France and the visual arts since 1945: remapping European postwar and contemporary art 9781501341526, 9781501341540, 9781501341533, 1501341529

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Illustrations......Page 8
List of Contributors......Page 13
Beyond the Clichés of “Decadence” and the Myths of “Triumph”: Rewriting France in the Stories of Postwar Western Art Catherine Dossin......Page 16
1 Art and Communism in Postwar France: The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism Cécile Pichon-Bonin and Lucia Piccioni......Page 38
2 The Art of Community in Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951) Marin Sarvé-Tarr......Page 54
3 Their Paris, Our Paris: A Situationist dérive Emmanuel Guy......Page 68
4 Pinot Gallizio’s Cavern: Re-Excavating Postwar Paris Sophie Cras......Page 92
5 Agnès Varda’s du Côté de la Côte: Place as “Sociological Phenomenon” Rosemary O’Neill......Page 108
6 Cybernetic Bordello: Nicolas Schöffer’s Aesthetic Hygiene Hervé Vanel......Page 122
7 Nouveau Réalisme in its “Longue Durée”: From the Nineteenth-Century Chiffonnier to the Remembrance of the Second World War Déborah Laks......Page 136
8 Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision of Antwerp: Movement, Time, and Kinetic Art, 1955–1959 Noémi Joly......Page 152
9 The Public Art of Jean Tinguely 1959–1991: Between Performance and Permanence Elisabeth Tiso......Page 170
10 Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Revolution: The French Happening, Surrealism, and the Algerian War Laurel Fredrickson......Page 184
11 Reimagining Communism after 1968: The Case of Grapus Sami Siegelbaum......Page 208
12 Autogestion in French Art after 1968: A Case Study of the Sociological Art Collective Ruth Erickson......Page 226
13 André Cadere’s Disorderly Conduct Lily Woodruff......Page 242
14 Places of Memory and Locus: Ernest Pignon-Ernest Jacopo Galimberti......Page 252
15 Questioning the Void: Sophie Calle’s Archival Subversions Rachel Boate......Page 270
16 Claire Fontaine, Redemptions Liam Considine......Page 284
Index......Page 298

Citation preview

France and the Visual Arts since 1945

France and the Visual Arts since 1945 Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art Edited by Catherine Dossin

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Catherine Dossin and Contributors, 2019 Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: detail of Elasticity by Umberto Boccioni © Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-5013-4152-6 978-1-5013-4154-0 978-1-5013-4153-3

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Beyond the Clichés of “Decadence” and the Myths of “Triumph”: Rewriting France in the Stories of Postwar Western Art  Catherine Dossin Art and Communism in Postwar France: The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism  Cécile Pichon-Bonin and Lucia Piccioni 2 The Art of Community in Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951)  Marin Sarvé-Tarr 3 Their Paris, Our Paris: A Situationist dérive  Emmanuel Guy 4 Pinot Gallizio’s Cavern: Re-Excavating Postwar Paris  Sophie Cras 5 Agnès Varda’s du Côté de la Côte: Place as “Sociological Phenomenon”  Rosemary O’Neill 6 Cybernetic Bordello: Nicolas Schöffer’s Aesthetic Hygiene  Hervé Vanel 7 Nouveau Réalisme in its “Longue Durée”: From the Nineteenth-Century Chiffonnier to the Remembrance of the Second World War  Déborah Laks 8 Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision of Antwerp: Movement, Time, and Kinetic Art, 1955–1959  Noémi Joly 9 The Public Art of Jean Tinguely 1959–1991: Between Performance and Permanence  Elisabeth Tiso 10 Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Revolution: The French Happening, Surrealism, and the Algerian War  Laurel Fredrickson 11 Reimagining Communism after 1968: The Case of Grapus  Sami Siegelbaum 12 Autogestion in French Art after 1968: A Case Study of the Sociological Art Collective  Ruth Erickson 13 André Cadere’s Disorderly Conduct  Lily Woodruff

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14 Places of Memory and Locus: Ernest Pignon-Ernest  Jacopo Galimberti 15 Questioning the Void: Sophie Calle’s Archival Subversions  Rachel Boate 16 Claire Fontaine, Redemptions  Liam Considine Index

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Illustrations Tables I.1  Table of contents of H. Harvard Arnason’s History of Modern Art (4th edition, 1998) I.2  Table of contents of Karl Ruhrberg’s Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts (2000) I.3  Table of contents of Daniel Soutif ’s L’ Art du XXème siècle (2002)

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Figures 2.1  Lettrists during the filming of Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951. Isou fixes his hair in the window, Maurice Lemaître and Gil Joseph Wolman are on his right. Photographer unknown 2.2a  Frame enlargements of Isidore Isou, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951. At the opening of the first chapter, Daniel exits a ciné-club screening, as pedestrians watch the filming. Courtesy of Catherine Goldstein 2.2b  Frame enlargements of Isidore Isou, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951. At the opening of the first chapter, Daniel exits a ciné-club screening, as pedestrians watch the filming. Courtesy of Catherine Goldstein 2.3  Guy Debord and his Isou graffiti during the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, April 1951. Photographer unknown 3.1   Emmanuel Guy, The Paris of the International Lettrist and International Situationist. This map was developed in collaboration with the Artl@s project directed by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, École Normale Supérieure, Paris: www.artlas.ens.fr Background image: Guy Debord, “Relevé des unités d’ambiance” on a map by éditions A. Leconte [circa. 1955]. Cutout map, glued onto pink cardboard, 27 × 27 cm (10.6 × 10.6 in.). Guy Debord Archive, NAF 28603, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France 3.2   Internationale Situationniste, Nouveau Théâtre d’Opération dans la Culture, 1958. Poster, 40 × 21 cm (15.7 × 8.2 in.) 3.3   Guy Debord, Ne Travaillez Jamais (Never Work), 1953. Graffiti, Rue de Seine, Paris. Debord did not photograph his graffiti himself. It

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was photographed by an unknown photographer, and later used by the Cercle de la Librairie, a postcard publisher, for a postcard by Mr. Buffier. Debord came across the postcard in the late 1950s and used the image regularly: in Internationale Situationniste, n°8, Paris, January 1963, p. 42; in Panegyric, vol. 2, Paris, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997; he also had a postcard made from the photograph for his personal correspondence 61 3.4  This photograph shows the film crew of Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time), Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilm Kompagni, 1959. The background shows the rue Mazarine and, as mentioned in this chapter, the tight bend behind the Institut de France, that hides the river Seine from the passerby. Courtesy of Alice Debord 63 3.5   Guy Debord, Guide psychogéographiques de Paris. Discours sur les passions de l’amour (Copenhagen: Permild & Rosengreen, 1957). Map, 60 × 74 cm (23.6 × 29 in.). The original map used for this détournement is Georges Peltier, Plan de Paris à vol d’Oiseau (Paris: E. Blondel La Rougery, 1951). Courtesy of Alice Debord 69 3.6  Comité pour le Maintien des Occupations, A bas la Société Spectaculaire 74 Marchande, May 1968. Poster, 49.5 × 36.5 cm (19.5 × 14.3 in.) 4.1  René Drouin inside A Cavern of Antimatter, May 1959. Courtesy of Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin 77 4.2   Giuseppe Gallizio, Caverne de l’ anti-matière (detail of the back wall), 1958–1959, mixed techniques on canvas (oil, plastic resins, solvents, pigments, wire), 210 × 368 cm, private collection. Courtesy of Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin 81 4.3  Map of the Galerie Drouin sent to Gallizio by Debord in 1958. Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin, file: “Documenti—Mostre—Eventi (1956–1964)” 83 4.4  Outside view of Galerie Drouin, Fall 1958. Photographs taken in preparation for A Cavern of Antimatter and sent to Gallizio by Debord. Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin, file: Gallizio’s Dario-Registro 88 5.1  Agnès Varda, Notebook, du Côté de la Côte, 1958. © Ciné-Tamaris 93 5.2  F. Hugo d’ Alési, Menton, travel poster, 1895. Fashion photograph, 95 Menton, du Côté de la Côte. © Ciné-Tamaris 5.3  Sunbathing on the Riviera, still frame, du Côté de la Côte. © CinéTamaris 101

Illustrations   5.4  Summer’s end, still frame, du Côté de la Côte. © Ciné-Tamaris  7.1   Arman, Petits Déchets Bourgeois, 1959. Accumulation of household garbage in wood box with glass cover. 58.4 × 40 × 12.1 cm. APA# 8017.59.001. Image courtesy of Arman Studio Archives New York  7.2   Arman, Le Village des damnés, 1962. Accumulation of dolls in store display box. 58.4 x 40 x 12.1 cm. APA# 8002.62.028. Image courtesy of Arman Studio Archives New York  9.1   Jean Tinguely, Eureka, 1963–1964. Expo64, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photographer: Kurt Wyss  9.2   Jean Tinguely, Chaos no. 1, 1972–1974. Columbus, Indiana. Photo courtesy of Chris Crawl  9.3   Jean Tinguely, Le Cyclop, 1969–1994. Milly-la-Forêt, France. Photo courtesy of Elisabeth Tiso 10.1  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Execution of the Thing,” L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely), July 14, 1960. Happening (detail), Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Photographer: Claudio Gallo—Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/© Carlo Pescatori 10.2  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Mourners and the Thing” (Madame Amey, Madame Hennessy, Pilar Pellicer), L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely). Happening (detail), Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Photographer: Claudio Gallo— Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/© Carlo Pescatori 10.3  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Corpse being carried down to awaiting gondolas” (Alan Ansen, Francis Amey, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and one mourner), L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely). Happening (detail), Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Photographer: Claudio Gallo—Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/© Carlo Pescatori 10.4  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Gondolas Receiving the Thing,” L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely). Happening (detail), Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Photographer: Claudio Gallo—Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/© Carlo Pescatori 11.1  Atelier des Arts-Décoratifs, 1968. Silkscreen poster. Bibliothèque Nationale de France 11.2   Grapus, Pour assainir l’ORTF il faut le démocratiser (Parti communiste français), 1972. Offset print poster. Courtesy of Pierre Bernard 11.3   Grapus, CGT, Paris, 1973. Offset print poster. Courtesy of Pierre Bernard 11.4   Grapus, Union du peuple de France (Parti communiste français), 1973. Offset print poster. Courtesy of Pierre Bernard

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11.5   Grapus, On y va (Mouvement de la jeunesse communiste de France), 1977. Offset print poster. Courtesy of Pierre Bernard 12.1  Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot, “Collectif d’art sociologique, manifeste I,” Le Monde, October 10, 1974. Courtesy JeanPaul Thenot. © 2016 Jean-Paul Thenot 12.2  Photograph of the Sociological Art Collective at the Venice Biennale, July 1976. Courtesy Fred Forest. © 2016 Fred Forest 12.3  Installation photographs of Art et ses structures socio-économiques (Art and Its Socioeconomic Structures), January 9–28, 1975, Gallery Germain, Paris. Courtesy Jean-Paul Thenot. © 2016 Jean-Paul Thenot 12.4  Installation photographs of Art et ses structures socio-économiques (Art and Its Socioeconomic Structures), January 9–28, 1975, Gallery Germain, Paris. Courtesy Jean-Paul Thenot. © 2016 Jean-Paul Thenot 13.1   Cadere with Blaise Gautier (holding the bar) and Pavlos at Pol Bury opening at CNAC, November 14, 1972. Gelatin silver print. Centre Pompidou—Mnam—Bibliothèque Kandinsky. Photographer: André Morain 14.1   Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Paris Commune, 1971. Sacré-Cœur, Paris, silkscreen print, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest 14.2   Ernest Pignon-Ernest, African Pietà, 2002. Durban (Warwick) South Africa, silkscreen print, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest PignonErnest 14.3   Ernest Pignon-Ernest, David with the Head of Goliath, after Caravaggio, 1988, Naples, black stone drawing, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest 14.4   Ernest Pignon-Ernest, The Entombment of Christ, after Caravaggio, 1988. Naples, black stone drawing, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest 14.5   Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Lamb, 1988. Naples, silkscreen print, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest 14.6   Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Pelvis, 1990. Naples, black stone drawing, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest 14.7   Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Death of the Virgin, after Caravaggio, 1990. Naples, black stone drawing, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest PignonErnest 14.8   Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Arborigènes, 1984. Jardin des Plantes, Paris, polyurethane foam and vegetable cells, Courtesy of Ernest PignonErnest

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Illustrations 15.1   Sophie Calle, Last Seen: Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Lady and Gentleman in Black, 1991. Ektachrome photograph with text sheet. Photograph (97 × 62 in. or 246.4 × 157.5 cm). © 2015 Sophie Calle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston 15.2   Sophie Calle, Friedenstaube (Nikolaiviertel)/Peace Dove (Nikolaiviertel), Souvenirs de Berlin-Est, 1996. C-Print, framed and installed in a book. Without frame: 46 7/8 × 35 1/16 in. (119 × 89 cm). With frame 51 7/8 × 40 1/16 × 1 3/16 in. (131.7 × 101.8 × 3 cm). © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Nørgaard paa Strøget. No photo credit 15.3   Sophie Calle, Bibliothek (Bebelplatz)/Library (Bebelplatz), Souvenirs de Berlin-Est, 1996. C-print, framed and installed with a book. Without frame: 23 5/8 × 31 1/2 in (60 × 80 cm). With frame: 28 7/16 × 36 1/4 × 1 3/16 in (72.3 × 92 x 3 cm). © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Nørgaard paa Strøget. No photo credit 16.1   Claire Fontaine, Redemptions, CCA Wattis, 2013. Installation view. Courtesy of Claire Fontaine 16.2   Claire Fontaine, Redemptions, CCA Wattis, 2013. Installation view. Courtesy of Claire Fontaine 16.3   Claire Fontaine, Some Redemptions, Metro Pictures, 2013. Installation view. Courtesy of Claire Fontaine, Paris and Metro Pictures 16.4   Claire Fontaine, Change, 2006. Modified US quarters. Courtesy of Claire Fontaine 16.5   Claire Fontaine, Trust (Helene Winer), 2010. Pen on printed paper, 16 1/4 × 12 1/4 in. (frame size). Courtesy of Claire Fontaine 16.6   Marcel Duchamp, Tzanck Check, 1919. Ink and rubberstamps on paper, 8 1/4 × 15 1/16 in. Copyright Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016 16.7   Marcel Duchamp, Twelve Hundred Coal Bags, 1938. International Surrealist Exhibition, Paris, installation view. Copyright Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016

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Contributors BOATE, Rachel is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, whose research has been supported by the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the Georges Lurcy Institute, and the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. CONSIDINE, Liam is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. His research is focused on the international impact of Pop art in the 1960s and on the critical problems of contemporary art. CRAS, Sophie is Maître de conférences at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. An English translation of her book, L'Économie à l’épreuve de l’art. Art et capitalisme dans les années 1960 (2018), is forthcoming with Yale University Press. DOSSIN, Catherine is Associate Professor at Purdue University and Editor of the Artl@s Bulletin. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (2015) and has co-edited with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel Circulations in the Global History of Art (2015). ERICKSON, Ruth is Mannion Family Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She has organized numerous exhibitions and published scholarly catalogs, including Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist and Leap before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957. FREDRICKSON, Laurel is Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her book Jean-Jacques Lebel: French Happenings of the 1960s and the Erotics of Revolution, will be published in 2018. GALIMBERTI, Jacopo is a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Individuals against Individualism: Western European Art Collectives (1956–1969) (2017). GUY, Emmanuel is Assistant Professor of Art and Design History and Director of the M.A program in History of Design and Curatorial Studies at Parsons Paris, The New School. He is the co-author with Fabien Danesi and Fabrice Flahutez of La Fabrique du cinéma de Guy Debord (2013), and with Laurence Le Bras of Guy Debord, Un Art de la Guerre (2013) and Lire Debord (2016). His book, Vers un design de l’ émancipation: le Jeu de la Guerre de Guy Debord, will be published in 2019.

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JOLY, Noémi teaches at the École du Louvre and at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Her research focused on the German ZERO Group, with a special focus on the relations between art and technology in the 1950s and 1960s. LAKS, Déborah is Scientific Coordinator at the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, and teaches at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Sciences Po, and École du Louvre. She is the author of Des déchets pour mémoire. L’utilisation de matériaux de récupération par les nouveaux réalistes (1955–1975) (2017). O’NEILL, Rosemary is Associate Professor of Art History at Parsons School of Design, The New School. She is the author of Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956–1971 (2012). PICCIONI, Lucia is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Musée du Quai Branly. In 2015, she received the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales’ Best Dissertation Award. PICHON-BONIN, Cécile is a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and lecturer at Sciences Po. She is the author of Peinture et politique en URSS—L’itinéraire des membres de la Société des artistes de chevalet (OST), 1917–1941 (2013). SARVÉ-TARR, Marin is Post-Doctoral Fisher Collection Curatorial Fellow at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She co-curated the exhibition Interiors and Exteriors: Avant-Garde Itineraries in Postwar France at the University of Chicago Smart Museum of Art in 2013. SIEGELBAUM, Sami is a Los Angeles-based art historian whose research focuses on the relationship between art and labor. He is completing two book manuscripts: The Ends of Political Art, on the ways artists in France responded to May 1968, and Surviving a Capitalist Economy, on Christopher D’Arcangelo. TISO, Elisabeth is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center the City University of New York. She is the co-author of New York’s New Edge: Contemporary Art, the High Line and Urban Megaprojects on the Far West Side (2014). VANEL, Hervé is Assistant Professor at the American University of Paris. He is the author of Triple Entendre—Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus (2014) and Le Parti Commoniste—Roy Lichtenstein et l’art pop (2013). He co-curated the exhibition Warhol Unlimited at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2015–2016), for which he edited the accompanying catalog. WOODRUFF, Lily is Assistant Professor of Art History at Michigan State University. Her book, Disordering the Establishment: Participation and Institutional Critique in France, 1958–1981, will be published in 2019.

Beyond the Clichés of “Decadence” and the Myths of “Triumph”: Rewriting France in the Stories of Postwar Western Art Catherine Dossin

The present book originates from a sentence by American philosopher Arthur Danto I came across several years ago in a book on twentieth-century American art. It read: “French painting between the wars and after the Second World War exemplifies so protracted a decline that the final three-quarters of the twentieth century could be written with scarcely a mention of France.”1 It caught my attention not so much for what it stated—the irrelevance of French art is a predictable cliché in the literature on postwar Western art, especially in the United States—but rather for who uttered it: whereas such a swiftly dismissive comment was to be anticipated from art critics, dealers, or artists who stand to benefit from undermining artists belonging to other groups, it was unsettling coming from the author of “The Artworld”2 who had provided such a sophisticated understanding of the discursive workings of the art world. It would seem that the decline of French art was so universally recognized that it did not need to be discussed or explained, let alone proven; it could simply be stated as a truth. French art is usually thought to have declined sometime during or after the Second World War, but according to Danto it was already over by the beginning of the century … unless it had started earlier still. Indeed, a quick review of American literature on France revealed that its end had long been announced—long before the twentieth century. In fact, French decadence is a recurring motive in American thinking of France since the very beginning of FrancoAmerican relations. As historian Saliha Belmessous explained, the French failure at establishing colonies on the North American continent in the sixteenth century was regarded as the result of moral shortcomings. The moral corruption of France, which was illustrated in the religious and civil wars that then raged throughout the country,

Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal, eds., American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1913–1993 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1993), 22. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–584.

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was contrasted with the pretended purity and virtue of the new continent.3 From then on, France was the decadent, corrupted other of the United States. Within the rich amount of American literature on French decadence, an article published in 1910 in the literary journal The North American Review is particularly noteworthy. Written by Maria Longworth Storer, an artist, socialite, and the wife of Bellamy Storer, a US representative and diplomat in Europe, it is exemplary in the way the cliché of French moral decadence was used in the complicated geopolitical context of the years leading to the First World War. According to Storer, religion and justice, which are the pillars of society, had been replaced in France by the “Déesse de la Raison” (literally the “Goddess of Reason,” that is to say secularity) and socialism. After describing the aggressive campaign of secularization of public education driven by the Républicains since the 1880s, the success of socialist ideas, and what she saw as the consequent degradation of authority, Mrs. Storer concluded that the French people had lost any moral sense. The general moral decadence of the country also resulted, in her eyes, in such a lax attitude within the French Army that little was to be expected from French soldiers in case of a conflict. In contrast to France’s moral and military corruption, the United States stood strong and powerful on the values of religion and justice (defined here as the opposite of socialism).4 From this article and others, one is drawn to conclude that the so-called postwar decadence of French art is part of a rich and long tradition that defines the United States as strong, moral, and thriving in comparison to a (perceived) decadent France. The decencies, motivations, and stakes have varied but the cliché has remained unchanged. Comments on France’s creative exhaustion uttered from the United States during the postwar period, such as Danto’s, thus need to be relativized, historicized and accordingly considered as discursive arguments. The question is not whether or not France produced any interesting art in these years but rather why at that particular moment the American art worlds appropriated the old cliché of French moral decadence to claim that nothing interesting was then coming from France. Moreover, what were the historical and cultural bases that allowed this cliché to develop and take hold in such a way that, expanding outside the United States, it became regarded as a fact everywhere, even in certain quarters of France? How has this affected and how does it continue to affect the historiography of postwar Western art and, more particularly, our understanding of the visual arts in France? And finally, what would it take to rewrite France in the mainstream history of postwar art? These are some of the questions that I would like to address in the following pages.

