Practice Analysis On Works 2008-2010

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I

Bella Ciao was performed once, in front of an audience: I sang with limited skills the famous Italian partisan song, helped by a video displayed in the background, showing black and white pictures of the partisans and the lyrics of the song, their words turning from white to pink at the time of their correct utterance, in the manner of a karaoke.

The support of Lawrence Weiner is a sheer A4 paper, bearing a citation and the name of the aforementioned artist. The text reads in upper case: “an artist is not supposed to assume authority.” Only the words “an artist” and “authority” are printed, in a black Sans Serif type font, the rest of the phrase being handwritten with a light graphite pencil so as to mimic the chosen type font. The antinomic endpoints of the phrase, highlighted by their sharpness and the density of their ink, are united by a fleeting, negative, link.

The video entitled Fireworks seamlessly loops in silence, displayed on a large wall. It shows an anonymous urban landscape in the lower third of the display and an open sky of greenish haze. Sporadic drops of coloured inks staining the sky, in a centrifugal course against the wind, are soon diluted, vanishing in the hue as slowly as they appeared. The simple exhibition of fireworks agonizing at slow pace, their foolish presence in daylight, amounts to a non-event, which accommodates more than disturbs the mere contemplation induced by the constant landscape.

Spitting is a two and a half minutes video displayed against a wall at viewer’s sight height, showing a close-up of my face. After a few instants of staring, I start spitting frontally, but the expelled saliva adopts a ludicrous path, falling back on my face. I keep however spitting, alternating aggressive and suffering stances, until the end of the video. My slightly askew, floating gaze attests an awareness of the camcorder and its display during the performance.

These examples of my past practice seem difficult to articulate as a coherent set of works, for they correspond to diverging aspirations. A theory, the kantian system of Aesthetics, was however found to encompass these attempts^[1]. One could legitimately wonder why choosing a bicentenary aesthetic theory to assist in the examination of a contemporary art practice. Kant's doctrine, after all, has been criticized from the moment of its inception, Schopenhauer noting for instance the taste of his author for architectonic symmetry, leading to the creation of fuzzy concepts, for the sake of structure balance^[2]. The exhumation of this normative framework is justified for now by the sole merits of its inclusiveness and the categorization it allows, as the following will show.

The late Critique of the Power of Judgement defines what constitutes an aesthetic judgement and how such judgement is possible. While the opus treats essentially of art reception — the aesthetic relation existing not between the representation and the object but between the representation and the subject, it implicitly relates to art making, the maker being the first recipient. The Critique first draws a distinction between two categories, the judgement of Beauty and of the Sublime. The Beautiful, in Kant’s words, is characterized in the pleasure given by the free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding. Such pleasure is non-conceptual in nature and relates thus only to the pure form of its source^[3]. This is possibly the case for Fireworks: the size of the display, its silence, the slowness and the faint marks of the fireworks focus the reception on the perception of visual cues, with no pretension but visual poetry.

The Critique introduces a further distinction, between pure and adherent judgements of Beauty. If pure judgement relies only on the form of the object, this second type of judgement must consider its content or appeal as a contingency which cannot be discarded. If Spitting, for instance, recalls the visual asceticism of the proto-conceptualists, Nauman and Acconci in particular, it is not as solipsistic. The video appeals directly to its audience: the spitting is directed to the viewer’s face too, in a harmless attempt to turn self-contempt into inter-subjective hostility. This superposition of confrontations and receivers, the performer and the audience, emphasizes reception itself.

In the broader kantian system, the faculty of reason manifests itself in cognitions disconnected from experience, whereas the faculty of understanding is necessarily experiential — reason allows thinking the infinite, while with understanding, we conceive of our own finitude^[4]. This fundamental distinction also applies to his aesthetic theory: the judgement of beauty stems from the free play of imagination and understanding when the judgement of the sublime relates to the interplay of the faculties of imagination and reason. More specifically, sublimity arises from the feeling of superiority of our reason over nature. The Critique considers two categories for this type of judgement. First, the mathematically sublime occurs in the vertigo of the infinitely small or the infinitely large. More generally, it relates for me to the seductive powers of reason, the minimality of its means (and not forms), the capacity to think what cannot be experienced. Such conceptual attraction drove the making of Lawrence Weiner, which centers on a semantic conundrum: if the audience accepts Weiner’s assertion, it assigns a position of authority to this famous artist, thereby negating the assertion and destabilizing this authority. The sentence is thus a specific instance of the liar’s paradox, of unlimited unwinding. The execution of the work in its minimality echoes and amplifies the aporia.

