’s, some of which I have already evoked: the Tas de bûches et briques, for example, with the gathered simple self-revealedness of its conjoined natural and industrial elements, or the Fil de fer sculpture offering its sample-like deployment of tempered wires on a plain but multiply slatted wooden panel. Other works follow such patternings, such as the 1972 Sans titre, utterly self-explanatory in its tripartite display of vertically placed corrugated steel sheets and two lightly piled horizontally laid branches, dyed with different tintings, or the 1975 5 billots fendus, immaculately literal except for its equally immaculate geometry (each log square cut to the same proportions) and painted orchestration. As with most artists, of course, drawing and painting constitute the liminal modes of self-exploration for Bernard Pagès, prior to what Xavier Girard terms the latter’s “rebellion against the rigid, intact world of painting [and subsequently] the mortuary integrity of high sculpture” (BP89. 15). It is work that yet may be said to anticipate much that is to come: the 1960 Indian ink Pierre trouée, for example, like the 1 2

See ReConnaître Bernard Pagès, 2002. Cf. Bernard Pagès. Sculptures récentes, 1984.

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1964 oil on canvas Paysage avec hangar, the 1965 pencil drawing Figuier (Coaraze) or the Nature morte au chapeau painting of the same year, may opt for a realist manner, but the latter represents an authentic desire for a close-up analysis and appreciation of the immediately given: the intricacies of its matter, its immersion in time, season, and thus change, the surprising heterogeneousness of its elements that yet fuse into an improbable oneness, the infinite fascinations, indeed, beauties, available in the world via the caressive lense of an art yet far from oblivious to existence’s precarities. Nor, in effect, do drawings and paintings disappear from the sculptural universe that Pagès rapidly chooses to inhabit. The excellent catalogue published in 1988 in the context of Pagès’ work on the ventilation tower on Ivry’s Place Voltaire, demonstrates fully the considerable role of both preparatory and explanatory drawings and technical markings on materials used and assembled: drawing renders visible imaginative potential, gives space to the required precise mathematics of design, and offers essential orientation at the moment of concrete assembly. And a glance at almost any work by Pagès, from the 5 billots fendus or the Arête ouverte to the 1987 Colonne aux bidons froissés, dedicated to Jean-Charles Blais, or the various Surgeons, shows just how significant the act of painting remains for him, though in ways utterly liberated from its traditional conception and application: one may point here 1. to the various murals and even ceilings Pagès has done, at Vence’s Fondation Émile Hugues (2002) or the Musée d’art Moderne de Céret (1987), for example, where the walls are “tattooed and scarified” (Gilbert Lascault), “transformed, turned away from themselves, coloured, incised, scratched and scraped” (J. Matamoros) (cf. BPSEM, np)3 – in short sculpt-painted and, moreover, often given illusionist “tilted” geometry into the bargain; 2. to the strong – “violent”, some feel, but this speaks of aesthetic fear, surely – contrastive colours Pagès may at times favour (the 1990 L’Arête argentée? or the 2000 Pal aux bouchons de gaz?), though frequently subtlety and softness prevail (the two 1994 Dévers aux os or the equally structurally bold but aesthetically harmonious Dévers aux cyprès of the same year); 3. to the sheer pleasure of colour, which stems far more from materials used than painted accents (which yet can help “settle” the sculpture), and which is not calculated, but in3

See Bernard Pagès. Sculptures et ensemble mural, 1987.

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stinctive, Pagès argues (cf. BPSC, 28), and in no way does he see his work as “painted sculpture”, i.e. involving an equation in which painting acquires the upper hand – La Grande Gloriette of 1993 beautifully exemplifies such a distinction, the bright green accents on some of the angle-iron “branchings” giving merely extra “decorative”, allusive energy to a sculpture already exquisitely endowed with great dynamic delicacy – one might, moreover, say the same of the 1992, slightly smaller, but no less highly energised Gloriette, this time topped off with a jumble of natural wood branches painted in a more subdued green. The materials used to fashion creations such as these are many: concrete (sometimes reinforced), brick, angle-iron, stone, masonry, woods of many kinds, tree stumps, branches, marble, steel, girders, sheet-metal, bone, lead, plexiglas, ceramics, oil drums, wire, bone, pottery fragments, straw, and so on, and, of course, all that is required, as is often the case, to bind one material to another, adequately or unerringly. The pertinent list is here perhaps less long, but with the same increasing constancies Pagès realises, to his surprise: gluing, soldering, bolting, screwing, simple juxtaposing, embedding, slotting, balancing, centrally stabilising via vertical rods, etc., And, at this point, we may proceed to gauge the principal forms of Pagès’ work and the processes that allow such forms simply to be or to come into their beingness. Heaps are not uncommon, from the early Tas de paille (1969) with its protruding red-painted steel bar to Les Trois Grâces (2006), where the galvanised sheet-metal wraps round the base of the giant soaring and twisted tapering girders, or the nine aligned Larrons, each with its heaped “pedestal” of brick pieces. Solid, anchoring blocks, too, are common, another form of pedestal, in effect, but, again, irregular, made from stone or masonry or wood or concrete, from which shoot forth at various angles certain of the recent Pals or the 1992 Dormants. Columns, of course, are numerous and yet amazingly diversified in their form, from the rusted metal of Les Chevêtres (1992), with the elegantly dishevelled branching auras, or the Quatre bidons avec os (1983), which now towers high (4½ metres), now lies low like a massive half-alien gisant, to the Colonne d’Antibes, with its stacked interlocking but serrated stone and masonry blocks or the most unusual Dévers aux souches (1994) and its burnt and painted olive stump somehow fused with pine and, as ever with the Dévers, obliquely angled, tantalising, defiantly though grace-

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fully stable. Then there are the twistings, of wire, steel angle-bars, massive girders, forming pseudo-branchings or festoons, crownings, searching and far-stretching arms: La Serpentine (1990) is a most elegant and dynamic example, with its snaking and medusa-like branchings growing out and up from the full length of the bright harmonies of the coloured concrete-stone-marble columns; the stark but classic and grouped Sculptures I and II (2005), with their broken concrete letters forming a base painted in near Yves Klein blue, send forth their twisting iron solidities tapering to their errant spires of black lightening; or there is the massive (865 x 855 x 390 cm) yet extraordinarily delicate Déjetée (1995), its base formed of three square castle-like towers, from which streak skywards, though obliquely, and contortedly, three long, spindly rusty iron bars finally meeting and spurting straight, fused, in a final long bony and skeletal arm. Such twistings and contortions frequently mime the forms to be found in nature – branches, vines, rock veining, lightning, viscera, gestures, etc., etc. –, whereas another major form at the heart of Bernard Pagès’ sculptural imaginaire appears more flagrantly evocative of human, geometricised and refined invention: the spikes and points that abound particularly in the obsessive Pals of the 2000-2005 period. Such forms do not speak of simple self-preservation, as with innocent rose thorns, or bee stings, for example, but rather of consciously aggressive, menacing gestures, primitive weaponing, the desire to kill. Like other metal shapes Pagès offers us, with their sharp potentially cutting or piercing points, the Pals remind us of darker instincts and fear-driven intentions of which the 20th century has seen ample evidence. The 2005 Toupet, for example, is no doubt a witty, “cheeky” creation around the notion of the hair-piece, but, like so many works of Pagès, it can leave us with a psychological, even visceral edginess, as we contemplate the cluster of long, sharp iron needles that catch our eye at the work’s bizarre and powerful apex. And, no doubt, Bernard Pagès will be eminently sensitive to the endless ways his principal sculpted forms emerge: not via the relative gentleness of drawing or painting or simple arrangement, but rather via that arsenal of intervention on matter that is his: cutting, hacking, sawing, crushing, perforating, grooving, galvanising, metallising, tarring, burning, scraping, gouging, and so on. The sculptor’s work, in the case of Bernard Pagès, is hugely physical. It may climax in the harmonies of final assembly, but its processes are not, largely, any

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more those of the 1978 Lit de briques or his 1981 oil and ink on paper Capillarisation, and certainly not of the very early gouache Xavier Girard reveals to us (cf. BP89, 16).4 There is, at once secret, discreet, and implicit, revealed, in all of Bernard Pagès’ work – its ultimate creations, its materials, its processes – a binariness, a contrastive tensionality that is not to be found in Rodin or Moore or Morellet. Most critics are alert to it: Gilbert Lascault speaks of the “variegated, heterogeneous” character of Pagès’ art (BPSEM, 5); Xavier Girard calls it “doubleness” (BP89, 13); Claude Fournet argues a logic of “microarticulations of surfaces replac[ing] unified space” (BP81); Philippe de Georges dwells upon the “play of contrasts” at work and suggests that Pagès’ oeuvre as a whole is predicated on the “general theme of the combinatory” (RECBP, 29, 30). But to appreciate, say, the various Surgeons is to observe not just what Michèle Montashar has termed Pagès’ sculptural “bifurcations”, but, simultaneously, the exquisite graftings and joinings that are achieved. Such creations do not separate, insist upon fragmentation, even though difference is critical to their challenge and their achievable charm: they offer unity, they gather, they fuse the disparate. The Houppe jaune, with its coloured concrete, twisted steel and cut marble, at the very moment of rendering feasible an equilibrium, a continuum that is kinetic, chromatic and material, reminds us of ever available harmony in the midst of seeming opposition and inadequation. Of course, such melding of “the rough and the smooth, the soft and the hard, the dull and the shiny, the dispersed and the structured”, as Maurice Fréchuret writes (BPArsac, np)5 – but many other antinomies are manifest: the vertical and the horizontal, the vegetal and the mineral, the natural and the industrial, the straight and the contorted, the quirky and the elegant, the plainly given and untreated and the radically modified, etc., etc. – may be deemed far more flagrant in works such as the 1983 Arête disloquée where dislocation is not just that of the hacked wooden backbone or recumbent ridged and broken column, but, too, the blason of the relation between this disrupted continuity and the mass of jumbled rusty and painted thick iron wire supporting the backbone-cum fallen column. What Marcelin Pleynet calls art’s paysage en deux may be held to figure that tensional, oppositional fusedness animating Bernard Pa4 5

Cf. Xavier Girard’s Bernard Pagès, 1989. See Bernard Pagès au Château d’Arsac, 1994.

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gès’ works, the harmonies of the latter emanating paradoxically from their material, processual, symbolic or other precarity, instability. Out of, and over and above, the multiplicity, the sheer, at times dizzying hybridness of Pagès’ structural elements, he himself argues the “absolute requirement that sculpture constitute a whole” (RECBP, 10). It is a logic evident in the artist’s simple gesture of juxtaposing or grouping; in his movement from cutting and breakage to soldering and gluing; in his rescuing of the demolished and dismantled and left-fordead, his resuscitation thereof; in his linking of our usually distinct conceptions of the sculptural, the artistic, and the agricultural or the industrial. Joining, articulating, gathering the hybrid, the variegated, urges upon us a sense of being’s fusedness: matter is matter, the earth is the earth; there is a curious unity, even sameness, at the heart of what is; chaos looses something of its, for some, fatal logic in Pagès’ conducting of the multi-instrumented orchestra of our given totality. Sculpture, for him, whether it be that of the 1978 Parcours d’herbe calcinée, the 2000 Matrone, the Épines vertes, the Acrobate IX, the Arête cheminée d’Ivry, involves resolution, harmonisation, balance. Element A of the earth is thrust up against element B, but, by virtue of the power of poiein, A and B resume, emblematically, that oneness we call C, Mallarmé’s “third element fusible and clear” we have often seen in play, a C dependent on Reverdy’s conception of (metaphoric) joinedness whose relationships are “as distant and as appreciable as possible”. It perhaps does not surprise us, in consequence, whilst ever delighting us, to find in works as already diversified as, say, the 1986 Hommage à Gaston Bachelard or the 1992 Arête lumière or again the 2006 ensemble Les Cariatides, a strange and beautiful blending of sheer massiveness and fragileness, delicacy. Pagesian sculpture gives us, as Nicole Caligaris has insisted, not image, but body, corporality, physical bulk. But it is a masculinity, some have suggested, a suggestion Girard has echoed (BP81, 13),6 finely attuned to its own intrinsic femininity. L’Arête ouverte may weigh two tonnes, but it also offers a mass of frilly, subtle lightness; the two-tonne stone anchoring L’Acrocabate au grand fusain sends out its long spindly arm effortlessly carrying an 8-metre calcinated and gouged tree trunk. Rootedness thus combines with élan, solid foundation with a twirling lyri6

See Bernard Pagès, Nice, 1981.

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cism often, as with the latter work, surprising us with its capacity for strength and unsuspected muscularity. Put differently, it is a sculpture fusing rationality and a fancy at times reminiscent of Miró, structural necessity and spontaneous irregularity which, as Maryline Desbiolles writes, “forces materials to show they are alive” (MD, 23-4),7 mobile, ever possible, never inert. Le Dévers aux falbalas (1994) and Le Dévers aux frisottis (2006) both offer in their own way finespun daintiness upon a powerful but never grandiose frame of some solid ten feet of steel. The 1995 Dépenaillée, soaring up to nearly fourteen feet, may be “raggedy”, but its decorated tilted column is equally extremely elegant and its painted corrugated metal hanging fruit-like flounces flashingly illuminate in their funky grace. Desbiolles argues that La Gloriette is a perfect emblem of Pagès’ sculptural manner, with the dislocation of its double pedestal, the easy, dashing plumage that tops it off, the implicit irony of such architectural provocation – but, then, all is firm, reliable, structurally rationalised. Geometry, some feel, is not an inherent part of Bernard Pagès’ work, but this is because it is hidden, made not to show its mathematics that, yet, are spontaneously elaborated and concretised by an artist seeking beyond mere calculation. Xavier Girard rightly speaks of an art endeavouring to escape from the constraints weighing down upon it (cf. BP89, 12) and the endless formal and structural irregularities that offer tilting, twisting, arguable ungainliness, lopsidedness, etc., certainly confirm this. Titles such as La Déjetée, L’Arête disloquée, the Dévers, and so on, speak to this desire to break free from straightness, clean verticality, just as so many works seek a supplementarity of ornament, quirkiness, unpredictable fun. But, as Nicole Caligaris maintains (BPMAMAC, 24), such escape into a freely flowing sculptural imaginativenss relies upon a base or spinal structure permitting such flair. There is, of course, a reciprocity at work here: if the loose, the frilly, the funkily ageometric, the delightfully irrational finds freedom from the solid and the certain, so do the latter seek and desire their freedom, away from such airy flounces and flourishes, in a valuation of their own merits and beauties. Thus, once more, do we appreciate that dream and earthy rootedness, pure imagination and sensitivity to the inalienableness of matter, form that “whole” Pagès speaks of. In this sense it is important not to view, for example, the Dévers aux 7

See Maryline Desbiolles’ Bernard Pagès, 2003.

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falbalas or the 1999 Aube de lune (with, this time, an astonishingly unreassuring leggy base supporting a massive slightly tilted concrete column), as offering solidity + frills: all components, however characterised, supplement one another; their objective is perfect fusion, oneness, a bold disregard of presumptions and preconceived values. What we may think of as a certain baroqueness ever at play in Pagès’ sculpture remains synonymous with an intrinsic classicalness hinging on a instinctive knowledge of how to make sculpture function with perfectly engineered dynamics. La Fontaine dédiée à Olof Palme (1986), the Fontaine parfumée (1991) or the beautifully improbable Point de vue (1997) (which truly looks as if it could come tumbling down from its 16-feet high precariousness and where, again, the pedestal looks as if it should be the crowning plumage) – all three works wonderfully confirm the exquisite unifiedness of the baroque and the classical, the bizarre and the refined, the acultural and the systematic, the unsettling and the securely ordered. Even a work like La Matrone achieves such aesthetic (and, implicitly, ontological) harmonisation: “a barbaric spinning-top turned upside down”, Bruno Duborgel calls it (RECBP, 16), and yet even this primitive, disturbing object of bristling hostility retains, in the unerring perfection of its form and its finish an elegance determinedly classical despite our protests. Nothing is fortuitous about the shaping of this sublime monster: Simeon Hunter speaks of Pagès’ “scientific system” that, yet, produces the sheer poetry of his works (ISBP, np)8 – whether, here, with La Matrone, some implicit tragicalness or anxious elegiacalness, or, elsewhere, the soaring poetry of elation. And nothing is clearer, either, than that the archaic, “mediaeval” dimensions of Pagès’ sculpture9 is seamlessly blended with a contemporariness everywhere visible, whether in the wild flaming viscera of La Souche de Cadillac (1997) or Le Dormant dit l’insolite (1998) or the great assemblage of seven pieces forming the 1994 Fléaux. If L’Écorchée (1989), with its fusion of shattered painted pine and cherry wood, its metal base and crown, its wood and metal bolts, varnish and cellulose finishes, remains wild, raw, viscerally linked to the earth’s ancient processes as well as humankind’s primal violences, its artistic (re)constitution could not be more modern, more radically postmodern in its leap beyond stabilised equations of knowing and aesthetic belief. 8 9

See In Situ. Bernard Pagès, 1999. See Pagès’ view quoted in Nicole Caligaris’ essay in BPMAMAC, 2006.