Saliha Belmessous, “Greatness and Decadence in French America,” Renaissance Studies 26, no. 4 (2012): 559–579. James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826) provides also an excellent context for early Franco-American relations. 4 Maria Longworth Storer, “The Decadence of France,” The North American Review 191, no. 651 (February, 1910): 168–184. 3

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US discourse on the decline of French art in the postwar period The origin of the American discourse on the decline of French art is usually assigned to a text written in 1948 by the art critic Clement Greenberg, in which he discussed new art from France that was then presented in New York, and famously declared: “The conclusion forces itself, much to our own surprise, that the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power.”5 Even though Greenberg’s actual knowledge of the French art scene was limited, to say the least, his programmatic argument about the decline of Paris and the rise of New York slowly gained influence in the United States over the following years to the point of becoming a “truth.”6 One of the reasons behind the success of Greenberg’s comment on the decline of France in the United States was people’s utter disenchantment with Europe.7 Twice now they had needed to intervene to stop the Europeans’ killing frenzy. They were appalled by the megalomania of the fascist and communist regimes, the madness of their fratricidal wars, and the barbarity of their genocides. They were also disappointed in the French for failing to resist the German invasion. Now the United States had to feed the Europeans, help them rebuild, and protect them from the Soviet Union. How could the Americans still hold Europe in high regard? How could they not despise them? In this context, the old belief that Europe was rotten and that Western civilization could regenerate itself only in America regained momentum. The United States was a good country with good people, and Americans were proud of the American way of life. As the prestige of European culture evaporated, the interest in American culture increased. After 1945, the number of American Studies programs in American universities went from twenty-nine to eighty-two. There were also more books devoted to American literature and art and perhaps the most visible of these was Alexander Eliot’s influential Three Hundred Years of American Art (1957). Similarly, US museums organized shows about the nation’s history of art, including Two Centuries of American Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1954.8 If before the war the label of “American artist” was a stigma associated with provincialism, after the war it started to take on positive connotations. Many American critics, including Greenberg, whose voices had emerged during the war, made the defense of American art their main issue. They repackaged America’s purported provincialism as an independent and original identity, radically different from the Clement Greenberg, “The Decline of Cubism,” Partisan Review 3 (1948): 366–369. In the immediate postwar period, exchanges between Europe and the United States were actually very limited, so that knowledge of the different art scenes was partial and biased. See Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). 7 Douglas Tallack, “Culture, Politics and Society in Mid-Century America,” in American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1913–1993, ed. Joachimides and Rosenthal, 29–38. 8 On this new interest for American art and culture, see Sidra Stich, Made in the USA: An Americanization in Modern Art (Los Angeles; Berkley: University of California Press, 1987), 8. 5 6

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European identity. In spring 1952, Partisan Review organized a symposium in three parts on American culture. Among its contributors there was a strong desire to assert the superiority of America over Europe, and a conviction that a long-overdue cultural affirmation of the United States was underway.9 In September 1953, Art Digest asked the question: “Is the French Avant-garde overrated?” Greenberg, of course, reiterated his conviction that Paris was finished: “Do I mean that the new American abstract painting is superior on the whole to the French? I do.” Yet, not all the participants at the symposium were convinced that such a shift had actually happened or could happen. The painter Jack Tworkov, for instance, dismissed the question: “In a symposium such as this one, it would be my aim to obtain a better climate for American painting rather than to fan up competition with the French.” Ralston Crawford, a painter who had actually spent time in France and so knew the scene first-hand, was perplexed: “There haven’t been any great artists in Europe since Picasso” has become an American song. Then there is the unsung but often suggested chorus: “That makes us all great.” The logic leading to this chorus has eluded me for a long time. In France, now there are many fine artists working in various styles. During my time there in 1951 and 1952 I didn’t happen to see any young artists who seemed to have the substance of Cézanne, Picasso or Gris. I don’t find them in New York either.

In his response, Greenberg theorized the difference between belle peinture française and rough and tough American painting. French painting was, according to the critic, decorative and dated (he was certainly thinking of Braque, Matisse, and Bonnard who were presented as the “French” painters at that time). American painting, in contrast, was wild and immediate.10 This image of the American artist as a savage—an image to which Greenberg would return in 1955 in his essay “American Type Painting”—came, as Arthur Danto has noticed, from Philip Rahv’s 1939 article “Paleface and Redskin.”11 In this essay, Rahv created a distinction between “paleface” writers who, like Henry James, were “highbrow,” and “redskin” writers who, like Walt Whitman, were “lowbrow.” The palefaces were European in taste, while the redskins were American originals.12 Danto has suggested that the concept of the American artist as wild actually came from the Surrealists, who were interested in primitivism and liked to see the Americans as rough and primitive. In the same way that they created the myth of the femme-enfant, they originated, or

Newton Arvin, et al., “Our Century and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19 (1952): 282–326, 420– 450, 562–597. 10 For the complete transcript of the symposium, see Ralston Crawford et al., “Symposium: Is French Avant-garde Overrated?” Art Digest, September 15, 1953, 12–13, 27. 11 Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophizing American Art,” in American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1913–1993, ed. Joachimides and Rosenthal. 21–28. 12 Republished in Philip Rahv, Image and Culture, Fourteen Essays on Literary Themes (Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books, 1949). 9

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at least fostered, the emergence of the myth of the wild American artist. Accordingly, after the war American artists were packaged as free and spontaneous. Jackson Pollock, born in Wyoming, became the best-known image of the redskin American artist; the antithesis of the paleface European artist.13 Willem de Kooning, who was 22 when he arrived in the United States and remained proud of his European origins, was annoyed by such discourses and used to mock the American artists: “They stand all alone in the wilderness, breast bearded.”14 Although there was an element of parody in the redskin image (and it is difficult to think of Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman as primitive and instinctive artists), this American identity won over the public’s imagination. If the end of Paris started to be under discussion in certain American circles during the war,15 the same was not true in Western Europe. Across the continent Paris remained the undisputed center of the art world, the place where museum directors, dealers, and collectors would go to discover new talent and where young artists would go seeking inspiration and success. John Franklin Koenig, an American in Paris, found the city’s cultural life amazing in the 1950s: “It was an extraordinary period: France’s intellectual and artistic renewal after the war. It was fantastic, it had incredible diversity and richness.”16 As late as December 1961, the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum of Eindhoven organized Kompas: Paris—Carrefour de la peinture, an ambitious exhibition devoted to the School of Paris, featuring, among others, Nicolas de Staël, Serge Poliakoff, Pierre Soulages, Jean Bazaine, Pierre Tal Coat, Maurice Estève, and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. In the exhibition catalog, Edy de Wilde, the director of the museum, asserted: “It is in Paris, more than anywhere else, reception center for artists of all nationalities, that the entire range of painting becomes visible.”17 Supporting this claim, the exhibition presented a School of Paris at its apogee. In 1961, Poliakoff, Soulages, and de Staël constituted the pantheon of postwar painting—those whose names were destined to pass into posterity.18 By 1964, however, everything had changed. In 1962, the international art market underwent a severe crisis, which led the international art world to move away from abstraction—especially Parisian abstraction—in favor of a new realism that Serge Guilbaut, “Création et développement d’une avant-garde: New York 1946–1951,” Histoire et critique des arts, July 1978, 29–48. Serge Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945–1964 (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1990), 30–78. 14 Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 125. 15 See for instance Harold Rosenberg, “On the Fall of Paris,” Partisan Review 7, no. 6 (December 1940): 440–448. 16 Quoted in Corine Giriaud, “Cimaise 1952–1963—Une revue dans une période de transition: du monopole parisien à la suprématie new-yorkaise,” (Mémoire de Maitrise, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2001), 28. 17 Quoted in Edy De Wilde and Roger Van Gindertael, Kompas: Paris—Carrefour de la peinture (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1961), no page. 18 On Paris’ central position in the 1950s, see Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 85–111, as well as Julie Verlaine, Les galeries d’art contemporain à Paris: une histoire culturelle du marché de l’art, 1944–1970 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012). 13

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better represented the spirit of the new decade, and of which American Pop art was the best representative.19 The end of Paris’s privileged position was ratified in June 1964 when the American Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg received the Grand Prize of Painting at the Venice Biennale. On that occasion, Alan Solomon, the curator of the American pavilion, rejoiced openly that the superiority of American art was finally being recognized abroad: “The fact that the art world center has shifted from Paris to New York is acknowledged on every hand.”20 That year, the American art critic Thomas Hess wrote “Tale of Two Cities,” an account of “the decline of Paris as an art center and the rise of New York in its place.” Hess begins his tale with the following observation: “We all know what happened to International School of Paris Painting at some time in between 1939 and 1945; it ceased to exist. We know how it happened; the evidence is plain in literally thousands of pictures by hundreds of very gifted, intelligent artists.” Echoing the old comments on the decadence of the belle peinture française, he continued: The nicely adjusted harmony of blues and roses took on a deathly look of undertaker’s cosmetics. Virtuoso drawing strangled form instead of defining it. The secret recipes of the painters’ cuisine, of fine cookery to Cocteau’s taste, now combined to dish up cloying sauces, pastries that would never rise no matter how thoroughly the dough was teased, the cream whipped, the crusts garnished and dusted.

Following such a vivid description, Hess then goes on trying to understand why “International Paris painting degenerated with a rapidity that was as astonishing as it was saddening,” using a terminology of corruption, decay, debacle, self-destruction, and vitality commonly found in the American literature on France. He concludes by assigning blame to the French painters for having sold themselves to the establishment, instead of resisting it. French art was over because artists lacked the moral strength to resist becoming “the servants” or “the cook” of the “the vanguard audience.”21 This was also the opinion of the painter Robert Motherwell, when he was interviewed in 1964 by the Parisian art critic Michel Ragon: R. M.—It is my opinion that French art is completely crushed. M. R.—Under what? R. M.—Crushed from the inside. It is a moral issue. After having read the transcript of his interview, Motherwell sent a letter to Ragon trying to rectify his comments: On the triumph of Pop art see: Catherine Dossin, “Pop begeistert: American Pop art and the German People,” American Art 25, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 100–111; Catherine Dossin, “To Drip or to Pop? The European Triumph of American Art,” The Artl@s Bulletin 3, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 79–103. 20 Jean-Robert Arnaud, “Mise à mort dans Venise la Rouge?” Cimaise, July–October 1964, 104. 21 Thomas B. Hess, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Location 1, no. 2 (Summer 1964): 84–111. 19

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The true response … is that I am not very well informed about the current situation of School of Paris … I have not spent more than a couple of days in Paris over the past twenty five years. I do not know if the French artists that are exhibited in New York are representative of what is happening in Paris, where there might be excellent artists that we do not see here.22

Demonstrating rare lucidity for those years, Motherwell realized that the moral argument was begging the question, and that he (and his fellow Americans) could only have incomplete knowledge of contemporary French art. If they did not go to Paris, they knew only what was brought to their doorsteps, which could only offer a partial view of French production. In the following years, as interest in French art decreased further, knowledge of it became ever more limited in the USA. Art magazines would have been the only way to learn about new art made in France, but by then French magazines had lost their significance and some, like Cahiers d’Art, had disappeared altogether. The production of knowledge about contemporary art was in the hands of US-based art magazines, which at best were uninterested in French art and at worst hostile to it. They failed to feature French artists so that reading them one would get the impression that nothing was going on in Paris anymore. In 1966, when the artist Donald Judd famously dismissed European art, his exact words were: “I am not interested in European art and I think it is over.”23 It was indeed first and foremost a matter of interest. Nothing interesting was happening in France, not because artists there suddenly lost their creative power but because the Western art world centered in New York was no longer interested in what they were doing; their attention had shifted from Paris to New York, throwing Parisian artists from the spotlight into media invisibility. As such, the low profile of Parisian artists in the second part of the twentieth century is not a problem. Many international artists had been overlooked internationally in the first half due to the prevalence of Paris. Perhaps they deserved their subsequent invisibility. They were now sharing the fate of any artists not based in New York, be they from Brussels, Berlin, or Chicago. The French situation is just particularly striking, not only because Paris was once the center of attention, but more importantly because the decline of French art is the key narrative device in the “American Century” plot on which our understanding of postwar Western art rests.24 Indeed, the decline of French artists is the necessary flip side of the so-called “triumph of American art,” on which the narrative of postwar Western art is constructed. Without the inferiority of French art, American art could not be great. Danto’s comment about the decadence of French art was made in a book on American art because the decline of French art in the second part of the twentieth century (or the last three-quarters of Michel Ragon, Vingt-cinq ans d’art vivant (Paris: Casterman, 1969), 309–315. Quoted in Lucy R. Lippard and Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd. Interview by Bruce Glaser. Edited by Lucy R. Lippard,” ARTnews 65, no. 5 (September 1966): 57. 24 See The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–2000, an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1999 in New York City. 22 23

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the century) had little to do with what was actually going on France at the time. It is nothing but a literary device in the triumphant narrative of American art because, as Danto actually implies, it is all about writing the history of art.

Writing the story of postwar art: the triumph of the New York perspective In Stories of Art, art historian James Elkins draws attention to the differences between the Western narrative of art history, exemplified by Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages and Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History, and its non-Western versions.25 But within the Western world, there are divergent narratives, as well. Their differences are particularly striking when it comes to twentieth-century art.26 To better understand this disparity, we can compare three textbooks devoted to that period: Harvard Arnason’s History of Modern Art (4th edition, 1998),27 Karl Ruhrberg’s Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (2000),28 and Daniel Soutif ’s L’Art du XXème siècle: de l’art moderne à l’art contemporain (2005).29 The tables of contents in these books clearly show the variations amongst different nationalities regarding the development of contemporary art. Let me start with the US-based narrative, encapsulated in the following excerpt from its table of contents (Table I.1). Table I.1  Table of contents of H. Harvard Arnason’s History of Modern Art (4th edition, 1998) History of Modern Art by Harvard Arnason (4th edition, 1998) Chapter 19: Abstract Expressionism Chapter 20: Postwar European art: Painting and Sculpture in France; L’Art Informel and Tâchisme in France; Concrete Art; Postwar Art in Italy and Spain; CoBrA; Painting and Sculpture in England. Chapter 21: Pop art and Europe’s New Realism; Pop art in Great Britain; Neo-Dada and Pop art in the United States; Happening and Environments; Europe’s New Realism. Chapter 22: Sixties Abstraction; Post-painterly, Color Field Abstraction; Hard Edge Painting; Optical Painting (Op Art); Motion and Light; Modernism vs. Minimalism. Chapter 24: The Pluralist Seventies; Conceptual Art; Performance Art and Video; Process Art; Earth and Site Works; Monuments and Public Sculpture; Figurative Art; Pattern and Decoration; New Image Art. Chapter 25: The Retrospective Eighties; Neo-Expressionism; Appropriation; Graffiti and Cartoon Artists; Installations; Abstract Art. James Elkins, Stories of Art (New York, London: Routledge, 2002). A point made by many art historians. See for instance Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion, 2009). 27 Harvard Arnason, History of Modern Art (revised by Marla F. Prather), 4th ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998). 28 Karl Ruhrberg and Manfred Schneckenburger, Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Taschen, 2000). 29 Daniel Soutif, ed., L’art du XXème siècle: de l’ art moderne à l’art contemporain, 1939–2002 (Paris: Citadelles & Mazenod, 2005). 25 26

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This story opens with American (in fact, mostly New York) Abstract Expressionism as the major artistic development of the postwar era. The next chapter covers parallel developments in France, Spain, Italy, Benelux, and England in the aftermath of the war. The chapter devoted to “Pop art and Europe’s New Realism” begins with British Pop, moves to American Pop art, and ends with Nouveau Réalisme, despite that movement having chronologically preceded American Pop art. The next two chapters, “Sixties Abstraction” and “The Pluralist Seventies,” present a succession of movements that are either specifically American (Color Field Abstraction and Pattern and Decoration) or that developed internationally but still are rooted in the United States (Conceptual art).30 There is no single chapter devoted to specifically European movements such as Zero (Germany), Arte Povera (Italy) or Supports/Surfaces (France). Arnason’s chapter on the 1980s opens, curiously, with paintings by Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter dating from the 1960s.31 Karl Ruhrberg’s Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts starts on a very different course (Table I.2). Instead of opening with US art, this story published in Germany begins with the situation in Paris at the end of the war, focusing on geometric and lyrical abstraction. The title of this first subchapter, however, refers to German painter Willi Baumeister’s book, Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (1947; The Unknown in Art), thus placing the artistic development of the postwar era under German patronage. The second subchapter, “Abstrakte Kunst in Deutschland,” is devoted exclusively to abstraction in Germany, while the third subchapter considers non-representational painting in “anderen Ländern” (Other Countries). Whereas Arnason does not mention postwar

Table I.2  Table of contents of Karl Ruhrberg’s Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts (2000) Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts by Karl Ruhrberg (2000) Chapter 10: Zwischen Aufstand und Einverständnis; Das Unbekannte in der Kunst; Abstrakte Kunst in Deutschland; Gegenstandlose Malerei in anderen Ländern; Wolfgang Schulze—ein deutscher Maler in Paris; Tachismus, Informel, Art Autre. Chapter 11: New York statt Paris; Malerei der Jahrhundermitte in den USA; Die Reaktion auf den Abstrakten Expressionismus in Europa; Pop Art und Nouveau Réalisme; Der Realismus des Francis Bacon; Aspekte des Neorealismus. Chapter 12: Malerei als Denkspiel; Grenzüberschreitungen der Op Art; Minimalistische und konzeptuelle Malerei; Malerei von Bildhauren und Objektmachern. Chapter 13: Jenseits von Utopia; Malerei an der Jahrtausendwende.

On Conceptual art’s internationalism, see Sophie Cras, “Global Conceptualism? Cartographies of Conceptual Art in Pursuit of Decentering,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 167–182. 31 For a discussion of the US reception of these German artists, see Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 229–275. 30

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German art, Ruhrberg gives preponderance to their work, granting an extra subchapter to German painter Wols (who was based in France). Another difference between these two nationally oriented narratives lies in the importance they confer to the Italian Lucio Fontana, the French Yves Klein, and the German Zero-Gruppe. The US story associates Fontana with postwar Italian abstraction, Klein with Nouveau Réalisme, and the Zero-Gruppe artists with 1960s American abstraction. The German story, in contrast, groups their works together as a European response to American art, thereby offering a vision of a continent united. The main characteristic of Ruhrberg’s story is its thematic approach, which emphasizes continuity in the history of art over ruptures—projects rather than national voices. Thus the subchapter on “Pop Art und Nouveau Réalisme” is subtitled “Fascination with Triviality,” and examines this tendency from Jean Hélion to Christo. Likewise, the subchapter on “Aspekte des Neorealismus” (Aspects of Neo-realism) presents figurative tendencies from Bernard Buffet and Francis Gruber to Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close, while “Malerei an der Jahrtausendwende” (Painting of the Twentieth Century) considers the meaning and function of painting from Baselitz (clearly identified as a 1960s artist) to the present. Overall, the author portrays postwar art as being composed of international movements in which German artists produced art of equal relevance to that of their American and other European counterparts. Not surprisingly, Daniel Soutif ’s L’ Art du XXème siècle differs from both the German and the American accounts (Table I.3). Soutif ’s story opens by discussing neither American Abstract Expressionism nor European abstraction. It begins instead with the end of militant Surrealism, the redefinition of abstraction, the late works of Picasso

Table I.3  Table of contents of Daniel Soutif ’s L’ Art du XXème siècle (2002) L’ Art du XXème siècle by Daniel Soutif (2002) Chapter 1: Mouvements et figures en Europe Chapter 2: L’Expressionisme abstrait et ses suites Chapter 3: Fin de la peinture? Chapter 7: Pop, minimal, conceptuel, peintres et peinture Chapter 8: Avant-gardes en France dans les années soixante Chapter 9: De Fluxus à L’Arte povera en passant par la Belgique Chapter 10: La conquête de l’espace Chapter 11: Mémoires et mythologies Chapter 12: Ceci n’est pas une photographie Chapter 13: Naissance de l’art vidéo Chapter 14: Sons et images Chapter 15: Et si des femmes … Chapter 18: Retours de la peinture

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and Matisse, the realism of André Fougeron and Renato Guttuso, and finishes with Marcel Duchamp. Soutif therefore stresses the continuity between pre- and postwar developments, and asserts figuration and realism as distinctively postwar trends, unlike Arnason and Rurhberg, who present abstraction as the postwar style. This focus on continuity and figuration is also present in his second chapter, “L’Expressionisme abstrait et ses suites,” (Abstract Expressionism and its Afterlives), which starts with American Regionalism and ends with the return to figuration of Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg, thereby relativizing Abstract Expressionism’s exceptionalism—a cliché in US literature. Soutif ’s story also diverges in its presentation of Nouveau Réalisme, which appears in the American and German books after American Pop art, despite its chronological anteriority. The French book, conversely, examines the movement in a chapter titled “Fin de la peinture?” (The End of Painting?) along with monochrome painting, Yves Klein, and the Affichistes.32 American Pop art is discussed at length in a subsequent chapter that also considers American Minimalism and Conceptual art. Just as Ruhrberg challenges the belief that nothing happened in Germany in the 1950s, Soutif and his collaborators dispute the common prejudice against French art in the 1960s with a chapter-long presentation of the artistic creation in France during that period, from Figuration narrative to BMPT and Supports/Surfaces. Finally, unlike the US book which presents the developments of the 1970s internationally, Soutif ’s story stresses the national roots of the movements of that decade, as exemplified in the chapter titled “De Fluxus à Arte povera en passant par la Belgique.” The differences in the stories told and the illustrations used cannot simply be dismissed as mere patriotism or historical opportunism. Beyond the expected preferential coverage given to their respective national artists, there are major discrepancies in the chronologic, geographic, and thematic ways in which movements and ideas are presented. In the US-American story, Nouveau Réalisme follows Pop art, the 1960s and 1970s are dominated by US-American art, and Baselitz is a 1980s artist. According to Rurhberg’s story, Abstraction dominates Western artistic production until the 1960s, Wols and Bacon are major figures (if not the major figures) of postwar art, and Baselitz is a 1960s artist. From the French point of view, abstraction is just one of the postwar movements, the United States just one center of artistic production, and art movements are firmly rooted in their historical and geographical contexts. Such discrepancies are not surprising, since those events must have looked different seen from Paris, New York, Berlin, or even between Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Munich, Strasbourg, Paris, Grenoble, and Nice, or New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, etc. so much so that it is difficult to talk of an “American,” or a “French,” or a “German” perspective. The stories that developed in each of these cities differ from one another not only because of their authors’ ideological positions, but also because of the point of view their location gives them on the international art scene. While the European members of Nouveau Réalisme started developing their specific practices in the mid On the Affichistes, see Esther Schlicht, Roland Wetzel, and Max Hollein, eds., Poésie de la métropole. Les affichistes (Bâle: Museum Tinguely, 2015).

32

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1950s, their works were not seen in the United States before the early 1960s. Likewise, Baselitz, whose first German solo-show took place in West Berlin in 1963, only began exhibiting in New York in 1981. The French, German, and US-American stories may diverge, but they might all be valid to the extent that they reflect multiple possible perspectives on the events that took place in the corresponding art worlds during the second half of the twentieth century. There is no one “true” story because there is not a correct way to perceive reality. Yet, we have to admit that the New York perspective that sees New York-based artists leading the trail of artistic innovation from Abstract Expressionism to Postpainterly Abstraction, Neo-Dada, Pop art, Minimal art, and Conceptual art has come to dominate the others. It has become the overarching story of postwar Western art— the one we all supposedly know and against which we mentally compare and contrast “other” stories (even our own) as we encounter them. These “other” stories are regarded as local narratives more or less solidly affixed onto the main story, and “local” artistic developments are perceived in relation to those of New York. We thus used New Yorkbased Pop art as point of reference to discuss and make sense of works created in other local scenes in the 1960s.33 The founding myth of this American story is, as already mentioned, the end of Paris and the rise of New York. Ignoring prewar artistic creation in the United States as much as dismissing any postwar developments in France, this story tells how, after the Second World War, the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. France, materially and morally ruined, had lost her creative power, while the United States gave birth to a radical new movement, Abstract Expressionism, which took over the regeneration of the avant-garde spirit from the School of Paris. As the story goes, modernist innovation became henceforth identified as an exclusively American project. This persuasive story was written and promoted through a series of books and articles that were published starting in the 1970s, including Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970) and Dore Ashton’s The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (1973), but also Max Kozloff ’s “American Painting during the Cold War” (Artforum, 1973), and even Serge Guilbaut’s Comment New York vola l’idée d’Art Moderne (1983; When New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art), since their analyses of the methods used to support the international success of American art further promoted the myth of its triumph.34 And, as the myth became part of the historiography of postwar Western art, its flip side—the creative exhaustion of Paris—became likewise a “fact” in the history of postwar art. The cliché of the moral and creative decline of French art having taken

As we can see in the recent wave of events devoted to international Pop art movements, such as The World Goes Pop (Tate Gallery, September 2015–January 2016) or International Pop (Walker Art Center, April 11–August 29 2015). 34 On the promotion of this story in the 1970s, see Jean-Luc Chalumeau, “Le ‘triomphe’ de l’expressionisme abstrait américain: Jackson Pollock,” in Lectures de l’art (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1991). 33

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hold, the same Parisian artists who had been enthusiastically acclaimed in the 1950s were relegated to the historical dustbin. Reflecting on this reverse of fortune, Parisian art critic Pierre Descargues recalled: Then art historians came and they pulled the carpet under our feet. No, they wrote, what you lived is worth nothing. The real adventure took place in the United States. Not in Paris … nothing happened in Paris. The School of Paris is irrelevant. They are serious people, the historians. And as they copy each other, at the end, the number impresses. Should we believe it? That what we had lived made no sense? Our life did not look like what the historians had decided.35

Beyond the American glass: French art in its context To make sense of the Parisian experience described by Descargues, it would be necessary not only to look beyond the US-based prism but also to use a different template for interpreting it (another grille de lecture, in French). Simply affixing references to events that took place in France within the official story of postwar art would indeed be insufficient because it would be using reference points that are meaningful in a US context but would not necessarily make sense from a French one (and this is true for any other country one would like to consider). Seen from a New York perspective, the artistic activities that took place in France (or Germany, Mexico, India, etc.) would appear partial and distorted. Writing France (or of any other country) into the story of postwar art would thus require us to rewrite the whole story and use a different analytic grid for reading history, politics, and art.