The second category is the dynamically sublime, felt when reason alone strengthens the powerless human condition, in his confrontation with a fearful nature. This sublime is correlated to ethics, according to Kant — in particular, moral feelings are an aspiration to this sublime (it is worth noting that Lyotard proposes to define justice on the premise of the judgement of the sublime^[3]) This category corresponds in my practice to the ambition of subsuming political matters under the aesthetic field, as in Bella Ciao, a work which opposes the reality of performing a political song and the safety of its artistic context, a formal frame denying any consequentiality, and contrasts therefore the logics of political action, positing that the ends justify the means, and contemporary art, in its inherent irony.

II

If the previous section on aesthetic judgement accounts for my past aspirations in art making, it felt short to represent all my interests in the art field, interests which all aim at developing an understanding of this field. Such purpose justifies obviously an artistic practice, as experientiality conditions the faculty of understanding, but this purpose also entails another investigation. Indeed, this faculty plays a major role in the constitution of knowledge, thus developing an understanding of art necessarily implies questioning the possibility of knowledge in this field and its limits. This epistemological investigation goes clearly beyond Kant’s aesthetic theory per se, but remains however within the kantian philosophical system: the vast enterprise undertaken by Kant is, in the Critique of Pure Reason, to delimit knowability in order to reform metaphysics. Here, against all suggestions of a comparison, the undertaking is prosaically modest, even if its question and answer offers a family resemblance with that of Kant.

My interest in Kant's theses lie additionally in the analogy they provide between the aesthetic and the epistemic experiences: both are explained as a pleasing experience of unity in its object — knowledge reveals a conceptual unity, while art fosters non-conceptual unity, the cognitive faculties being freed from the task of identifying a category. This analogy probably flatters a form of “knowledge fetishism” developed in my previous scientific training, due to the enlightening effect of knowledge acquisition, this fetishism being an important motor for my activities in the art field. The starting point of my works is thus often an enlightening moment I would like to share. A distance has to be taken however from the epistemic source of this experience, to form an understanding of it, avoid the authoritarian tendency of knowledge and allow the free play of cognitive faculties.

The Space Outside Meaning is an installation of silvery pipes, made of three identical vertical outline (1,80 meters high by 3,25 meters large) connected by horizontal links (for a total length of 2,2 meters), the outline being a scaled profile of the exhibition room. This ceiling of this structure is covered with aluminium foils, as well as the upper half of the walls. Entering the structure reveals that a text has been handwritten on these vertical foils, leaving no physical mark on the aluminium but the ink. The text, entitled A toy theory of theories, is a tentative theory to categorize systems of belief, such as art, according to formal properties. The notice for this sculpture reads:

This “toy theory” is an echo of my collision with paradoxical forms of art, as practised by Hirst, Koons and others, where promotion and critique go hand-in-hand, blurring their author's position. This text is strongly inspired by works of logicians, who interrupted the positivist dream at the beginning of the 20th century. Positivists genuinely believed that Truth could be proved mathematically. These logicians took the mathematical system as an object of study, considered it from the outside, and showed that it will always contain paradoxes, propositions which are both true and false. Thus the extent of knowledge, understood as true, justified belief, is not unlimited: there's a space outside, which cannot be reached by rationality. I initially wrote A toy theory of theories to define a framework where art could be meaningful, thereby fulfilling a modernist need. But this investigation showed me that no framework encompassing art can be meaningful. Yet this text constitutes a meaningful framework on its own. Hence, I cannot define my position with respect to the toy theory: genuinely believing in it, or considering it ironically, as an object doomed to failure?