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Philippe de Georges relates that Bernard Pagès once described his work as offering “the story of a man’s sawing through a piece of wood” (RECBP, 34), an act that is basic, fundamental, a daily foundational gesture cutting into the rawness of the given to provide the self with its equally basic needs. If “nature”, the things of what is, may be given the name of chaos, such a gesture, strictly from the self’s non-transcendent point of view, may be regarded as (impulsive and compulsive) orchestration – a relative, subjective ordering of the so-called “chaotic”, from which yet all springs. Gilbert Lascault, writing in 1989, suggests that Pagès’ 1986 Souche désarticulée is the work that “comes closest to the chaotic”, an observation that understands the degree to which Pagès’ art of resisting anarchy and disarray yet precisely draws upon such energy in an intimate relation to it – and this, I should argue, is true even of the most elegant creations such as the 1988 Sculpture extérieure (Contes), the 1986 Chapiteau bleu or the 1992 Arête lumière: the artist’s beautiful and unfailing caress is everywhere palpable, but it is a caress that ever leaves visible, tangible, the strange ruggedness of matter, of impenetrable and opaque origin. Certainly, as Xavier Girard emphasises – and this is eminently so even in the pseudo-chaos Lascault sees in La Souche désarticulée –, that there is “no room in Pagès’ world for something that is not intensely worked” (BP81, 11). Bernard Pagès, by his own confession – one thinks, too, of Claude Simon’s self-description –, is a bricoleur, a handy-man ever recycling, resurrecting, using and playing with and creating from what is at hand, stone, wood, as well as members of the demolished “industrial body”, as Nicole Caligaris writes (BPMAMAC, 13). Sculpture, rather than (traditional) painting, allows Bernard Pagès, as he says, to do what he likes to do: “rescue materials, repair, transform, get matter to return to life, differently” (BPSR, 24). To be the artist-bricoleur is to join together an almost naïve, playful, childlike enthusiasm that Jean-Marc Aubert is particularly sensitive to, and a capacity to achieve, spontaneously, intuitively, genially, a refinement that, as with Picasso according to Reverdy, is predicated, 99 percent, upon work, trust in the solutions that flow from sheer doing, from that participatory and interventional dance about the object of one’s attention. The solutions of the bricoleur are artisanal, immediate, “cunning”, free, open,10 no doubt in 10

Cf. Bernard Pagès’ sense of this in BPSC, 24.

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some fair measure like the solutions reached by a Jean Tinguely, a Ben Vautier, even perhaps a Georges Rousse. Solution, of course, is a relative notion to the extent that the doing involved can never be finished. The marking, cutting, joining, the intervening, the seeking of otherness in the given, all is an ongoing (hi)story of the self’s connection, endless connectability to all that isn’t self. “There is no mystery involved”, Bernard Pagès maintains (BPSR, 7): his art is an endlessly spun pure poiein, like but also unlike the birth and death of trees or dayflies. The artist bootstraps himself up into his own (art of) doing and being, creating his own “traps” and catches, as well as the teeming “ways out” of them (ibid.). “He invents nothing outright, from scratch”, Claude Fournet remarks (BP81, 7) – but, then, nobody does, except for the sheer uniqueness of all intervention with the already created, which is a vast, infinite residue or (Derridian) “remainder” out of which creativity weaves further createdness: thought, feeling, doing, remaining to be accomplished. To intervene, with what is, what remains, is to become involved, as Pagès would seem to sense, in the production of an unclosed, unfinished thing – art, the art of one’s very being –, a thing ever modifiable, becoming, other (cf. BPSC, 32). To look, once more, at the 1969 Tas de paille or the 1973 Fil de fer; to pass from them to the 1991 La Torsade with its conifer + concrete + oildrum elements or the lovely delicate Dévers aux os II with its multiple constituents; to gaze finally upon such works and even run one’s hand over their surfaces with their obscure ontic depths – to travel, thus, through the palimpsests of Pagès’ poietic doing time has laid down, is to appreciate, precisely, this unfinishableness at the heart of it all, the implicit infinity paradoxically available via the experience of finitude. But, this said, is there anything that Pagès’ work can be said to add up to? Philippe de Georges maintains that it is not “an art of signification”, although it does produce “an effect of meaning” (RECBP, 32, 34). But where does that leave us? Maryline Desbiolles opts for a fair though mildly frustrating summation, arguing that we have here a “sculpture which is what it appears to be” (MD, 23), i.e. is literal, purely self-revealing, offering no message other than its production and its material emergence into seemingness. Pagès himself confirms this perception by insisting on the absence of any parti pris informing his work (cf. RECBP, 32). And all of this is perfectly acceptable, except for the fact that meaning and purpose manifestly

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abound, for Pagès, as for all others entering into its experience. When Bernard Pagès tells us, for example, that he sculpts “to keep myself awake and alert” (ibid., 16), we are catapulted into an art of high consciousness, of high ontic purpose, even though this implies no laying down of solved equations of being and doing. When he speaks of his desire for experiencing the unknown via materials with a history, regarding this as an ongoing challenge, once again the highest, quasiRimbaldian episteme is at stake: the psyche’s confrontation with all that lies beyond its until now experienced limits. When, similarly, Maryline Desbiolles further suggests that Bernard Pagès’ work represents “a meagre, derisory, magnificent flowering [amidst ruin]” (MD, 32), how can we not be sympathetic to so much a statement implies – the beauty of this art’s psychic, physiological accomplishment with a matter and (perhaps) a global culture hardly making things too evident – whilst at the same time realising its utter subjectivity: could one not argue that all being and doing, despite, at times, their seemingness, are far from meagre and derisory – manifestly Pagès’, for he has found the way to his own (difficult) Poussinian délectation; but all others’, too. (Of course, this is a provocative posture, but it is merely predicated upon an unknowing allowing for all imaginable equations of our individual and collective being and doing.) Maryline Desbiolles is utterly right to point us towards her sense of the meaning of Pagès’ personal world, which culminates in the “reenchantment of the world” at large (ibid., 28). The niceties of the debate over figurativeness / afiguration melt away when private responses enter the scene, and it can never be just a matter of those shifting shapes and realities Denis Roche evokes as we move around a given sculpture, relevant though they remain in relation to the latter. When Bernard Pagès tells us that, beyond surface experience and pertinence, he seeks depth and fullness (cf. RECBP, 12), we enter a realm of meaning and purpose where matter fuses with a strange, never developed mysticalness. “Pagès works away, Claude Fournet suggests, in a poem that is matter” and such a doing (poiein), he properly suggests, lies intrinsically beyond the grasp of any value judgement we may be inclined to lay upon it. That forms may at times appear humanoid or snake-like or even chicken-like, that any column may become, despite Pagès’ admonitions, vaguely phallic for some, that titles inevitably throw out tracers of potential meaning, that hommages (to Bachelard, to Camus, to Toni [Grand]) may orient our understanding

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of the artist’s larger sensibility, none of this, valuable as it may be, reaches into the true depths of meaning and purpose in Pagès’ art. The 1988 La Noire, an interior sculpture of some six feet or more however it is placed (and the options are many), clearly plays with the very freedom it has developed within and for itself. Its purpose and meaning thus escape architectural limitations, just as they cannot be bound by interpretations hovering about its blackness or even its fused aerialness, writhingness and improbable mechanics. It is the sheer magic of the feasibility of all of this, its creatableness and, via the artist’s determination to enter the field of the latter, its spontaneously emerging actual createdness, that gives mean-ing (: ongoing, continuous, open, infinite sense) to a work (: a process and a product) such as La Noire. It is because of the nature of this Pagesian meaningness that Yves Ravey can give us his splendid “reading” of the 2006 Cariatides (with its five aligned four-metre high sculptures of twisting, gracefully tapering blue-tipped girders reaching high from their straw bales), a reading leaping and dancing as freely, as unconstrainingly, as infinitely “reenchantingly” as Pagès has laid before us, and himself, the strange mystery of his hands, his arms, his mind, in their whirling tussle with and beyond matter. Sense, open, ever generatable meaning, thus resides within what some have termed the “silence” of Bernard Pagès’ work. The excellent writing of Yves Ravey or Xavier Girard or Maryline Desbiolles, but so many others too, as we have seen, yet confirms that this silence speaks volumes, never stops speaking, in the midst of its tantalising silence. The 1996 Acrobate III or the 2005 Pal aux feuilles de laiton, or, again, works as visually different as the 1988 Électrisée and the 2006 Torse II – all allow the spinning of endless hermeneutic narratives, themselves ever wound about, interwoven with, that infinity of meaning at the heart of all being and doing, all incarnation and all dissolution of visibleness, Pagès’ and beyond. The extraordinarily intricate and quirky Cimier mauve (1986), with its endless metal “twigs” or “feathers” or “bones” and its painted and ceramic wood crest or “head”, or the beautifully at once “raw and cooked” Épines vertes of the same year, a massive standing pure conifer piece rescued from the forest fires and decked out in the genial simplicity of Pagès’ sure caress – these will be my last examples –, both offer what Philippe de Georges has termed un plus-de-sens: that beauty seeking no meaning beyond the engagement with its doing, its making, yet, “magnificently”, as Maryline Des-

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biolles says, laying before us with a “meagreness” of means yet far from derisory, I insist, a reenchanting Pongian remake of the world. This is not simply meaning enough; it is, rather, the height of purpose and meaning. Meaning that has no name, that speaks the silence of its unending (re)making and the intrinsically unsayable beauty of all matter and mindfulness. Le Cimier mauve thus simultaneously deploys a being and a doing in excess of (known) meaning, whilst inviting us to join the dance and the adventure of such an “excess”. Like Les Épines vertes, it celebrates all language laid in homage at its feet, whilst quietly retreating into the taciturnity of its inherent exuberance, the solemn yet dynamic play of its ontic origin and the magic of its unceasing remadeness, its infinite sense.

STRUCTURE, SENSUALITY, FABLE, ACCOMPANIMENT: JEAN-PIERRE PINCEMIN That Jean-Pierre Pincemin may be considered to be, in the world of contemporary art, “a free electron”, as Josiane Bellan has called him, is perhaps not overly surprising given his parcours. An “outsider” who trains as a turner, finds himself working on the Concorde engine with Snecma, a pure autodidact whose leisure-hour visits to the Louvre will ensure that, as Bernard Lamarche-Vadel says, his future oeuvre and vision will be utterly remote from any idea of “the death of art”, Jean-Pierre Pincemin will yet become, by the age of thirty, an artist of distinction and subtlety. He himself tells us there is, early on, no real affinity with B.M.P.T ? –, and, despite his connection with the Supports / Surfaces group, his gratitude to Claude Viallat and his admiration for Bernard Pagès, he is not involved in the movement’s creation or what he terms its “contradictions”, and no doubt feels the distance between Paris and Nice. Paris yet gives him the occasion to see first-hand the work of Flavin, Andre, Morris, and to measure their pertinence and their validity against not only the new French school immediately impacting on his free-spirited, selfsearching aesthetic consciousness, but against – in relation to – the teeming lessons learned from the earlier modernities of Mondrian and Picasso, for example, and, beyond, far beyond, yet there, intimately close, those lying still vital and vibrant in the halls of the Louvre. If, before long, critics will be speaking of his “sophisticated chromatism [and a] rigorous construction [yet offering] a cerebral sensualness”, of an “oeuvre of double-headed knowledge, of double teleological vision”,1 it is in significant measure due to Pincemin’s free and alert availability, his desire to enter into a principial and comprehensive relationship with art, and particularly painting, of the past as well as the present. Thus, if Franz Kline and Josef Albers can draw his attention, so can Veronese and Goya. “I am always questioning the nature of my vision”, Pincemin tells us in his conversation with Michel Griscelli, recorded in Monkey Business (cf. MB, 62), where unfold the humour, the ironic wit and what Barbara Rose can term the “perversity” of an artist not given to a banal stabilisation of an aesthetic and ethical démarche that, in effect, constantly twists and turns within 1

As Josiane Bellan and Bernard Lamarche-Vadel have respectively written (: see Bibliography).

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the supple, open-ended limits which yet define it. Jean-Marc Huitorel has spoken rather of Pincemin’s “intransigent nonchalance”, an easefulness that nevertheless is informed by a sharpness of perception and vision both unassuming and in quest of a self-knowledge art may foster but which, too, remains beyond art. Indeed, if, as Pincemin maintains, he is “an assimilator of principles” rather than a seeker of personal originality (cf. JPP, 2000, 37),2 and if it is true, as he again argues that “all painters act out of analogy” – though not in imitation, and barely inventing (cf. ibid., 23) – it is equally important to recognise the pertinence of his firm declaration that “I have always painted instinctively” (cf. ibid., JPP, 1980, 80): the visceral, the intuitive, even the impulsive, remains significant modes deeply embedded in any volition and calculation emerging from the examination of work as varied as that, say, of Malevich or Tàpies or Velasquez. Alain Bonfand has suggested that Pincemin’s work “oscillates between an experience of ennui and a practice of contemplation” (JPP, 2000, 58), but, I should argue, it is essential to understand this contemplativeness not merely as involving a rational, deliberate appropriative study of the other, but as a deep reverie to do with the larger purpose and function of one’s being, one’s poiein. Speaking with Sylvio Acatos in 1979, Pincemin clarifies the for him largely invisible but critically and instinctually lived links that may develop between one artist and another: “between a work by Rubens, he suggests, and La Mort de Sardanapale there is a whole world, but Delacroix needed Rubens to create it” (JPP, 1980, 88). To seek, similarly, overt flagrancies of similarity and influence between Pincemin and let us say, Veronese – so frequently Pincemin’s surprising benchmark – would risk misapprehending the nature of the contemplativeness Bonfand evokes. What is at stake is an infinitely more profound meditative and spiritual exchange, an exchange yet equally predicated upon Pincemin’s inalienable feeling that “painting is a place of sensual delight I couldn’t do without”. No neat equations thus lie in evidence in the work of Jean-Pierre Pincemin. The free-wheeling manner, the personal spontaneity of discipline, it arrogates to itself, the heterogeneity it consequently develops, reveal an artist happy, and quick, to assume what Philippe Dagen called, in 1999, “the right to dare to do any-

2

Jean-Pierre Pincemin, La Différence, 2000.

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thing” (Le Monde, 16 April). Yet this, as Pincemin reminds us, always “in good company” (cf. JPP, 2000, 23). The early work of Pincemin is created from the later 1960’s well into the 1970’s and, if we may easily detect preoccupations of form, structure, orchestration, neither will this impose any absolutes, nor will it exclude that volupté, that sensual, bodily, materio-emotive delight we have seen him deem critical even in the midst of a seeming mathematics of the created. “Whoever, he writes, can guarantee the flow and continuity of colour in a painting, can paint”: if we may read into such as declaration a consciousness of the need to arrange and control, it is equally clear that Pincemin sees colour as a far more fluid, unstable and subtle force than that involved in the sheer geometry and assembly of line and form. Colour, he will argue in his Épiphanie, impacts powerfully on the latter, “destroying and reconstructing” them (MB, 54), becoming in effect, beyond any normal sense of figuration, a purely self-naming “figure”, a “real” far from abstract in its recounting of its own material sensuality – we shall soon have occasion to elucidate this crucial element of Pincemin’s poet(h)ics. The first paintings undertaken palpably bear out Lamarche-Vadel’s contention that Pincemin’s aesthetic “ambition was both simple and excessive” (P-P, 8)3: free, spontaneously produced Empreintes that involve the use of sheet-metal and wood recuperated from waste sites, materials impregnated with paint, applied either uniformly or in two or three bands, the surfaces then being printed onto the definitive receiving surface. The results can be quite striking, as with the 1968 1.5 x 2 metre Empreinte shown in Monkey Business (pp. 42-3) or those works reproduced in Bernard Lamarche-Vadel’s 1980 monograph, where he relates them to and counterdistinguishes them from various techniques and conceptions espoused by Pollock, Stella and others. Such work leads, though with a logic of pure modal experimentation and discovery, to the Carrés collés, begun in earnest in the 1969-70 period. Method and intention tend, here, to synthesise earlier creative modes with newly developing conceptualisation and interrogation of material supports and surface results: a serial process involves the assembly of small canvas squares once more impregnated with paint of a markedly limited range of colours, the assembly itself produced by a type of stapling and collaging; the resulting can3

Cf. Pincemin-Paysage, in JPP, 1980.