Experiences and memories of the Second World War It would first be necessary to consider the specific French experience (or rather experiences) of the Second World War, which drastically differs from the American, but also from the Italian or German, because without knowledge and understanding of what happened locally during the war, we cannot understand postwar developments in different countries, because the experience of the war motivated the different paths visual arts in each nation took afterwards.36 In France, the experience of the war was that of an occupied country, in which everyone including artists, dealers, critics, and art historians had to find a way to

Pierre Descargues, “1945 à Paris: la liberté partout?” in L’Envolée lyrique—Paris 1945–1956, ed. Patrick-Gilles Persin (Paris: Musée du Luxembourg, 2006), 24. 36 For an international overview of the visual arts during the war, see Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Géopolitique des avant-gardes. Une histoire transnationale, 1918–1945. Collection Folio Histoire. Vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 787–901. 35

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continue living.37 After France declared war on Germany in September 1939, many artists and intellectuals had to flee. This was particularly true for the Surrealists, who were well-known communists and often had, like André Masson, fought against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. But the majority stayed. For them, artistic life continued during the four years of the German occupation and Vichy government. In fact, the art field had rarely been as active as it was during the occupation. Artists seemed even more productive. At the Salon d’Automne of 1941, there were 2,447 artworks on display—a record number for the period, according to Sarah Wilson who explains this growth of activity in relation to the lack of other distractions, a deepseated need to express oneself and communicate with others, and the return to favor of academic styles.38 This increased activity did not slow down, either, as collectors were also buying more art. The occupation of France actually stimulated the art market. As one of their first measures, the Germans devalued French currency. This gave them extraordinary buying power, which many German officials took advantage of in their own art-collecting endeavors. In the economic context of occupied France, art also became one of the rare outlets for anyone who had cash, from collaborators to black marketers. Artworks became regarded as highly desirable objects—safe assets in a very uncertain world.39 The 1941–1942 season was particularly good for the Parisian market. The auction house Hôtel Drouot sold more than a million objects—a record. Buyers were particularly fond of Bonnard, Braque, and Matisse, that is, established French artists.40 The dynamism of the art scene was reinforced by the relative freedom artists enjoyed. The Germans tolerated in France the kind of art and artists that were condemned as degenerate at home. Unless the work was obviously anti-German or the artist Jewish or communist, German censorship in France was rather lax. As for the Vichy government, its art policy was not particularly strict, either. Maréchal Pétain himself was in favor of a traditional, sentimental, realist style, but the visual arts were not his priority. French artisans were far more important, because they produced useful and beautiful objects that could be sold and that demonstrated the famous French savoir-faire. As a result, there was little official theorization of what art should be and no strong censorship. For a detailed account of German occupation of France, see Pascal Ory, La France allemande (1933–1945) (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). On the specific situation of the visual arts in occupied France, see Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite, 1940–1944 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993) and Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, ed., L’Art en guerre: France 1938–1947 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012), as well as Agnès Callu, Patrick Eveno, and Hervé Joly, eds., Culture et médias sous l’Occupation. Des entreprises dans la France de Vichy (Paris: Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2009). 38 Sarah Wilson, “La vie artistique à Paris sous l’occupation,” in Paris–Paris, 1937–1957—Création en France, ed. Pontus Hultén (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981), 96–105. 39 Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art (New York: BasicBooks, 1997), 122–154; Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1995), 153–183. 40 On the French art market during the war see, among others, Joyeux-Prunel, Géopolitique des avantgardes. Une histoire transnationale, 1918–1945, 819–834 ; and Georges Bernier, L’Art et l’argent—Le marché de l’art à la fin du XXème siècle (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1990). 37

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Although no style was imposed on them by the German occupiers or the Vichy government, French artists spontaneously adopted a style inspired by Fauvism and Cubism, two styles that were widely exhibited and sold in Paris during the occupation. The Salon d’Automne in 1943, for instance, organized an important retrospective of Braque’s work. Braque and Matisse, who had remained in France, became the models for a younger generation in these precarious years—the symbol of better times and of a French culture that needed to be preserved. Thus, the works exhibited in the famous Vingt jeunes peintres de tradition française, which opened on May 10, 1941, at the Galerie Braun in Paris, featured Cubist features and the Fauvist palette. Young artists were not interested in abstraction or Surrealism,41 because those styles were too cosmopolitan and too leftist to have symbolic power in occupied France, and their main practitioners had fled. The interest of the young artists went rather to Romanesque art—a French tradition to which art historian Pierre Francastel drew public attention with the publication of his Humanisme roman (Romanesque Humanism) in 1942.42 Besides, as Sarah Wilson indicates, the Romanesque rooms were also the only exhibition rooms open in the Louvre during the war. The works of young French artists, such as Jean Bazaine, Maurice Estève, and Alfred Manessier, thus synthesized French modernity and French tradition, in a soft, spiritual language that could pass censorship and that reflected the uncertainty of the period.43 Overall the occupation prompted artists, critics, and art historians to cling to threatened French traditions. It was indeed during the war that art historian Bernard Dorival wrote his two volumes on French painting and his three-volume Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine that were published after the war, in which he called for and defined an art growing out of the French tradition.44 The anxiety over the preservation of French culture and values did not end with the liberation and cessation of hostilities. Once the festivities were over, France was faced indeed with the depressing reality of postwar recovery.45 If the fighting did not completely destroy the country’s infrastructure, it was nonetheless worn out by years of economic exploitation. French industry was in a poor state and had difficulty meeting the basic needs of the population. As Simone de Beauvoir explained: “The war was over; it remained in our hands like a great, unwanted corpse, and there was no place

Surrealism remained important for some younger artists, including the founding members of La Main à Plume who saw themselves as the “guardians” of the movement. See Michel Fauré, Histoire du surréalisme sous l’occupation (Paris: La table ronde, 2003). 42 On all these polemics, see Michela Passini, La fabrique de l’art national. Le nationalisme et les origines de l’histoire de l’art en France et en Allemagne (1870–1933) (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2013). 43 See Sarah Wilson, “Les peintres de tradition française,” in Paris–Paris, 1937–1957—Création en France (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981), 106–115; and Michèle C. Cone, “‘Abstract’ Art as a Veil: Tricolor Painting in Vichy France, 1940–44,” The Art Bulletin, June 1992: 191–204. 44 Bernard Dorival, Les étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, vols. 1, 2, and 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1943–1946). 45 See Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “La joie de vivre, et après?” in 1946, l’art de la reconstruction, ed. Maurice Fréchuret (Genève: Skira, 1996), 14–68. 41

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on earth to bury it.”46 The French had first to deal with the uncomfortable issue of the Vichy government and collaboration. In the first days of the libération, there was a surge of violence against those accused of collaboration with the Germans. Women’s heads were shaved, while notorious collaborators were executed. Jean Fautrier’s Otages series began in 1943 as a monument to the resistance fighters shot by the Germans in the forest of Châtenay-Malabry near his home, but the location’s meaning changed after the liberation when the resistance started to use that same forest to shoot collaborators.47 In the following years, the épuration of France continued through thousands of public trials and condemnations that prolonged the fear, anxiety, and anger of the occupation years. In the name of a necessary national reconciliation, however, President Vincent Auriol started using his amnesty power in 1947 to forgive many collaborators and bring back peace within the country.48 Yet people did not forget, and the memories (or repressed memories) of these dark years continued to haunt French artistic creation long after the war ended, so much so that, as Jill Carrick showed for the Nouveau Réalisme, one cannot understand the French postwar art scene without taking the painful and complicated memories of the war, occupation, libération, and épuration into consideration.49 They define the artistic production in France as late as the 1990s when a public discussion on France’s responsibility in the Holocaust was finally started following the trials of Klaus Barbie (1984–1987) and Maurice Papon (1981–1997), and President Jacques Chirac’s recognition of France’s responsibility in the deportation and death of French Jews in 1995. The testimonies of the victims, accounts of the accused, and defenses of their lawyers who placed their clients’ offenses in the larger context of France’s crimes during and after the war—especially during the wars of decolonization—shook the country and triggered the creation of somber works of which Christian Boltanski’s 1990s installations and Louis Malle’s motion picture Au revoir les enfants (1987) are only the most famous.

The geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonization The specificity of the French experiences and memories of the Second World War is not the only thing that needs to be taken into account when trying to understand the French artistic production of the postwar period. One needs also to consider the geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonization, and how they widened the gap

Frances Morris, ed., Paris Postwar: Art and Existentialism (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), 15. Patrick Le Nouëne, “Jean Fautrier, des Otages aux Partisans, 1945–1957,” in Face à l’histoire, 1933–1996—L’artiste moderne devant l’événement historique, ed. Jean-Paul Ameline (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/ Flammarion, 1996), 230–243. 48 On the épuration, see Rousso Henry, “L’épuration en France une histoire inachevée,” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 33 (January–March 1992), and Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, Histoire de l’épuration (Paris: Bibliothèque historique Larousse, 2010). 49 Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-garde: Topographies of Chance and Return (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). 46 47

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between France and other Western countries, especially the United States, where the Cold War had different meanings and implications. In postwar France, communism had an aura of prestige due to its role in the Résistance, and consequently it became an important political force.50 Until the late 1960s, the Parti communiste français (PCF; French Communist Party) would get up to 29 percent of the seats in the Assemblée nationale, and during the 1969 presidential election, Jacques Duclos, the Communist candidate, received 21.5 percent of the votes. Many French people subscribed to communist ideals, rejecting US imperialism as the worst of all evils. Others, like Charles de Gaulle, wanted Europe to act as a third force in the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. To counterbalance US influence, de Gaulle formed links with the Soviets and left NATO in 1966.51 In the United States, in contrast, communists were not seen as heroes of the resistance but as enemies. As the image of the Red Menace prevailed, McCarthyism officially deemed members of the Communist Party traitors. For mainstream US citizens communism was not an option and they could not understand how it could fool European intellectuals and artists. When Picasso became a member of the PCF in 1944, for example, American artists and intellectuals wrote him a letter begging him to reconsider his decision. Picasso was reportedly puzzled by the Americans’ irrational fear of communism: in his village, everybody was a communist—the butcher, the baker, the teacher—and they were all nice people.52 It would, however, be wrong to conclude from the importance of the PCF in postwar France that the country was divided between those who embraced communism and those who chose capitalism, in the same way as the world was divided between Soviet and American zones of influence. In fact, it would be a mistake to read the situation in France through a Cold War ideological opposition between two models, with Frenchmen on either side. The situation was more complicated because the political spectrum expanded to the left beyond the PCF, which represented the establishment and, as such, was criticized and attacked from both the right and the left. The leftist critique of communism was particularly strong among intellectuals and artists who rejected the PCF because of its links to Moscow and who instead adopted a palette of Marxist positions ranging from Trotskyism, Maoism, and socialism to different types of anarchism. Maoism was particularly in favor in France. In the context of the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China had come to represent for them the country of “real” communism. While the Soviet Union had betrayed the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideal and given in to imperialism, Mao’s China was carrying on the spirit of revolution. On Art and Communism in postwar France, see the contribution of Cécile Pichon-Bonin and Lucia Piccioni to this volume: “Art and Communism in Postwar France: The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism.” 51 French governments tired also to build strong relations with Eastern European countries, Poland in particular, and to maintain a strong presence in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. On the Cold War in Europe, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). 52 See Pierre Cabanne, Le siècle de Picasso, vol. 2 (Paris: Denoël, 1975), 120–121; Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 64–65. 50

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In the 1960s, Maoism offered an alternative to Soviet communism: a way to remain faithful to Marxism without aligning oneself with Moscow. Standing strong against both US and Soviet imperialism, the heroic figure of Mao captured the French imagination and fired up the revolutionary spirit among students, artists, and poets.53 Seen from France, the anti-authoritarian nature of the Cultural Revolution appeared as a popular movement in which the masses were given authority to criticize the establishment.54 Jean-Luc Godard captured the early enthusiasm of French youth for the People’s Republic of China in his movie La chinoise (The Chinese, 1967). Such enthusiasm was particularly strong among artists because it assigned them an important role in the revolutionary project.55 But Maoism was not the only leftist position that could be adopted. Understanding the complex—to say the least—political landscape of postwar France and grasping the subtle differences among the different Marxist, Maoist, and anarchist groupuscules, as well as their evolutions before and after the events of the social uprising of May 1968 is key to understanding the art scene of the period because they shaped the French art worlds and influenced artists’ practices. Even though seen from afar, especially from New York, they might have seemed to be all “communist,” from Paris they were opposing groups who would not talk to each other, let alone exhibit together.56 Reading the situation in postwar France through the Cold War lens used in the American narrative is thus problematic overall. Not only did the ideological divide play differently there, but also it was not the most meaningful geopolitical event for the French nation; decolonization and in particular the Indochina War (1945–1954) and the Algerian War (1954–1962) were. These decolonization wars affected the entire country at all levels. Economically, the wars to prevent the loss of the colonies were costly and the difficulties integrating former colonists (the so-called PiedsNoirs) weighed heavily on the country’s growth.57 Politically, the falling apart of its colonial empire further diminished France’s international significance, and caused much instability at home. This culminated in April 1961, when four French generals attempted a military putsch to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle, in reaction to his initiating peace negotiations with the Algerian National Liberation Front. Morally, the wars of decolonization and the French military’s use of torture, which was revealed to the public in 1957, resulted in disenchantment with France and its supposedly republican values. In fall 1960, 121 French intellectuals thus signed the “Déclaration For a detailed study of French Maoism, see Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 54 On the Cultural Revolution, see Rodrick MacFarquhar, “The Cultural Revolution,” in Art and China’s Revolution, ed. Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian (New York: Asia Society, 2008). 55 See Catherine Dossin, “Alors la Chine? The Journeys of Parisian Intellectuals to the People’s Republic of China in 1974,” in The Chinese Chameleon Revisited: From the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou, ed. Yangwen Zheng (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 200–228. 56 See Sami Siegelbaum’s contribution to this volume: “Reimagining Communism after 1968: The Case of Grapus.” 57 See Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français. Histoire d’un divorce, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2004). 53

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sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” (Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria), an open letter to the government requesting the recognition of Algeria’s independence and condemning the use of torture.58 The Algerian War had a strong impact on the Parisian art scene. Since every Frenchman over twenty had to serve as part of the obligatory military service, many artists were enrolled in a war they did not support and which they more actively condemned upon their return.59 The terrorist actions launched by the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) after February 1961 to hinder the peace process and the generals’ putsch in April 1961 brought back dark memories of the Second World War and created an urge among artists to act against fascism.60 In October 1960, the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel and the critic Alain Jouffroy organized a debate on Western civilization and the above-mentioned Manifesto of the 121 in collaboration with the Italian artist Enrico Baj at the Milanese gallery of Arturo Schwarz. This was followed by three exhibitions entitled Anti-procès, which took a position against the war, fascism, and torture.61 During Anti-procès 3, which took place at the Galleria Brera in Milan in June 1961, Lebel, Baj, Erró, Antonio Recalcati, Roberto Crippa, and Gianni Dova created a collective work full with screaming mouths, bulging eyes, a quartered female body, collages of a Virgin and Child in the mouth of a decorated general, a swastika, photographs of Pope John XXIII and Cardinal Ottaviani, painted words (moral, fatherland, death), and names of Algerian towns (Constantine, Sétif) that evoked dark moments of the war. On June 14, 1961, the Italian police confiscated the Grand tableau antifasciste collectif (Great Anti-Fascist Collective Painting), considering it to be an attack against the state, religion, and the Pope.62 As Hannah Feldman showed so well in her book From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962,63 the artistic production of postwar France needs to be considered in the specific context of decolonization. More than the Cold War, it is the disturbing and pervasive background on which the history of French art ensued.

See, for instance, Raphaëlle Branche, La guerre d’Algérie: une histoire apaisée? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005); Jean Balazuc, Guerre d’Algérie—Une chronologie mensuelle: Mai 1954–décembre 1962 (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 2015). 59 Ernest Pignon-Ernest, the subject of Jacopo Galimberti’s contribution to this volume, is one of these artists: see “Places of Memory and Locus: Ernest Pignon-Ernest.” 60 Laurent Gervereau, “Des bruits et des silences: cartographie des représentations de la guerre d’Algérie,” in La France en guerre d’Algérie: novembre 1954–juillet 1962, ed. Laurent Gervereau, JeanPierre Rioux, and Benjamin Stora (Paris: Musée d’histoire contemporaine, 1992), 178–209. 61 On these events see Robert Fleck and Annie Gouëdard, “Tableau d’Histoire ou histoire d’un tableau,” in Grand tableau antifasciste collectif, ed. Laurent Chollet (Paris: Éditions Dagorno, 2000), 65–130; as well as Laurel Fredrickson’s contribution to this volume. 62 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Un tableau collectif contre la torture,” in Grand tableau antifasciste collectif (Paris: Éditions Dagorno, 2000), 37–63. See note 5. 63 Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 58

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Thinking of art in terms of engagement, ideology, and structure Not only does French art require to be read through a different historical and geopolitical lens than American art; it also needs a different aesthetic reading grid. While in the United States Clement Greenberg’s ideas dominated aesthetic debates for most of the second part of the twentieth century as a model or a foil, in France Greenberg’s texts were only translated in 1988, and his name and ideas little known before the 1960s. In the French context where most intellectuals adhered to one form of Marxist thinking or another and, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Michel Foucault, regarded political engagement as their duty, aesthetic questions were posed in different terms. There, art did not seek to be pure and autonomous in Greenbergian terms; it wanted, to use the words of Eduardo Arroyo, a Spanish artist living in Paris, “to participate totally in the real. That is to say, to accuse, to denounce, to cry out, and not to be afraid of taboo subjects such as politics and sexuality.”64 To take stock of the differences between US and French discourses on art, we can consider the example of Gilles Aillaud’s compelling and influential reflection on art and politics. Aillaud, who had studied philosophy and whose ideas followed the thinking of Louis Althusser, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and other contemporary French writers, developed a very original understanding of modernity and the avantgarde, which became the driving force behind the Jeune Peinture, a rather large and heteroclite association of artists founded in 1953.65 In the pages of the Bulletin de la Jeune Peinture, he repeatedly presented modern art as a myth created by the bourgeois capitalist society to serve its own interests. Part of the myth involved the concept of creative freedom, according to which artists are totally free to create whatever they want. Yet, artists had to express themselves within the limits of a physical medium and a formal language that restrict their freedom of expression. Moreover, artists were always the product of a general and artistic education that shaped their creativity such that they are never absolutely free. Artistic freedom was nothing but an illusion—a perverse illusion which made artists believe that they are free so that they see no need to fight for their freedom: The artist in the bourgeois society plays the role of a free man. He spreads, by exhibiting it through his works, the image of the total freedom and the unlimited creative power of the human mind. It is in that sense that he is a particularly effective defender of the capitalist system of exploitation. It is his duty to make us understand that the fight is meaningless because we are already free.66

Quoted in Jean-Jacques Lévêque, “Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture écartelé entre Bonnard et Bacon,” ARTS: Lettres, Spectacles, Musique (January 15, 1964): no page. 65 On Althusser’s influence at the Jeune Peinture, see Sami Siegelbaum, “The Riddle of May ’68: Collectivity and Protest in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2012): 53–73. 66 Anonymous “Police et culture: Notes préliminaires pour la prochaine manifestation de la Jeune Peinture,” Bulletin de la Jeune Peinture 4 (March 1969): 3. 64

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Another aspect of the bourgeois myth of modern art was the autonomy of art, which postulates that art exists outside the real world and can remain unaffected by the logic of society. Aillaud thus regarded art for the sake of art as a trick. By making art autonomous, it became disconnected from the real world and its problems, and reduced to the world of forms and colors. Aillaud thus invited artists to reject the illusionary autonomy of art and, instead, “to manifest themselves as true individuals in time and space,”67 because “only then [can] we show that as painters we intend to get involved in what they want us to believe does not concern us, that is the affairs of the world and not of forms and colors.”68 The third aspect of the myth Aillaud attacked was the quest for originality, which leads artists to always try to be more autonomous from the world. “Why is the bourgeoisie systematically encouraging cultural novelty?” he asked. “The answer may be found in this assertion—‘because it does not call anything into question.’”69 Besides carrying artists deeper into formal investigations and farther away from the world, the cult of originality also isolates artists from one another, trapping them in their individual styles and personalities. As solitary individuals, artists have no power.70 The quest for originality and individuality culminates in the myth of the avant-garde, in which formal revolution is mistaken for real revolution. Obviously, Aillaud’s radical ideas were not shared by all French artists, but they exemplified the type of thinking and discussions that were taking place in France at the time, especially in regard of the pervasiveness of ideology even in the most abstract artworks—a model completely at odd with Greenberg’s formalism. One of the consequences of this belief was a shared desire among French artists to deconstruct the ideological structures of the artworks and the art worlds. Such a focus on the structure was also shared by the cineastes of the French Nouvelle Vague, who deconstructed movies to show viewers the codes and conventions that made them. Their films constantly reminded viewers that they were watching actors playing in a film through the use of different techniques ranging from natural lighting to actors’ directly addressing the camera to mise en abyme.71 A similar structural deconstruction was also taking place in the Nouveau Roman. The nouveaux romanciers endeavored to systematically deconstruct the traditional novel and create a new form of text.72 As the writer Jean Ricardou summarizes, “The novel is not the writing of an adventure

Gilles Aillaud, Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp (1965). Reproduced in Jean-Louis Pradel, La Figuration Narrative (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2002), 163. 68 “Éditorial,” Bulletin de la Jeune Peinture 2 (December 1968): 4. 69 Gilles Aillaud, “Essai de développement. Atelier populaire: oui. Atelier bourgeois: non,” Le Bulletin du Salon de la Jeune Peinture 2 (December 1968). Reproduced in Opus International 7 (June 1968), 64, 66. 70 Gilles Aillaud, “Les raisons de continuer notre action,” Le Bulletin du Salon de la Jeune Peinture 3 (March 1969): no page. 71 On the Nouvelle Vague, see Antoine de Baecque, La Nouvelle Vague : Portrait d’une jeunesse (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2009). 72 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 149. 67

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but the adventure of writing.”73 The same type of analyses of literary techniques and conventions can also be found in the contemporary work of French literary critics, and in particular in the writings of Roland Barthes. Discussing the ambition of this nouvelle critique, Barthes explained: “Literature is truly only a language, that is to say a system of signs: its being is not in its message, but in this ‘system.’ Thereby, the critic does not have to reconstitute the message of the work, but only its system.”74 A similar interest in structures was shared by other French scholars working in different disciplines, including Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Michel Foucault in history, and Jacques Derrida in grammatological critique—an approach often described as deconstructivist, structuralist, or post-structuralist in American literature.75 The idea of structural analysis also applied to art criticism. In 1968, Pierre Daix wrote Nouvelle critique et art moderne, in which he called for a new approach to art: “A criticism of convergence, that is, a multiple criticism that is structural … in the active sense of a criticism engaged in the art and capable of clarifying its living relations. In other words, ‘a new criticism.’”76 While many artworks created in France in the second part of the twentieth century could only fit oddly in a history of art written from a New York perspective because their interest in the underlying ideology, structures, and conventions of painting were at odds with the conversations formulated in the United States at the same time, placed in the larger intellectual context of the Nouvelle Vague, the Nouveau Roman, and the Nouvelle Critique the works of artists in France in the postwar period make perfectly sense.