III

The aim of developing an understanding of the art field guided another aspect of my practice, inspired by the method adopted by the aforementioned logicians: if the “art institution”, loosely defined as the socio-economic nest of art, is to be understood, it has to be considered externally, to become an object of study. That the study itself can be of artistic concern, and not merely of scientific interest, has been asserted by the actors of Institutional Critique, with very little illusion on its effectiveness^[5]. This approach, in all its purposiveness, is opposed to any feeling of disinterested pleasure and would thus be denied aesthetic value in kantian theory, as it infringes on the presumed autonomous status of art. Against this premise, Peter Bürger argues, in the Marxist tradition, that “works of art are not received as single entities, but within institutional frameworks and conditions that largely determine the function of the works” and that art has thus a specific function in our society: the neutralization of critique^[6]. If a tentative resolution at theoretical level will be offered later, it is enough to mention that my motivation for producing works having the art institution as object lies in developing an individual consciousness of the context of art production and reproduction, and exploring once again the overlapping zones of knowledge and art.

An early example concerned remains of the modernistic view of art as the expression of a unique individuality: the requirement for the artist-to-be to have a portfolio showing a coherent set of idiosyncratic works, a requirement which conveniently provides a clear message and a clear product to gallery owners and buyers. The Portfolios Project tried to subvert this commercial necessity: my past works, amounting to sixty micro-works then, some barely existing, were numerically evaluated according to nine questions, relating to process, means and outcome. An algorithm was then used to find the most pertinent questions and the questions which were correlated (interestingly, the algorithm is also used for market analysis.) To avoid defining yet an artistic “individuality”, the pieces were then grouped in three clusters according to their score for the most pertinent questions. The elements of each of these clusters showing thus a higher degree of coherency, the clusters effectively define three separate personae, which deserve each a portfolio.

The thought that critique presupposes a reconstruction of History^[6] triggered the making of another work, Round trip from Conceptual Paradise, an installation composed of three TV screens, each placed on a pedestal at viewer's height. A first screen shows the upper half of a person, moving his arms, hands and fingers according to a sign language. Opposite to this screen, separated by a few meters, are the two other screens, placed side to side so that both face the first screen. The screen on the left shows varying content, but the soundtrack can hardly be heard, its low volume being dominated by the voice from the screen on the right, which shows the upper half of another person, speaking. It is soon clear that the left screen is showing a documentary called Conceptual Paradise, which gathers a cornucopia of interviews with prominent figures of conceptual and contemporary art. Any intention of understanding the original content is frustrated by the action of the speaker of the right screen, whose communication nevertheless relates to the expected content of the left screen, but in asynchrony and idiosyncrasy. Is a conversation taking place between two opposite screens, between this probably mute person and his speaking interlocutor, despite their concurrent use of languages?

The two actors on the first and second screen are acknowledged in the closing credits as sign language interpreters. The outside voice overlaid on the original soundtrack, the title of the piece and the relative position of the screens all suggest that the operation taking place is a two-fold translation, from the documentary into sign language and back into spoken form. The elicited dialogic situation between the two opposite participants is in fine denied and has to be construed to unidirectional, instrumental communication. Regarding the documentary, a single interpretation, homogeneous in tone and vocabulary, is provided in lieu of a multiplicity of voices individualizing the manifold conceptual movement. This coalescence alludes to the discursive formation intrinsic to the documentary, as dispersed interpretations are articulated to feed the underlying historicizing process. More, the choice of language as primary medium to question the cultural discourse about art and its logocentrism, a choice which typifies conceptual practices, is here reactivated by the round-trip translation. This procedure of intervention produces only an ephemeral visual form — the sequence of corporeal signs soon vanishing in sounds, thereby advancing a tentative resolution to the documentary's aporia: providing a representation to the critique of representation. (This work was actually never executed in this form.)

IV

The Space Outside Meaning showed me that what I initially took for an aberration, was constitutive of the artistic field and essential to its understanding: the paradox, by defecting reason to the mathematically sublime, “makes room” for Art — by analogy to Kant’s own analysis: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”^[7]. My interest in paradox has further been heightened by the realization that it can be described effectively as a superposition of antagonistic terms: the speaker of the liar’s paradox is both lying and honest. Such form hints at a possible reconciliation for two dualisms of particular concern in my practice: naïveté/irony and autonomy/heteronomy. These dualisms could be considered in a post-structuralist reading as platonistic oppositions, and be subject to Derrida's critique^[8], which highlights the ideological bias in the implicit hierarchization of its poles — for instance, the supremacy of irony over naïveté remaining mostly unquestioned in contemporary culture. The re-valorization of naïveté ensuing from the deconstructionist perspective does not however break loose from the two-poles categorization, when the interference between these poles is to be heard in the general problem of self-consciousness, the possibility of feeling in post-modern times.