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vases, quite large, 2 metres square or larger still and rectangular, offer simple yet aesthetically complex geometric structures, striking chromatically despite their constraints and, indeed, engaging in their spatiality in significant measure because of the sensual impact of colour (: see MB, 12, 14, 19, for example) – even though Pincemin uses whatever colours are at hand, he remains sensitive, he tells Michel Griscelli, to their “values” their combinatory harmonies (cf. MB, 1618), this being part of a broader strategy aiming to “transform painting in successive stages” (MB, 16). It is perhaps also worthy of note, in connection both with the Carrés collés and the Échelles series contemporaneous with them, that, whilst Pincemin regards this largely deconstructive-reconstructive mode he is in as having affinity with “industrial” analytic practice (cf. MB, 18), the actual material finish of these early works in no way has that smooth, utterly depersonalised air: the geometries and forms are inevitably freer due to the arguably aleatory process that generates them, allowing matters and supports to find, as it were, their own level of contentment in a given, though personally launched, set of circumstances. The various Échelles, then, pursue the path of conscious architectural orchestration of form, combining this rationality, however, with a deployment of colour already understood to be at the heart of the reality of produced structure. The échelles – ladders, scales, measures – give a different, extended rhythm, a music, one might say, to the carrés, offering what Lamarche-Vadel has called a “landscape” (JPP 1988, 38),4 a spatial continuum of coloured composed space(s), a manner – and a plastic realness – which, he suggests, may be seen in the light of work by Léger, Matisse, Mondrian and Kline. Frédéric Nef, writing about the monochromatic works of the 1974-76 period, draws our attention to the temple-like structures that can characterise them and encourages us not to see in them merely the abstraction of pure mathematics but, rather, to recognise a tussle – and no doubt a harmony, an equivalence, perhaps – between what I should term the sheer self-reflexivity of structure and colour, and “the uncertain depth of the world” (TC, 17), between, that is, I take it, the prestige and temptation of form, “image”, as Bonnefoy has it, and the mystery of presence, realness, at its heart. Speaking in later years of “geometric and abstract painting”, with which his own Palissades and 4

Cf. Tableau et couleur, in Jean-Marc Pincemin, façons de voir, manières de décrire, 1993.

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Portails are often associated, Pincemin will suggest that “the active perception [of such painting] would involve a speculation on relationships existing between its parts or constituent elements, thus making it into a non-alienating object, one, indeed, deprived of ideology. Poetry, metaphysics, knowledge, would be its common attributes with traditional representational painting” (MB, 60, my emphasis). It is clearly important not to lose sight of the implications of such an affirmation when looking not only at the Palissades and other work of their period but also work, invariably untitled, of a so-called geometric nature that will continue to be produced into the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, and, indeed, more sporadically up until Pincemin’s passing in 2005. The 1974 Palissade Bernard Lamarche-Vadel gives us (cf. JPP, 1980, 57), with its board-like horizontal strips of colour and its “enclosed” space obtained by two outer vertical “struts” in the lower half of the canvas, certainly draws its power from its piled alignment of paling-like forms which structure an ensemble equally notable for its monochromatic effect. But, as with another very large Palissade of the same year – painterly modernity’s monumentalness, it has been argued, is that of colour every bit as much as of form –, a blue-red one, its vast blueness edged and partitioned by thickish but delicate red “strips”, one is taken not merely, perhaps not nearly as much, by the pseudo-geometric composition (for there is nothing at all here configured à la Morellet or à la Buren), but rather by the strange sensuality oozing from such an orchestration, a poeticity, indeed a beauty, intrinsic to the real’s matter and offering us an experience of deep consubstantiality, connectedness. Pincemin, apart from the above statement does not particularly dwell upon such matters in explicit fashion, but he can declare, in conversation with Michel Enrici, firstly that “geometric rigour is a deceptive allurement and one must just keep the fictional space it provides” (JP, 2000, 33), and, perhaps even more tellingly, that “Mondrian often influenced me without ever convincing me” (ibid.). The implications of such remarks are, of course, complex, but if we look at other work accomplished in 1974 – the Peinture that fascinates Frédéric Nef, for example, with its “columns” and “roof”, all in a sensuous, discreetly, voluptuous red, or the Sans titre with its two joined brown vertical rectangular “panels”, their thin edgings framing the canvas, or even a late large Carrés collés (210 x 294 cm), prepared via the usual technique and offering a sober but subtly harmonious chromatics marked

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out by a few thick lines that both frame and divide global plastic space into “window-” and “portal-”like sub-space – we can see that 1. pure abstraction is eschewed; 2. “fictionality” is retained but never narrativised; 3. no Morandi-like “realism” is retained via Pincemin’s manner, but rather 4. Pincemin privileges that sheer sensuousness seeping from a certain application of colour in its spatialised deployment – something the later “geometricised” work and the so-called figurative painting of 1984 on will both continue to insist on conveying: the secretive but often luscious pleasure of that oddly palpable intrinsicalness – realness – of paint, colour, rather than the “picture” or the form attributable to their orchestrated unfoldment. A quick look at some of the painting from the later 1970’s and early 1980’s – before moving on to Pincemin’s sculpture, his pseudo-figurative painting and his engravings – will allow for a more ample appreciation of the artist’s long-developed and long-explored relationship with structure, form (which is counterdistinguished from structure and deemed to have but “a secondary level of significance”: cf. MB, 38) and colour, their laws and systems and their possible subversion, a subversion which yet remains caressive rather than dismissive. The 1976 Peinture, 3 x 4 metres, with its subtle and saturated greens and pinked or greyish off-whites (cf. MB, 22-3), offers a crude, rustic structuring of coloured space. It has nothing of the derealised absoluteness of precise, mathematicised geometry, nor does its chromatics seek some dry, clinical, purified finish. The two untitled works Lamarche-Vadel reproduces in his 1980 study, dated 1978 (JPP, 1980, 89) and 1979 (ibid., 91) maintain a similar balance of qualities and intentions and, if we may deem Pincemin to be entering the arena of abstraction, we recognise too a poiein that is less expressionistic, less expressly emotive à la Pollock or à la Soulages, where structure emerges via modes of quasi-automatism, but which, as Lamarche-Vadel eloquently shows, whilst sensitive, certainly, to modernism and contemporary avant-gardism, remains alert, just as importantly, to the “architectonics of Veronese and Titian […], the interiors of Vermeer [and] Matisse’s ateliers […], Delacroix’s scenography [and] the great Spanish school” (ibid., 52). 1981 and 1983 works such as those selected for Monkey Business (cf. MB, 26-7, 24-5) can appear at times somewhat slicker in their lacquered finish, but still do not possess that inhuman and unreal impeccableness of, say, Mondrian’s 1929 oil on canvas Composition or Ellsworth Kelly’s more

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tendentiously and scrupulously calculated 1969 oil on canvas and hardboard Rouge bleu vert jaune. Rather does Pincemin leave us with the palpable sense of what paint is, its layeredness, its streaked and personally handled matter, the fleshy relationship the artist entertains with it whilst generating a visual, structural space intimately fused with and dependent on such incarnate engagement. Echoes of interchromatic affiliations are significant, too, but these are not flat equations (: green, olive, yellow; or cream, beige, brown) but rather memories – Pincemin often has spoken of this – drawn from the depths of painting’s massive tradition – memories and equations, moreover, that fuse and dapple distinctions, giving colour the ineffable variegation and soft speckledness of the things of the earth. Theory and concept thus yield to the free vitality and quiet sumptuousness of experience and sensation, whilst maintaining a consciousness of the framework within which modernity and postmodernity unravel their systems. To turn now, of necessity briefly, to Jean-Pierre Pincemin’s sculpture is to offer ourselves an apt reminder of a certain quixotic quality to his global plastic démarche. His 1967 creation, with its piled pieces of “found” wood, or the 1968 “column” of similar inspiration, elegant in its simple but bold seeming precarity and set amongst sun-lit trees and rough grass (cf. MB, 49); the truly massive (11-metre long), brutish 10-tonnes 1984 piece composed of great untreated concrete slabs gathered with no apparent thought of embellishment or refinement,5 or, again, a sculpture such as the 1990 vaguely humanoid sculpture, with its crudely stapled and most basically constructed pieces of old painted wood – all demonstrate a level of indifference to received aesthetics in an artist yet hyperconscious of the many delicate and subtle beauties art’s Western tradition has wrought. Barbara Rose says of the relatively numerous sculptures built along the lines of the latter 1990 piece that “made out of the debris of gutted slum buildings [, they] look dirty and dilapidated instead of utopian. There is a message in these materials and techniques: even the small sculptures would look awful on your marble coffee table” (JPPDC). Whilst the latter point is true and thus distinguishes a Pincemin sculpture from a small Giacometti or a Pagès Surgeon or Acrobate, Pincemin’s gesture cannot be said to be icono5

Sometimes titled Le Jour après.

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clastic or derisive: rather does it seek to discover what remains feasible within the discarded, what might be uplifting where ruin seems to prevail. The 1990 piece, like others like it, has improbable charm; it has a liveliness about it; it generates fun, humour, yet in the midst of a seriously meditated gesture. The earlier sculptures mentioned (1967, 1968) will, moreover, find an echo in the heightened elegance and funkiness of a 1993 piece (shown in MB, 46) that, in fact, might happily be placed in a sizeable living-room, just as, despite Rose’s view, smaller quirky pieces such as those shown in Monkey Business, from 1988 and 1989 (cf. ibid., 46-7) could brighten up any salon. Beauty, as writers and artists from Victor Hugo to Arthur Cravan, Beuys to Kabakov or Tàpies, have suggested or shown us, can be grotesque, banal, throwaway, raw: such epithets only limit what is sublimely indefinable: all being and doing. “How to build the Eiffel Tower with matchsticks”, Pincemin wittily describes the challenge undertaken from the outset (cf. MB, 36): from abandonment, caress; from seeming nothingness, a something that speaks to unlosable beingness and ever available poiein; from even the most recalcitrant beginning, such as dull concrete slabs, pleasure and intrigue and discovery as an end. And, throughout Pincemin’s apparently hybrid disconnected sculptural modes and materials, there is a continuity in their improbableness, their precarious questionableness, their “imperfection” that is simultaneously their “summit”, as Bonnefoy might have remarked. A continuity exists too, Pincemin maintains – this beyond the fatal obviousness of authorship – , between his sculpture and his painting, one that we shall also observe in regard to his engravings. He writes, perhaps rather quizzically: “If I want to know what the object of my painting is, well, I just have to sculpt it” (DC, 17).6 Huitorel takes this to be a significant statement, without explaining why he does. Certainly it cannot be upheld that Pincemin absolutely needs to see in three-dimensional form the elephants he will soon paint: if the rather charmingly eccentric 1987 sculpture (cf. JPP93, 34), with its baby yellow and sky-blue elephant prancing on the neck of its presumed parental torso, itself emerging like a rabbit from a magician’s hat from a small stool-like table, concretises paintings to come, such as the tiny 1992 Peinture (cf. ibid., 20) with its creamy animal figure set against blue, it is hard to read into Pince6

See Jean-Pierre Pincemin: Dérive des continents, 1994.

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min’s equation much more than a droll paradox, at best a reference to his own desire to amusingly query and play with any figurativeness in his work. Ultimately, Pincemin remains quite uncertain as to the raison d’être of (his) sculpture, which, finally, does not preoccupy him nearly as much as painting or engraving. “The sculptor’s dream, he tells us, is not sculpture, I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t sculpture” (MB, 46). This does not imply a devaluation of his sculptural activity, but rather, I should argue, that continuing sense that emerges from much that Pincemin writes about his démarche, namely a sense, simultaneously, of his art’s seriousness, the commitment, the fascination and the historical consciousness it may offer, and of a dimension of art that, beyond aesthetics, beyond factors of originality and conceivable prestige, may offer delectation, sensual and spiritual joy and liberty and that “generosity” to which I shall return in conclusion. “One must change, Jean-Pierre Pincemin affirms after a period of illness, one can’t keep doing the same thing indefinitely” (DC, 19). Not that one is inclined to accuse Pincemin of stagnation: his 1967-8 sculpture and his painting of the late 1960’s and 1970’s already give strong evidence of an artist instinctively making his yet reflective way through the expanding gamut of his experience. But the years from 1984 on certainly reveal a bold indifference to received perception of his by now internationally recognised painterly “style”, a freedom of self-perception, an easeful and fearless desire to explore new plastic manners rather than to submit to the constraints of his Palissades or immediate post-Palissades modes critics, the “market”, he himself, might conceivably demand he respect. Identifiable forms thus emerge in these years. The Année de l’Inde plunges us into a variety of animal and vegetal motifs, essentially ready-made in the sense that Pincemin does not draw upon direct personal experience, the truly lived sights and sounds of the Orient. The Dérive des continents work pushes farther still such a considerable plastic adventure and the 1990’s will see painting drawing upon or containing echoes of mediaeval Christian iconography, Buddhist cosmography, Persian miniatures, Tibetan and Western medicinal plates, Japanese prints, Tuscan frescoes, work by the Douanier Rousseau, Matisse and Pincemin’s own contemporaries. That said, to look at specific works, which I now propose to do, albeit most compactly, reveals the degree to which Pincemin’s painting of the 1986-1996 decade nevertheless refuses to be notionally packaged as the above, often found neat criti-

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cal analysis suggests it can be. The 1987 Peinture (cf. JPP93, 4) seemingly depicting an upside-down naked body immersed in a mass of swirling darkness cannot be reduced either narratively or representationally. The “problem” – which, of course, is not one – lies here, as with much of Pincemin’s so-called figurative work, in finding, as Roger Pouivet has remarked, “how to describe the description it would be appropriate to offer” (ibid., 35). The extraordinary 1991 Peinture (cf. MB, 29), with its tigers or leopards, its (possible) masked hunter poised to strike, its lianas (?) and unstabilisable spaces and perspectives, gives us an exquisite “all-over”, a tantalising jungle of form and colour the pertinence of whose sheer sensuality by far exceeds that of its describableness. As Louis Dalla Fior suggests in his fine text to accompany Pincemin’s 1994 exhibition Cartographies, the artist is engaging in a measurement of the unmeasurable: “only fable recounts our earthly state, the rest is description” (C, 20).7 The Année de l’Inde (Peinture) of 1988 may seem to provide an image of a great, massively leafed tree, or is it a small plant, set against a creamy backcloth, with a visible streak of blue sky, though what orange-brown phenomenon could be higher than the sky? No, we are in the land, at once, of the fabulous, the imaginary, and that of paint(ing) itself, its self-reflexivity that yet provides a shimmering image of a real our rational mind would risk rendering banal, humdrum, dismissible: just another bit of vegetation! Paintings such as the two large 1991 oils, as almost always untitled (cf. MB, 30, 31) show us, on the one hand a haloed, seemingly male figure traversing and hugely dominating a roaring river, a more or less featureless child freely standing on his shoulder, for the two hands of the major protagonist are taken up with holding the long rope-like roots of a tree, all this surveyed by some cloaked and hooded small but seemingly still adult person watching from the bank of the river. It is a splendid piece in so many ways, powerfully chromatic, narratively suggestive enough to have some scurry off to find its biblical origins. But, as with the second pseudo-iconographic piece (MB, 31), Pincemin’s aim is to enter the plastic and imaginative atmosphere of art such as this: Pincemin does not imitate; this is not iconography; this is art in one of its countless guises, all of which, undoubtedly, assist in accomplishing what he has termed the “soul’s quest” (MB, 28) – but the 7

See Cartographies, 1994.