Conclusion It goes without saying that all I have just said is not intended to provide a complete analytical grid for reading the history, politics, and art of postwar France. My intention in these introductory pages is merely to highlight various ways of reading the artistic production that took place in France after the Second World War. By offering examples of instances where the ambitions, conversations, and artistic creations that actually developed were at odds with the overarching (US) narrative of postwar Western art, I simply wish to call attention to the fact that this story is biased. It looks at postwar art through a New York lens that we cannot use to interpret the situation in other regions without running the risk of distortion and misunderstanding. I will let the essays that follow explore further this necessary shift in perspective through the corrective lenses of their specific cases studies. My hope is that they will offer English-speaking readers ways to not only rethink the place of France in the visual arts since 1945, but more generally to remap and rechart Western postwar and contemporary art. 75 76 73 74

Jean Ricardou, Problème du nouveau roman (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 111. Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991), 257. See Anna Boschetti, Ismes. Du réalisme au postmodernisme (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014). Pierre Daix, Nouvelle critique et art moderne (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 198.

1

Art and Communism in Postwar France: The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism Cécile Pichon-Bonin and Lucia Piccioni

At the end of the Second World War, the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF) played not only a major political but also cultural role in France. Between the end of the war in 1945 and the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the party paid special attention to intellectuals and artists, and attempted to define a specific cultural policy.1 The PCF intended to determine what kind of relationship it should have with artists—whether the party should support and promote a particular aesthetic line and, if so, how to define it. Socialist Realism,2 which starting in 1949 was called Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism),3 was the aesthetic project that the party defined during the first years of the Cold War (1947–1953). The official history of the PCF’s relationship to the visual arts is based on a totalitarian vision of the party and the Soviet system.4 It speaks of the Communist Party as one homogeneous and monolithic entity, and assumes that the party advocated

Marc Lazar, “Le Réalisme socialiste aux couleurs de la France,” L’Histoire 43 (1982): 62. This expression first appeared in 1932 in USSR in Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper. It related to the official Soviet arts. Within the French Communist Party, some people such as the writer Louis Aragon tried to import these terms into France and applied them to French art in the 1930s, but they succeeded only after the war. 3 This “New Realism” has to be distinguished from the Nouveau Réalisme founded by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960. 4 The analysis of the Soviet system has long been dominated by this trend, freely inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1951). Schematically, its proponents postulated the existence of a monolithic political system, of an allpowerful state controlling an indoctrinated society, deprived of its rights and dominated by terror. They focused on political history, in which the state was merged with the party. This history thus became one of the political leaders, mainly of the omnipotent and omniscient chief. When access to sources was a major problem, the authors sought to identify a system as a whole. The limit of this work lies in particular in the fact that they considered a project whose realization would be perfectly planned and thus tend to ignore tensions and conflicts within society. 1 2

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for the clear and coherent aesthetic program that was Socialist Realism.5 According to this doxa, the party legislated in a proactive manner toward the creation and development of a discursive arsenal through exhibition reviews, theoretical articles, speeches of political leaders and artists, and the masses’ comments on works of art. The party defined its aesthetic line upstream, in congresses, and then determined the proper content and form, while communist art criticism post-edited the artistic production in order to influence future achievements by promoting certain artists, granting them with recognition, educating the public and guiding its understanding of the works.6 According to this official story, the party interfered in all possible ways in the French art scene, commissioned artists and, consequently, was able to dictate artistic themes. From there, the story splits three ways. The first trend embraces a broader vision of the relationship between art and communism that exceeds the question of Socialist Realism and takes into account the positions of the Surrealists, the existentialists, and those painters who were members of the party but did not follow Socialist Realism, such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse.7 The second trend considers the art of the communist painters along the main lines of the party’s aesthetic project, and within the broader context of the postwar French art world.8 The third approach takes note of the formal diversity within so-called Socialist Realist works, and explains it as the result of two contradictions between the theoretical project of the party and pictorial practice of the artists.9 On the one hand, the party simply embraced works whose features disagreed with the party’s vision.10 On the other hand, the stylistic diversity within Socialist Realism expressed endogenous contradictions within the PCF’s cultural policy. The fact that artists could create both sordid and epic works is thought to reveal a gap between the ideological triumphalism based on the Soviet discourse and the everyday speech of the PCF addressed to the needy.11 This latter trend of research12 highlights the lack of discourses devoted to stylistic issues and work analysis within the party’s rhetoric, which in turn gave communist artists freedom to follow the legacy of Gustave Courbet and Jacques-Louis David (André Fougeron), the Futurists (Orizi), or the Expressionists (Boris Taslitzky). Yet, This opinion is relayed in particular by Jeanine Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti. Le Parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture, 1944–1956 (Paris: Fayard-Minuit, 1983); Dominique Berthet, Le PCF, la culture et l’art (Paris: La Table ronde, 1990). 6 Ibid., 308; Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti, 35–36. 7 Sarah Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France, c. 1935–1955,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1992). 8 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Après la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 9 Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti; Sylvie Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France, 1945–1953: sa peinture,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1986). 10 Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France.” 11 Berthet, Le PCF, la culture et l’art, 315. 12 Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France,” 125, 141–142; Lucie Fougeron, “Un exemple de mise en images: le ‘réalisme socialiste’ dans les arts plastiques en France (1947–1954),” Sociétés et représentations 15 (2003): 201, 204. 5

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it does not question Socialist Realism as a clear aesthetic line.13 This chapter thus has a twofold objective: to stress problems, often implicit, that allowed the coexistence of different views among the communists’ group, and to demonstrate the vagueness of the Socialist Realism project in and of itself. To reconstruct the problematic development of the PCF’s postwar aesthetic program, we reviewed the monthly communist periodical La nouvelle critique (The New Criticism; 1948–1954), and the literary weekly magazine Les Lettres françaises (The French Letters; 1944–1957), which was controlled by the PCF after 1947. Cultural sections of those journals were the main sites of theoretical and critical discussions on communist art. In addition, to explore different voices among French communists, we reviewed a lesser-known but not less important magazine, Le Musée vivant (The Living Museum; 1946–1969), which was edited by the communist art historian Madeleine Rousseau. We considered these French debates in light of the latest research on Soviet Socialist Realism. These new elements led us to read French interpretations on Socialist Realism from a new point of view. In the following pages, we shall first debunk the apparent simplicity of the debates inside the French Communist Party. We shall then consider the issues that rose from defining artistic references for French Socialist Realism, and finish by taking apart the blurry terminology related to the social function of art.

The apparent simplicity of the debates Various studies have, to date, pointed at the difficult establishment of Socialist Realism as the only aesthetic program of the PCF.14 Looking back at the chronology of events, especially through the lenses of communist journals and magazines as we did, allows the main debates to be highlighted, open or latent, which animated the PCF. Through our systematic reviews, it becomes obvious that the opinions and reactions of painters and critics were numerous and did not conform to a univocal realist aesthetic. At the end of the war, realism encompassed a variety of formal and theoretical definitions. Within the PCF, the conflicts of the 1930s15 re-emerged between realists, abstracts, and Surrealists. The main debate took place in 1945, at the 10th party convention. On this occasion, the philosopher Roger Garaudy encouraged communist painters to get closer to the masses by choosing more appropriate subject matters and to avoid abstraction (considered individualistic and aristocratic); thereby he explicitly opposed realism and abstraction.16 Despite the insistence on the ephemeral nature of the Socialist Realism theory in the French literary field, attempts are still shy when it comes to visual arts matters. 14 For precise chronologies, see Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France” and Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France.” 15 See Serge Fauchereau, introduction to La querelle du réalisme (Paris: Éditions du Cercle d’art, 1987). 16 Roger Garaudy, Les intellectuels et la Renaissance française (Paris: Éditions du parti communiste français, 1945), 2–11. 13

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These controversies were widely relayed in both the communist and non-communist press, but it was a false debate in many ways.17 First, no one would disagree that the leaders of the PCF had confirmed the need for a specific communist aesthetic, and that it was called realism. Next, it should be noted that the realist and abstract groups were far from being homogeneous and that their boundaries were not clearly delineated. Thus, the debate “pro or against abstract art” poorly concealed other oppositions and contradictions concerning mostly the very definition of the concept of “reality”—as vague and omnipresent as it may be, and to which we will return later on. The years 1947–1948 constitute a turning point in the promotion of Socialist Realism, which was ardently defended by two major figures of the PCF: the head of artistic affairs within the party, Laurent Casanova,18 and the poet and writer Louis Aragon.19 The latter, who had been one of the founders of Surrealism, became, after the war, the “poet laureate” of the PCF and his influence on the leaders of the party and its painters would not cease to grow. In 1947, the ideologist and Russian politician Andrej Aleksandrovič Ždanov (Andrei Zhdanov; 1896–1948), a fervent promoter of Socialist Realism, outlined his two camps theory, whereby he formalized the beginning of the Cold War. From that point on, the leaders of the PCF, with its secretary general Maurice Thorez at the forefront, took Zhdanov as a reference point and spared no efforts to impose Socialist Realism as the official aesthetic of the PCF. In 1948, André Fougeron became the leader of French Socialist Realism when his manifesto painting, Parisiennes au marché (1947–1948), was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. This painting represents in the foreground a stall of fish and behind this anxious housewives. Their empty baskets, the fixity of their bodies, their clasped hands and lowered eyes indicate both their desire and their inability to acquire these products. The direct gaze of the woman in the center takes the spectator as witness. A harsh critique of the expensive life, the image was considered vulgar by mainstream art criticism but praised by communists for its subject matter and figurative treatment. When Thorez went on recovery leave in 1950, Auguste Lecoeur succeeded him and hardened the cultural policy of the party in an anti-intellectualism way, through a campaign for André Fougeron at the expense of Picasso, who was previously protected by Thorez. With Stalin’s death in 1953, a complete shift occurred in the Soviet Union, which coincided with the disavowal of Auguste Lecoeur’s policy and an attack on André Fougeron. His painting, Civilisation atlantique (1953), which was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1953, intended to denounce the Americanization of Europe and the colonial wars in Korea and Indochina. In the composition, Fougeron made use of emblematic elements for his critical purposes. He stigmatized capitalism (a Cadillac and a big man in a suit, at the center) and its consequences (families and immigrants living on the streets, on the left). He showed other aspects of American Bertrand Dorléac, Après la guerre, 129. Laurent Casanova, Le Communisme, la pensée et l’art: discours au XIe congrès du PCF (Paris: Éditions du Parti communiste français, 1947). 19 In May, in the foreword of a drawings book of André Fougeron, see Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France,” 292. 17 18

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society, such as violence (the electric chair, a soldier pointing his gun), segregation (the African American boy shining shoes), and obscenity (the man reading a pornographic magazine in the center). This painting became the subject of strong criticism from Louis Aragon who judged it schematic, allegorical, and antirealist. According to him, Fougeron juxtaposed too many elements and the spectator was lost in the composition and unable to identify the main idea.20 Furthermore, this painting was considered atypical because it reduced the American brutality in several clichés. Meanwhile, the portrait of Stalin by Picasso published in the pages of Les Lettres françaises (on March 12, 1953), by Aragon, scandalized Lecoeur and the direction of the PCF, and divided the party.21 The drawing of a young Stalin was considered incompatible with the image of the leader of the Communist Party, usually associated with that of a wise and benevolent old man. Those attitudes towards Fougeron and Picasso reveal the complex relationships that the leaders of the PCF had with intellectuals and the fact that opposite theoretical currents coexisted within the party throughout that period.22 Communist advocates of abstract art, Surrealism, as well as painters of the Cobra group did not yield. Despite his communist engagement, the leader of Surrealism André Breton always rejected the Communist Party’s stylistic guidelines. According to him, Socialist Realism was a dogmatic art unable to express the revolution.23 Similarly, the Cobra group, founded in Paris in 1948 by Belgian (Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret), Danish (Asger Jorn) and Dutch artists (Karel Appel, Corneille, Constant), once close to the party, distanced themselves from the PCF because they did not want to follow orders and claimed freedom of critical thinking. In regard to communism and abstraction, the art historian Madeleine Rousseau (1895–1980) provides an interesting case study.24 In 1946, in Le Musée vivant, she defended painters close to the PCF like Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Charles Lapicque, and Jean Bazaine, as well as the abstract paintings of Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Deyrolle, Jean Dewasne, Hans Hartung, Alberto Magnelli, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, etc., thus attempting to overcome the division between realism and abstraction. In addition, she did not fail to denounce the danger of the dogmatism that the party applied to the visual arts. She condemned the Communist Party’s attacks against Louis Aragon, “Toutes les couleurs de l’automne,” Les Lettres françaises (November 12, 1953). Berthet, Le PCF, la culture et l’art, 223–243. 22 On Louis Aragon’s views see in particular: Emmanuelle Cordenod-Roiron, “Aragon derrière l’emblème politique: où en est-on?” Itinéraires 4 (2011). Accessed March 27, 2016 doi:10.4000/ itineraires.1380. 23 See Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France,” 366–370. 24 Madeleine Rousseau was accepted to write a thesis on the painter and republican activist writer Philippe Auguste Jeanron (1809–1877) at the École du Louvre under the direction of Louis Hautecœur. Two articles by Danielle Maurice establish the state of the research on the figure of Madeleine Rousseau and the review Le Musée vivant: Danielle Maurice, “Le Musée vivant et le centenaire de l’abolition de l’ esclavage: pour une reconnaissance des cultures africaines,” Conserveries mémorielles 3 (2007). Accessed March 27, 2016 http://cm.revues.org/127; Danielle Maurice, “L’art et l’éducation populaire: Madeleine Rousseau, une figure singulière des années 1940–1960,” Histoire de l’art 63 (October 2008): 111–121. 20 21

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abstract art, which—in Rousseau’s own words—evoked painful memories: “People ask for a national art that must regenerate France, and this brings back the too well-known and unfortunate echoes: one used the same words to attack the same art; did we forget the Hitlerian campaigns against degenerate art?”25 Additionally, if the PCF did aspire to promote a clear and realistic aesthetic line, it does not mean that this aspiration was achieved. Scholars have mentioned two factors that affected the clearness of the communist aesthetic line. First, the PCF leaders’ attitude appeared ambiguous. Indeed, they officially promoted Socialist Realism and rejected abstract art and Modernism as expressions of bourgeois ideology. It may seem contradictory that they supported Picasso, Léger, and Matisse—all internationally renowned artists and party members who openly refused to be part of Socialist Realism.26 This became particularly obvious in August 1947, when Maurice Thorez was photographed in front of a Matisse painting for the newspaper L’Humanité, while the artist had just been attacked by Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party; and, in 1950, when the communist press relayed praise for Picasso by Laurent Casanova, at the presentation of his sculpture with expressive gestures and proportions L’Homme au mouton (1943) to the city of Vallauris.27 Second, Socialist Realist art and artists were part and parcel of the French art scene. Thus, these artists often participated in shows other than those dedicated to that trend or organized by the party.28 The PCF was at times critical of these shows, but at times also tried to rally them. The party, for instance, did not organize the annual exhibitions of Les peintres témoins de leur temps, the first of which opened in 1951, and was entitled “Work,” or those devoted to the peace movement. The communist press nonetheless praised the works on display, despite their pluralist styles. Overlooking its great stylistic diversity, the daily communist newspaper L’Humanité interpreted Les peintres témoins de leur temps (1951) as evidence of the party leadership position in the art field. Owing to the paintings’ subject matter, it concluded that artists took the side of the workers.29 Content was as much a marker of Socialist Realism as style. Madeleine Rousseau, “Quelques réflexions recueillies parmi nos adhérents,” Le Musée vivant (January 1948): 5. See Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France,” and Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France.” 27 Laurent Casanova, “Salut à Picasso! La classe ouvrière et les artistes,” La nouvelle critique (Summer 1950): 25–29. 28 The most important exhibitions organized by the PCF were the exhibition in honor of the 50th anniversary of Maurice Thorez (Mairie d’Ivry-sur-Seine, 1950), De Marx à Stalin (From Marx to Stalin; Maison des métallurgistes, Paris, 1953) and solo exhibitions by André Fougeron Le Pays des mines (The Mining Country; Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1951), Algérie 1952 (Algeria 1952; Galerie André Weil, Paris), by Boris Taslitzky, and Mireille Miailhe. But the communists’ artists also participated in exhibitions whose themes were close to the interests of the party, especially Art et Résistance (Art and Resistance; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1946), the Salon devoted to Les peintres témoins de leur temps (Painters Witnesses of their Time; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1951 and 1953) and exhibitions on peace (in 1948 at the World Congress of Intellectuals in Warsaw and in 1950 in Lyon). Finally, they were also involved in main events of the French artistic life as the famous Salon d’Automne, Salon des Indépendants or Salon de Mai. See Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France,” 90–99. 29 See articles of 1951 quoted in Peignon,“Le Réalisme socialiste en France,” 93–95. 25 26

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The outlines of the Socialist Realist practice are thus difficult to accurately grasp. And it seems that the problem of the definition of communist art resulted in no small part from the lack of solid theoretical foundation and consensual definitions of basic terms.

Issues in defining a communist aesthetic: in search of references Two main issues made it hard for the PCF to define a coherent aesthetic. Firstly, there are very few references to the visual arts in Marxist texts and, secondly, the doctrines coming from Moscow were anything but clear. In fact, the problem was as much the little influence Soviet ideas had in France as the vagueness of these ideas. The writings of Marx and Engels dedicated to artistic questions are few and scattered.30 If Marx considered art as a social factor, he nevertheless noted the difficulty in explaining that Greek art and the epic “linked to certain forms of social development … can still give us aesthetic satisfaction and be considered to some extent a standard and unattainable model.”31 He highlighted the problem of the aesthetic value of the works of art that goes beyond the historical, economic, and social (superstructure) conditions from which they rise, though not providing any solution to that conundrum. The philosopher Henri Lefebvre attempted to answer Marx’s aporia in his text “Introduction à l’esthétique”32 published in 1948 in the philosophico-communist magazine Arts de France. There he advocated for historical and dialectical materialism, as a system capable of handling the metaphysical dimension of artworks and their historical backgrounds. Lefebvre denied therefore art as an idealist essence and claimed the need to study art’s historical and social links through a dialectic method rather than a schematic one. The ambiguity also applies to the question of the Soviet model being imported in France. To date, scholars have postulated that French Socialist Realism was essentially based on Zhdanov’s texts, particularly his speech at the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 and his brief formulation of Socialist Realism.33 Scholars have also argued that, if the Zhdanovian theory had a great impact in France, it was difficult to turn it into concrete, influential policies. His ideas constituted reference points, authoritative arguments that were integrated within the discursive arsenal of the French communists. In other words, the influence of Soviet Socialist Realism is being relativized as the authoritative model of French Socialist Realism; but it is not called into question. Karl Marx, “Einführung in die Kritik der politischen Ökonomie” (1857), in Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: F. Duncker, 1859); translated in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Sur la littérature et l’art, textes choisis précédés d’une introduction de Maurice Thorez et d’une étude de Jean Fréville (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1954), 183; Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Hambourg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1867); translated in Marx and Engels, Sur la littérature et l’art, textes choisis, 174. 31 Karl Marx quoted in Henri Lefebvre, “Introduction à l’esthétique,” Arts de France 21–22 (1948): 55. 32 Lefebvre, “Introduction à l’esthétique,” 19–20, 21–22, 23–24, 25–26. 33 Fougeron, “Un exemple de mise en images,” 196; Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti. 30

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To the Zhdanovian corpus that reached France, one should add translations of Lenin’s writings on art, as well as texts by Plekhanov, Gorky, and Stalin.34 With the exception of a few reviews from Soviet art critics on exhibitions of Russian art that took place in Moscow, almost all these texts deal with literature. Even though they claimed to have a more general application, their adaptation to the visual arts was not straightforward. The systematic use by French communist intellectuals and leaders of phrases and terms including “Socialist Realism,” “Revolutionary Romanticism,” “typical,” “party spirit,” “engineer of souls,” and “critical assimilation of the artistic heritage” gave the impression of a united front and a consensus on the definition of the PCF’s aesthetic line. Yet, as recent scholarship on the visual arts in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has shown, these theoretical discourses could never impose themselves as a clear communist dogma for they were fraught with problems and raised more questions than they provided answers.35 By importing Soviet terminology, the PCF also integrated inaccuracies and contradictions inherent to that vocabulary, without exposing them. Did Socialist Realism mean a trend, a style, a set of iconographic themes, a vision of the world according to the Marxist theory, or rather a method of creation as Zhdanov would have claimed?36 And what is to be understood by the phrase “method of creation”? Behind the appearance of a unified discourse, a series of taboos, unspoken ideas, and latent conflicts emerge. Yet, the benefits of using such a terminology were numerous. Through it, the party claimed its ties with the USSR and showed its participation in the international communist movement. It also gave the impression of a doctrinal coherence. By taking part in the creation of labels to describe literary and artistic productions (be it “Socialist Realism,” “French Realism” in 1937, or “New Realism” in 1949), its intention was to legitimize its intervention upon the world of art. Communist artists also profited from it: united under a common label, they could overcome their isolation, access greater recognition37 and participate in the writing of a national history of the arts.38 This last

Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Sur la littérature et l’art, textes choisis, traduits et présentés par Jean Fréville (Paris: Éditions Sociales internationales, 1937); Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Les grands textes du marxisme sur la littérature et l’art, textes choisis, traduits et présentés par Jean Fréville (Paris: Éditions Sociales internationales, 1937); Georgij Valentinovich Plekhanov, L’art et la vie sociale, précédé de deux études de Jean Fréville (Paris: Éditions Sociales internationales, 1950, 1953); Andrej Zhdanov, Sur la littérature, la philosophie et la musique (Paris: La nouvelle critique, 1950). 35 See Cécile Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en URSS, L’itinéraire des membres de la Société des artistes de chevalet (OST), 1917–1941 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2013); on the RDA, please refer to the writings of Jérôme Bazin, Réalisme et égalité : une histoire sociale des arts en République démocratique allemande, 1949–1990 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2015). 36 See Régine Robin, Le réalisme socialiste, une esthétique impossible (Paris: Payot, 1986), 69; and Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en URSS, 278. 37 Marc Lazar, “Les ‘Batailles du livre’ du parti communiste français (1950–1952),” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 10 (April–June 1986): 47–48. 38 Philippe Olivera, “Aragon, ‘réaliste socialiste.’ Les usages d’une étiquette littéraire des années Trente aux années Soixante,” Sociétés et représentations 15 (2003): 229–246. 34

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aspect was important. While French political leaders and intellectuals swore allegiance to Soviet concepts, they also insisted on the autonomy of French artists, especially in favor of Stalin’s dictum that art should be “socialist in content, national in form.” This might have been one of the reasons why Soviet art never completely imposed itself as a model to French artists. Their ignorance and indifference to Soviet artists’ production have often been emphasized in the literature.39 But it is also important to stress that the Soviet model was a problematic reference, and embracing it was not a straightforward process. In 1950 when Maurice Thorez called artists to “take inspiration from Socialist Realism,” he provided little information on the aspects to take into consideration. Although historians have relativized the impact of Soviet Socialist Realism, they have not considered the vagueness of its definition as an essential factor in its limited impact. Communist leaders and intellectuals faced the complex theoretical interpretation of communist aesthetics and its elaboration of a communist art, according to which they had to answer the three fundamental questions pertaining to art: What is an artist? What is the function of art criticism? And finally, how are the functions of art defined, particularly its social function?

