Art Concept
Art Concept
Situating the Volcano Project in my work
As I explore the art process through two different forms (writing and painting) stemming from one single art intuition, I am progressively constructing a myth and performing it at the same time. The project’s dimensions demand a capacity for sustained focus that I learnt from practicing Chinese calligraphy, and developed through subsequent painting experiences.
The installation of paintings/drawings/sculpture is the second phase of the Volcano Fault Utopia. I have completed phase one, a novel/art manifesto, in 2008. Using vocabulary and syntax in a manner similar to brush strokes, it minutely details the artistic quest and fictional life of a sculptor who lives in isolation for three years inside a volcanic shaft.
This Volcano Fault is a utopia in the sense suggested by anthropologist Marc Augé (Harvard, 2007) and once exemplified by historian Robert Darnton.
A utopia has defining characteristics— a set form and a story to tell. This translates here into the square panels, the fixed dimensions, the unifying red tonality and the quest to make an artwork from a molten, changing medium.
Post-Positivism taught us to conceive that two separate and distinct things, even opposites, need not be mutually exclusive. Science has demonstrated it, although we have not yet been able to physically experience it. Ubiquity, a concept long associated with magical narratives, now pertains simultaneously to the conceivable and the imaginary.
After 29 years as a painter and fiction writer, I came to think that forms of transfer or ubiquity are at the root of art creation. I intend to demonstrate this through the dual media – written and painted – of the Volcano Fault Project.
My work is bound by a form of realism. One “feels” when there is somebody in a room. Our memory compiles images associated with feelings. Representing this ongoing intuition of presences is what I would call realism. What is real, moves. It never is twice alike, just as my paintings cannot be photographed twice identically. The Volcano Fault figures are an expression of this state of existing.
The complex varnish-medium is unequaled in its potential for reaching the core of human experience. The fleeting, evolving images denote a presence of life while the continuous process of construction and destruction allows an experience of time.
From creating the pieces and from listening to viewers’ comments, I understand that these paintings have an immediate “speaking” presence. The spectator sees the painting each time as both alike and different, triggering new sensations and interpretations.
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Larger perspective
Since World War One negated the value of human life, artists have shifted away from sublime representations of death and life. They embraced rejection and questioned meaning. Rupture held a strong artistic appeal.
The overwhelming awareness of this historic collapse prompted a wide range of responses, from minimalism to “arte povera.”
Lately, movements such as “Post-Studio” separated the artist from the conventional artwork space. Art with entrepreneurial and journalistic components, or technologically assisted, are further options that define new relations to art production.
Visual art gradually stretched between two extreme forms, a slick utilization of media and a morbid carnal fascination, casting the artist as perpetrator or in a work-in-absentee status. These approaches gradually reach their limit in a complex mix of fascination and repulsion for bodies and death.
Extreme empowerment (Zhang Huan or Damien Hirst) or embodiment (Marina Abramović) entertain an angst that links itself to mainstream world preoccupations. In the search for the radical, after all layers of meaning are peeled away, are we left with essential substance and freed energy or with exhausted flesh and objects? Or merely with “the news” of what we have done?
While aware of these successive movements, I am engaging in a different path. I manipulate centuries-old varnishing and lacquering processes: instead of breaking with art history, I propose to borrow its heritage and use its energy toward life. Although undoubtedly pushing limits, Volcano Fault has no thaumaturgic goal. Rather, it will show the synergy between work, mind and body in a single person at a single place.
Because my personal background is one of survival since childhood, labeling my interest in life as typically feminine would not cover the extent of my interrogation. Responding in some sense to Damien Hirst’s blood sculptures, which challenge our (impossible) relation to death, I ask how a human being carries on life, literally extracts him/herself from disappearance, in the strongest sense of abs-traction, and thrives again, day after day, in continuous existence.
I believe that the definition of presence is still unresolved. I came to recognize how an artwork can create a place that retains a presence. There lies an interaction potential between the artist and the spectator who share the intuition of a meaning.
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Notes and bibliographical references
1 I documented the origins and fascination for Chinese lacquer in the 17th- and 18th- century Europe in the following articles:
“A Thousand and One Varnishes”, The Strad, May 1999, London, pp. 508-51;
“Varnishing techniques: an 18th century European mania, a lasting fascination”, Journal of the Violin Society of America, November 1998, No 17, Part II, pp. 55-74;
“Varnishers in Europe in the 17th and 18th century: the work context”, BVMA Journal, 1999, London, pp.70-85.
2 In all the following endnotes, I situate my views in relation to diverse perspectives on art spanning 1950 to 2008. Regarding my translations, I will gladly make all original texts readily available upon demand.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957; Le mythe aujourd’hui, 1970, partly translated by Annette Lavers, 1972, Hill and Wang ed.
“… I have always been preoccupied [...] with the question of the meaning of cultural objects” (Barthes: 1981 p.64)
“… Real violence is the one that says “it-goes-without-saying.” (Barthes: 1975 p.88) (“la vraie violence, c’est celle du cela-va-de-soi”)
I am interested in creating a myth that evidences some ideological factors, as defined by Roland Barthes and other linguistic theories. Yet, I remain curious about a more conventional understanding of the myth as a metaphor enacting shared human preoccupations (see analysis of myths in psychoanalysis). Such representations are components of art creation.