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essential gesture required fuses matter and mind, plasticity and dream, and its agenda is not strapped down, either modally or idealogically constrained. The range of works during this period becomes, in so many ways, quite astonishing. Pincemin can give us tiny oil canvases such as the three 1992 pieces all summarily titled/untitled Peinture, shown in the catalogue of the 1993 exhibition held at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Saint-Priest: one (cf. JPP93, 28),8 a Gauguin-like landscape of poplars and fields, at once flagrantly allusive, honouring of the real, and boldly derealised, overtaken by a certain pure elasticity; another (ibid., 12), not unlike a Louise Bourgeois gathering of combed wool or thread, but lying there in its enigmatic unidentifiableness, its potent, infinite (non-)figuration, its, once more, swirling, self-referencing paintedness; the third (ibid., 18), surreal, freshly emerged from the unconscious, beyond all hope we may idly have of rationalising its elongated oval crossed blue forms, its two rows of stone walls, or teeth, its barely shaped human – female? – face and neck, its flowing-water wing flying out behind – all of this ceaselessy reduced to pure speculation as, once more, structure, form and colour defy our figurative whims whilst smilingly urging and ushering them into their infiniteness. Finally, a quick look at the strange, inimitable, at once elegant and rough-hewn paintings from the 1994 Dérive des continents exhibited in Brest and Douarnenez, as also in Cherbourg, this time with the exhibition title of Cartographies. The Brest-Douarnenez catalogue, with Jean-Marc Huitorel’s excellent essay, offers three pieces (DC, 3, 20, 23): the first (DC, 4) beautifully evokes old maps, the space of surmising, imagination, of, too, the earth’s becomingness, as well as its ineffableness, its ever-recreatableness, i.e. its, and our, plasticity; as in the second painting (DC, 20), form, perception, indeed, in consequence, reality, have no absolutes, no fixity – like Pincemin’s own oeuvre as a whole, they constantly shift, dream-like, fabled: the second piece seems to imbricate one animal form with another, devourer and devoured caught in their cosmic dance as strange, as unsayable, as fused and unified, as the dance of any phenomena, any two or more creatures, flowers or ants, clouds or dream beings; the third painting (DC, 23), both simpler and more enigmatic, displays the sheer emblematicalness of shapes, their adjacency, their connectable8

See Note 4.

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ness, their rationalisableness that yet can be seen to be utterly fluid, infinitely refigurable: it is a map of our mental, emotional and spiritual plasticity, a tipping of the hat to our wonderful depth of being which only painterly doing, poiein, can measure – by freeing it from finiteness of measurement. The move into figurative modes of one kind or another, perhaps unsurprisingly in an artist whose surprises we grow accustomed to, does not mean Jean-Pierre Pincemin turns his back on art we may consider abstract, geometric, more purely structural. Various works titled Peinture, offering squared or rectangular modulations of earlier pieces or else exploded yet clumped and distinctly energised masses of thick coloured lines, continue to appear side by side with the work we have just examined (cf., SM, 20, 36, 38; JPP93, 22) and if the gap seems stunningly great between these now sober, unspectacular and restrained, now rather more violent but still geometrically preoccupied oils and the remarkable, swarming, eroticised labyrinth of interwoven figures of, say, the 1995 Peinture that Monkey Business presents to us (cf. MB, 59), it clearly is a gap that Pincemin has no trouble exploring and, in a sense, closing. Manifestly, there is no need to choose abstraction over figuration, or vice versa, and indeed Pincemin’s practice and general conception of his practice is such as to discourage rationalising firm frontiers between the representational and that purely inwardly turned plasticity that we can be tempted to regard as abstract. Barbara Rose rightly suggests that what is at stake in 1984 and beyond is “a questioning of the validity of the hypotheses of abstraction” (JPP93, 13) – not an invalidation, of course, but a broader thinking of its logic and its relation to figuration, the way in which, finally, both are subsumed in a vaster, open-ended category: painting – hence, I should argue, the easy, nonchalant, but witting decision to title/untitle much of his work with the term peinture. “I try, Pincemin already tells Sylvio Acatos in 1979, to have things join up, things which, perhaps, are not made to do so” (JPP1980, 86). But, at the same time as this slight hesitation is articulated, he is critically conscious of the idea, the fact, that there is “no progress in art” (ibid., 88): Mondrian, Malevich or Newman, thusly, are, in short, not superior to Velasquez or Ingres or Renoir: form, structure, the very matter of painting, too, and the sheer sensuality – the mystery – of colour are to be found in Tintoretto and Delacroix. Just as abstract, “geometric” painting cannot, ultimately, establish itself as divorced from “poetry

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[and] metaphysics”, i.e. meaning more difficult to represent. When Pincemin writes that “I am opposed to the figure for moral reasons” (JPP2000, 51), we can take this both as a tongue-in-cheek statement, sensitive to art’s conceptual, theoretical “monkey business”, and, no doubt, as a personal, instinctive, visceral inclination to avoid any overt, readily totalisable anecdotalness, any easy reduction of the act and process of painting to something outside of such an act and process – and, of course, product. To return to the 1995 Peinture just alluded to, we can better appreciate that its entire agenda is painting itself, its own, its imaginable “models”, the sheer poiein, throughout the ages, of oblique yet intense relation to the world via the oddities of drawn shapes and the infinite gamut of the real’s colour that paint conjures. Throughout the intense period of painting just discussed and, in fact, from 1979 onwards – there is but one earlier piece – JeanPierre Pincemin also gives himself to that fairly considerable sum of creative activity which the 1998 Jean-Pierre Pincemin: Gravures 1971-1997 meticulously gathers and documents, thanks to the efforts of Pascale Chauvineau. “Engraving came along, Pincemin comments, at the time I was ceasing to be an analytical painter. I was looking for a new support that would have allowed me to escape the rigour of the geometry most present in my painting, and that might also provide an element of reflection with regard to the process of engraving” (JPPG, 19).9 The very first piece predates this desire by some eight years however: a small 1971 etching on copper (14 x 20 cm), heavily geometricised; the first two 1979 works, on the other hand, boldly leap into new territory: a delightful tiny aquatint that could rival the work of Gérard Titus-Carmel (2), 10 followed by a larger (51 x 45 cm) and simply drawn and rather bare labyrinth of few lines and much untreated space (3). Plexiglas becomes an early and faithful support, but wood will be used in 1987, then photo-engraving, as well as, over the years, sugar aquatints on copper, lithography, zinc supports, certain pieces occasionally touched up or, rarely, stencil-coloured. The range of Pincemin’s engraved work is great. There are extremely primitive drypoints on Plexiglas (cf. 8, 9), with rough hatching and “assembly” of form reminiscent of what Barbara Rose called his “neo9

See Jean-Pierre Pincemin: Gravures 1971-1997, 1998. I give the number attributed by Pascale Chauvineau in the above Catalogue raisonné. 10

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constructivist” sculpture. There is the elegant red carborundum on aluminium of 1986 (16), a medium-size piece printed, as usual, on paper (59 x 44 cm). Pieces such as the 1984 dryprints on plexiglas (cf. 28, 29) evoke painting going back as far as 1969 (cf. MB, 17) and hesitate between an aesthetic indifference and yet a desire to gather and orchestrate audaciously simplified forms. The 1985 pieces done for Claude Faïn’s book, Ne rien dire (cf. 42, 43, 44), have an almost musical kineticism to their tracings and one thinks of the artist’s statement that “a successful engraving is close to very free and rapid writing” (JPPG, 3). The 1987 wood cuts (cf. 73-77) are charmingly and finely vigorous in their final large printed form, despite being created by drilling into plywood. L’Année de l’Inde produces, in effect, a broad variety of engraved as well as painted works, many of them, as elsewhere, seeming to conform to Gérard Sourd’s characterisation of Pincemin as “the virtuous iconoclast” – although, as I have argued, there is more of the lackadaisical, the imperturbably easygoing in Pincemin’s gesture, than of the denunciatory or the dissident: Pincemin is an artist who, no matter his exploratoriness, ever remains sensitive to consonance and deep relatedness before art’s traditions. The three 1989 aquatints prepared for Sylvie Richterova’s book, Le Brave Soldat Chveik. Le cliché et le non-sens comme expression d’un monde en dissolution (cf. 97-99), emerge, Pincemin tells us from “a meeting of the conscious and the unconscious” (JPPG, 75) and, indeed, combine impulsive art brut and an awareness of the preoccupations of Richterova, yet only partly Pincemin’s. His power, technical, processual and imaginative, increase as the engravings accumulate, ever “richer and more dramatic”, Barbara Rose writes. I am obliged to content myself with mentioning, in conclusion of this brief discussion of the engraved work, the following pieces, heterogeneous, unpredictable, making of Pincemin, as Gérard Souard so nicely puts it, “one of the foremost engravers of his generation, inexplicably” (JPPG, 14): the amoeba-like brown sugar aquatint “figure” of 1990, fluid, indefinable, a pure oozing of mind and viscera and the matter of his art (cf. 118); the six lithographs of the same year (120-125), the ultimate in unabashed childlike figurative simplification; the 1990 anti-anecdotal yet phantasmagorical possible selfportrait (cf. 144), with those haunting facial features that will recur with shifting intensity in various works to come, the sheer smiling artfulness of a depiction of the unsituatable; the twelve lithographs

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Pincemin prepares for the stained glass windows project at the Abbaye de Sylvanes (cf. 155-166), work certain of his paintings will echo; the beautiful largish sugar aquatint on copper piece (cf. 184), cosmic and earthy inseparably, reminiscent of the 1987 Peinture discussed above (JP93, 4), light and love and celestialness plunged into/growing from dark, seething telluric incarnation; the most surprising and ingeniously geometricised large (82 x 69 cm) 1992 engraving (cf. 187), suddenly surging forth in the midst of so many animal, human or vegetal forms; the two celebrated engravings, inspired by Jean Duvet’s Moïse et Saint Pierre (cf. 188, 189) but at once – and most unusually – politicised in Pincemin’s mind, and, in the second of the two, personalised, satirised and in a sense depoliticised, that amused, ironic face again; the expanding 1994 series commissioned by the Louvre’s Chalcography department, a series (cf., for example, 225-230) at once “comico-erotic, as Pincemin says, light, [yet] allowing me to advance in the question of figuration and helping me shift to a more narrative painting” (JPPG, 156) – and, once more, revealing that sardonic face of the self’s other, with its prophetic skeletal body of death; the wonderfully spontaneous and bare unaffectedness of the fifteen sugar aquatints on copper that Pincemin creates in 1997 to illustrate an edition of Voltaire’s already quirky and fancifully meditative Micromégas (cf. 267-281). The art of Jean-Pierre Pincemin is commodious and accommodating. It willingly embraces the diverse and, as Jean-Marc Huitorel suggests, “will not let [itself] be shut up in the least of categories” (JPPDC, 21). His is an art, inevitably, of personal mythology – how could it not be, he asks –, but, of equal importance, it is an art of exchange, sharedness, commonality, as well as renewal and inventiveness. Pincemin can thus speak, improbably though genuinely, of “taking 20th-century forms, geometricisation or even abstraction, and saying them in a language practically that of the 16th century” (JPP1980, 86). Bernard Lamarche-Vadel has spoken of a “disjunctive synthesis” (JPP1990, 8) involved in such telescoping where, rather than consciously developing a personal “style”, Pincemin’s teleology becomes, rather, the “glory of painting” (cf. JPP1980, 65), something – an emotion, a conception, a way of being – beyond the serious narcissism of some individualised accomplishment. Thus does Pincemin’s art become an act and a place of exploration and caress of the other, a kind of joyous and smiling, half-plagiarising (as he sees all

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gestures to be), half genially and fearlessly reinventive appreciation of so much that art already has laid before him. Pincemin’s art, in effect, is founded upon modesty, unpretentiousness and easeful, errant preparedness to expand the self through its poietic adventures. “All my works, he characteristically tells us in Monkey Business, are merely approximations. I lack knowledge but I am always trying out what I don’t know” (MB, 3). To paint, engrave and sculpt as Pincemin has, is ever to risk the enterprise not just of one’s artistic capacities, but, more importantly, Frédéric Nef has hinted, of the fable of one’s very being. Jean-Pierre Pincemin has articulated in his oeuvre what he has called the dream of “melding with [the harmony of the universe]” (cf. MB, 26). When he tells Sylvio Acatos that “I am seeking to create a painting of generosity, of ampleness” (JPP1980, 90), he is not just speaking of being a servant to art and its admirers; what art can offer, he affirms, is not just itself as art object, but, more significantly still, though via the object produced, an experience of the fullness of the real, of the realness of being (cf. ibid., 93).

CHIMERA, CARESS, SACRED IMPLOSION: ANNETTE MESSAGER Whimsy and truth, the dreamed and the real, chimerical invention and earthy rootedness: the work of Annette Messager, from its earliest moments, with Le Repos des pensionnaires (1971-2) and the first of the many Albums-Collections (1971 on), weaves a canvas of creation seamlessly deploying a quirky imaginativeness yet inseparable from endless realities both external, perceptible, and affective, psychological. Les Pensionnaires emerges from the spontaneity of a “found object”, a tiny dead sparrow, taken home, restored, covered in a small knitted jacket. Others, many others, follow, now hand-made, now stuffed corpses, all clothed or blanketed in similar fashion, like little dolls Messager finally displays in glass cases, at once relics of childhood fantasised or lived gestures, and emblems, drawn from the real, of the real: fragility and death, gentle caring and honouring. Thus does art meld with life, never usurping it, but rather revealing its simultaneous bizarreness and simplicity, for some its absurdity, but, too, its touchingness, qualities varyingly brought out by Messager’s tiny handwritten texts, paintings and photographs that accompany this already, and characteristically, not inconsiderable exhibition of artistic feyness and livable, perhaps personally lived, emotion. If, as artists such as Robert Fillion have suggested, art should strive to make “life more interesting than art”, it remains that art, in such a process of revelation, is the crucial catalyst. Her 1990 Histoire des robes, for example, may indeed show a vital, throbbing, strange and, for some, even easily derided, life energy at the centre of what we may have thought to be but ordinary and therefore perhaps, dismissible – dresses, childlike written declarations, even single words, drawing, watercolours, images, all pinned to the framed or “entombed” dresses –, but it is art’s gathering, juxtaposing and memorialising that dynamises all here, fuses inextricably its evident power with that, perhaps so easily forgotten, of quotidian meaning, multiple, proliferating, even infinite beneath the skin of a seeming blandness. Artistic chimericalness, in brief, is the developing agent in the production of Annette Messager’s teeming narratives of our collective truths. Her various Chimères (1982-4) taken with her 1986 Piège à chimères, may appear to offer pure improbableness with a witch-like moon with nose and eyes and painted-over photograph, with their massive, fan-

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tastic web with its hairy-legged spider-woman hanging upside-down at its centre, with the splayed, animal-like figures, snakes, bats, often nightmarish, yet at times quizzically empowering, even bewitching. The feminine is hybridised, at once conceptually, materially and psychically, in this vast and continuous universe that Chimères (inter) weaves. All is banal and unfathomable, the feminine caught in its archived images, in a huge dys-play / di-splaying (and fusing) of its unspeakable, unsayable psychic and affective realness. The AlbumsCollections reveal, both flatly and periodically, but also affectionately – for Annette Messager is not intent on any deconstruction of anything deemable feminine – woman’s so-often-called domestic dailinesses: the works collect, record, caress and smilingly honour, parading before the self and the other what, much later, Parade (1994-5) will show of the human in much darker and more troubling tonalities and registers.1 Always, however, the truths of lived existence are at stake, always the fantastic or the phantasmagorical point to depths of individual and shared beingness, to a real as secret as it is flagrant, as intricate as it may seem simple and humdrum. A work such as Annette Messager truqueuse (1974-5) may encourage us to believe all is staging, contrivance, threatricisation, and, of course, all making, all doing, all poiein, does indeed add to what we may have thought was life’s fixedness, a kind of unalterable truth only requiring reproduction. Balzac, the czar of realism, is quick to put us right on this score, however, arguing in his immaculate story of the artist Pierre Grassou that what the art of the real requires is invention, imagination, creation, not copying! Observation, study, meditation of the given, by all means, but the cauldron of art’s inventions to call forth the drama of what is. Catherine Grenier’s description of Annette Messager’s use of photographs in the production of her 1980-81 series Les Indices is instructive: “she dresses them up, applies make-up, orients them, casts them in particular light, manipulates them like dolls” (AM, 86), 2 and Messager herself never hesitates to evoke her techniques of dis1

Rebecca DeRoo’s essay in The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art (2006) offers analysis of Messager’s notebooks and Albums-Collections of the early 1970’s. In addition, in relation to Parade’s retrospective recontextualising, one may consult essays by Élisabeth Lebovici, Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Béatrice Parent, as well as an important interview with Robert Storr, in Annette Messager: Faire parade 197195. 2 See Catherine Grenier’s Annette Messager, 2000.