Communist aesthetics and the social function of art: A terminological blur In postwar France, three major issues pertaining to the functions of art were being given serious thought: the definition of realism, the relationship between art and the people, and the appropriation of a national artistic heritage. Since these last two have already been the object of many studies and interesting contextualization,40 we wish to focus here on the question of realism, and put forth some additional elements to the study of this concept. The term “realism” refers to a wide variety of designs and practices. The problem with the definition of this term is that it far exceeds discussions of form, as it extends itself to philosophical considerations that appear twofold. The notion of “realism” questions the definition of the real and, subsequently, the relationship that the artist, the image, and the viewer must maintain with the so-called real.41 These two issues have become increasingly complex since the nineteenth century, and even more so after the word “realism” was used to describe an artistic movement.42 See in particular Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Moi, André Fougeron, peintre communiste,” L’Histoire 151 (January 1992): 65; Carole Robert, “Les échanges artistiques entre la France et l’URSS entre 1945 et 1985,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Paris I Sorbonne, 2000). 40 See Bertrand Dorléac, Après la guerre; J. P. Chimot, “Avatars de la théorie de l’art dans Arts de France (1945–1949),” in Art et idéologies, l’art en Occident 1945–1949 (Saint-Étienne: Université de SaintÉtienne, 1978), 145–158. 41 See D. Milhau, “Présupposés théoriques et contradictions du nouveau réalisme socialiste en France au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale,” in ibid., 115–128. 42 Realism was an artistic movement that began in France after the 1848 Revolution. Realists proposed to depict real and typical contemporary people and situations, while not avoiding unpleasant aspects of life. In Russia, the Wanderers of Itinerants Association promoted those principles by the 1870s. 39

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Marxist theory was developed in the nineteenth century in a context where reality was conceived as accessible by human reason and senses. According to this positivist view, the real corresponds to the sensible features of the outside world.43 In Russia and subsequently in the USSR, the articulation between the notions of reality and truth proved fundamental. From the early twentieth century on, the real has also been conceived in its relation to time. For advocates of Socialist Realism in the 1930s, the real corresponded to the time in which the artwork emerged, along with some element coming from the past and seeds of the future. An easy temptation was then to confuse reality with presentness. Simultaneously, abstract art was condemned because it was understood as favoring the expression of the eternal and timeless. During the first half of the twentieth century a paradigm change occurred: a shift from the materialistic acceptation of the real to a claim that the real is not something that already is, but something that must be constructed. Inevitably, the hesitations and contradictions inherent to this general evolution of the definition of reality had repercussions on the communist aesthetic project.44 From the question of which relationship art should maintain with reality, two major positions emerged: either art is to be conceived as the construction of a new reality,45 or it is to be understood as a reflection thereof. The concept of reflection is a complex one, since according to Marxist theory artworks objectively reflect both the social conditions that gave birth to them, and the vision of the world of the social class to which the author or artist belongs. It is then to be determined what, for the artist, constitutes part of a conscious or unconscious process, what constitutes his or her commitment, and more broadly what defines the figure of the artist-activist.46 The Marxist painter, as a member of the party, had to express a proletarian vision of the world and the values of the working class. According to Marxist theory, art is a way to acquire knowledge of reality.47 The problem for communist abstract artists was that their works were not mirrors of reality but rather its transposition or transfiguration. Yet, as Jean Dewasne, an abstract painter and a member of the Communist Party, said, “abstract art is eminently materialistic” because it consists of “color and form only.”48 In 1946, he co-founded the Salon des réalités nouvelles (Salon of the new realities), devoted to abstract art. There Dewasne

In this context, see Michel Aucouturier, “Les problèmes théoriques de la critique littéraire marxiste en Russie,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Paris IV Sorbonne, n.d.). 44 Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en URSS, 78–79, 127–128. 45 Jean Pérus, “La critique et la création,” La nouvelle critique 22 (January 1951): 61. 46 See for example Émile Bottigelli, “À propos de l’esthétique de Lukac,” La nouvelle critique 3 (February 1949): 51–58; see also Louis Aragon, “Réalisme socialiste et réalisme français,” La nouvelle critique 6 (May 1949): 27–39; reprinted from Louis Aragon, Réalisme socialiste et réalisme français, 1937. 47 See Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en URSS. 48 Jean Dewasne, “Pour et contre. Où se trouve l’art marxiste? Opinions de Fougeron, Jean Dewasne, Madeleine Rousseau et d’un surréaliste révolutionnaire,” Arts. Beaux-Arts. Littérature. Spectacles (March 12, 1948): 5. 43

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defended abstract art as “a universal language”49 and fought for its integration in society through architecture and urban planning.50 Madeleine Rousseau similarly argued that abstract art is realist to the extent that it reveals the dominant reality of the moment. Rousseau interpreted abstract art emancipation from the figurative as the symptom of a radical transformation of the old bourgeois and capitalist system. Elements behind this change were, in her view, at once political and social (colonialism, totalitarianism, war); technical (photography, cinema, press, radio, transportation improvements, telephone, etc.), and scientific (the discovery of the theory of relativity and the atom). In her mind, Hans Hartung’s abstract paintings, as a system of signs, shapes, and colors, not only express a simple individualistic point of view, but also the forces of a new world free of any nationalist ties, thereby being a vehicle for universal values. Madeleine Rousseau also defended communist abstract art in Le Musée vivant. In her articles and reviews, she developed a Marxist and Universalist conception of art that was shaped both by the experience of the Front populaire51 and her time working at the Musée de l’homme in Paris. Knowledge of the non-Western collections exhibited at the museum acquainted Rousseau with a social vision of art, and made her think differently about abstraction. Just as African art inscribes itself in the collective life without necessarily supporting a mimetic relationship with reality, abstract art could have a political function within the West, which had been profoundly shaken by the horrors of the Second World War. True to what she defined as “the art of the present,” Rousseau condemned ethnocentrism and supported abstract artists such as JeanMichel Atlan, Jean Deyrolle, and above all Hans Hartung—whom she designated as an artist capable of revealing the “Reality” of the human drama that stemmed from totalitarianism and wars.52 Rousseau’s interpretation of Picasso was also part of her vision of the West as a world in transformation. She celebrated him as the artist who expressed in his Cubist paintings the disintegration of an uncertain social order. She compared his work Le Charnier (1944–1945) to Hartung’s pastel T1946–14 (1946); both were, in her view, the

Jean Dewasne, “Traité d’une peinture plane” (1949) reprinted from Traité de la peinture plane et autres écrits (Paris: Minerve, 2007), 55. 50 Patrice Deparpe, ed., Jean Dewasne (Paris: Somogy, 2014). Published in conjunction with the traveling exhibition of the same name. 51 In 1937 Léo Lagrange (Undersecretary of State for the Organization of Sport and Recreation under the Popular Front) put Madeleine Rousseau in contact with Paul Rivet, George-Henri Rivière, and Jacques Soustelle then occupied with the moving of the Musée de l’homme that was scheduled for opening in 1938. That same year, Paul Rivet founded Le Musée vivant, the review of L’Association Populaire des Amis des Musées (APAM) of which Madeleine Rousseau was appointed editor. 52 Madeleine Rousseau played an important role promoting Hartung. She signed the text of his first personal exhibition at the Parisian gallery Lydia Conti in 1947 and collaborated with Alain Resnais in the creation of the short-length film Visite à Hans Hartung (1947). On those aspects see in particular Annie Claustres, Hans Hartung: les aléas d’une réception (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2005); Marianne Le Galliard, “Alain Resnais: initiation à l’art abstrait (1946–1948),” Attractions. Carnet de recherche visuel (http://attractions.hypotheses.org/55). 49

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expression “of a new order […]: the nightmare of war that dissipates to let shine the hope for better days.”53 According to Rousseau, Marxism must be transposed from: the plane of social forces (such as Marx conceived it a hundred years ago) to that of cosmic forces introduced in our world through a century of scientific discoveries: to conceive a dynamic universe which will include in its new rhythm the recently conquered forces and where mankind will find its place as both a dependent and conquering force.54

This original design of Marxism that linked the social to the cosmic was connected to her commitment to decolonization and was in line with emerging voices of this movement such as the poet Aimé Césaire and the historian Cheikh Anta Diop. Discours sur le colonialisme (Speech on Colonialism, 1950) of Césaire and Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture, 1954) of Anta Diop55 are among the seminal works of postcolonial studies: they denounce racism and colonialism in the Western world and celebrate the rebirth of the African people. As we can see, the relationship of art with reality and the fact that, according to Marxist theory, art is a way of acquiring knowledge of reality, received very different interpretations among French communists, so much so that Dewasne and Rousseau could defend abstraction in the name of realism. Yet, the PCF was officially rejecting abstract art, and so it proceeded to Rousseau’s excommunication in 1949. Excommunications, however, did not eliminate diverging opinions within the party and most importantly did not clarify the debate. However, the main reproach addressed to abstraction by the advocates of Socialist Realism was its lack of content.56 Communist theory claims that the shape of the work is dictated by its content. But this statement remained elusive, and the definition of “content” vague. The term sometimes referred to the subject or to the emotion that the subject matter provides to the artist and then to the viewer.57 The Russian theorist Georgi Plekhanov defined it as “the representation that the artist has about reality, his or her experience and the ideology he or she expresses.”58 During the 12th congress of the PCF in 1950, Thorez spoke of “the social content of our time,” that he characterized as “the great rise of popular forces, the struggle between the new and the old, the latter

See Madeleine Rousseau, “Vie et œuvre,” in Hans Hartung, ed. Madeleine Rousseau, James Johnson Sweeney, and Ottomar Domnick (Stuttgart: Domnick-Verlag, 1950), 38–39. 54 Madeleine Rousseau, “Rencontre de l’Europe avec l’Afrique,” Le Musée vivant 36–37 (1948): 40. 55 Aimé Césaire, Le discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Réclame, 1950); Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture (Paris: Éditions africaines, 1954); on Césaire, see also Aimé Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014). 56 André Fougeron, Jean Milhau, and Boris Taslitzky, “Révolution et contre-révolution en esthétique,” La nouvelle critique 10 (November 1949): 91. 57 Boris Taslitzky, “La peinture et le lyrisme de notre temps,” La nouvelle critique 16 (May 1950): 105. 58 Pérus, “La critique et la création,” 60. 53

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which recesses everywhere before the surge of the forms inherent to the new life.”59 The term “content” thus seems to hold different meanings and to refer equally to the artwork’s relationship to reality, to its creator, and to its recipient. The issues pertaining to the choice of a subject matter to express content were then paramount. On this subject, French Socialist Realists were facing the same problems as their Soviet colleagues: what subjects could be considered Socialist Realist? The ideological aspect of a landscape or a still life, for example, had to be debated. When a work displayed industrial elements or bore traces of the action of the working class, critics praised the artist for working in true contact with reality. See, for instance, the reception of the André Fougeron’s exhibition, Le pays des mines (The Mines Region) in 1951.60 This show was the result of a commission to Fougeron by the Confédération générale du travail (CGT; The General Confederation of Labor) of the miners of the regions Nord and Pas-de-Calais. The painter spent almost a year in the Calais region where he created paintings and drawings that were then presented at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery under the title Le pays des mines. This cycle intended to represent the mining culture through portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, and a few still lifes. It included the work at the mine with all its drama, its stigmata, and its traditions. The choice of subject was important. The miner embodied the proletariat’s force and was a key figure of the communist iconography since the nineteenth century. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was one of the archetypes of the worker, patriot, and communist. French miners had won fame during the Second World War through acts of resistance to the German occupation forces and then after the war by strikes that were violently suppressed by the French state, in particular in 1947–1948. So, this was a highly political topic. Auguste Lecoeur himself, as federal secretary of the Pas-de-Calais Communist Party, played an active role in the miners’ resistance during the war and, after the war, chaired the CGT of the mines in the region Nord-Pas-de-Calais. He was actually the initiator of the commission to Fougeron and of the large press campaign that accompanied the opening of the exhibition. His introduction to the exhibition catalog set the tone for the majority of the communist critiques of the show, which simply relayed Lecoeur’s dual amalgam between artist/activist and subject of the picture/cause to defend.61 In his words, pictures were understood as tools that lead viewers to adopt the miners’ point of view and therefore to support their struggle against the “Governmental boss.” He assessed pictures in terms of political effectiveness. The emotional shock derives from one’s knowledge of the subject matter. In this light, the writer and journalist André Stil divided his review of the show into two equal parts: the first emphasized the importance of observation for Fougeron who Maurice Thorez, Rapport au XIIème Congrès du Parti, 2–6 avril 1950 (Paris: Éditions du PCF, 1950), 55. André Stil, “‘Avance Fougeron!’ Vers le réalisme socialiste,” La nouvelle critique (1952): 31–53; reprinted from: André Stil, “La peinture en mouvement,” La nouvelle critique 22 (January 1951). 61 Auguste Lecoeur, “Introduction,” in André Fougeron: Le pays des mines (Lens: Fédération régionales de mineurs du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais, 1951), 5–7. See also Jean Fréville, “Peintre de la classe ouvrière,” La nouvelle critique (June 1951). The exhibition was extensively discussed in the January 1951 issue of Arts de France. 59 60

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does not remain isolated in his studio but instead grasps the reality on the ground; the second half of the text provides an account of French miners’ struggles since 1941. The author focused on the iconography and working method of the artist, thus leaving aside formal and stylistic issues.62 For some communist critics and painters, a painting had to feature a tractor in a landscape or a worker in a factory for it to be labeled as Socialist Realist.63 For others, the mere fact of representing a French landscape was seen as a patriotic gesture worthy of New Realism. But in both cases, the discourse external to the artwork was the element defining the artwork’s engagement—be it the title given or the commentary written by the artist or critics. As art historian Lucie Fougeron explained, communist art criticism sometimes went as far as to transmute the misery shown in some artworks into a triumph, as in Fougeron’s piece Le pensionné.64 The painting depicts an old and, according to Lecoeur, asthmatic man sitting on a chair and looking directly at the viewer. The horizontal format allows for a general view of a bare interior with a coil stove, and a chimney with pansies on it, as well as two portraits, one of the man’s son and the other of Maurice Thorez. About this theatrical staging of misery, Lecoeur wrote: “Fougeron powerfully reproduced this distress. We who know the subject, are deeply moved by this painting, we find it beautiful, beautifully true.”65 In Le Musée vivant, Madeleine Rousseau, on the other hand, accused Fougeron of confusing “realism” with “subject matter.” “For him,” she wrote, “a painting is realist when it illustrates a portrait or a battle. Does this narrow the conception of realism— valid over a hundred years ago—and still make any sense today? Only a handful of authentic painters can claim this, even among the communist ones.”66

Conclusion Behind a unified theoretical façade, the PCF’s relationship to art and artists was fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. Deconstructing the coherence of the communist aesthetic line does not aim at denying its existence. The project of a communist aesthetic did exist. Elements for a definition of a (French) Socialist Realism or New Realism were given, but the terms employed were complicated and therefore could not lead to an unequivocal interpretation. Pointing at the vagueness of the French Socialist Realist doctrine is not for us a goal in and of itself. It allows us to return to the doxa that asserts the existence of an art of the party and presents communist artists as devoid of any creative project, reducing them

Stil, “‘Avance Fougeron!’” Boris Taslitzky, “L’art et les traditions nationales,” La nouvelle critique 32 (January 1952): 70–71. 64 We refer in particular to the foreword of the catalog written by Lecoeur, “Introduction,” 7–8. See also Fougeron, “Un exemple de mise en images,” 204. 65 Lecoeur, “Introduction,” 7. 66 Madeleine Rousseau, “La querelle de l’art présent,” Le Musée vivant 36–37 (November 1948): 94. 62 63

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to mere “workers of painting,” who conformed to the expectations of the PCF.67 By not directly challenging the myth of a cogent Socialist Realism, we contend, scholars find themselves entrapped into a contradiction: while they assert that the role of the artist was to conform to the wishes of the party, they have to recognize that in practice the body of postwar communist art was not very coherent.68 We argue that contradictions did not just occur between theory and artistic practice, but rather were endogenous to the theoretical development itself. We believe that it is therefore essential to always keep in mind the realm of the unsaid that artists and art critics relied upon to create their works and write their texts.

Berthet, Le PCF, la culture et l’art, 311. Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France,” 146.

67 68

2

The Art of Community in Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951) Marin Sarvé-Tarr

Isidore Isou’s 1951 film Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treatise on Slobber and Eternity) pictured his Lettrist community and declared their common project to renew the avant-garde after the Second World War.1 Founded in 1946 by two Jewish refugees, the Romanian Isou (born Goldstein) and the French native Gabriel Pomerand (born Pomerans), Lettrism claimed to open new avenues of creation by breaking words into letters and phonetic sounds.2 In tandem with their aesthetics, Lettrists organized regular interruptions of events such as the anticipated premier of Dada leader Tristan Tzara’s play La Fuite (Flight) at the historic Vieux-Colombier Theater on January 21, 1946.3 Public demonstrations asserted the group’s presence in the Parisian cultural scene and prolonged the social history of the avant-garde, recalling Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist soirées, Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire, and the Bureau of Surrealist Research. On- and off-screen, Traité merged Lettrism’s dual aesthetic and social program to “struggle against men and their conventions” by picturing their art as a shared set of acts for change that could transform the postwar avant-garde in the cinemas and streets of postwar Paris.4 For its American premiere at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) on October 23, 1953, Traité was translated as Venom and Eternity, eliminating Traité (treatise) and the bodily relation of bave (drool or slobber). I follow translations in recent scholarship on the film including “Treatise on Slobber and Eternity,” in Kaira Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 27; “Treatise on Drool and Eternity,” in Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962, (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 13; and “Treatise” in Andrew Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 56. See the restored film released on DVD (Re: Voir Video, 2008) and the published screenplay, Isou, Traité de bave et d’éternité (Paris: D’ARTS, 2000). 2 See Isidore Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) and L’ Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). 3 See Maurice Nadeau, “Les ‘lettristes’ chahutent une lecture de Tzara au Vieux Colombier,” Combat, January 22, 1946, 1 and Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 233–234. 4 “Principes Poétiques et Musicaux du Mouvement Lettriste,” La Dictature Lettriste 1 (1946): 5. On Lettrist aesthetics, see Fabrice Flahutez, Le Lettrisme historique était une avant-garde (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2011). Lettrist demonstrations secured contracts for Isou’s first two books with Gallimard Press and gained André Breton’s support after a 1950 interruption of Easter Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral. See Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 233–234, 259–288. 1

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The film’s communal independent production, its depiction of Lettrism as a lifestyle of attending ciné-clubs and wandering Paris, and its extension into the group’s protests at the 1951 Cannes International Film Festival reveal Isou’s conception of art as social belonging. In the film, three chapters titled “The Principle,” “The Development,” and “The Proof ” theorize, visualize, and perform Lettrism’s social make-up. First, a voiceover recounts a ciné-club debate in which the protagonist Daniel, played by Isou, outlines a critique of cinema while walking the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The second narrates a love story between Daniel and two women, Eve and Denise, over intercut shots of Daniel walking with a woman and hand-scratched found footage.5 In the third, Daniel and his companion attend a Lettrist concert as recordings overtake the soundtrack with intercut portraits of Lettrists and abstract sequences of scratched film leader. Following the Cannes demonstrations, a rough cut of Traité premiered alongside the festival on April 20, 1951 at the Cinéma Vox. The finished film screened in Paris at the Ciné-Club AvantGarde 52 at the Musée de l’Homme on May 23 and June 5, 1951 and at the Studio de l’Étoile from January 25 to February 7, 1952.6 Traité animated the ideals and habits of Isou’s community as an art that emerged from and affirmed their own subculture. Lettrism forged a model for late-1950s movements including the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) and the Situationist International (Internationale Situationniste) whose public lives also inflected their aesthetics.7 Traité established Lettrism as a daily practice shared by Isou’s followers despite his claims to revolutionize the cinema with “discrepant” montage that separated the soundtrack from the visuals. Scholars often follow Isou’s critical discourse and examine Traité as a formal investigation, a commentary on ciné-club culture through sound, or a meditation on Paris in its historical moment.8 Yet by linking his film with Lettrism’s social acts, Isou cast his movement as a force for change. Traité’s independent production contested the nationalized cinema industry’s commercialization and contrasted Lettrism with intellectual cinephile culture by venturing beyond criticism. In the narrative, rituals of walking Paris and attending poetry concerts linked Lettrism’s social life to its aesthetics. At Cannes, group protests and Traité’s improvised premiere impacted state-sponsored programming and inspired Lettrist productions The found footage was reportedly recuperated from the trash bins of film labs including newsreels from the French military film service, the Services Cinématographiques du Ministère des Armées. On the significance of the inclusion of footage of French colonies in conflict, see Feldman, From a Nation Torn, 87–88. 6 Traité traveled to the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels on October 31, 1952 and San Francisco in 1953. 7 Thomas Crow characterizes the avant-garde as a subculture in “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 3–37. 8 Uroskie situates Traité in an international lineage of postwar expanded cinema in Between the Black Box. Cabañas analyzes the performative soundtrack and ciné-club culture in Off-Screen Cinema, and Feldman connects the found footage to decolonization and Isou’s outsider status in From a Nation Torn. For Christophe Wall-Romana, Isou constructs a positive postwar Jewish identity in Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 5

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that appeared in later festivals.9 Traité projected Isou’s community and claimed their place in the postwar history of the avant-garde.