3 On February 27, 2006, Marc Augé presented the latest state of his research at Harvard Department of Anthropology in a lecture titled The Utopia of Education that advocated the need for intellectuals to be utopian.
In his analysis of our modern and global world, Marc Augé rehabilitates the concept of Utopia. In his view, utopia would be an efficient tool for regenerating the power of imagination (in particular through art); it would open new avenues to our world.
I am also interested in the 19th century heritage of utopian philosophy. It then meant to experiment an imagined world (I reject the term “imaginary” because nothing is a fantasy in the project) thriving towards action. Interestingly, true utopian theories always seem to give way to constructive acts.
4 On November 27, 2007, Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Libraries gave at The Radcliffe Institute an experimental public class, that he named “Lecture-Cabaret”. This innovating performance/academic lecture presented the historian analysis alongside with the actual live performance of some of his documents, which were, in this case, 18th century songs performed by opera singer Hélène Delavault.
Robert Darnton proposed a form of instant utopia (singing 18th century songs as at the time) to trigger extended conceptual faculties in his students’ minds, calling on them to hear simultaneously the traditional historian lecture (which presented facts and documents) and the live performance of some of these documents (which solicited their intuition and sensibility).
Listening to Darnton and Augé’s current conclusions corroborated aspects of the art project that I have been building since 2005.
5 Several renown photographers among my friends have taken time photographing my paintings or devising photographic techniques to express their changing optical effects.
6 “ The art of taming Emptiness, of capturing its impalpable presence, primarily mobilizes the painter’s gesture, this nostalgic of the invisible, preoccupied with letting us “see” through the “minus”, which conventionally represents emptiness, an inaccessible “plus,” that ordinary perception persistently denies to us.” Francois Cheng, l’Espace du rêve, mille ans de peinture chinoise, Phebus ed., Paris, 1980, p.40 (my translation)
7 “ The artist or the contemporary writer who notices in ancient artworks signs of their historical relevance and who feels their presence (they still speak to him) should find reasons for hope in the experience. Contemporaneity is not actualities.
The paradox is that an artwork is fully modern only as long as it is both original (from a certain time) and innovative, not merely reproducing the existing. …. One needs the past and the future to be modern.
The second paradox is the present arising of a new space-time concept that seems to sanctify an everlasting present, as if the acceleration of time was preventing us from perceiving its movement.” Marc Augé, Essay about aesthetics: “Contemporanéité et conscience historique” in Où est passé l’avenir? p 62-63, Edition du Panama, Paris, 2008 (my translation)
8 ” The relation to time that the great contemporary urban architecture expresses, is inverse to the one evoked by ruins. Ruins compile too much history to express a history. They do not evidence History. We only perceive how impossible it is to fully envision what they meant to those who contemplated them when they were not yet ruins. They do not express history, but time, pure time. [...]
The aesthetic perception of the pure time is the perception of an absence, of a lack.” Augé, Id. p.67-68 (my translation)
9 For the sake of completeness, I should mention my particular interest for these two movements. I am sensitive to Minimalism for the philosophical perspective it opens. My relation to “art brut”, mentioned in the past by critics, is more complex: my care in using what already exists goes from painting with discarded rags to preserving knowledge and from salvaged wood pieces to traces of human memory.
10Salvador Dali, Aspects phénoménologiques de la méthode paranoiaque-critique. Lecture at the Sorbonne, December 17, 1955. Translation Richard Howard, La Table Ronde ed., 1964:
“The consequences of contemporary modern art have brought us to the maximum of rationalisation and the maximum of scepticism. Today, young modern painters believe in nothing. It is entirely natural that when one does not believe in anything one ends by painting nothing, which is the case in all modern painting, including abstract, aesthetic, academic painting, with the single exception of a group of American painters in New York who, through lack of tradition and because of an instinctive paroxysm, are very close to a new pre-mystic faith that will take form when the world is finally conscious of the latest progress of nuclear science.”
Jean Dubuffet: Asphyxiante culture, Minuit ed., 1968: “The first duty of the artist is to escape culture”
Yves Michaud, L’art à l’état gazeux, Essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique, Stock ed., Paris, 2003:
“ Art finds refuge in an experience that is not anymore the one of objects enhanced by an aura, but of an aura that is attached to nothing or almost nothing. This aura, this halo, this perfume, this gas, as one may call it, expresses the identity of our time through fashion.” (My translation)
11 In Art News, Collector Issue, Summer 2008, “Shock Art: How Far is Too Far?”, Phoebe Hoban asks:
“Contemporary artists have made work depicting graphic sexual acts, damaging property, injuring their own bodies, or paying others to alter theirs. But when does art cross the line from avant-garde to unacceptable?”
Moving away from this question, which has been a recurrent one since art exists, the article situates our current art scene:
“This spring, the ante was upped significantly when German artist Gregor Schneider announced plans for a performance piece that centers on a human death. Schneider wants to enlist a moribund person to die in a gallery, or, short of that, display a very recent corpse, in an effort “to show the beauty of death.” Beauty may be nothing but the “beginning of terror, we’re still just able to bear,” as Rainer Maria Rilke put it. But the deliberate staging of death – the ultimate taboo – still remains well beyond the scope of what is considered acceptable as art.”
12 The latin root: “abstraho” means: drag away from, extract from, excerpt from.
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