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membering and restructuring of given materials in order to “give birth to [her] chimeras” (cf. AM, 91) – chimeras inevitably laying bare avowed or unconscious personally obsessive realities, just as they point to universal constructs of both the psyche’s “surface” and its deep and multiple layers.3 Drawing truth from the seeming, from art’s theatre of what the surrealists termed the marvellous; offering paths to human presence-to-the-world via art’s creative shimmer, its refiguring masking and uncovering… The 1997-99 Mes Voeux sous filet may be said to constitute a vast emblem of this process of fusing revelation of life’s truths and their suppression, their half-erasure. Of course, here as elsewhere, self-confession is at play, but the cords and nettings of art, in covering what would have been the photographs’ arguable explicitness, push the implicit discourse of the work (: desire and lack, avowal and taboo, etc.) into a more global arena where the shared realities of such factors become evident. Annette Messager may love the fetishised and ritualistic, coded and thus obscure play of, and with, the human (cf. AM, 111), but she is not at all predominantly concerned with simply self-fictionalising truth. Auto-biography is, fatally, everywhere: in every choice of material, every gesture of orchestration of every photo, drawing, painting, stringing, pinning, and so on. But the “meanings”, pertinences, “applications” of every image and word of her oeuvre, from Les Pensionnaires to her 2000 Eux et nous, nous et eux and beyond, massively overflow the limits of personal verity, just as their seeming minimalities offer the seeds of our endless complexities. The large 1999 exhibition titled Les Messagers de l’été, all at once haunting, bizarre, troubling, droll, touching, thus lays before us, bare yet fantastic, pure image yet undecipherable message, truths as chimerical as one may care to experience, but far, as Yves Bonnefoy would say, in excess of their signs. That Annette Messager in her 24th Album-Collection, titled Pour trouver ma meilleure signature (1972), plays about – as no doubt we all have on various occasions – with her handwriting, suggests something of the multiple, if not infinite, potential nature of the self’s, all selves’, identity – i.e. realities, truths. To choose the path of such exploration is to enter the realm of humanity’s strange and moving

3

Bernard Marcadé’s essay in Annette Messager: Chimères 1982-1983 (1983) provides an alert and insightful discussion of a non-realistic but “mixing and transmuting” art yet “playing with reality”.

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theatre, where Les Messagers de l’été arrive bearing gifts of extreme imaginativeness yet dripping with realness for self and all others. Seriality and proliferation become from the outset significant patterns of creation for Annette Messager. There are fifty-six AlbumsCollections created over a two-year period and, taken with Le Repos des pensionnaires, with its hundreds of gathered and at least in part fabricated little doll-birds and accompanying texts and complementary images, we can appreciate immediately the extent to which multiplication and amassing to a point of saturation, grouping, ordering and pseudo-archiving quickly become principles that, via differently modulated techniques, will mark into the longer term both practice and any theory that may be said to underpin it. Proliferation, however, in no way, with Messager, implies slipshod and offhanded practice. The Albums are meticulous, from Mes Croquis d’oiseaux to the amusing photomontages of Les Hommes que j’aime, les Hommes que je n’aime pas or Le mariage de Mlle Annette Messager, to the more enigmatic and perhaps disturbing Enfants aux yeux rayés or the Tortures volontaires, parodic for some, but flatly socio-documentary for others, and, on and on, to the witty, falsely aggressive Mes Jalousies or the huge assembly of 62 drawings and 55 photos constituting Comment mes amis feraient mon portrait, or, again, the bold Qualificatifs donnés aux femmes or Mes travaux d’aiguille, the former listing the full range of terms men apply to women they purport to love, the latter offering 24 panels of simply sewn materials with their drawn patterns – part of the larger subset of collections intimately titled Annette Messager femme pratique (1974). Multiplication involves, of course, emphasis, even exaggeration to the point of a banalised clarity of the repeated or the very closely similar. We are yet impressed by the sheer labour and fastidious attentiveness involved in Messager’s creations, the tender care of what we may deem infantile, but which is a caress of childhood’s not-so-simple simplicities and, in the case of the Albums-Collections, though also many other works to come, of the doing, the neglected, even grossly dismissed poiein of women’s everyday creativity. Much, in Messager, subtly conveys a cultural and socio-economic discourse on the feminine, to which I shall shortly attend: a discourse not overtly militantly feminist, for the flatly articulated images, in their swarming proliferation, their refusal to offer self-reflexive theorisation and their very “maternal” attachment to the non-aesthetic and the non-intellectual, allow rather for an openness of

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response no doubt often revealing of our human complexities, even duplicities. Many other types of seriality and proliferation will ensue. The 1997-98 2 clans 2 familles once more groups, divides, catalogues and confronts the human, multiplying plastic-bag-children and emptied, eviscerated stuffed animal adults, all joined, reserialised, if I may put it that way, by a generalised crucifixion on wooden crosses of both clans and the creation of a unified but chaotic jungle of finally hardly worth distinguishing human effigies. Mes Voeux sous filet (1997-99) implodes its serialness, forming a thick, pulsing knot of some 200 largely eroticised micro-photographs of body parts, halfmasked – a pudeur inviting prurience? – by a vast tangle of strings and nettings catching the proliferations of the self’s eros exposed to, inviting, the other’s. And La Promesse des petites effigies (1990), composed of three standing and sizeable display cases each containing a finely articulated but dense mass of stuffed toys, hanging and framed black and white photographs (once more very largely of body parts) and handwritten backcloths only half-visible – this triptych, too, generates its power via a process of obsessive and mutative reiteration whereby overlapping and interwoven mental and material constructs form a proliferative yet barely penetratable discourse, halfpuerile, half adultly phantasmatic. That repetition – with endless modulation, manipulation, interference, in her case – preoccupies Annette Messager, may be readily understood in her relation to the photographic image, where, rather than texture, granularity or even “strictly photographic effect”, what fascinates is “the tremendous possibility of endlessly repeating a same image” – and she acknowledges in this context the originality of Warhol (cf. AM, 115). Reiteration, layering within a given work or from work to work (the above triptych, for example, but, say, from Annette Messager truqueuse (1975) to this triptych), multiplication via linear seriality or by dense conglomeration of, say, the two hundred or more individual components of La Promesse des petites effigies, Messager sees such processes as a kind of “circulation of blood”, the blood of mind and body, of all of being: she is thinking here rather of her 1988 Jardin du Tendre (cf. AM, 110), but it is a broadly applicable image, just as is her notion – this time put forth in connection with her 1988 Mes voeux, offered this time without netting – that the “overlayering, piling, heaping and covering over of image and word [in her work] refer-

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ences the successive strata of memory and time” (AM, 114). A final point of significance to note with regard to all of the above is Messager’s conscious use of remainders, left-overs, a practice in intimate alliance with her use, from the first moments of her creative activity, of what lies at hand, that so often traditional feminine and maternal instinct to recycle, redeploy in a great imaginative bricolage of domestic “stuff” – and this, not to overlook a similar creative impulse in the young child, quick to “make do” with all and sundry as the creative gaze instantaneously refigures and moulds to its desires. The 1998-99 series Les Restes amply testifies to the logic of the residual pertinence of the left-overs: they display the infinite, ever proliferating and multipliable creative principle at the heart of all – anything – that is: a kind of unlosableness, unwastableness, of being and doing ever available to us, if we determine to see it, practice it, play with it: that Annette Messager makes, in this series, two major pieces titled Le Coeur and L’Étoile, I read as meaningful, a meaning, as ever in her oeuvre, both buried in, and poking buoyantly and even cheekily out of, improbably but smilingly tongue-in-cheek pseudo-puerility, mock-banality. Ambiguities and pluralities, in effect, abound in this oeuvre that has carved out a surprising originality in the wake, it is true, of indirectly influential precursors such as Duchamp, Dubuffet, Goya, Jean Renoir, Hitchcock and movements such as Fluxus and, to a lesser extent, Arte povere. Such ambiguities and pluralities of meaning and purpose stem from numerous factors: l: Annette Messager’s disinclination to step sideways from her practice into its interpretation and theorisation: what we see is what we get, one might say, and Catherine Grenier is right to quote Robert Rauschenberg in this connection, when he argues that “if you don’t take [such work] seriously, there is nothing to take” (cf. AM, 85); 2: the simultaneous multiplication and fragmentation of Messager’s work disallows that coherence, concentration and clarity the searching interpretative mind would be happy to settle for: the endlessly verbally linked and surrounded photographs of Mes Ouvrages (1988) cover entire walls like huge webs that push the eye and the mind in all directions, so that we are very, very far from the kind of gathered energies Corot’s Souvenir de Morte-fontaine or Rodin’s Baiser deploy, Messager’s own gatherings being marked by dispersal, broken image, centrifugal splaying out of a myriad of shards; 3: while an arguable simplicity of intention and

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selection of individual component pieces may characterise certain works – take, for example, Maman, histoire de sa robe verte (1990) or even Les Piques de la Révolution française (1991) –, the massed simplicities (dress, photographic fragments, drawings, watercolours, the whole gathered into a huge flared heart; pikes mounted with stuffed animal figures, toy heads, mickey mouses, bears, etc.) form a swarmingly complex mosaic, nostalgic, referential, yet bizarre, excessive, touching and disturbing, ridiculous and thought-provoking; 4: the emotional impact or implication is thus distinctly plural throughout Messager’s oeuvre: Les Piques generates, one feels, outrage, denunciation and exorcism, yet, equally perhaps, a sense of revolution’s imaginably justifiable logic of end over means, and this is not to forget that caressive gesture of the practical artist once more superceding all definitiveness self or other may be tempted to lay upon a given moment in life, historical or plastic, aesthetic; 5: such ambivalence and generation of simultaneously felt emotion or ethical position is also undoubtedly related to that complexifying but perfectly natural distinction Messager varyingly insists upon between self and artist, the “Annette Messager” of so many of her works, the artist-as-model – Les Effroyables Aventures d’Annette Messager or La Femme et le barbu, both works from Annette Messager truqueuse, serve as fine examples – and the self both behind the artist and propelling the artist’s creativity: we are far beyond Philippe Lejeune’s distinctions, of necessity, rather into the complex but highly pertinent discourse Barthes may bring to bear on “authoriality”, or Michel Sirvent may offer us in his subtle but clear-eyed gaze upon the work of Perec;4 6: Messager’s remarks on a process she uses of caricature that brings about an unsettling of what we may have believed to be firmly established, equally emphasises the consciousness she has of the shifting ground upon which existence seeks its balance: she speaks of her general liking for that “enlargement of life whereby the friendly, serene world becomes unstable, bristling with menace and danger” (cf. AM, 75-6): Les Lignes de la main (1988) and those fabled photographs of the artist’s hands in Mes Trophées, touched by the (black) magic of acrylic paint, charcoal and pastel, reveal this tipping of the secure, the familiar, into the possibly dizzying swirl of forces, obsessions, phantasms, radically pluralising and rendering equivocal what 4

See Georges Perec ou le dialogue des genres, Rodopi, 2007.

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we may take for granted. What we come to understand here is that Annette Messager’s creations are articulated always at the cusp, the interface, of endless psychological, sociological, ethical and, indeed, spiritual factors and “positions”: rather than developing their oppositionality, Messager gives us their simultaneity, their inextricableness, their equivalence even, for clear-cut nomination is not on her agenda. No hierarchy thus emerges from her work: Parade (1995) parades; Dépendance indépendance (1996) fuses, indistinguishes, enfolds in an unnaming jungle of nettings, ropes, hanging photos, pieces of wool, stuffed animals and limbs; Plaisir déplaisir (1997) cannot, will not decide, as we will not, cannot, with any certainty. What is offered is the sacred totality of all that is, sacred not because Messager designates it as such, but because, like life itself, that it mimes, no reductive designation can speak the infinite strangeness, the stunning interconnected beauties and so-called banalities, the upliftments and traumas, loves and aggressions, the extraordinary ontological mystery of our incarnational whole. Le Bonheur illustré, Les Piques, Les Restes may contain parody, irony, satire, but they never cease to invite playfulness, exhilaration even: what I am calling the sacred in Messager’s work is that intersection, that non-differentiation, that embrace of the self’s as well as the collectivity’s, capacity to sense the infinity of its beingness. Happiness, love, relationship manifestly preoccupy throughout Annette Messager’s work, and, not surprisingly we may feel, the feminine condition draws her in such central elements of experience. If the modern French literary and artistic tradition offers, of course, ample testimony to the trials and tribulations, the ecstasies and the petits bonheurs of such centrality, from Stendhal and Delacroix, Baudelaire and Desbordes-Valmore, Flaubert and Moreau, to Rodin and Eluard, Beckett and Giacometti, Quignard and Beyala, Bourgeois and Djebar, there is no evidence to suggest other than fleeting and oblique influence: readings of Sade, the impact of Surrealism’s and Art brut’s libidinal release, for example. Messager’s “art of love” (cf. AM, 42) is home-grown, instinctual, drawing upon popular culture, moreover, rather than an intellectualised and aestheticised tradition, although the feminist movement of the past forty years inevitably has marked the parcours of this sociologically alert woman even if at that distance gazed across by the “ethnologue or a historian of the primitive arts”, as she puts it (AM, 49) – for feminism is not lived as an

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ideology nor as a life’s campaign. As has become clear in looking at any piece by Messager, complexity ever underpins any apparent simplicity. If it is true, as Catherine Grenier suggests, that the superficiality [commonly] attributed to the feminine [is] claimed [by Messager] as a quality” (AM 98) – intuition, spontaneity, domesticity, sensitivity, “irrationality”, lack of gravity, sentimentality, etc. –, it is equally true that Messager, in embracing such naturalness, both thematically and materially, processually, does so with a sharp consciousness of the ironies, the naiveties and the vulnerabilities this may be said, potentially if not always really, to generate, for women. Implicitly, then, works such as Le Bonheur illustré, many of the Albums-Collections, Le Portrait des amants (1977) or, more obliquely altogether, Pénétration (1993-4), all convey equivocalness, ambivalence, subtext upon subtext. Certainly, Messager delivers fondness for the feminine condition, but she chuckles too, or even cautions, just as, in portraying men, one might artistically caress their over-seriousness, their claims to rationality and common sense, whilst simultaneously laughing at their pretensions or warning of the potential abuse of their supposed authority or physical power. Messager’s recognition of the feminine passes, precisely, through art’s mirrors and prisms: it thus complexifies, multiplies facets, plays, distorts, transmutes, disallows all univocal, specified discourse.5 Love is an art, an artfulness, an artificiality, a teeming, moving, ever redrawn creation. When Messager says that “one can only speak of happiness in clichés” (AM, 140), she does not imply its unrealisableness, but points rather to the fact that if art’s images cannot escape their intransitivity, their fatally clichéd, imagistic nature, yet these same images, as in Le Bonheur illustré – and the same is true for the images of love, countless in Messager’s work, or for the images of relationship in, say, Dépendance indépendance or Eux et nous, nous et eux –, by the very power of their banalisation, their pseudo-popularised modes of fabrication and flat accessibility, may succeed in plunging us into the maelstrom of the truly profound pertinence of questions of joy, affection, all forms of human intercourse. Works such as Le Jardin du tendre, Le Piège à chimères or Effigies (1985) show woman and her relationships on centre stage but a centre stage that is daedalic, web-like or vertiginously spiralled. The 5

Rebecca DeRoo recognises Messager’s work as a vast feminist enterprise: cf. op. cit., 141 and passim.