The cinema and communities of production The production of Isou’s independent feature-length film constituted a group demonstration that directly challenged the state-sponsored professionalization of French commercial cinema.10 In 1952, Isou wrote, “We must … act on movie theater directors and their public, with tracts or through direct discussions … Young activists must not just cause an aesthetic scandal, but accomplish a constructive, economic work of propaganda.”11 Isou repurposes the charged wartime language of propaganda to call his followers into action to forge their own opportunities in film production and distribution that modeled their cultural participation. Traité challenged the recent history of the increasingly regulated industry and its commercial definition of the cinema while illustrating Lettrism’s potential to effect change. Lettrists pooled group resources to independently produce Traité without support from the nationalized commercial film industry that implicitly revived Vichy policies. From the 1930s to the 1950s, continued state financing measures modernized commercial production as a key component of shifting French cultural and economic agendas. In 1940, the Vichy government founded the Comité d’organisation de l’industrie cinématographique (Committee for the Organization of the Cinematographic Industry, COIC). As Karen Fiss has argued, COIC regulations overtly “cleansed” the profession of Jews and undesirable foreigners and ensured stable aesthetics to “pacify the French with escapist entertainment.”12 The illusion of visual continuity from the late 1930s on masked the industry’s propagandistic structure before and after the liberation. As a Jewish foreigner, Isou produced his film outside of the highly controlled system, contesting the commercial industry’s recent history. Onscreen, Traité also forcefully pictured his presence in the streets and cinemas of Paris. By skirting state financing, Traité also countered continued aesthetic regulations that defined the cinema as a commercial industry rather than an art. In 1946, the COIC became the Centre national du cinéma (National Center for Cinema, CNC), which promoted a similar commercial agenda that virtually eliminated what Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit Lettrist films include Maurice Lemaître, Le Film est déjà commencé ? (1951), Gabriel Pomerand, La légende cruelle (1951), Gil Joseph Wolman, L’anticoncept (1952), Guy Debord, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952), François Dufrêne, Tambours du Jugement Premier (1952, premiered at Cannes in 1952), and Marc’O, Closed Vision (1954, screened at Cannes in 1954). 10 Traité was originally shot on 16-millimeter film and transferred to 35-millimeter and the original vinyl sound recordings were mildly distorted when transferred to the higher-quality optical sound. See Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema, 29–30. 11 Isou, “Esthétique du cinéma,” Ion 1 (1952): 143–144. 12 Karen Fiss, Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 206–209 and Pierre Darmon, Le monde du cinéma sous l’Occupation (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1997), 372. 9

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calls the cinema’s “artisanal character.”13 Further measures in 1948 limited international competition with screen importation quotas, censorship, and regulated career paths requiring directors to first work as assistants.14 By 1949, feature productions returned to the prewar level of 104 films and the industry expanded into a significant financial sector in the 1950s. Produced at a time when there were limited opportunities for unsponsored experimentation in the costly medium, Traité polemically displayed Lettrism’s ability to redefine accepted understandings of the cinema outside of commercial agendas.15 Traité’s collective production registered as a group feat that countered the limitations of public support and modeled Lettrism’s revolutionary potential. Numerous artists contributed to the sound while Marc’O, a loose affiliate and manager at the Tabou jazz club, produced the film. Through encounters at his bar, Marc’O secured funding from otherwise improbable sources such as Robert Mitterrand, a successful industrialist who held cabinet positions in the Fourth Republic and later Fifth Republic for his brother, President François Mitterrand.16 Maurice Lemaître took over editing at the Ciné-Tirage Maurice Laboratory, working late into the night with Isou.17 While Isou’s writings called for Lettrists to revolutionize youth production generally, Traité in fact drew heavily from the resources of the Lettrist community. Rather than posit a sustainable model of film production that anyone could replicate, Traité asserted Lettrism’s pioneering role in redefining cinema as an experimental rather than a commercial enterprise.18 A production photograph of eight Lettrists assembled around the camera foregrounds the importance of the film’s location shooting and presents Traité as a manifestation of Lettrism on screen and in the streets of Paris (Figure 2.1). While a small team by commercial standards, the pictured group demonstrates Isou’s visible following. Isou fixes his hair in a vitrine advertising language courses, recalling the shoot’s placement in the student-centered Left Bank. The photograph visually connects the Lettrists rallied together behind Isou and his film. The backdrop of the street instead of a studio setting further establishes their group as a peripheral but historically significant movement transforming film production in postwar Paris. See Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, “Prolégomènes à une étude du cinéma français des années cinquante,” in Les cinémas européens des années cinquante, ed. Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit (Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma, 2000), 49. 14 Bertin-Maghit, “Prolégomènes à une étude du cinéma français des années cinquante,” 50. The 1946 Franco-American Blum-Byrnes agreements also included screen importation quotas. 15 Far from a commercial enterprise, Traité incurred significant debts for Lettrists including Isou and Lemaître. See Lemaître, Réalisation et Sauvetage du Traité de Bave et d’Eternité d’Isidore Isou (Paris: Fondation Bismuth-Lemaître, 2008), no page. On limited opportunities for experimental cinema in the 1950s, see Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “‘Method of Production’ in the French Cinema 1946–1950,” in France and the Mass Media, ed. Brian Rigby and Nicholas Hewitt (London: Macmillan, 1991), 60. 16 Author interview with Marc’O, May 3, 2013. Lettrist publication sales also helped pay off Traité’s debts while Lemaître stated he used borrowed money and personal funds to purchase material and rent sound and editing labs. See Lemaître, Réalisation et Sauvetage, no page. 17 Lemaître, Réalisation et Sauvetage and Frédérique Devaux, Le Cinéma Lettriste (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1991), 52–53. 18 For Raphaël Bassan, Traité arrived before a French experimental film scene existed. Cinéma Expérimental: Abecédaire pour une contre-culture (Crisnée: Éditions Yellow Now, 2014), 258. 13

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Figure 2.1  Lettrists during the filming of Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951.

Isou fixes his hair in the window, Maurice Lemaître and Gil Joseph Wolman are on his right. Photographer unknown.

Ciné-club cinema Beyond commercial cinema, Traité also distinguished Lettrism from the prolific rise of cinema culture. Postwar membership surged at ciné-clubs with specialized programming that fostered the discussion and appreciation of art-house, documentary, foreign, and ethnographic cinema. Traité’s references to the history of cinema and the staged ciné-club debate in the soundtrack revive the venue’s historic connection to experimental film and reveal the limitations of its postwar emphasis on pedagogy. By modeling the ideal conversion of a select group of followers from an audience, the film foregrounds its own aggressive publicity tactics that alienated critics, but also attracted new members. Traité cast Lettrism as a vanguard alternative to the dominant cinephile culture that would lead to the formation of the French New Wave. In the opening credits, Traité’s dedication to auteurs including Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, and Jean Cocteau echoes both the classic art-house programs of many postwar ciné-clubs and their 1920s predecessors that promoted revolutionary productions. In 1920, Louis Delluc founded the journal Ciné-Club and an inaugural

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1921 association. Early ciné-clubs organized meetings and screenings for independent critics and filmmakers to promote and even fund art-house films that elevated the cinema to what Ricciotto Canudo dubbed the seventh art.19 In the 1930s, clubs such as Jean Renoir’s Ciné-Liberté also worked with unions to promote a leftist program to connect the cinema to social liberation. The German occupation halted official ciné-club activities; however, Henri Langlois, Jean Mitry, and Georges Franju held clandestine screenings for their Cinémathèque française, founded in 1936 from their Cercle français du Cinéma. The opening credits align Traité with ciné-clubs’ historic relation to avant-garde cinema and social change while implicitly challenging their contemporary discursive aims. Beyond its embrace of the history of the cinema, Traité challenged postwar ciné-club culture that encouraged pedagogy over production. After the liberation, youth interest drove a rapid expansion of ciné-clubs that educated a growing base of passionate viewers.20 Between March 1945 and April 1946, the number of nationally registered ciné-clubs leaped from six to eighty-three, with over 50,000 members.21 Standard cycles of well-known classic and contemporary art-house screenings, debates, and journals reinforced the rise of dominant histories such as Georges Sadoul’s 1946 six-volume History of Cinema. As Kaira Cabañas argues, “Ciné-club culture helped to codify a specific practice of how to view and speak about film.”22 The pedagogical aims of cinéclubs informed attentive viewers, but did not explicitly promote youth filmmaking. For Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Frémaux, early 1950s film criticism served as “a creative act of substitution that was as important as the films themselves” before later New Wave directors turned to filmmaking.23 In sharp contrast, Isou launched directly into production and secured ciné-club screenings for Lettrist films, cementing their maverick identity within cinephile culture while targeting the venue as a site to demonstrate their innovation. By staging a ciné-club debate in the soundtrack, Traité foreshadows its screenings and performs the conversion of a group of followers to Lettrism. As Daniel outlines his theory of cinema, the voices of fictional ciné-club patrons at first interject with boos and insults, “Egotist! Bourgeois!” However, one by one a singular voice, and then others begin to agree with and defend Daniel’s position. The dissociated soundtrack and visuals coupled with the lack of visual representation of the respondents gives the effect of the staged voices coming from a live audience in the darkened theater. The

Ricciotto Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art” [1923], in L’Usine aux images (Paris: Etienne Chiron, 1926), 29–47. Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du cinéma. Cinéphiles, ciné-clubs et salles spécialisées à Paris de 1920 à 1929 (Paris: AFRHC-École des chartes, 1999). 20 Vincent Pinel, Introduction au ciné-club: Histoire, théorie, pratique du ciné-club en France (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 1964). 21 Virginie Champion, ed., Les Cinémas de Paris 1945–1995 (Paris: Délégation à l’action artistique de la ville de Paris, 1995), 70. 22 Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema, 69. 23 Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Frémaux, “La cinéphilie ou l’invention d’une culture,” Vingtième Siècle 46 (April–June 1995): 133. See also De Baecque La cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1944–1968 (Paris: Fayard, 2003). 19

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film, which was first screened in full at a ciné-club, performs its ideal reception. In each screening, the soundtrack stages Lettrism’s ability to create a confrontational collection of revolutionary actors within ciné-club culture.

Social Lettrism On screen, Traité presents the social dynamics of Lettrism as a key driver of its public program that cemented the group’s collective identity and affirmed their significance in postwar Paris. Traité uses a cyclical montage to depict banal acts such as walking as a form of activism. The narrative portrays the protagonist Daniel played by Isou as a visionary leader who triumphs in the social arenas of ciné-club debates, courting women, and meeting avant-garde celebrities. By connecting the film’s jarring visuals to the rituals of his community within Parisian youth culture, Isou recast confrontational avant-garde aesthetics as productive behavior. In the first chapter, Lettrist walking visually performs Isou’s theory of art as action. Walking follows the legacy of Charles Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century flâneur (stroller) who walked the grand boulevards of Paris to observe modern life as well as Surrealist tropes of wandering streets and flea markets in search of chance encounters to spark artistic inspiration and revolutionary ideals.24 Rather than describe walking in his theories, however, Isou claimed to “unveil newness in every act to come.”25 He describes his art as an embodied gesture that renews given meanings in aesthetic and public arenas. An early sequence of Traité connects walking with acts for change as Daniel ambles past a restaurant decorated with planters. The camera slowly pans to follow his path as he pulls leaves from the bushes, yanks open the door, and drags his hand along the second row of planters. Before Guy Debord theorized the dérive or drift to rediscover urban surroundings, Isou’s Lettrist creation consisted of acting on given elements found in Paris to alter even slightly the fabric of the city and his public’s perception of it through the cinema.26 In Traité, shared forms of walking initiated by Daniel affirm a growing Lettrist community whose activities took place in the streets of Paris. While shots of Daniel dominate the first chapter, other Lettrists including Lemaître and Gil Joseph Wolman, who are named in frontal portraits during the third chapter, periodically walk through the frame and stop to tie their shoes in the street. Beyond these cameo appearances, two notable scenes of walking shot from the legs down visualize shared acts in the public sphere. In one sequence, Daniel’s slow saunter crosses paths with a woman’s feet. Rather than continuing to follow Daniel as many other shots do, the camera shifts direction to follow the woman whose legs reappear later on. Shortly after, a young Charles Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions de la Pléiade, 1954), 881–922; André Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: J-J Pauvert, 1962). 25 Isou, Fondements pour la transformation intégrale du théâtre (Paris: Bordas, 1953), 248. 26 See for example, Xavier Costa, ed., Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani, 1996) and Emmanuel Guy’s contribution to this volume: “Their Paris, Our Paris: A Situationist dérive” 24

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woman played by the painter Poucette waits near a park for a male companion. After a shot of their legs walking away, Daniel’s recognizable shoes join in step with the pair. The cropped framing of legs emphasizes the group nature of Lettrism that emerges from artists’ habits of meeting and navigating the streets of Paris together and becomes legible as unified acts for change on screen. By abandoning continuity editing, Traité furthermore folds its portrait of Lettrism into the public space of Paris. The first chapter opens with a shot of a street sign: “6ème—Rue Danton.” The name recalls Lettrism’s dual social project by locating the scene in their Left Bank headquarters and referencing the French revolutionary leader Georges Danton. As Lettrist chants in the soundtrack give way to the voiceover recollection of Daniel’s ciné-club debate, the camera cuts to a still of a wall of posters featuring a flyer for the Ciné-Club de Saint-Germain. Daniel emerges out of a dark doorway and the camera pans right as he enters the street, revealing curious onlookers (Figure 2.2a). A long view of a Parisian boulevard seems to match his gaze, but instead of a standard reverse shot back to Daniel in front of the ciné-club, he reappears against a barred, open window. The spatial displacement counters the aesthetics of continuity editing and subsumes the geography of Paris into the daily habits of Lettrists across Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Passersby further register the significance of Daniel’s walking in Paris as they acknowledge the camera and its subject. The cinematographer Nat. Saufer used frequent angled pans and tilts to trace the contours of buildings and track the movement of Lettrists and pedestrians across Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Figure 2.2b). While Daniel

Figure 2.2a  Frame enlargements of Isidore Isou, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951. At the

opening of the first chapter, Daniel exits a ciné-club screening, as pedestrians watch the filming. Courtesy of Catherine Goldstein.

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Figure 2.2b  Frame enlargements of Isidore Isou, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951. At the

opening of the first chapter, Daniel exits a ciné-club screening, as pedestrians watch the filming. Courtesy of Catherine Goldstein.

often looks up to avoid addressing the camera, four onlookers feature prominently as the character exits the ciné-club debate at the opening of the first chapter. A couple to the left curiously peer at the camera over the actor’s shoulder, a man down the street looks directly into the camera, and others on the right edge of the frame stop to watch. The film underscores its own public conditions of production that overtake the street and alter the trajectories of surrounding pedestrians. While Traité locates its filmmaking project in Paris, the portrayal of Daniel/Isou as a revolutionary maverick affirms the social status and youth vitality of Lettrism. Beyond the staged success of Daniel’s ciné-club debate in the soundtrack, his character succeeds in courting two young women and meets with historic avant-garde luminaries including Jean Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars. The protagonist often approaches the older artists in the street or in cafés as text labels identify the literary and cultural celebrities, associating them with Isou’s film. Towards the end, a prolonged still of the author labeled “Isidore Isou” framed by scratched hash marks breaks with the fictional narrative to assert the film’s auteur as a youthful iteration of the visibly older faces of the avant-garde. By re-enacting the fluidity of café culture and isolating the portrait of Isou, Traité locates the history and continuation of the project of the avant-garde in both the cinema and the public spaces of Paris.

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Beyond its social portrait of Lettrism in Paris, the scratched sequences visually present the movement’s productive communal project. In the third chapter, the narrative space of the café where Isou and his companion attend a poetry concert disintegrates into rhythmic sound poems over frontal portraits of Lettrists including Lemaître and François Dufrêne. Each directly addresses the camera, lips unmoving, as recordings of sound poems cue heavily painted and scratched black and clear film leader that disintegrate photorealistic space and return attention to the fact of film viewing. As Hannah Feldman has noted, the first scratched images to appear early in the second chapter show a single carpenter at work, a positive embodiment of the “chiseling” in Isou’s discrepant cinema.27 Recycled footage of carpenters at work returns throughout the remaining chapters, echoing the process of splicing and editing film. Towards the end of Traité, two carpenters join the first. The frame-by-frame scratches obscure each figure’s face and draw animated and illuminated connections between their bodies. The marks connect the filmic project to the construction of a productive community of artists, workers, and actors that inhabit and change postwar Paris.

Cannes and the Lettrist demonstration Beyond Traité’s narrative, Lettrist actions played a key part in securing its premiere on the margins of the 1951 Cannes festival. Public group demonstrations inserted Lettrism in the postwar development of the French film industry and attracted new members such as Debord, then a local high school student in Cannes. Sponsored by the CNC, Cannes invited almost thirty national representatives between April 3 and 20, 1951 in order to compete with the more established Venice Film Festival. For Andrew Uroskie, Cannes constituted “a place to debate and institutionalize the appropriate aesthetic trajectory for the growing consensus around the idea of cinema as a modern art.”28 Yet the festival’s embrace of universalist aesthetics also sought to bring the international industry to France. Cannes promoted cinema as a means to overcome Cold War tensions by inviting China, the Soviet Union, and the United States to participate in what would become a French patrimonial tradition. Despite Cannes’s internationalist aims, Lettrists specifically targeted the French industry and the festival’s seamless revival of the historic avant-garde at the expense of young artists.29 The most highly acclaimed screenings offered two aesthetic poles for art-house and popular film: Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neorealist Miracle in Milan (1951) and Joseph Mankiewicz’s Hollywood studio picture All About Eve (1950). The festival also recognized established avant-garde filmmakers. Luis Buñuel won the best director prize for his social realist film Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned, 1950) and

Feldman, From a Nation Torn, 89–90. Uroskie, Between the Black Box, 56. Cannes coverage predictably appeared in French newspapers that often previously reported on Lettrist interruptions in Paris.

27 28 29

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Jean Cocteau won the national award, Victoire du cinéma français (Victory of French Cinema, now called the César). As one protester, Monique de Beaumont wrote in the fringe Lettrist journal Soulèvement de la Jeunesse (Youth Uprising), “We provoked incidents at Cannes … to make ourselves properly seen.”30 Beaumont dismisses Cannes as an extended cocktail celebration of mediocre cinema, but also identifies the festival as a ripe site for the Lettrists to gain exposure while impacting its programming. The band of Lettrists established their art as a public practice by disturbing screenings and press conferences to participate in the daily functioning, or malfunctioning, of the burgeoning festival. A few days into Cannes, a group including Lemaître, Marc’O, and eventually Isou arrived with an unfinished version of Traité and repeatedly interrupted official events to demand a screening.31 Rather than a single protest, a journalist groused, “No one finds these interventions amusing anymore. They have become more or less quotidian. They are part of the daily picturesque of the Cannes insiders.”32 Despite critics’ complaints, the Lettrists succeeded in inserting their marginal movement into the daily routines of the exclusive festival. While the main group from Paris continued to interrupt official events to leverage publicity, they also attracted locals. Debord, with his friend Jacques Fillon, promoted Isou’s campaign with chalk graffiti around the city of Cannes (Figure 2.3). A photo of Debord, Fillon, Marc’O, Isou, and others in Cannes declares the Lettrists as a force overtaking the street just as Traité’s location filming did in Paris. Other photographs of Lettrists in Cannes present their “work” as their public demonstrations. Debord poses next to the word “ISOU” on a wall in Cannes. A tilted photograph of Lemaître in front of a screening room pictures the artist before his disruptions. In the popular film fan magazine Cinémonde, a low-angle photograph of Isou on the beach describes him as the festival’s “unexpected celebrity.”33 He addresses the camera with the iconic row of flags over the festival palace in the background that acknowledge the site of his project. The photographs depict Lettrists as activists who overtake the Cannes landscape. Despite journalists’ exasperation, Isou secured a meeting with André Maurois, president of the Cannes Jury and member of the Académie Française. Maurois in fact had a brief cameo in Traité while walking in the streets of Paris, and was perhaps unknowingly credited as an actor. After the Cannes meeting, Maurois stated, “We want to see [Isou’s] film … We should not denounce unknown beauty.”34 The repeated protests succeeded in promoting Traité sight unseen. Maurois invited Isou to screen his film outside of the competition at the Cinéma Vox for free on the last day of the festival. A large, curious audience of Cannes insiders attended the Monique de Beaumont, “‘La vraie histoire’ du festival de Cannes,” Soulèvement de la jeunesse 1 (June 1952): 11. Her emphasis. 31 See reports by R. M. Arlaud in Combat, April 14–22, 1951, Devaux, Le Cinéma Lettriste, 56, and Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 323–324. 32 Arlaud, “Isidore Isou pose des mines et le meilleur de Cannes est un resquilleur,” Combat, April 14–15, 1951, 2. 33 Robert Chazal, “Après Cannes: Cinéma français quand même,” Cinémonde, April 28, 1951, 4–5. 34 France Roche, “Les histoires de France,” France Dimanche, April 22–26, 1951, 2. 30

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Figure 2.3  Guy Debord and his Isou graffiti during the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, April 1951. Photographer unknown.

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premiere with an ad hoc jury led by Jean Cocteau, the journalist Curzio Malaparte, the screenwriter Maurice Bessy, the actor Raf Vallone, and the journalist and film critic Henri Jeanson. At the Vox, Traité’s raucous premiere prolonged its manifestation of Lettrism as a forceful social movement that could shift the trajectory of postwar French culture from the streets of Paris. The unfinished film included scenes from the first chapter with the soundtrack from the second and third, but firmly located the Lettrist project in Paris. One journalist described: “After a few images of Saint-Germain-des-Prés where we saw our Lettrists walking and affirming that they are the new gods of literature and all of the arts, the screen went blank, the projector light cut off, and … a concert of vociferations, cries, and lectures deafened the ears.”35 Like Traité’s narrative, the premiere linked Lettrism to the streets of Paris, provoked audience reactions, and rallied their followers. Sonika Bô, founder of the Parisian children’s Cinderella Film Club, reportedly slapped Isou while Cocteau awarded the film an unofficial Prix des spectateurs d’avant-garde (Prize of Avant-Garde Spectators).36 The award’s name recognized Traité’s emphasis on the audience, whose backlash, like Bô’s, contributed to the demonstration of Lettrism as a set of actions that participate in transforming conventions. Despite critics’ outrage, Traité sparked a debate on the place of experimental cinema in the commercial context while publicizing Lettrist art as a shared public practice. In a response to critics in the pages of the leftist newspaper Combat, which began as a clandestine resistance publication during the occupation, Isou described his film as a demonstration. He wrote, “I have always believed that a new manifestation (manifestation) is worth more than a work because the manifesto (manifeste) shows how we create future works.”37 Playing on the similarity of the French words for manifesto and protest (manifestation), Isou’s response describes Lettrist activism as a means to realize Lettrism beyond its aesthetic production. Isou’s public approach to art resonated with his band of followers and new youth members. After seeing the film, Debord wrote: “The Slobber and Eternity of Isou … that very night, I entered the campaign … The Revolution the Night—Isou and me.”38 Debord describes his immediate affinity with Lettrism as a group activist program presented in various forms to diverse publics. Traité and its extension into Cannes located Isou’s art within the social dynamics of his community inside and outside the cinema. For McKenzie Wark, the Situationist International similarly functioned as what Debord described as a “provisional micro-society” that practiced social theories on the margins of culture.39 Isou privileged action as a key component of his art, providing

Franck-Dominique, “Drôles de ‘19’ Bobines Lettristes,” Nice-Matin, April 21, 1951, 1. Ibid. Cocteau sponsored Traité’s Paris screening. 37 Jean-Isidore Isou, “Rectification à propos d’un film,” Combat, April 26, 1951, 2. 38 Debord, Le marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2004), 101. 39 McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso, 2011), 62. 35 36

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a key armature for Debord’s early thinking that would inform his later theories on constructing situations to initiate new creative interactions with urban space.40 Despite Traité’s limited circulation, its investigation of Lettrism’s social life attracted followers and anticipated other movements that tied their work to youth culture and public space. The New Wave director Éric Rohmer (aka Maurice Schérer) reviewed Traité and its deep investment in continuing the historic avant-garde into present in Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1958, Rohmer’s circle of critics revitalized French commercial cinema with location shooting, stylized youth culture, and storylines based on current events.41 Dufrêne joined Lettrism in 1946 before, in 1960, helping establish New Realism (Nouveau Réalisme), a term coined by the art critic Pierre Restany to describe the use of real or found materials in French art.42 While Lettrism struggled in the late 1950s as artists and filmmakers deemed their approach mired in history rather than in touch with the modernization of France, Isou’s community drove the early development of the postwar avant-garde by proposing an art of public practices. Isou’s cinema animated the daily lives of Lettrists and propelled their work to participate in the cultural reconstruction of postwar France.