The binary opposition autonomy/heteronomy appears on various levels of my approach to the art field: in the theoretical questions of the autonomy of Art with respect to cognition, knowledge and its possible social function, but also in the practical investigation of referentiality in an artwork. As mentioned previously, some of my works stem from the experience of an enlightening moment, but requires the introduction of a distance, a distortion, acting as an implicit critique or blurring the authoritative tone of knowledge. These works, which can be interpreted as reactions or responses, thus labour (against) the autonomy/heteronomy dualism in their referentiality. For instance, Lawrence Weiner is in the act of singling his phrase out a clear reaction, following the recognition of its contradictory nature. The work visually refers to his work, but the quotation is disturbed by the heterogeneous styles of writing.

The theoretical questions recently engaged the attention of Jacques Rancière, who relies explicitly on kantian and schillerian concepts for his Aesthetics^[9]. Modern Art's radicalness stems here from the Sublime, in the irreducible power of incarnation of a work from Donald Judd or in the negative acknowledgement that a space beyond representation exists (following the thesis of Jean-François Lyotard). The philosophical system of Kant and Schiller is then expanded to contemporary art. In Rancière's historicizing view, Aesthetics is sublated as a specific regime of identification of art, where a work is "a sensible form, heterogeneous to the ordinary forms of the sensible experience, all marked by dualities" (form/material, active/passive...). This heterogeneity allows the sensible to be redistributed, shared anew, in a form equated to Schiller's game or to its generalization in Kant's free play of faculties. The general question of the autonomy of Art is thus ill-defined; the current regime is paradoxical, as its autonomy from the political sphere embeds a promise of emancipation. Rancière thus adopts a dialectical framework to offer a synthetic solution and to deny any claim of rupture to post-modernism.

The dualism naïveté/irony or equivalently performing/acting, appearing respectively in Bella Ciao and in Spitting, could alternatively be regarded as an hegelian dialectic, suggesting a paradoxical resolution. A synthesis has been proposed in the idea of strategic naïveté^[10]. I would favour a dual form, a core of naïveté embedded in an "involuntary" irony, as adopting naïveté in our current “disenchanted vision of Schiller’s game”^[9] participates in a redistribution of the sensible by debasing the expected amusement and disappointment of an ironic audience. For instance, personal matter is genuinely treated in Family (an acceptation) — Famille (une acceptation), a black and white video showing two hands folding and unfolding a family picture, where it is unclear whether the picture is being scratched or restored from its scratches. A synthetic voice is declaiming in gothic accents, or perhaps singing, a poem whose refrain asks: "What's a family? What's my family?". The video ends with the complete unfolding of the picture, left open with no visible crease. Both the picture manipulation, of no consequence, and the artificial voice, in its melodramatic tone, work as distancing devices, implying thereby the authenticity of their material. Paradoxically, the distance strengthens a naïveté more than it suggests irony. A naively autobiographical work is thus protected, nuanced by the consciousness of its naïveté, not a priori, as if it was produced in a state of purposive naïveté, but a posteriori, by acknowledging the implicit choices made to avoid full exposure.

References

1. ↑ Paul Guyer, 18th Century German Aesthetics, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
2. ↑ Arthur Schopenhauer, Appendix to Volume I of The World as Will and Representation — as cited in the entry Schema (Kant), Wikipedia
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1} Hannah Ginsborg, Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
4. ↑ Garrath William, Kant’s Account of Reason, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
5. ↑ Andrea Fraser, From The Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique in John C. Welchman (2006). Institutional Critique And After. JRP||Ringier. ISBN 978-3-905701-65-4
6. ↑ ^{6.0 6.1} Peter Bürger (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1067-3
7. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Preface to the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason — as cited by Philip Rossi in Kant's Philosophy of Religion, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
8. ↑ Jacques Derrida, Preface to Dissemination — as referred to by Leonard Lawlor in Jacques Derrida, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
9. ↑ ^{9.0 9.1} Rancière, Jacques (2004). Malaise dans l'esthétique. La Philosophie en effet. Galilée. ISBN 978-2-7186-0662-0. 
10. ↑ Timmer, Nicoline (2010). Do You Feel It Too? The Post-postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Postmodern Studies 44. Rodopi. p. 17. ISBN 978-90-420-2930-9.