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project for the first of these works leads us from “The grove of solitude” to “The tree of wishes”, through the amorous landscape of lie and reconciliation, whispered intimacy and assiduousness, hope and luck, rupture and promise, indiscretion and oblivion: it charmingly – like the actual execution of the project in a real park-like garden in Castres, where she pins “secret” signs to the summer’s bushes and trees and paints ephemeral figures and constellations on the backs of tortoises that slowly wander the enchanted trails of love – affirms the intricacies and unforeseeableness, the fraughtness and instabilities, as well as the ever surging desire, the sense of lack or, of course, joy, that mark the adventure of human passion or friendship. Le Piège à chimères, not dissimilarly, sets woman at a central position, arachnean, seemingly powerful, yet, too, caught in the web of her own secreted emotions, actions, beingness: entrapment vies with freedom in this phantasmal space, ours as well as Messager’s, as she is quick to emphasise. Effigies goes arguably still further in depicting the dizzyingly convoluted multifariousness of self’s ontic identity and the latter’s relation to the grimacing or expressionless masks and (dis) figurations of others. Nothing reassures here, especially given the black, KKK-reminiscent and crucifixional forms that contain such troubling cosmogonies. Self and other find no ready ease in Effigies, the undoubted surface lightness of Le Jardin du tendre, already inscribed in the half-securing frame of Madame de Scudéry’s wit, gives way to a cosmic, zodiacal nightmare only ever so slightly mellowed by the floating childlike drawings attached to the more peripheral heads. Woman cannot find her simple happiness here, nor the love of her life, this psychological troubledness being prefigured, in various much simpler works such as Les Qualificatifs donnés aux femmes (where woman may be deemed “goddess”, “princess” or “beloved”, but can equally become object, possessed object at that, of male scorn, disgust, irritation: “my hole”, “my rat”, “my prostitute”, etc.) or the 1974 Ma Collection de proverbes: “When a girl is born even the walls weep”, or: “If woman were good, God would have had one too”. Of course, here as ever, Annette Messager is in the mode of mimicry, facelessly, flatly miming the reductive terms or statements applied to woman and, via such parodic tactics “silently” satirising, rather than truly judging – the ethnologue, the anthropologist ever gaining the upper hand – the complex relationships women “enjoy”

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with those, men, that is, who, so often, as one looks even today around the world, barely understand what relationships can offer, i.e. love, gentleness, respect and freedom. To collect – proverbs, terms, and with them ambient affects, psychologemes, philosophemes – is not to moralise, but alertly not note, to gather and collate, and in the case of Messager, whilst often provocatively and no doubt phantasmatically implicating her theatrical, artistic self in the scenarios and spectacles her work affords, to efface autobiographical flagrancy whilst flashing before us the teeming blasons of hostility and fear, hurt and distress, as well as those of continuing strength, empathy, love, and so on. Pièces montées (1995-96) may dramatise different untitled vertical discourses, with their tall and narrow oils and thickglued photographs framed in red, like standing coffins, but all tend to reveal with that characteristic mixture of depersonalisation and clever, oddly relaxed (because theatricised, pantomimed) caress the massive hindrances to interpersonal relations: there is bloody regurgitation of dismembered limbs by a disfigured female mouth or fleshless males, their heads only guaranteeing some coherence to their skeletal remains, cast down an equally fantastic (Jacob’s) ladder into an unrevealed hell by the power of a pseudo-divine unsexed finger. There may be wit and fantasy here, but there is, too, the drama of that complete absence of joy and love which may beset so many upon our contemporary globe: hysteria and madness often lurk in the shadows of Annette Messager’s implicit desires and phantasms – just as, reversing any emphasis we may be tempted to apply, the light of such simple, uncluttered, imaginably liberated desires, erotic and spiritual, shines through the lacerations, eviscerations and skinnings. The tensions and “negative”-“positive” pullings many works enact6 – Mes Enluminures (1988) or Dépendance indépendance (1996), for example, or, too, the very recent Vanitas (2003) or Sous vent (2004) – may be said to cancel each other out, reach that state of equilibrium or equivalence that, rather more easefully, the unravelled wools of the 1998 En balance evoke. Messager herself speaks in 2000 of the “turmoil of her contradictions” (AM, 164), but the her, here, it is essential to remind ourselves, in the context both of Messager’s distinction between private self and the artist’s self and her desire to place on centre stage the “feminine condition”, remains a reference to that 6

Whilst various critics may dwell upon such binarities, they, of course, remain purely notional, subjective, unreal, in a sense, in their indeterminacy.

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persona at the heart of each creation, rather than some pure autobiographeme, even of multiple dimensions. Whatever mourning or rejoicing over the feminine may be held to be accomplished from beginning to end of Annette Messager’s oeuvre, it remains watched over by the mother of all her inventions, the materning, birthing power of an art enamoured not of itself but of an obscure upliftment it may generate beyond itself – for the real self beyond the artist, and for the other, woman, and, of necessity, man. Before concluding with a compact examination of that double logic in Annette Messager’s oeuvre of the sacred and the profane, ontic embrace and sociopsychological iconoclasm, I should like to pick up on and further meditate certain modal and processual factors at times passingly evoked. The materials used are numerous: wool, “found” objects (birds, rabbits, etc.), bought toys (dolls, animals), cloths sewn and stuffed, thread for embroidery, ink, pencils, crayons, acrylic and oil paint, canvas, paper, wood, string, rope, plastic bags, cardboard, gloves, rubber, photographs, frames, glass, and so on. The materials tend be professionally unclassical, antiaesthetic, some would say, ordinary, popular. They are materials often of bricolage, make-do, at-hand materials, largely the materials of domestic, broadly feminine work: mending, simple creativity, basic doing. The photographic work is, however, not left at such a level: like the use made of many other materials, subversion and transmutation exploit and divert away from the quotidian and the taken-for-granted. The smallness and banality of individual objects or components is offset by a process of intensification and proliferation, which may be explosive or implosive. Works may, despite the multiplication of their elements, often remain aerated, or they may become dense, thickly layered or even attain to an almost claustrophobic, jungle-like massiveness where the hangings – I am thinking of, say, Dépendance indépendance and Plaisir déplaisir – stifle despite the possibility of moving amongst them. Collecting, of course, is the instinctive root modal strategy in Annette Messager’s art: its gathering and use of all that is gathered, rather than via some finely selective sifting, developing an aesthetically honed single object, is reflected in her determination to exploit even the left-overs, the remainders of other major creations. Collecting is synonymous with not wasting, with a creative method open to recycling the merest trifle, the most seemingly derisory bit of cloth,

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button-eye, photographic fragment. The whole that we deem a work of art, with its implicit gathered ontic and aesthetic rightness, justesse, thus may be constituted by parts that other works of Messager’s found unnecessary. The part and the whole, the discarded and the essential, no doubt mirroring the thematic interpenetration, everywhere to be sensed, of presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, being and nothingness, meaning and meaninglessness. This hybridisation, or indistinction, of part and whole, is, of course, matched both by the extremely hybridised nature of the materials and by the free mingling and interweaving of Messager’s processes of fabrication. There is no hierarchisation of elements or modes: art’s doing has liberated itself entirely from any fixed aesthetic agenda and, in consequence, what we may think of as its ontology, the logic of its very being, thereby attains to a freedom permitting, precisely, a reclaiming of being and its infinite doings, which, whilst seeming to some iconoclastic, is also a form of love, non-judgemental embrace – not just of non-classical material and modal impulses and preferments, but of the life this implies. The legends, labels, namings and writings that are integral to Annette Messager’s creative processes do not block or limit this acquired freedom, as language so frequently can: Catherine Grenier argues that this is largely because “progressively what was named has become unnameable” (AM, 159), and there is much truth here.7 I should add, however, that the clichés (of, say, the AlbumsCollections or Maman or Le Jardin du tendre) and single word designations (“Promise”, “Encounter”, “Protection”, “Tolerance”, etc., in works such as Les Lignes de la main or Mes Petites Effigies or Mes Voeux), in their compact but uncontextualised allusiveness, but also in their flight from developed rational discourse, end up favouring an openness of implication, where language becomes just another image and, as such, unfixable, oddly unnaming by dint of a certain deliberately embraced linguistic aphasia of sorts – but one that demands we contemplate our own immersion in it, or, conceivably, some elevation beyond it that, yet, would not be cerebral, but, rather, bathed in some strange experience of incarnation’s ineffableness. The same is true, of course, of so many “emblems” and “signs” that Messager’s teeming universe of objects generates: the hearts, crosses, circles, coffin-like frames, nettings, and so on – all are caught up in a symbolics beyond 7

For a further discussion of Messager’s use of language, see Marie-Laure Bernadac’s L’écriture mode d’emploi, in Annette Messager, mot pour mot (2006).

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identifiable, localisable meaning. Messager’s “creative method” may not be driven by quite the same poetics of object→ obplay→ objoy animating Francis Ponge’s work, but, certainly, we are plunged into the “semantic density” of, here, fabricated objects and gathered images, beyond any absolute and manifest desire to have the latter neatly interpret the world “out there”, and, certainly offering an art where the ludic, the “playing” with the data, the givenness, of matter, may be said to show a way – not the Way – to a possible transformation of fear, concern, trauma even, into the exhilaration, the joy of caress, care, love. And all this, via a process where no evident separation of the significant from the insignificant, the deep from the shallow, the magical form the absurd, is insisted upon: their tensions never leave us, their (un)names remain synonymous. If Annette Messager’s use of photography allows her to become the “poor man’s filmmaker” (cf. MA, 88), a generator of broken stills from some silent cinema of our and “her” being, and if her knitting and sewing and crayoning and handwriting are at a great distance from the “grandiose and the powerful” of an art she refused in choosing quite unspecifically a simple “something else”, as she so unpretentiously puts it (AM, 45), what this something else represents is a manner, process and product rendering to us the equivalence of all we believe ordinary and all that, in effect, is unspeakably extraordinary. To seek to pinpoint the precise purpose of an art of collection of the given and its reinvention and redeployment is rather like our attempts to neatly package, psychologically and philosophically, the daily doings, the natural, living poiein of anyone we know: it is a gesture fraught with complexity and yet, too, a certain deep selfevidence, if we free ourselves of limiting, cramping beliefs. Annette Messager’s (self-)creation has centred or been seen to centre, from its earliest moments to its most recent manifestations, on the mundane and the profane, the practical and the visceral, the affective and the sentimental. Her work has been termed a “story of skin”: not just because it can deal with the erotic, with body parts, with slicing, impaling and crucifixion, but because its materials, its processes and its thematics may appear superficial, too near their own surface for comfort. And, of course, their proliferative, reiterative aspect, may only serve to confirm such impressions as may have been entertained. I offer three closing remarks, of necessity most telescoped, to counter,

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better, to supplement, such possible reactions to a work that still puzzles and leaves some rather perplexed: 1: If Annette Massager’s work may seem iconoclastic, an antiart deliberately provocative in its various arguable simplicities, it remains that the practical creative care it involves is immense. This care is, no matter any protest, a vast aesthetic caress of the substance, the tohand materials, of the world, just as it is a validation of the work, the unsung poiein of countless women across the planet – this, yet more complicatingly as Messager’s gesture, particularly in the AlbumsCollections, succeeds equally in satirising – though never with hostility, harshness, for compassion or gentle smile ever reign – emotions, actions and attitudes associated with the feminine. Reclaiming and honouring do not obviate a twinkling, (self-)conscious, ever ironic or concerned gaze up on the reclaimed and the honoured. 2: There is nothing superficial or ordinary or dismissible in an art that theatricises our dealings with eros, our hopes and phantasms, our disappointments and our turmoil. The sentimental life of the child, its ongoing relations with the mother or the father, the ups and downs, desires and vulnerabilities, of adult amorous life, the avowal, the open truth, the liberation of female libidinal energy, so often mired in repression and double standards, the capacity to meld this already massively (self-)re-creative gesture with flashes of humour or simple quizzicalness – this, surely, too, constitutes a remarkable feat, one that exceeds by far the demands of any strictly aesthetic agenda of the plastic, for, whilst riding on the latter’s power, all in Messager accedes to the much vaster realm of life’s own intrinsic art of selfperception and self-modulation. 3: To truly bring art to the threshold of this latter accomplishment requires a creativity that appreciates the true nature of what I feel we can only sensibly call the sacred, but this precisely beyond anything vaguely doctrinal or rationally sayable: an ontic totality that embraces the “banal”, the “profane”, the underrated, the derided; that understands utter relativity, the non-existence of such categories in the face of our incarnate mystery, the astonishment of all being and doing, from what we may hastily regard as silly or fairy-like to what any true swami or mystic would deem to be our irrational and utterly unwarranted fears of death or the “apocalyptic”. Annette Messager’s cosmogony is all-inclusive, its ontology disturbs in direct function of the fact that it welcomes, plays with, dramatises, without valuation, any-

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thing whatsoever of that all of what we do, feel and think, any of the endless so-called stereotypes we live and enact – but it does so against a backcloth of the strange hallowedness of this allness, its alrightness, the soul-lit forces that permit, laughingly, playfully, our, “Messager”’s, plunge into that totality of which we only obscurely know the dimensions. This plunge takes eros and thanatos by the hand and ushers them into the space of agape, a love, an ethical, spiritual buoyancy, as unconditional as art’s theatre of being can manage to dream them. Messager’s work continues, of course, to develop and expand its agendas and its modes. The 2004 Sous vent is at once intimate, sensual, and capable of generating a rich though ever elliptical, swirling allusiveness pertaining to the place of its “performance” – the Couvent des Cordeliers.8 Casino creates a significant impact at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where it occupies three rooms of the French Pavilion with its dehors, its dedans and its dessus, revealing respectively a bizarre and yet seemingly banal play with the figure of Pinocchio, a beautiful installation of moving, “breathing” red veils that yet disturb in their masking of ambivalent presence, and a roomful of hanging stuffed limbs and other “objects”, animated to further empower a tensional poetics of the residual hovering between game and horror.9 Not dissimilarly, the 2006 Gonflés-Dégonflés thrusts us, brutally yet naturally, into a veritable jungle of organs and human, dehumanised fragments and forms, a quasi-, a pseudo-life breathed into them, then withdrawn, a rather grotesque yet authentic parody of seeming human physical frailty, perhaps provisionality and relativity, even. If a tragicalness may be glimpsed in Annette Messager’s work, it remains but a human attribution to the dizzying enigma of incarnation and death. To be the artist Messager is, is not to finalise, immobilise ontic meaning, but rather to blow life into its imaginable forms, set in motion infinite equations, for our delectation and our equally infinite contemplation.

8

See Sous vent (2004) for Annette Messager’s extensive evaluation of her own creation. 9 See the preface to Casino: Annette Messager (2005), by Suzanne Pagé and Béatrice Parent, as well as Julia Kristeva’s essay arguing the work’s rich allusiveness, from Pinocchio to extermination camps.

ABSENCE AND MELANCHOLIA, MEANING AND BEAUTY: GÉRARD TITUS-CARMEL To experience the fairly early work of Gérard Titus-Carmel, from, say, the three bold “a-visual” Opérations olfactives “performed” in Paris and then Aachen (1970-2) or the 25 variations sur l’idée de rupture (1970) to the curious, barely legible compacted textimage of Joaquin’s Love Affair (1971) with its various accompaniments (photographs and film), the as ever exquisitely executed and complexly emblematic nineteen drawings of L’Usage du nécessaire (1972), or the masterful 1973 Déambulatoires so elegantly conceived and executed – to gaze upon, read, meditate such work is already to realise its modal range, its claiming of freedom, its imposing of its own formal, self-supporting agendas, and yet, simultaneously, its insistent though oblique engagement with that question – that indeterminacy, that fluctuating, ever becoming, open, unanswerable question – that will inform all of the vast plastic and poetic work to come, of the self’s “presence to the world”, as the artist very recently put it in an interview with Jacques Darras. Jean-Marc Tisserant’s study of the early creations, Gérard Titus-Carmel ou le procès du modèle, eloquently merges the discourse on the artist’s manifest investigation of form with that which he rightly deems to underpin it: a philosophical exploration of self’s immersion in being producing an ontological rhetoric in the very space and process of form. Catherine Millet, in turn, perceives the Déambulatoires as establishing, beyond but also via the formalistic debate the series engenders, a great implicit discourse on being (: desire, pleasure, newness, discovery, self-other relationship, etc.) – one, moreover, enlarged and further problematised by the work’s seriality, its poetics of modification, palimpsest and self-masking. Titus-Carmel may speak of “my indefectible feeling of estrangement from the world” (PA, np), 1 a feeling which also implies an inner dissociation, but all of his art, the relentless work in that Pongian fabrique of images and words, moves to deal, in its own way, with such a sense of radical separation. Yves Bonnefoy, in his essay on Feuillées (2000-2003) and other recent painting by TitusCarmel, would see in the use of colour and “light” something of a more visceral, instinctive resurgence of art’s, perhaps illusory, for 1

See Portrait de l’artiste en profil perdu, in Le Jardin des épargnes, 2007.

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still tinged with Carmelian doubt and melancholy, potential for generation of that non-representational yet powerful symbolic connectivity with the earth’s “presence” and ours within it.2 But it is not unreasonable to argue, not only with respect to the Feuillées or Forêts series (1996) but also with regard to the early work mentioned above or the astonishing Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin series of which Jacques Derrida so ably speaks, that, if, as Titus-Carmel writes of Chardin, creation produces absence via freedom’s demand for disconnection from the real, the given, art, by virtue of this severing, becomes “presence in itself”, as the artist writes in Fragments et tesselles relevés au pied du mur, II. Yes, 25 variations sur l’idée de rupture or the very recent L’Herbier du seul (2006) establish a pure formal, aesthetic interiorness (: drawing = drawing, painting = paint: I shall return to this); but, too, simultaneously, inseparably, this pure, quasiMallarméan plastic “presence” engages constantly with being in its broadest modes: emotion, thought, their insertion and transmutation in the act and place of art. If form, structure, orchestration seem to reign, so, as Alain Robbe-Grillet suggests, does an implicit, inalienable metaphysics.3 Ici rien n’est présent, the powerful poetic collection of 2003, may tilt our sense of Titus-Carmel’s poetics towards lack and loss, but its entire process of constitution pulls the energy of raw being, via its own deployment, into an original mode of beingness that is art’s – and, arguably, though only arguably, art’s alone: “the minute tomb of the soul”, Mallarmé termed it, but a tomb offering rebirth into a realm of the ontological language inadequately copes with. If The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin (1976) may be said in some way to give a name, a form, “to the place of exile” (cf. PA), thus speaking or imaging, designing, profiling absence, Titus-Carmel is always clear about what art can manage to salvage from an original woundedness (: unwholeness, impairedness, imbalance, defect): the improbable wholesomeness of beauty. The artistic process is, he writes in Au vif de la peinture (2002), quoting Genet on Giacometti, precisely the place where transmutation can take place, and although beauty is not mentioned in his own commentary on The Pocket Size 2

Light is far from that conceived and represented in, say, Monet’s work, or Delacroix’s. 3 In Cathédrale, mémoire du monde (1981), written for Titus-Carmel and in the context of his then most recent work, he writes that “an obstinate gaze, fixed excessively upon anything […], quickly becomes metaphysical”.