Debord split with Lettrism to found the Lettrist International (Internationale Lettriste) in 1952 before founding the Situationist International in 1957. See Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 41 Maurice Schérer, “Isou ou les choses telles qu’elles sont,” Cahiers du cinéma 10 (March 1952): 27– 32. On the New Wave, see Antoine de Baecque, La Nouvelle Vague: Portrait d’une Jeunesse (Paris: Flammarion, 2009). 42 See Kaira Cabañas, The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), and Déborah Laks’s contribution to this volume. 40

3

Their Paris, Our Paris: A Situationist dérive Emmanuel Guy

Between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s, the urban fabric of Paris changed dramatically. The city council and urban planners set about demolishing the officially designated îlots insalubres (insalubrious neighborhoods), which were entirely redeveloped to accommodate tertiary activities or large housing projects of the kind that can be found today around the Gare Montparnasse and in the 13th arrondissement. Meanwhile, a large portion of the population of these neighborhoods was relocated to the outskirts of Paris, to the notorious grands ensembles (housing projects) of the banlieues (suburbs) that have continuously fostered segregation and social violence ever since.1 It has been estimated that a third of Paris’s existing buildings were destroyed in this period, while the number of workers living within the city declined by more than 40 percent.2 The development of public transportation and of highways further accentuated and accelerated this disintegration of the capital’s traditional urban milieu. The modernization of Paris and of the country as a whole is inseparable from the violence that was simultaneously exercised by the French state, which in the same period engaged in postcolonial conflicts (the Indochinese War, the Algerian War), the repression of social movements (the massacres of protesters on October 17, 1961, the violent response to the protests of May 1968), and the expulsion of workers, middle-class employees, and immigrés from the city centers to the grim urban projects of the banlieues. The brutal modernization of France under the technocratic regime of President Charles de Gaulle is a key contextual element that underlies many of the intellectual, literary and artistic movements that emerged in France, and in particular in Paris, over the period spanning the end of the war in 1945 to the aftermath of May 1968 and the 1973 oil crisis. The Nouveau Roman in literature, Nouveau Réalisme3 in See especially the series of riots that occurred in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities in October and November 2005. See Alèssi Dell’Umbria, La Rage et la révolte (Marseille: Agone, 2010). 2 Claude Eveno and Pascale de Mezamat, eds., Paris perdu: quarante ans de bouleversements de la ville (Paris: Éditions Carré, 1991), 159, cited in Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, and Clean Bodies, Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 151. 3 On the Nouveau Réalisme, see Déborah Lack’s essay in this volume, “Nouveau Réalisme in its ‘Longue Durée’: From the Nineteenth-Century Chiffonnier to the Remembrance of the Second World War.” 1

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the visual arts, and the Nouvelle Vague in cinema all display an artistic impulse to process this new state of affairs, one embedded in their very names. The writers, artists and directors of these various movements sought to provide their readers or viewers with the aesthetic means to apprehend the changes taking place around them. The two avant-garde movements that French poet, filmmaker, Marxist theorist and revolutionary strategist Guy Debord (1931–1994) successively co-founded, namely the Lettrist International (LI, 1952–1957) and the Situationist International (SI, 1957–1972),4 were no exception to this rule. However, Debord’s engagement with contemporary politics and social changes was far more explicit, radical, and critical than that of his contemporaries. The Paris of the 1950s is a consistent point of reference, from the Lettrist International that formed there, to the Situationist writings of the 1960s and in Debord’s personal oeuvre after 1972; this chapter will bring together these three different chronological moments of what could be considered a single narrative: the time of experience—the Lettrist International—the time of critical analysis and revolutionary action—the Situationist International—and finally the time of nostalgic recollection—Debord’ s personal œuvre of the 1970s and 1980s with films such as In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978) and texts such as his autobiographic cycle, Panegyric (1989–1991). This chapter will reassess and refine some key aspects of this history by answering a series of questions: How did the Situationist critique of urbanism develop from a direct experience of the urban space? How does it dialogue with the city itself, the people living in it and transformations occurring within the intertwined urban and social bodies? This chapter is also an attempt to show how an early interest in urban space not only developed into a general critique of urbanism, as generally recognized in existing scholarship, but was also redeployed in strategic practice during the crucial month of May 1968. The attached map (Figure 3.1) of Lettrist and Situationist activity is meant as a point of reference to situate in the urban space the various locations and events mentioned throughout this article.

Situating situationism Though claiming to be “international” in scale, in reality Debord’s two movements were mostly active in Paris. The Parisian context in which they developed is key to understanding Debord’s avant-garde project of reuniting art and life, of combining a critique of modern culture—the development of mass consumption and mass media—and of modern politics—the colonial conflicts and the so-called modernization of the country. Emerging The reason underlying the replacement of Lettrist International by the Situationist International lies in Debord’s project to free its first avant-garde from its Lettrist origins and to integrate within a single avant-garde his own ideas and network with those of another group, namely the Imaginist Bauhaus that Danish painter Asger Jorn founded in reaction against the reenactment of the functionalist Bauhaus under the leadership of Max Bill in the 1950s.

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in the field of art and culture in the 1950s, Debord’s avant-garde project grew steadily more political, engaging ever more closely with revolutionary radicalism throughout the 1960s, up until the direct participation of the SI in the May 1968 uprisings in Paris. Debord’s circle changed frequently throughout this period: the Lettrist International was created in 1952 as a left-wing splinter group of Isidore Isou’s Lettrism,5 and along with Debord included other younger Lettrists, such as Ivan Chtcheglov and collage artist Gil J Wolman. When Debord founded the SI five years later in 1957, his wife Michèle Bernstein was the only member of the LI to join the ranks of this second avantgarde group. The SI counted amongst its early members key figures of the European avant-garde such as Danish painter Asger Jorn or Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys, but also lesser-known artists such as Walter Olmo and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio.6 In the early 1960s, however, the membership of the SI underwent a radical change: all artists either resigned or were expelled from the movement, replaced by a younger generations of politicized members such as René Viénet, Raoul Vaneigem or, later on in the mid-1960s, Mustapha Khayati. The communication strategy of both of Debord’s avant-garde movements consisted of the dissemination of various publications, the Internationale lettriste and Potlatch, followed later by the Internationale situationniste, along with numerous posters, leaflets, and flyers. These publications, along with the various archives recently acquired by institutions such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Yale University Beinecke Library, have constituted key sources for our understanding of the revolutionary project of Guy Debord. Published in 1958, the poster “Nouveau Théâtre d’Opération dans la Culture” (New Theater of Operations in Culture, Figure 3.2) offers a fairly representative summary of the Situationist project and the group’s arsenal of theories and practices. The title clearly indicates the group’s avant-garde ambitions and its strategic perspective, as well as their chosen battlefield: the SI stated their intention to operate within “culture,” within the everyday life and representations that reflected the changes occurring at the macro political, economic, and social levels. The aerial photograph of the southeastern area of Paris that illustrates the poster is a reminder of Debord’s fascination with maps and the way in which they could determine or alter the perception of urban space. Aerial photography was indeed a key instrument for both the military and social geographers such as Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, who participated in surveying and documenting the rapid changes taking place in postwar Paris and its urban fabric.7 “It is impossible to understand most strategic issues without reference to geography,”8 wrote Debord in 1988, in a letter advocating the inclusion of On Lettrism, see Marin Sarvé-Tarr’s essay in this volume, “The Art of Community in Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951).” 6 On Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, see Sophie Cras’s essay in this volume: “Pinot Gallizio’s Cavern: ReExcavating Postwar Paris.” 7 Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952). 8 Guy Debord, “Lettre à Floriana Lebovici, 19 mars 1988,” in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Vol. 7, (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 2008), 22. 5

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Figure 3.1  Emmanuel Guy, The Paris of the International Lettrist and International

Situationist. This map was developed in collaboration with the Artl@s project directed by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris: www.artlas.ens.fr. Background image: Guy Debord, “Relevé des unités d’ambiance” on a map by éditions A. Leconte, [circa. 1955]. Cut-out map, glued onto pink cardboard, 27 x 27 cm (10.6 x 10.6 in). Guy Debord Archive, NAF 28603, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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The Paris of the International Lettrist and International Situationist – Captions Lodgings   1 - Guy Debord, Hôtel de la Faculté,

rue Racine (1951-1956).   2 - Guy Debord, 1, impasse de Clairvaux (1956-1969).   3 - Jacques Fillon, 36, rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.   4 - Ivan Chtcheglov, in the 16th arrondissement, close to Molitor station.   5 - Mohamed Dahou, 32, rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.   6 - André-Frank Conord, 15, rue Duguay-Trouin.   7 - Gil J. Wolman, 216, rue Saint-Denis (1952-1953).   8 - Gil J. Wolman, 63, rue des Cascades (1954-1955).   9 - André Mrugalski, 22, rue des Bois. 10 - Asger Jorn, 28, rue du Tage.

Events and Actions 11 - Notre-Dame, 1951. The young

Lettrists take to the pulpit during Easter mass to announce the death of God. 12 - H  ôtel Ritz, 1952. The International Lettrists distribute a tract denouncing Charlie Chaplin at a press conference for the actor’s latest film, Limelight. 13 - R  ue de Seine, 1953. Guy Debord graffitis the slogan « Never work ».

14 - Galerie du Double Doute, 1954.

An exhibition of ‘métagraphies influentielles’ collage works organized by Gil J. Wolman brings together members of the Lettrist International.

Bars and Meeting Places 15 - Chez Moineau. Guy Debord

frequents this bar shortly after his arrival in Paris at the end of 1951. 16 - Le Square du Vert-Galant. Meeting place of the Lettrist International in 1953. Guy Debord’s ashes are scattered here in 1994. 17 - Naït-Naziz, Kabyle bar. On rue Xavier-Privas there are several Kabyle bars, which Debord and his friends visit regularly. One of these bars is the meeting place for the Lettrist International in 1953. 18 - Le Tonneau d’or. The official address of the Lettrist International from 1954 and later of the Situationist International from June 1958 to January 1963. 19 - La Méthode. Debord’s wife Michèle Bernstein and the singer and guitarist Florencie renovate this bar in 1958. Musical instruments donated by the brother of Boris Vian adorn the walls. Florencie often plays here at night.

20 - Le Saint-Claude. 21 - Le Mabillon. 22 - La Pergola. 23 - La Chope gauloise. 24 - Le Old Navy. 25 - Le Bar Bac. This bar is a favourite

of night crawlers; the author Antoine Blondin and his friends are regular patrons. 26 - Le Mont-Blanc. Florencie makes his musical debut here. 27 - L  a Taverne des Révoltés (Chez Paco), Aubervilliers. This bar to the north of Aubervilliers is frequented by Spanish immigrants, and is mentioned in the writings of Gil J. Wolman.

Cinemas 28 - Ciné-club du musée de l’Homme. On 30th June 1952, the premier of Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade is interrupted after just ten minutes. 29 - Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin. On 13th October 1952 Hurlements en faveur de Sade is projected in its entirety for the first time in the Salle des Sociétés savantes at this ciné-club run by Maurice Schérer (Éric Rohmer).

30 - Le Champo. 31 - Le Celtic. 32 - Studio Saint-Germain. 33 - Studio des Ursulines. 34 - Cinéma du Panthéon. 35 - Cinéma Cluny. 36 - Cinéma du Quartier latin (opened 1952).

37 - Cinémathèque française (from 1955).

Galleries 38 - Galerie de France, 3, rue du

Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Starting in 1942, the Galerie de France is directed by Gildo Caputo, a close relative of Michèle Bernstein. 39 - Galerie Rive gauche. Asger Jorn exhibits his modified paintings or Modifications at this gallery in May 1959. 40 - Studio Paul Facchetti. The art critic Michel Tapié, much reviled by the Lettrist International, is closely involved with the exhibition program at this gallery. In 1952, he introduces American painter Jackson Pollock to Parisian audiences for the first time. 41 - Galerie Colette Allendy, 67, rue de l’Assomption. In 1957, the gallery exhibits Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé who frequent many of the same bars as the lettrists at the start of the 1950s.

42 - Galerie René Drouin. In May

1960, La Caverne de l’antimatière by Situationist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio goes on display here. 43 - Galerie Iris Clert. This gallery opens its doors in 1956 and exhibits work by Asger Jorn and later Yves Klein and the Nouveaux Réalistes. 44 - Galerie Rive droite, 82, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré : “Last May at the Galérie Rive droite, the coronation of the painter Mathieu was organized by the Jesuit Tapié, a celebration of a man who manages to embody all the concierges of the Poujadist movement.” (International Lettrist, Potlatch, n°27, Nov. 2nd 1956) 45 - G  alerie Stadler. Guy Debord’s archives contain numerous invitations from this gallery where Michel Tapié often curated exhibitions.

46 - Galerie Jeanne Bucher. 47 - Galerie À l’étoile scellée. André

Breton is responsible for the artistic direction of this gallery.

Bookshops 48 - Le Minotaure. Guy Debord ensures that publications by the Belgian Surrealists of Les Lèvres Nues are stocked here. 49 - Le Terrain vague (Éric Losfeld). 50 - L  e Pont traversé (Marcel Béalu).

Press and Magazines 51 - L  e Monde libertaire, 3, rue

Ternaux. René Fugler regularly discusses and reviews Situationist publications in this journal. 52 - Combat. Isidore Isou publishes a tribune in Combat on 1st November 1952 in which he denounces the young lettrists’ protest against Charlie Chaplin. 53 - Les éditions de Minuit, directed by Jérôme Lindon, publishes the journal Aguments 54 - L  es Temps modernes, journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. 55 - S ocialisme ou Barbarie, cofounded by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort among others. 56 - L  es Lettres nouvelles, founded by Maurice Nadeau in 1953. 57 - P  oésie nouvelle, directed par Maurice Lemaître.

Printers 58 - Impressions Dragor. 59 - Imprimerie Claude Bernard.

Debord collaborated with these two printers on various Situationist publications including Internationale Situationniste.

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Figure 3.2  Internationale Situationniste, Nouveau Théâtre d’Opération dans la Culture, 1958. Poster, 40 × 21 cm (15.7 × 8.2 in.).

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maps in an edition of Clausewitz’s On War: if you want war, prepare maps. This is just what the SI set about doing, as we will see in this chapter. But in addition to maps, an avant-garde also needs weapons. These weapons, both theoretical and practical, are presented in the diagram that constitutes the lower part of the 1958 poster. “Permanent play” provides the foundation for this seemingly cohesive blueprint for action: when applied to culture, “permanent play” allows for “détournement,” that is, the reusing and repurposing of pre-existing elements to create something new and different; combined with “experimental behavior” in the urban space, “permanent play” fosters the dérive, or urban drift. Finally, this “permanent play” allows for the development of “unitary urbanism” and Situationist architecture via psychogéographie, a new approach to space involving the representation and psychological experience of the city. This ensemble of theories and practices is meant to culminate in the “construction of situations”—a Situationist Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts that can be summarized as a moment of intensively lived life—a wild party or an urban insurrection for instance—that emerges in stark contrast to the stultifying boredom of modern everyday life. The existing scholarship on Guy Debord, the Lettrist International, and the Situationnist International explores and discusses this project through the lenses of various disciplines: art history, literary studies, philosophy, sociology, architecture theory, and urban history. This historiography has long been divided into three ensembles, which largely correspond to different academic specializations. Art and architecture historians, along with exhibition curators, have focused on the first period of the LI and the SI that spans from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, and hence on the artistic outcomes of an avant-garde group that was essentially composed of artists.9 The SI’s shift towards the field of radical politics and activism from the early 1960s onwards has meanwhile attracted the attention of philosophers and critical theorists, since it was in this latter period that the Situationist critique of modernity and capitalism came to fruition with the publication in 1967 of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s Treatise on Living for the Young Generations.10 Literary studies have tended to take a rather essentialist approach to Debord’s oeuvre,11 decontextualizing his stylistic In Art History see, Mirella Bandini, L’Estetico, il Politico. Da Cobra all’Internazionale Situazionista 1948–1957 (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1977); Roberto Ohrt, Phantom Avantgarde: eine Geschichte der Situationistischen Internationale und der modernen Kunst (Hamburg: Nautilus Verlag, 1990); Evgenia Theodoropoulou, “L’‘Internationale Situationniste’: Un Projet d’ Art Total,” Doctoral dissertation, adv. P. Dagen (Paris: Université Paris 1, 2008) ; In Architecture History, Jean-Louis Violeau, Situations construites: “était situationniste celui qui s’employait à construire des situations dans la ville …” (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 1998); Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Two major exhibitions dedicated to the Situationist International: Elisabeth Sussman, On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, February 21 to April 9, 1989; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, June 23 to August 13, 1989; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, MA, October 20, 1989 to January 7, 1990. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Stefan Zweifel, ed., L’Internationale Situationniste: In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni: 1957–1972, exh. cat., Centraal Museum, Utrecht, December 14, 2006 to March 11, 2007; Musée Tinguely, Basel, April 4 to August 5, 2007 (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2006). 10 Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord (Oakland: University of California Press, 1999). 11 Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: la Révolution au service de la poésie (Paris: Fayard, 2001); Cécile Guilbert, Pour Guy Debord (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 9

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choices and disregarding their status as strategic choices in a war against society.12 No matter the discipline, one of the challenges that scholars face when approaching the history of the SI is the fact that the movement itself largely contributed to establishing its own history: put simply, the SI was its own historian, and provided its readers and analysts with a convincing readymade narrative whose pull is not easily escaped.13 Finally, and most importantly for the purpose of this chapter, the Situationist project is constituted not only of theories and practices, but also of a style that mediates them, both in textual and visual terms—a style that Debord and his comrades considered as no less than the culmination of the means and ends of their project.14 Given the SI’s interest in and rhetorical approach to style, scholars must take care to avoid neutralizing the group’s radicalism and energy with too heavy an academic discourse, whilst simultaneously resisting the temptation to offer a mimetic response that imitates the group’s taste for irony and Marxist phraseology. This chapter will attempt to navigate this tricky discursive terrain as it seeks to restore Situationist practices to their original Parisian context by considering the nature of the city and the ways in which the Situationists might have experienced it in the years spanning from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. By adopting the format of the dérive to consider Parisian urban space, considering activities and ideas as they developed on the ground and in specific areas of the city, and through extensive reference to the new resources offered In addition to these now well-established approaches, the recontextualization of the Situationist adventure within a dialogue with other groups has finally been recently undertaken, allowing for a better integration of the group activities within the cultural, artistic, and political history of these two decades. See Miquel Amorós, Los Situationistas y la Anarquía (Bilbao: Muturreko Burutazioak, 2008), Patrick Marcolini, Le Mouvement situationniste, une histoire intellectuelle (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2012). Frédéric Thomas and François Coadou have respectively researched the relationships between the SI and Marxist group Socialisme et Barbarie and Belgian Surrealist group Les Lèvres Nues; this research has been published in the proceedings of the “Lire Debord” 2013 symposium which took place in conjunction with the “Guy Debord. Un Art de la Guerre” exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, see Emmanuel Guy, and Laurence Le Bras, eds., Lire Debord (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2016). Another key aspect of the recent scholarship on Guy Debord and the Situationist International has been developed by English-speaking scholars. In art history, Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, October, vol. 79 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), Tom McDonough, The Beautiful Language of My Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City (London, New York: Verso, 2009), and McKenzie Wark, Fifty Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008); McKenzie Wark authored a series of three books which aim at taking into account the collective dimension of the Situationist International—see Wark, Fifty Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso Books, 2011), and McKenzie Wark, The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situation Passages out of the Twentieth Century (London, New York: Verso, 2013). For a collective approach to the Situationist International and other avant-groups of the postwar period, see also Jacopo Galimberti, Individuals against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956–1969) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017). 13 Art historian Fabien Danesi explores this issue in Fabien Danesi, Le mythe brisé de l’Internationale situationniste: l’aventure d’une avant-garde au cœur de la culture de masse (1945–2008) (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2008). 14 I have extensively studied this aspect of the Situationist project in Emmanuel Guy, “‘Par tous les moyens, même artistiques’ Guy Debord stratège. Modélisation, pratique et rhétorique stratégiques,” Ph.D. dissertation, dir. Anne Larue and Fabrice Flahutez (Paris: Université Paris-Nord, 2015). 12

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by the Debord archives at the Bibliothèque nationale, this chapter aims to offer an alternative to the distance and tone conventionally required by academic scholarship, which has in any case already produced a rich body of work on the topic of Situationist critique of urbanism,15 whilst avoiding the stylistic pitfalls of the mimetic trap.

A street corner as epicenter At the northern tip of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the rue de Seine and the rue Mazarine join to form a tight bend behind the Institut de France, that hides the river Seine from the passerby. At this spot, one morning early in 1953, one could read the following graffiti daubed in big white letters on the walls of the Institut: “NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS,” that is, “NEVER WORK” (Figure 3.3). The author of this graffiti was the young Guy Debord, aged 23.

Figure 3.3  Guy Debord, Ne Travaillez Jamais (Never Work), 1953. Graffiti, Rue de Seine, Paris. Debord did not photograph his graffiti himself. It was photographed by an unknown photographer, and later used by the Cercle de la Librairie, a postcard publisher, for a postcard by Mr. Buffier. Debord came across the postcard in the late 1950s and used the image regularly: in Internationale situationniste, n°8, Paris, January 1963, p. 42; in Panegyric, vol. 2, Paris, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997; he also had a postcard made from the photograph for his personal correspondence.

