ANTI-THINKERS IN THE '80S
"Young french artists refuse to legitimize philosophy, prefering to
place it in crisis: truly the vrmine of tought, they strive for a
beyond of occidental rationalism"
What
is French rationalism ? An understanding of systems which
subordinate logic and ethics to stylistics necessities. How then to
delineate the boundaries for the respective territories of visual and
linear thought ? The roles are transposed, meaning is confused. If the
international success of Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard and Virilio
exaggerate the weak echo of French artists, this also indicates the
powerful fissures that divide the sphère of art and philosophy
in France. Baudrillardian theories were not followed by any visible
effects in the plastic arts, almost. As early as 1979, Lyotard's
posmodern summons didn't modify anything vis-à-vis reflection on
the visual arts. The relationship between these two worlds have always
been distinguished by respective suspicion and disdain: when Yves
Klien, impassioned by Gaston Bachelard's ideas finally decided to meet
the philosopher, Bachelard took him for a madman and showed him the
door. Nevertheless, in France one must to recognize that the principle
power figure is the man of letters. The artist's fascination for the
intellectual is on par with the little desire he actually feels to be an
intellectual. One doesn't touch on these matters, or at least one wears
gloves. "Each painting must first exist in the mind before beeing
painted on canvas, and something is always lost as soom as it is
painted", axplained Marcel Duchamp. "I prfer to see my pictures without
this mud".
In order to find the landmarks of a true dialogue between art and French thought, it was necessary to await the Tel Quel thoricians,led
by Philippe Sollers, as well as Roland Barthes and
Michel Foucault. Dominated by an omnipresent structuralist
Marxism, throughout the sixties the artistic field let itself be
hypnotized, then engulfed by the all-powerful university:
the Marxist postulate for the primacy of production over product,
linguistics, Barthes' "degree zéro", took fire troughout
studios before resulting in the "Surface Support" Group. In The Order of Things (1966),
Foucault's "death of the subject" gave free reign to the worst
formalist misunderstanding amidst the hyper-politicized atmosphere.
Between '65 and 70, when American minimal and conceptual practice
referred to Pierce's systematics or Wittgenstein's mathematics
epistemology, France prferred structuralism and semiotics as their
bible, containing the universal key to signs. During May '68, French
artists liquidated their "art's for art sake"guilt gy politicaly
analysing the painting-object and its producyion. Surface-Support
extolled a "science of production methods", issued tracts and read
Althusser. Likewise, Buren-Mosset-Parmentier-Toroni defined the oeuvre
as the sum of its constituent materials.
Everyone reacted fecerishly to that "legacy of irréposabilité" already denooounced in Sartre, rejecting aesthecism à la française
as dandy rrecklessness. And like the Situationists in the late fifties,
everyone was opposed to a stagnent surrealism, as well as
existentialist and phenomenological thought - which had harbored the
Ecole de Paris, leaving room in the early sixties for the political,
tentacular dogmas that would end up stifling creative process and
deadening individual conscience.
It was Deleuze and Guattari's Anti Oedipus (1972)
which subverted the philosophical landscape by once again introducing
the individual faced with history: to produce a work of art is to put a
desire in motion, which overcomes all models, pre-established ordres,
and determinism in order to give concrete form to potenciality and
difference. Determined to isolate control structures. Deleuze and
Guattari, like Foucault, lauched themselves into the location of
multiple, heterogeneous orderings, "desiring structures" which
constitute the social body. Again like Foucault, they threw off
structuralism to rethink individual will. Finally, in full, low
ideological tide, a few art works appeared in which the resolution and
strategy were to pervert the Freudian-Marxist grid. To inscribe their
singularity into yhe narrow framework of modernist imperatives, these
artists played with interdictions -Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Christian
Boltanski, Jean-Pierre Raynaud. Each applied the rigor of maethod to
the administration of immaterial.
Not until 1981, whit the great dissolutionment of figuration libre, did
anti-intellectualism explode in the face of institutions. Saturated
with texts and finally wanting to forget May '68, France welcomed the
"end of beauty", as Lamarche Vadel's exhibition proposed, which
reunited the protagonists of "bad painting".
Therefore the eighties, already suspect, aspires to transversally
redeploy the philosophic message trough the energy of the new
generation. they renounce the "great legitimizing recitals" of which
Lyotard has noted the collapse, and they are interested in reinvesting
all the interstices of knowledge, exploiting all the flaws in
university discourse, and resuming the legendary "French spirit" -that
loralism composed of skeptic rationalism, irony and paradox. Bertrand
Lavier's games with object and definition, Garouste's "chess-game"
where he disputes the history of art, Boltanski's or the Poirier's
archeological stagings, Jean Michel Alberola's Godardian strategy, or
IFP's fictional devices: all converge at this redefinition of
art/theory in France.
In 1985at the Pompidou Center Lyotard himself organized les Immatériaux", the
exhibition which was to be the harbinger of this trend. In the
postmodern's realization of images, faced with the bankrupcy of the
universal, the multitude of miniature, susceptible narratives proposed
the consideration for a future horizon. It collided with genaral
skepticism: according to Baudrillard, the Americans "have passed from
the idea to the real, whereas we persist in transforming reality into
ideas. "French theorie, in fact, is still profoundly directed by
structuralism and its theoretical associations. Linguistic analysis,
applied by Levy-Strauss to ethnology, brought about the
conception of the imaginary as an ordering of interdependent systems.