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Tlingit Coffin (1976), his insistence upon the notion of a “work of harassment and wear” centred on “a reconnaissance of the subject” of its own production and subject once more demonstrates that the work (: the travail and the product) of art he perceives as process, expenditure of poiein’s energy, production of forms offering access to that aesthetic rather than primary emotion Pierre Reverdy, too, deemed a carrier of high ontic enhancement which the raw experience of ontos as daily existential tension could not supply.4 The tussle between place, presence and being, on the one hand, and, on the other, the “unspace” of art and writing as TitusCarmel has called it,5 its place of non-being, may certainly be viewed in a Mallarméan and Reverdyan light, but the equations are always particular, personal and paradoxical. In Le Retrait, le surcroît (2001), with its already highly suggestive title, Titus-Carmel, in the context of his three series, Forêts (1996), Nielles (1996-98) and Quartiers d’hiver (1999-2000), can speak of art’s simultaneous voiding and filling (RS, 17), its endless internal process of self-reconstitution, at once serially, in the individual component pieces of a given series, and from series to series: thus does the Carmelian equation of presence and absence extend and complicate its central pertinence: withdrawal and increase, depletion and surfeit penetrate everywhere the fabric and the fabrication of Titus-Carmel’s oeuvre. The artist-poet, faced with immediate presence lived as absence and impasse, seeks an “honorable exit”, as he writes in the same essay, an exit into the plastico-poetic realm where some “inventing of an end for oneself” (RS, 31)6 may come about. Take the 1986 24 compositions autour de l’X, for example, a seried work that is rooted in earlier ensembles such as Suite Chancay (1985) and echoes on in the 1986 Boréales and the 1987 Intérieurs, though no doubt going back as far as H.I.O.X. (where the artist is explicit as to his own understanding of the X’s embeddedness in other symbols or blasons): Titus-Carmel himself dwells upon some of the at once formal and ontological, compositional and metaphysical, implications of the X in evoking the latter work: “Crossing out (excising). Sign of the unknown. The drawing becomes a crossing out – material stroked through – displayed on the 4

I have discussed such matters in finer detail in The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel (2007) (: see Bibliography). 5 Cf. Jungle (non-lieu)/Jungle (unspace), Edns VVV Edns, 2005. 6 See Le Retrait, le surcroît, dans Titus-Carmel, Toulouse, 2001.

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spot (immediately)” (NA, 113-4). If other forms, signs and geometries – and colour, too – complexify the discourse of 24 variations autour de l’X, and if the X deletes, nullifies and “displays” the plastico-metaphysical “immediacy” of this erasure, yet it remains that the work of this series equally affirms and displays that other immediacy which is the composing of a space where release, “exit”, movement from lived exile, renders feasible the “presence” Gérard Titus-Carmel believes art may generate – at the very heart of the absence it continues to speak. The Form of Being, we may think of it as: spectral, but there, drawn, painted, the Other of the Real. “How can one dream one’s life and give a credible form to this enticing illusion”, TitusCarmel asks himself in Portrait de l’artiste en profil perdu: the answer lies in a work such as 24 compositions autour de l’X or the 25 beautiful newsprint-collaged acrylic paintings of the 2006 Herbier du seul: as Reverdy says of Braque’s painting: there is the place of his being: pure absence, pure otherness. Form thus forms that object – drawing, engraving, painting, for Titus-Carmel – that allows us, and the artist, to recognize his ontic otherness. No opus incertum is involved, moreover,7 for all is ordering, control, choice, responsibilisation, orchestration of art’s “presence-to-itself”, an orchestration demanding containment and reassignment – transvasement, decanting, Reverdy named it8 – of raw, unprocessed lyrical élan (cf. RS, 43). The Grande ombre #1 of the 1984 series IX ombres pour STC, a very large oil on paper thick-glued onto canvas (245 x 320 cm), offers ample and beautiful evidence of the kind of powerful orchestration of pure line and colour that constitute that “putting into shape and form of a mental space” (RS, 44) where the emotion and intellection of a reading of Coleridge (: STC) transmute into the luminous “glory”, as Yves Michaud writes of this work, where homage attains to a plastic originality devoid of sentimentality, argument and, rather, becoming that radically other but intimate equivalent of the poetry admired. In this way, what Titus-Carmel terms in Au vif de la peinture “my presence to the world”, comes about via an evacuation of realist referentiality or mirroring, yet in a blaze of being’s infinite forms and chromatics.

7

See “Elle bouge encore…”: opus incertum is yet the subtitle given to this richest of meditations on painting’s process and end. 8 Titus-Carmel is completing an essay on Reverdy, as I write.

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Gérard Titus-Carmel’s entire oeuvre and the many notes, essays and books, critical and poetic, reveal a marked alertness to what he calls that “dialectic relation reality/imitation”, a relation he writes in 1971 Picasso “endlessly formally deals with [, putting reality in its place” (NA, 19).9 In other words, if we look at works such as the remarkably fine 20 variations sur l’idée de détérioration (1971) or the celebrated thirty-three drawings-cum-collaging titled Four Season Sticks (1974-5) or even the recent Feuillées, a rush of questions come immediately to mind: is a model involved?; if so, what exactly is its role?; are we dealing with (some element of) realist illusion, mimesis, adequation, flat truth?; “what remains [– over and above strict form – ] of [that other model that is] primitive emotion” (FI, I)?; is not any tracé fatally destined to draw, rather than its model, its palindromic écart?; and so on. With regard to the first of the above-mentioned three works, it may be argued that Titus-Carmel disturbs the illusions at the heart of our epistemology of the real via his rigorous and delicate insistence upon them, that the “variations” upon the “idea” under scrutiny “offer the pure music of the relativity of all projection of relationality”, undercutting figuration, representableness, in the pure gesture of their seeming feasibility.10 The Four Season Sticks proceed at once similarly and differently: similarly, in that seriality continues to impact on the poetics of (re)semblance and (re)presentation; differently, because here, whilst the work moves through its pseudo-seasonal production (: no real mimetic evocation is involved), a relative constancy of tripartite presentation persists: the upper part of most pieces bandages stick-model onto paper; the drawing at the centre of the work is a residue of the created “model”, though not its copy; the triste broche, offered below the drawing, is an additional “trace” of the above, derisory in its minimally disassembled-reassembled form. The use of tracing paper further complicates the equation, which fuses gestures of hiding and revealing, production and reproduction, and disrupts the hierarchy and relational pertinence of model and copy, as well as all those equations we develop around notions of presence and absence. Works such as Agrès et biffures (1976), with its twelve drawings topped off with the very large Grand agrès, and, of course, The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin of the same period, explore further such tensions and intricacies. Agrès 9

NA: Notes d’atelier (1990). Cf. The Endless Theory of Days, 14.

10

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et biffures elects for a new tripartite mode involving a model handassembled but no longer existing, the lower half of each micro-work providing a miniaturized object or “copy” predicated on the drawing, given on the work’s upper half, of the now disappeared model. The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, on the other hand, retains the original hand-assembled portable model from which emerges the finally selfexhausted series of 127 drawings and engravings, the mathematics of which Derrida muses on in his own parallel diary-entry series plunging him into the infinite indeterminableness of the work and his own discourse accompanying it.11 And, if we needed any confirmation of this swarming, constructed, long-lived (: the work’s fabrication lasts, like that of the Four Season Sticks, a full, calculated year) and longmeditated indeterminacy or endless différance of its pertinencies and implications, Titus-Carmel’s didascalic text offers us his clearminded and highly self-aware text, finely translated by Joan Robinson in a book arguably further problematising Derrida’s scrupulous mathematics (as much as the two discarded drawings may be said to do). That each component “part” of The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin – with, inevitably, its own claim to a wholeness albeit embedded in a labyrinthine web or matrix that includes, implicitly, all didascalia (Titus-Carmel’s, all criticism, model, missing drawings, Joan Robinson’s translation) – that each drawn (or written) part, then, endlessly reforms, rewrites, the original model (: already a phantasmatic creation) thereby establishing an ever renewed “real” from which each part draws energy, gives some sense of the dizzying equation any conceptualisation, indeed, any experience, of the model/copy, reality/art dialectic Titus-Carmel’s work obliges us to balance. An appreciation of all of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s serial creations and their component elements mentioned to date requires that we acknowledge the crucial role of mind at work on matter, a role the artist is ever eager to affirm: art “participates in the great adventures of mind that engage upon the threshold of the unformulatable”, he has recently written (FT, II). No lax atheoreticalness, no mental drift, no easy, impetuous embrace of the substance of emotion, no toying with means and processes. Forever, on the contrary, do The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin or the 1973 15 incisions latines or the 1989-90 Extraits & fragments des saisons, demand a conceptual discipline and a for11

See Cartouches, in La Vérité en peinture.

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mal will and cultivation – this, despite the fact that Titus-Carmel understands well that one can never attain to any reductive knowing in regard to one’s saying or one’s doing. When Titus-Carmel quotes Maurice Blanchot in Au vif de la peinture – “Giving a form to the system of dying” –, we need not read this as merely emblematic of the ontological tensions at the centre of, say, The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin: what is at stake in, for example Feuillées, with its various fine charcoals of lush graceful fronds hemmed top and bottom with acrylic bands, and its huge acrylic on paper Grande Feuillée glued to cardboard, is, precisely, the forming, the construction, the doing – in the midst of life’s (but art’s, too,) deeply felt fated mortal tragicalness – of something capable of generating that brief elevation Baudelaire dreamed into its fragile poetic existence: “order and beauty / luxury, calm and delight”. Thus do the things of réalité – here, stems, leafings, light, colour, in their enigmatic and even alienating otherness – submit to the “law” of the artist’s atelier via a delicious anagrammatic reorchestration and possession of them. Speaking of Chardin in Premier sang, Titus-Carmel speaks of the “central role of the mind” in its tussle with the outer and inner substance of existence (PS, 61), and in his fine short study of Picasso’s 1923 Tête de femme de profil gauche he dwells, switching perspectives, upon the inseparableness of vision, intuition, and material means (cf. Quatre images mémorables). It is mind that imagines that crucial distance from self(’s daily emotions and relations with the social world) allowing the “writing of the novel of my invisible body” (FT, II) – that fictional reality of what he terms in Portrait de l’artiste an “hors-corps” – with works such as the 1973 Pourtours (with its delicate yet processually bold drawings-plus-collaging-bandaging-stick-framing) or the 1977 Noren (with its six pencil drawings with watercolour or gouache, its oriental “shop curtains’ hanging from rail or stick stretching across the paper, creations caught between an experienced earthiness and a mental appropriation thereof that yet cuts these “objects” loose from their original moorings) or, again, purely by way of example, the 1992 Dopo Como acrylics with their prepared papers applied to canvas, their creams and whites, blues and yellows vigorously marked out by those insistent yet unfathomable black-line blasons that, so often, structure and intensify forme and fond. A vast and fused poetics of memory, excavation, deep self-searching, on the one hand, and, on the other, forgetting, erasure and transformation, lies at the centre of

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the mind’s plastic modelling of primary experience and doing. “I should call biographical legacy, Titus-Carmel writes in 2005, that crumbling memory whose dust has been rising up in clouds ever since childhood” (FT, I)12: dust, indeed, of loss, tragedy, suffering – and, of course, of much else, and, above all, a coping with dust, ever watering the eyes, modifying one’s seeing of what the Upanishads term that, near-blinding totality, the “THAT [which THOU ART]”; dust, too, for 17 exemples d’altération d’une sphère or The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin or even the largely unattributable Dédicaces disappearing into a murky (but luminous) unnameableness – all of TitusCarmel’s work volatilises, “dehistoricises”, Antoine Émaz will write of the Nielles series, liberates, one might say, and, in liberating, places his art in that “unspace”, that non-lieu, as poets such as Jacques Dupin and Bernard Noël have also called it, where absence and presence lose their banal contrastedness and merge the intense experiences we have of them. “Paint oblivion, write non-presence”, we read in Au vif de la peinture – but, in so doing, allow, make to rise up from such doubly layered dust (of existence and art’s “excarnational” thrust) a fresh life, an antinature as we have seen Reverdy call it, a Hollanian vie silencieuse of sorts, which the glorious Feuillées or the equally remarkable Casque de Nikko superbly emblematise and to which they offer their infinite expansion. To draw, to paint, certainly is to exhume and to recognise, but their gesture proceeds via “bits and pieces, peelings and droppings” (cf. RS, 31): the mind’s intervention here is ever critical, demanding analysis, breakage, of the given, synthesis of intuitively generated and re-assembled fragments. Veiling thus accompanies revelation, Charian “obscurity” any emergent clarity. The pure delicacy and unspoken, unspeakable “whatness” of, say, 9 constructions frêles – but any Carmelian creation would serve – demonstrates admirably that mind is principally, though in no way pretentiously, engaged in founding a new origin, a new lyricism of fearless, discreet emblematicity, where none perhaps – in the midst of frailness, unsureness, lived unreliableness – seemed probable, possible. A further few necessarily compact remarks on the matter of seriality in the work of Gérard Titus-Carmel, this before moving on 12

Dominique Viart in particular has written tellingly along these lines: see Bishop and Elson, eds, L’Art français et francophone depuis 1980, 2005. For FT, see Bibliography: Fragments et tesselles, I.

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to, firstly, a more detailed examination of the artist’s conception of drawing and painting; secondly, interlocking questions of failure and achievement, melancholia and pleasure; and, finally, the equations of meaning in an art privileging internal plastic functionality over referentiality and representation: 1: as Robbe-Grillet points out in his Cathédrale, mémoire du monde, obsession, drivenness, “obstinacy of gaze” is always at stake in Titus-Carmel’s gesture; 2: Ann Hindry’s observation that what is centrally at play is “latency, recurrence, variation, rupture, repetition, proliferation” (AH, 98),13 reminds us of the fact that serial wholeness is predicated on a fine balance of interruption and a unifiedness that yet is, in principle, infinitely nuanced in its shifting self-constitution; 3: completion of a series is at once relative and strangely absolute: via exhaustion, physical, notional, psychical, composition brings closure to what is, in effect, unfinishable; 4: the fragmentation seriality implies, as do the collaging and orchestrating of “broken”, “partial” papiers collés, is a way to voice both formal vision and endless memory trace, and attain to the “amazement of each” (FT, I); 5: a single piece is rare in Titus-Carmel’s oeuvre, for he sees a painting and a drawing as “only delivering itself forth in snippets” (VP) – a remark applied to his collaging technique, which generates a kind of microseriedness within macroseriality; 6: a given series of drawings, paintings or engravings is, inevitably, embedded in those that precede and follow, and, pursuing this logic to its fullest implication, and as André du Bouchet felt with respect to his own work, each creative production is but a part of one single vast, sinuously woven “sentence” or production: the entire oeuvre, plastic and written, being that ultimately (and fatally ever unfinished) macroseries speaking the artist’s “presence-to-the-world”; 7: the Carmelian series is a dance, a ronde, as Titus-Carmel can all it, that “encircles” (NA, 189) and circumscribes at once in space (x component elements) and time – frequently a year for major series such as The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin or, more or less, Feuillées, though time frames may be shorter or seasonal (Huit notes d’octobre or Quartiers d’hiver) or may extend, as with various poetic collections (Ici rien n’est présent or Seul tenant [2006], for example), over periods of two years or so: the Nielles work is a powerful example (1996-8), as is the never yet exhibited exquisite series of 150 or so paintings inspired by 13

See her essay in Gérard Titus-Carmel: oeuvres récentes 1988-1992, 1992.

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Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece; 8: the series may often be massively inclusive, but from its initial gesture on it is equally hugely exclusive, this with respect to what it “models” or “argues” (cf. NA, 189), its blason (cf. NA, 193), and in regard to the mathematical/temporal constraint it tends to self-impose from its very point of self-launching; 9: seriality always is predicated in significant measure on “the principal idea [of] engendering” – of self-forcing poiein (cf. NA, 190): quoting Blanchot, Titus-Carmel, sees the remainder, what ever surges up as the unsaid-waiting-to-be-said / painted / drawn, as “the urge to die in its repetitive newness” (cf. VP), an ontology TitusCarmel would seem to see as centrally pertinent to that global macroseries that is an art immersed in “the endless theory of days”. Gérard Titus-Carmel’s drawings and engravings, from the 25 variations sur l’idée de rupture or the 15 incisions latines to The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin or Suite Narwa, have drawn the very highest praise from a wide range of critics, some of which I have had occasion to evoke here; and both his drawn and painted work has accompanied the production of many of our major contemporary French writers: Jacques Dupin, Jean-Pierre Faye, Denis Roche, Pascal Quignard, Yves Bonnefoy, Henri Meschonnic, Philippe Jaccottet, Jean Frémon, etc. Titus-Carmel’s own reflections on drawings are fairly abundant, though scattered throughout his 1990 Notes d’atelier. I can only emphasise here the insistence upon the paradox involved in seeing drawing as at once “laying down”, depositing, storing, and as a gesture that wears away the paper, tiring it out, and, in a curious turn, drawing the loss of drawing and its remainder simultaneously; the insistence upon the related notion, too, that drawing sets up its own archaeological site, showing its ruins (built on erasure, scraping away, “woundings”), the kind of washed up épave the artist has managed to save from absolute extinction, nothingness, via the exhaustion/exhausting working of a “grammar” of “trimming, sharpening, rubbing, tracing, errancy, blurring, scratching, erasing” (cf. NA, 58 and passim). Gérard Titus-Carmel’s decision, in the mid-1980’s, to “return” to painting is not, moreover, to be regarded as an absolute moment: various painterly means had been used throughout the first fifteen to twenty years of his plastic production: The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, with its watercolour, sanguine, ink, charcoal, pastel, felt-tipped pen and many other material aids, is a good example of a hybridity yet dominated by the precision and close attentiveness of

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pencil, drypoint and, despite Titus-Carmel’s sense of the distinct modal and perhaps ontologically symbolic manner of engraving (: removal, rather than depositing; inverted production of the form, the image, finally desired, etc.), the engraver’s burin, also: and, then, black line, charcoal, crayon and ink will persist as part of the processual arsenal of Titus-Carmel’s “painting” to this very day; and the “silence of art” (cf. PA), so sensitively evoked in the study of Max Ernst’s Jardins gobe-avions (cf. QIM, 21-8), continues to reign supreme, whether painted, engraved or drawn. This said, it is clear that the resumption of painting implies change, renewal, discovery: “the body claims to find redemption, the artist writes in Portrait de l’artiste, in, and via, painting” – but “differently” than in drawing and poetry (cf. PA). To gaze upon, say, Palmes (1989), with its charcoals and crayonings, its use of white chalk and various prepared papers, or Dopo Como (1992), with, in turn, its sweeping acrylics and glueings onto canvas, is to appreciate something of the relative liberation available via the use of ample brush strokes, a wide range of coloration and form. Yet again, however, we need to not lose sight of the fact that L’Herbier du seul, no less than La Grande Bananeraie culturelle (1969) or Suite italienne (1976), is above all involved in an operation of self-elaboration and self-investigation whereby art shows itself, poiein shows itself, its matter, its processes, its mode of being, ever in its tensional relation to the world and being in the largest conceivable sense. L’Herbier du seul may be said to deploy ever burgeoning florality, La Grande Bananeraie culturelle its quirky and exalted ludicity, and Suite italienne an array of gestures fusing and complexifying language and figure; but all of these pieces, as TitusCarmel writes of Bonnard’s L’Indolente or Caillebotte’s Les Raboteurs de parquet, and despite their many exquisitely distinctive features – all of these works engage in a profound and intense meditation on their own doing and being. The 1977 Dessin and the various Peinture pieces of 1988 seem to point clearly to this interiorness, this revealed self-sufficient functioning, and many serial works are subtitled and numbered dessin # …, peinture # … Yves Bonnefoy recognises the pull of such a poetics of self-withdrawing disconnection from the rawnesses of existence, but he sees, too, in Titus-Carmel’s use of a more luminous palette – as in the poet’s clinging to a tenuous “alliance [with] sky and lilac” in the midst of language’s alienated would-be transcendence – a sign of an instinct to seek the light of

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presence and cast off the understandable temptation of art’s closure for an offering of the latter’s “beauty to the sky” of that Oneness lying beyond, though ever here and now (cf. En présence de ces “Feuillées”, passim). However, and Bonnefoy is quite cognisant of such matters, Titus-Carmel’s general discourse, although crucially, most crucially inserted into what he indicated to Jacques Darras was “the question of my presence-to-the-world” (Aujourd’hui, poème, 74, 20), is ever drawn, when addressing the subject of his painting, to its modal, material and formal dimensions, though every observation carries ontological weight. Thus is the choice of breakage and crumbling […] as subject of painting” (RS, 11) at once aesthetically and emblematically significant (: painting painting’s structure, but, too, a blason of being); thus does “cutting into colour” take place “to break the wings of painting” (cf. RS, 11, 9), stymie its conceivable gushingness, its suspect ease (: with its accompanying ethos of discretion, hiddenness, and sheer work, rigour); thus is fragmentation seen as “guaranteeing the painting be free of the disenchantment of impetuousness” (RS, 11), which implies a reenchantment predicated on discipline, domination, patient construction (: with their psychological values); thus does painting move from disassembly to grafting and new wholeness (: a vicarious self-constitution); thus may the “forced cohabitation of clumps of painting, with their individual narrative histories”, impose the “law of the ensemble”, as well as “stiffen the painting” (cf. RS, 29, 43) (: a compositional logic allowing for that new hors-corps to assume its symbolic prothetical function); thus “to paint might be to give form to the world’s excessiveness” (RS, 33) (: an ordering and arrangements where chaos, unmanageableness otherwise might reign); thus, despite dismantling and orchestration of pieces and leftovers, “everything must be the centre” (cf. VP) in an art not privileging one element, structure, form over another (: an aesthetics perhaps akin to an ontology more of dizzying indistinction than intuited oneness?); thus can colour be seen to be a support of dislocation (cf. VP) or involved in that same intransitive self-naming at play in line and geometry (cf. PA) (: and, hence, implicitly, being’s forms and hues are seen in their irreducible thereness, contingency, their impenetrable quiddity, rather than a source of felt, livable, absolute meaning?). To look at the many paintings of Gérard TitusCarmel is to see in action the pertinence of these evaluations and conceptualisations directed towards his own production. The 25 In-

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dian ink on paper works, for example, of the 2005 L’Herbier du seul, each thick-glued onto cardboard with acrylic treated newsprint, reveal, as do many other more recent works, the aesthetics-cumontology of rupture and gathering, analysis and synthesis. The extensive Nielles work or the Sables series show clearly the desire to resist pure creative impetuousness, preferring a formal constraint that yet rids the artists of narcissistic attachment to the immediately given, freely him for meditation and a fashioning in accord with such meditation on plasticity and the pertinence of poiein. The very extensive Forêts work shows the endless exploration, from an initial “model”, of newness, and, in so doing, demonstrates the unrepeatableness of a doing, and a being we may have thought condemned to the ennui of apparent sameness, out of which it conjures inexhaustible origin/originalness. The 1993 Égéennes reveal in exemplary fashion Titus-Carmel’s practice of the “law of the whole”, both with given “component” paintings of the series and from painting to painting: if paradise may be felt to be scattered irretrievably upon the face of the earth, such art, perhaps illusorily, ironically, but also desiringly, and symbolically, whispers the beauty of a human, ideal unifiedness salvageable – the artist’s prothesis – from the felt ambient wreckage. And so on: there is no space here to truly demonstrate, say, the simple classical-but-so-postmodern elegance of the 1991 Dédicace VII, with its powerful black line oval and cross, its luminous creams and yellows, its many-hued fleckings against pseudo earthy greens and sky blues, and its untraceable pour Franz M., its referentiality retreated far into the depths of its plasticity; or the overall “centrality” of value of each element of the delicate, at once austere and luxuriant Quartiers d’hiver acrylics and aquatints and Indian inks, all with their papiers collés, or the vast Grande Feuillée with its thirteen impeccably fused panels forming one great retable; or, in, say, the 1998 Nielles et Sanguine I, that pure intrinsicalness of line, geometry and colour, turned within upon a material mystery that, whilst of art’s means, speaks too of a physicalness beyond painting into which art dips its brushes and other implements. It seems paradoxical, as we appreciate the ever shifting originality and accomplishment of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s artistic endeavour, to feel obliged to take stock of perspectives related to its gesture that may speak of failure. Suite italienne, for example, offers the finest fusion of the figural and the aporetically pseudo-figurative, even

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though the artist’s brief notes elliptically suggest a certain troubledness hovering about the work’s conception. The beautiful Grande Ombre # 1 of the IX ombres pour STC series seems, however, undisturbed in the execution of its ravishingly bold forms and subtly evocative colorations, just as the various 1986 Petites Boréales (with their refined and discreet, amply lit forms stemming from the disciplined use of sanguine, black chalk and papiers collés) or the oil on canvas Grande Boréale #2 establish those silent, immobile yet aesthetically energised spaces that appear to have achieved that Baudelarian “elevation”, that Matissian “light and happiness” (as Reverdy wrote), firmly withdrawn from the turmoil of the quotidian. Denis Roche, gazing upon the multidinous work of Nielles thus speaks of a “voiding of misfortunes, injuries, wrongs, ugliness” (DR, 13). JeanLouis Baudry dwells on the equilibrium, the order, the harmony of a characteristic series such as the Dédicaces (cf. JLB, 43). And Yves Michaud emphasises Titus-Carmel’s “glorious” deployment of colour in his discussion of the 1984 homage to Coleridge. Beauty is undoubtedly dreamed, sought and accomplished in Titus-Carmel’s art, and, indeed, “ideally”, beyond it (cf. NA, 72). But melancholia, we need to appreciate in any elaboration of Carmelian aesthetics / ethics, is a powerfully persistent force (cf. NA, 59, 68), though equally compelling and unusually energising in Titus-Carmel’s case: beauty is the available fruit of woundedness; the “failures” of Chardin’s depiction of martyrdom and sacrifice yet found emergent beauties that “save”; Patrick Casson argues we are dealing with an oeuvre that is a “monument of collapsings”, a remarkable gesture of genial performance amidst much that might have brought absolute ruin. Thus, if Titus-Carmel can see himself engaged in a form of “war”, it is predicated on the notion, the feasibility, “in the final analysis, [of,] on the paper, the victory of the drawing” (cf. NA, 48). And, likewise, painting may envision a “glory” stemming, paradoxically, from that independency it will demand – from its author, and all others (cf. NA, 136). Art constitutes a going beyond futility; a using of solitariness (: estrangement, etc.) to attain to freedom and that “victory that the artist can offer the world, called Beauty” (NA, 146); a melding of finitude and, perhaps, as in the case of Munch, of despair, but of pure poiein, too, pure doing, making, in the face of one’s conceivable undoing. The wonderfully judicious formal harmonics of the pieces composing the 1985 Suite Chancay, pieces in part accompanying

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books by Jean Frémon and Henri Meschonnic, leap beyond any raw emotion into the discretion, the “innocence”, that place of “pure (self-) dispossession”, as Titus-Carmel writes in Fragments et tesselles, I, where primariness fades and otherness comes into its “deferred” focus (cf. NA, 75). Paysage au revers speaks of the “wound that ever broadens you [called a work of patience]” and Dominique Viart is no doubt right to see in the poetics of patior a critically central tension that, I should argue, links a Blanchotian sense of “disaster” to its slow, life-long, mortal confrontment – that curious and distinctive interweaving of the skeletal and an “angelic wingedness” Le Retrait, le surcroît evokes (RS, 46-7) and which the masterly Grünewald inspired series, soon to be finally revealed to the public, so magnificently, so powerfully, so patiently, enacts in all of its, again Blanchotian, ineffableness – “the unnamed remains, in the name of which we fall silent”, Titus-Carmel quotes him as saying (cf. FT, II). This silence, this unsayingness and unsayableness of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s oeuvre – plastic and poetic, he would maintain – is central to any appreciation of what we may think of as the meaning of (his) art, the latter being open, infinite, proliferative, obscure and luminous both, self-evident yet locked within its subtle flagrancies. La Grande Bananeraie culturelle, distant as it may seem from the major drawn, engraved and painted work to come, sets the at once aesthetic and ontological tone: it keeps wide open that gap between itself and any “role” or particular interpretative colouring we may wish to lay upon it (cf. NA, 136). Memento mori (1999-2001) may appear simply to restrict its semantic value to death and a commemorative honouring of the (unidentified) dead, but both its own poiein and its link to the Feuillées series show that Paul Louis Rossi is correct in quelling any desire we may have reductively to constrain meaning and suggesting rather that we are faced here with the artist’s, and our, “contemplation of art’s pure epiphanic and alethic power” (PLR, 66). The Caparaçons (1980-81), which Titus-Carmel has so doggedly and insightfully tracked in his Notes d’atelier (cf. NA, 78-9, 81-2, 89-91), remain above all, rather like Caillebotte’s Raboteurs de parquet in the fanciful eyes of Titus-Carmel’s de-realising / rerealising gaze, the scene of artistic labour.14 If Alain Robbe-Grillet is affected by Gérard Titus-Carmel’s plastic work, it is, as with his own 14

See Quatre images mémorables.

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written works, not because it handily makes itself available to some flat, univocal explication or purpose, but because its forme and its fond constitute what he terms a “textual generator rebus” – even though Titus-Carmel is not, strictly, into riddles, pure ludicity. Derrida not only shies away from (the possibility of) pinning down meaning and purpose in The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, but is seized with vertigo in the deployment and investigation of the unending, ever unfinishable implication the work (of death) resuscitates in his own mental accompaniment of it. To read Titus-Carmel’s observations on his 1973 H.I.O.X. (cf. NA, 12, 113-4) may enlighten our reading of the self-enfolded nature of the four “symbols” chosen to be “figured”, but this in no way closes the debate around the work. The drawing, the painting, like the poem, as Titus-Carmel sees each, “is its own landscape” (FT, II). The Jungles series of 2004, large acrylics on canvas or metre-square acrylics on newsprint thick-glued onto cardboard (and called dessins), offers no representational portrayal of the real. Its “meaning” may be associated with lush, exotic, barely penetrable or controllable vegetation, as well as, in the case of the socalled dessins, with the teeming eventuation the world generates and which is endlessly, over-abundantly reported to us by the media; but all remains unarticulated, disarticulated even, absorbed into the matter of art, the landscape and discourse of plastic means and process which, at best, offers us but the obscure and floating blasons of a world outside of themselves. Art, like poetry, we have heard Gérard Titus-Carmel affirm, “is presence in itself”. It is a self-presenting (: “presentifying”, as Claude Simon once wrote), “interested in its joinery and carpentry alone”, we read in Fragments et tesselles, I, a statement that, far from dismissive of what lies beyond the artist’s gesture, founds an ethics and an ontology that clearly have deeply meditated the highest, most valid, most solemn, purpose to which Titus-Carmel feels he can, and must, give himself – his life, his doing. 25 variations sur l’idée de rupture or the twelve sérigraphies constituting Cairn (1994) or the large Intérieurs series of 1988, may each, as the artist says of the poem’s functioning, “convoke about [themselves] some of the heavy figures of the world’s matter” (FT, II), but their deep meaning – at once aesthetic, ethical, ontological – is in their freedom, their joyous, beautiful autonomy that, better than having no absolute clear saying to offer (cf. VP), speaks that potential infinity at the heart of all doing and being. Art, for Titus-Carmel, does

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not “decode the mysteries of the day” (FT, II), it encodes them, embraces their now painful, now dazzling strangeness, wraps them in the many delicate veils of its deferrals which are ever augmentations, expansions. As a great work like Nielles or The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin or the as yet unshown Isenheim Altarpiece-inspired series develops, it sheds its engagement with all that would limit its emergence into its own fullness, its own “imperious necessity” (VP, 32). One can ask of it, as of its creator, no greater commitment, at the heart of this stripping away of constraint and superfluousness, to that supreme tussle with absence and presence we all live in our own way.

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