Here fundamental questions are brought out: French politics suffer from
decolonization, the memory of the Algerian war, and troubles in New
Caledonia. Lyotad denounces "liberal capitalism, creator of poverty in
the planetary balance".
Artists are lost in the breach.
Thus Laurent Joubert's work, a critique of technology, also qustions
economic and cultural laws that structure societies. "I try to question
20th century artists' attraction to primitivism and Archaism. After the
pillaging of primary materials, it is the plundering of the senses. And
ethnology, neo-colonialism, these prove the catastrophy". A war machine
against hegemonic, philosophical discourse, Joubert's work is part of
this "placing in crisis" current; a refusal of all totemism and
legitimacy.
French art will be ambiguous, the carrion of doubt and vermine, or it will not exist. Don't expect naîveté
from the French, or the light transpositions in today's New-York art
scene: under the appearence of knowledge, the Frech are opposed to the
slight time-lag (unwedging) which reveals the unamable and consequently
the unthinkable. Under the appearance of power, they respond with
resistance, exhibiting repression and deconstructing systems.
Such was Gasiorowski's case (before his death in '86), it is the case
with Daniel Buren, Philippe Thomas, Jean-Sylvain Bieth or Laurent
Joubert.
Joubert proceeds through genealogical intuitions. He projects images of
archives and ancient engravings on heavy, wood panels, with a
perspective that could be qualified as "mnemonic", saturated with
significations. Colonization, inquisition, emblems of power: how could
one miss Foucault's analogous intention, dislodging microstructures
from the ideological order? Nevertheless, Joubert claims complicity in
Fernand Braudel, an ethnologist of capitalism and the European,
cultural arena. Moreover, Braudel has defined France as a "layering
from the highest velocity to that of the lowest", a rapidity perused,
extremely stratified space. The conflictual connections between thought
and image, this superficial brillance that skirts the most rigorous
rationalism, is explained by the incessant interaction of these
different social velocities. Moreover, this unceasing attention
attributed to time, movement, and duration, has a constant in French
philosophy.
In this vain, Jaspert/Cheverney's work inscribes itself, from Bergson
to Virilio, passing through Bachelard and Jankelevicht. Situated
at the point of vacillation between microphotography, the fractal
image, and the satellite photo, their lacquered panels evoke and
question a pretende mastery of the visible. Jaspert/Cheverney's work
reinstate both an "aesthetic of disappearence" (Virilio) and the
French scintillate surface tradition -from Monet to Klein's Planetery Reliefs. In a parallel direction, René Thom's Theory of Catastrophy
explains time as a series of accidental discontinuities set in a
continuous sphere. If Jaspert/Cheverney approach chaos as an interior
variable, even of their own practice, Pat Bruder celebrates it throught
monuments which incorporate it in an architectural thought. Cards,
shooting stars, trains derailing: so many images of the universe's
permanent catastrophies, of the machinery of chance. Bruder's permanent
structures lose th, i.e. discover, casualty, and destruction. Bruder
opposes absurd, philosophical speculation with grating, visual
jubilation.
The same sarcastic pessimism is clear in Jean-Sylvain Bieth's clay
monochromes and austere photographs: these assimilate the picture into
a conglomerate of endlessly recycled dust. Boredom to Bieth is the
culmination of aesthetic contemplation, finding Schopenhaure and
Cioran, Bieth places himself amongst this progeny of denial and
resistance -an attempt to distance art from spectacle society and
consuption. "The eternal return of the same" is Bieth's trap from which
to re-establish the coherence of sense through a tragic conception of
the art work. Art alone is capable of suspe,ding time, but this moment
of suspension is hardly worth any other moment: contemplation begins to
smell musty.
Similarly, Jerome Basserode's work, on the cycles of decomposition,
situates itself between negation of the natural and derision the
rational. With the help of tar, earth, plants and grass, Basserode
recreates the logic of immaterial in vitro. Here, vapor
modifies the color of a synthesized constituent; there, a hidden
reserve of lemon extract renders the genuine fruit ridiculous, as
though one could procure energy from a fascinationfor natural forces.
Basserode's mockery corrupts every determinism: reducing marble and
lichen, electricity and vegetal growth to humiliated subjugation, as
well as forcing grass to submit its growth to the organ pipe.
Nature herself, submitted to artificial insemination, robotics and
cloning, is no longer for the disclosure of one's insignificant fiction.
Thus, French art today conveys a subtle guerrilla attack against the
pretensions of philosophic discourse. Perpetuating the demonstrative
clarity of 17th century moralists, this new generation cultivates
paradox and ambiguity in order to circumscribe the only possible ethic:
one which is finally inseparable from aesthetics, or rather a utopia in
which every contradiction, every struggle, will be unravelled. But
every utopia secretes its methods: here, meticulous skepticism, cold
passions bordering on cadastral precision and telephone directories, a
systematic "encyclopedism" once agin finds itself in artists as varied
as Dubuffet, Filliou, Lavier or Buren. And, is this not the only
posture capable of masking what is, according to Deleuze, that "the
French are too human, too historical, too anxious about the future and
past."?
Nicolas Bourriaud