In English language, McDonough, The Situationists and the City ; Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space,” October vol. 67 (1994): 58–77; Sadler, The Situationist City; Libero Andreotti, “Play-Tactics of the ‘Internationale Situationniste’,” October vol. 91 (2000): 37–45; Anthony Vidler, “Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented,” October vol. 115 (2006): 13–30.

15

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Along with his 1951 film Howlings for Sade, Debord considered this graffiti as the inaugural gesture of his revolutionary life and the most concise summary of the project underlying the two successive avant-garde movements that he would go on to co-found: the absolute refusal to participate in everyday alienation, and the firm will to take down the capitalist system that produces it. Guy Debord’s Paris, and consequently the Situationist Paris, revolves around this section of wall that has blackened with the passage of time. Just a hundred feet from this spot, a little further away from the River Seine, there is a small passage that looks like a porte cochère.16 You would think you are about to go inside the Institut. It is actually a passageway leading to a dramatically different atmosphere, passing abruptly from the narrow and dark streets of Saint-Germaindes-Prés towards the theatrical Place de l’Institut17 that opens up in a semicircle overlooking the Seine and facing the Palais du Louvre on the other bank of the river. This experience, which one can still live today, could be described in Situationist terms as a psychogeographic experience, triggered by the practice of the dérive—or urban drift—that Debord described in his 1956 “Theory of the dérive” as the “technique of swift passage through varied environments.”18 The word dérive evokes a long and adventurous journey with no preset destination, and this is precisely how it was experienced and depicted by Debord and his friends. Nonetheless, the usual territory of the dérive was rather limited. Painter Ralph Rumney (1934–2002) recalls: “My experience of Paris long remained within an enclosed perimeter, between Montparnasse [where many artists had their studios], SaintGermain-des-Prés and the rue de la Huchette. Every time we would leave it, it was an adventure.”19 Debord marks out a similarly reduced terrain in Panegyric as he recalls how “between the rue du Four and the rue de Buci, where our youth so completely went astray as a few glasses were drunk, one could feel certain that we would never do any better.”20 Now, if you go in the other direction, south of the graffiti, and look at the corner of the rue Mazarine from the square Pierné, you will recognize in contemporary colors the setting of a black-and-white photograph inserted by Debord in his movie On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time (1959, Figure 3.4): the The aforementioned wall and this porte cochère can be seen on Google Street View by searching for “3 rue de Seine, 75006 Paris.” The Institut de France is a learning society gathering five acedémies, the most famous of which being the Académie Française. Established in 1635 by Cardinal de Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, the Académie Française is the official authority on French language. It consists of forty members, known as les Immortels (the Immortals), most of them being well-established writers. Their main mission is to publish and update an official dictionary of the French language. Unsurprisingly, the Académie Française has often been criticized for its rather conservative approach towards the evolution of French language and its mostly masculine and pro-establishment body of members. 18 Guy Debord, “Théorie de la dérive,” Les Lèvres nues no. 9 (November 1956): 6–10. Translated in McDonough, The Situationists and the City, 78. 19 Ralph Rumney, Le Consul. Entretiens avec Gérard Berréby, ed. Gérard Berréby (Paris: Allia, 1999), 71. 20 Guy Debord, Panegyric. Volumes 1 & 2, trans. James Brook and John McHale (London, New York: Verso, 2004), 26. 16

17

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Figure 3.4  This photograph shows the film crew of Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques

personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time), Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilm Kompagni, 1959. The background shows the rue Mazarine and, as mentioned in this chapter, the tight bend behind the Institut de France, that hides the river Seine from the passerby. Courtesy of Alice Debord.

photograph shows the film director and his crew filming the movie you’re watching, a movie about the companions, the time, and the places that shaped the Situationist project “to reinvent everything each day; to become the masters of their own lives.”21 The film later shows a barge running up the river, towards the east. In a place where, in the time of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), wine barrels and travelers were once unloaded, the viewers of Debord’s film can see piles of concrete bricks on the Quai Saint Bernard, a reminder of the intense construction work taking place on the site of the former Halle aux Vins (wine market) where the early 1960s saw the erection of Paris Faculty of Sciences by architects Cassan and Albert. From the birth of the Lettrist International in 1952 to the dissolution of the Situationist International in 1972, the city of Paris underwent many drastic transformations, which were witnessed by the artists, activists, delinquents, agitators, and intellectuals of these groups. One distinction between the International Lettrists “Ils voulaient tout réinventer chaque jour; se rendre maîtres et possesseurs de leur propre vie,” Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez coute unité de temps (1959), in Œuvres (Paris : Gallimard, 2006), 471.

21

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and the Situationists lies in the fact that, while both claimed an international ambition, only the second would actually realize it. London, Amsterdam and Venice would eventually become “Situationist” cities thanks to the conferences that the movement organized every two years or so to gather the troops and reflect the internationalization of their composition and activities. The writer and junky Alexander Trocchi (1925–1984) recalls Guy Debord as being an adept psychogeographer as he walked the streets of London; 22 in Amsterdam, an exhibition project at the Stedelijk Museum included the direct experience of the urban space coordinated with walkietalkies; 23 Ralph Rumney, founder and sole member of an otherwise rather legendary “Psychogeographic Committee of London,” disappeared for a while in Venice, where ten years later the last conference of the group took place. The presence of Belgian, German, Danish and Italian members in the Situationist International evidences the Europeanization of the total critique of capitalist society supported by the movement. The Situationist theories and practices were thus not limited to the Parisian space; when Paris does feature as their playground and battleground, the locations of choice are often those of the earlier Lettrist period, now reworked into the critical theories and the narratives of the Situationists. This (re)construction of Paris characterizes, up until its revolutionary moment in 1968, the Situationist adventure.

A day on the Left Bank In many ways, Debord’s oeuvre is a tale of the city, in which the environment or the “milieu” of his youth plays a crucial role. This urban tale also played a crucial part in Debord’s attempts to establish the avant-garde movements he co-founded in stark opposition to the rest of the cultural sphere, which he and his companions copiously taunted in the pages of their periodic publications, namely Potlatch, followed in 1958 by Internationale situationniste.24 Debord’s Saint-Germain is not that of the Café Flore or Les Deux Magots, where the gentrified and compliant intelligentsia—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir above all—would sit next to acclaimed artists, famous writers, and the usual American tourists. Nor does Debord mention Le Tabou or Le Vieux-Colombier, where musicians or singers such as Sydney Bechett, Claude Luter, Catherine Sauvage, or Juliette Greco would perform. More importantly perhaps, Debord rarely mentions the many galleries of the rue de Seine and the nearby streets. The rue de Seine is precisely located between Chez Moineau, Debord’s headquarters in the early 1950s, and the psychogeographic vortex Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 387. 23 “Die Welt als Labyrinth,” Internationale Situationniste no. 4, (June 1960): 5. 24 A long list of those who had the dubious honor of being insulted in the pages of Internationale situationniste has been compiled in Jean-Jacques Raspaud and Jean-Pierre Voyer, L’Internationale situationniste; chronologie, bibliographie, protagonistes (avec un index des noms insultés) (Paris: Champ libre, 1972). 22

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around the Institut. Between the rue de Buci and the wall of the Institut where Debord scrawled his infamous slogan, the rue de Seine had indeed become a hot spot for the art market since the 1920s. As historian Julie Verlaine has shown, many galleries opened in this neighborhood during the 1950s (their number doubled from 20 to 39), thus renewing the artistic landscape in the area.25 Did Debord close his eyes in disgust when he was passing by these artsy-fartsy addresses? Quite the contrary. His archives leave no doubt as to his precise knowledge of what was going on there: they contain many exhibition flyers from some of the most important galleries of the neighborhood.26 At Studio Facchetti (17 rue de Lille), he may have seen paintings by Jean Dubuffet and drawings by poet Henri Michaux. Iris Clert (3 rue des Beaux-Arts) displayed works by Danish painter Asger Jorn—Debord’s friend since the middle of the 1950s and a founding member of the SI in 1957—and more famously, works by Yves Klein who briefly dialogued with Debord and his comrades.27 The Galerie Stadler, whose flyers frequently appear in the archive, was connected with the crowd Debord probably despised the most: the “avant-garde royalist”28 Georges Mathieu, and “secret agent of the Vatican”29 Michel Tapié, who was what we would call today a curator and critic in residence at the gallery. There is also a photograph of Debord30 at the Galerie Rive Gauche (44 rue de Fleurus) in front of one of Asger Jorn’s Modification paintings. To create these tableaux détournés, Jorn purchased antique canvases at flea markets and “improved”31 them, as he would put it, with serendipitous jets of colors. The territory occupied by Debord and his companions very much overlapped with this epicenter of Paris’s artistic and intellectual life in the 1950s. But in this urban setting, “social diversity” was still a reality rather than the duplicitous urban branding slogan that it is today. In order to get a sense of a day in the life of a young Lettrist in this area of Paris, you could read the witty “Economic status of the basic Lettrist”32 drafted by Debord in his correspondence, not only as a dark-humored détournement of the “Economic status of the entry-level labourer” published in those years by the bureaucratic-sounding Collective Labour Agreement Committee,33 but also as a kind of spatialized schedule of Julie Verlaine, Les galeries d’art contemporain à Paris: une histoire culturelle du marché de l’art, 1944– 1970, Histoire contemporaine 8 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012). Guy Debord Archive, “Invitations + Presse sur l’IS (Générale) de 1957 jusqu’en 1964 environ, ” NAF 28603, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France. 27 See Guy Debord, “Letter to Ralph Rumney, January 16th, 1957,” in Correspondance, Vol. 0 (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 2010). 28 “Pour ne pas comprendre l’IS,” Internationale Situationniste no. 10 (March 1966): 68. 29 “L’Absence et ses habilleurs,” Internationale Situationniste no. 2 (December 1958): 7. 30 In Debord, Œuvres, 494. 31 Asger Jorn, “Peinture détournée,” in Vingt peintures modifiées par Asger Jorn, exh. cat (Paris: Galerie Rive Gauche, 1959). 32 Guy Debord, Letter to Ivan Chtcheglov, November 23, 1953, published in Le Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille, de beaux yeux pour faire sauter les ponts (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 142. 33 This committee brings together representatives of both employers and employees to regularly redefine the legislative framework of employment and working conditions in their respective sectors of activity. A key feature of the French labor system, the Conventions Collectives were founded in 1919, and mostly developed under the left-wing government of the Front Populaire in 1936, and in the decade following the Second World War, due to the influence of the Communist Party in French politics at the time. 25

26

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usual activities: “For a month: 1 hotel room, 10 cinema screenings, 30 couscous (without meat) rue Xavier Privat, 30 cafés-crèmes at the Dupont-Latin [boulevard Saint-Michel], 30 sandwiches at the Tonneau d’Or [32 rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève].”34 The hotel room, or “meublé,” was the typical accommodation of students and low-income workers of the city at the time, while the 5th and 6th arrondissement were (and still are) home to dozens of avant-garde and independent cinemas. In the streets around the Saint-Séverin church, rue Xavier-Privas for instance, Kabyle35 bars would serve couscous for cheap; it was also easier for the young Lettrists to find hash there than cigarettes. More importantly, rue Xavier-Privas also harbored the headquarters of Messali Hadj’s Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, that would soon be supplanted by the Algerian National Liberation Front at the start of the Algerian War of Independence. At the end of the 1950s, the Latin Quarter was a long way from the somewhat nightmarish theme park for tourists and students that it is today: homeless people could find shelter in attic rooms for a night or two, depending on their ability to put up with the stench of boarding houses, as vividly recalled by Jean-Paul Clébert who was then living among them.36 On the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, around the now fully renovated Panthéon, furnished rooms in the upper stories still housed numerous workers. With his historiographer’s style, Debord often returns to those never-forgotten first steps of the Situationists. In his works, literary and cinematic alike, he often recalls the Paris of his youth, Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter; though nominally a student in law at the Sorbonne, he actually spent most of his time wandering around these areas, meeting up with friends, reading and writing on the state of art, culture, and politics. Debord makes frequent references to the Paris of the French Revolution, the Paris of the 1870 Commune, and later the Paris of May 1968—but also to a Paris that had been lost, “assassinated”37 in the great redesigning of the city in the 1960s. In Debord’s aforementioned short film, On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time—a series of notes about the origins of the movement— the first sequence documents the buildings and decor of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, dedicated to the “wretched dignity of the petite bourgeoisie.”38 The boulevard, the Ibid. The “Kabyles” are an ethnic group originally from southern Algeria. They constitute an important part of the Algerian diaspora in France. On the distinction between Kabyles and Arabs, and its importance for French colonial and postcolonial history, see Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France; Transpolitics, Race and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) and Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonical Algeria (London: I.B.Tauris, 1995), and Patricia Lorcin, Kabyles, Arabes, Français: Identités Coloniales (Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2005). 36 Jean-Paul Clébert, Paris insolite (Paris: Denoël, 1952). A partial English translation appears in a book prefaced by Marcel Aymé, with a contribution by Antoine Blondin and photographs by Patrice Molinard. Jean-Paul Clébert, The Paris I Love (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1956). 37 See Louis Chevalier, L’Assassinat de Paris, Archives des sciences sociales (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977). Debord had this book in his library. 38 “Ce quartier était fait pour la dignité malheureuse de la petite bourgeoisie … ” in Debord, Œuvres, 470. The “petite bourgeoisie” refers to the upper middle class, a growing social group in the decade after the Second World War in France, both distinct from the middle class by its aspirations to tertiary and intellectual work, and distinct from the bourgeoisie per se, by its lack of actual cultural or financial capital. 34 35

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Dubonnet wine and liquor shop; tourists, students, employees coming out of the SaintGermain metro station, those for whom “duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty”;39 the upper stories inhabited by young intellectuals, the cafés too, le Café de la Poste at the corner of the rue Serpente and the ancient rue Hautefeuille, in front of which a group of Sorbonnards—students from the nearby Sorbonne University— passes by, the rue des Écoles, the rue de la Montagne Saint-Geneviève. These streets and scenes provided the environment in which the small group of Situationist friends gathered around a table littered with empty bottles and an overflowing triangular “Ricard” ashtray; between the zinc of Paris’s bar counters and roofs, Debord’s avantgarde movement took form. The revolution was fermented, like so much booze, in the bars and cafés scattered around Saint-Germain: Le Mabillon, Le Saint-Claude, rue des Canettes, L’Homme de main, 31 rue de Jussieu, Le Bouquet, La Pergola, Le Old Navy, and most importantly, Chez Moineau, rue du Four. In his colorful Paris insolite, Jean-Paul Clébert, living the life of a vagrant, also depicted some of these bars.40 Chez Moineau, the favorite spot of Debord and his friends, was also captured in those years by Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken, who later published his book Love on the Left Bank.41 In these bars, a mixed crowd of old barflies and lost souls, small-time crooks, idle winos, drop-outs, and unruly girls freshly escaped from the reformatory would play cards or chess, read the news, chat from dawn to dusk, and, of course, drink. This bar is also where Debord frequented Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, the future Nouveaux Réalistes whose art the Situationists would loathe for its ambiguous integration and depiction of modern life and materiality. In 1954, Debord left Chez Moineau behind, allegedly after taking offense at increasingly insistent requests that he settle his tab;42 in reality, it was more likely that Debord felt it was time to have a headquarters of his own, where mail and subscriptions could be sent and where members could receive friends and potential recruits for the group. The Lettrist International settled at Le Tonneau d’Or, further east, at 32 rue de la MontagneSainte-Geneviève; this would in turn be the address of the Situationist International up until 1963.

Mapping our Paris It is between those years, 1951 and 1963, that the Situationists formalized the everyday practice of the urban drift, first into a “Theory of the Dérive” and soon afterwards into the pseudo-scientific discipline of psychogéographie which allowed for the realization of psychogeographic maps and the development of Situationist architecture projects. “Pour eux déjà le devoir était devenu une habitude, et l’habitude un devoir,” in Debord, Œuvres, 478. Clébert, Paris insolite. Ed Van Der Elsken, Love on the Left Bank (Amsterdam, Hamburg, London: Bezige Bij, Rowohlt Verlag, André Deutsch, 1956). 42 Christophe Bourseiller, Vie et Mort de Guy Debord: 1931–1994 (Paris: Plon, 1999), 74. 39 40 41

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The dérive certainly inherited the critique of the modern city developed via Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur of the streets of Paris and Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris. The dérive was also an after-the-fact theorization of what began as a way to spend some idle and drunken hours wandering about in the city. But as Debord observed, “the difficulties of the dérive are those of freedom”:43 the urban space is also a space of conflict where power consistently exerts itself over the denizen, from Baron Haussmann in the second half of the nineteenth century to his successors and their postwar urban redevelopment plans. The key aspect of the dérive is not chance, but rather a certain attention to the unités d’ambiance (ambiance clusters) and the resulting relief psychogéographique (psychogeographic relief) that necessitate a familiarity with the historical and social identity of the urban block; of course, maintained the Situationists, no urban planner would ever bother engaging with this identity. This experience of the city would eventually undergo a cartographic translation as psychogeographic maps. Psychogeography is first and foremost about insubordination: in the series of maps that Debord designed together with Asger Jorn in the late 1950s, the apparent objectivity of the cartography is annihilated in favor of subjective narratives of the city (Figure 3.5). These maps are an example of Situationist détournement in that they reuse and repurpose existing—i.e., official, objective, continuous—maps: Guy Debord cut out maps of Paris into fragments of the city, which he scattered around and interconnected with red arrows, thus inducing a permanent state of movement within the traditionally static cartographic depiction of the urban space. The psychogeographic cartographer makes the map show what it usually serves to obscure: the fragmentation of the urban experience. Both the dérive and its cartographic translations hence reintroduced subjectivity into the very spaces—the city and the map—from which it had been erased by the modernization process.

The assassination of Paris To a certain extent, the notion of a Situationist Paris can be discussed as a way of experiencing the city, the dérive. But this practice, theory, and tale of the city is also an act of subversion. The SI was not some stuffy heritage association jealously defending old Paris. The war they were waging was not one for the conservation of ancient stones and picturesque street corners. The Situationists thus disapproved of the urban conservation plans drawn up by André Malraux, de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, “whose passion for sanitizing and gentrifying the old as a complement to the new presented an official image of the city just as surely as wholesale reconstruction,”44 as Simon Sadler rightfully points out. The Situationist opposition to changes occurring in the landscape must be considered as an integral part of their general critique of the spectacle and of “Les difficultés de la dérive sont celles de la liberté,” in Debord, “Théorie de la Dérive,” 6, translated in the excellent anthology of Situationist texts: McDonough, The Situationists and the City, 78. 44 Sadler, The Situationist City, 62. 43

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Figure 3.5  Guy Debord, Guide psychogéographiques de Paris. Discours sur les passions de l’amour (Copenhagen: Permild & Rosengreen, 1957). Map, 60 × 74 cm (23.6 × 29 in.). The original map used for this détournement is Georges Peltier, Plan de Paris à vol d’Oiseau (Paris: E. Blondel La Rougery, 1951). Courtesy of Alice Debord. its consequences: an entire chapter of Debord’s notorious essay of 1967, The Society of the Spectacle, is indeed dedicated to the exploration of “Environmental Planning,” that is to say the spatial embodiment of the contradictory dialectics that characterize the spectacle: “Environmental Planning” both fosters the fragmentation of the social

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body into atomized forms of life and activity (the individual automobile, the private suburban pavilion, the television), and organizes the unification and the “banalization” of urban life through the infinite duplication of architectural or domestic commodities (from urban projects to house appliances).45 But as Debord reminds his reader in that same chapter, the city has also been the crucible of countless revolutionary movements throughout history. While the 6th and 7th arrondissements, where political and intellectual power resided, went largely unchanged, other areas of Paris evolved dramatically and attracted the attention of both the Lettrists and later on the Situationists. This is especially true of the Eastern part of the city, home to the city’s workers, immigrants, and working classes. Instances in which entire streets were destroyed make up some of the striking events from which a more comprehensive critique would eventually develop: One of the most beautiful spontaneously psychogeographical places in Paris is currently in the process of disappearing. Rue Sauvage, in the 13th Arrondissement, which offered one of the most stirring nocturnal views of the capital, located between the train tracks of the Gare d’Austerlitz and an area of empty ground along the Seine (rue Fulton, rue Bellièvre) has—since last winter—been enclosed by several of those debilitating structures that line the suburbs to house unfortunate people. We deplore the disappearance of a little-known street, little-known and nonetheless more alive than the Champs Elysees and all its bright lights. We have no predilection for the charms of ruins. But the civilian barracks that we build in their place are so gratuitously ugly as to be an open invitation to dynamiters.46

The rue Sauvage—literally, “wild street”—had by its very name an undeniable kind of Surrealist cachet, and it was certainly valued for the panorama it then offered, similar to the one still visible today from the “beautiful and tragic rue d’Aubervilliers”47 along the tracks of the Gare de l’Est. But most importantly, Debord identifies in the so-called “modernisation” of the urban space an outgrowth of capitalism by other means—an interpretation still supported today by urban sociologists such as David Harvey.48 The Situationist attack on urbanism naturally extended to a critique of the Parisian banlieue—the outskirts of Paris where large urban projects were cheaply and industrially built throughout the 1950s and 1960s and where the workers and immigrés would be relocated from a less and less affordable city center. For the Situationists, who considered that these grands ensembles were anything but benign, adopted an all-encompassing approach to make their point. They took aim at everything from the actual architectural projects themselves to the ways in which they were promoted by politicians and branded by the media, to the kind of society that could give rise to such Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. David Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 119–128. 46 “On détruit la rue sauvage,” Potlatch no.7 (August 3, 1954). Republished in Guy Debord and Internationale lettriste, Guy Debord Présente Potlatch : 1954–1957 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 54–55. 47 Guy Debord, “Deux compte rendus de dérive,” Les Lèvres nues no. 9 (November 1956): 12. 48 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003). 45

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developments. Debord saw these projects as the urban expression of the underlying movement of separation that capitalism brought about. The Situationists criticized the grands ensembles as a reflection of a “concentration-camp organization of life”49 in a rare and quite revealing reference by Debord to the horrors of the Second World War. Sarcelles, one of Paris’s most notorious banlieues, also provides the decor in which young Josyane, the heroine of Christiane Rochefort’s 1961 novel Les petits Enfants du Siècle, leads her idle existence, surrounded by housing projects and a stifling family. Josyane tries to escape, dreams of love, and eventually surrenders to the pathetic happiness provided by mass consumption society. Christiane Rochefort’s concerns are similar to those of Henri Lefebvre and his Research Group on Everyday Life who invited her to discuss her book in their seminar. Debord, who would also be invited as a guest speaker later on, was present at Rochefort’s talk, as indicated by one of the notebooks from his archives.50 Of course the Situationists were not the only ones to develop a critique of contemporary urbanism, and a variety of approaches caught their attention, including Rochefort’s novel; the Situationists were well aware of the fact that fiction could sometimes provide a firmer grasp and a more vivid rendering of reality than any specialized academic discourse. Whatever the approach, the Situationists’ critique was all-encompassing in its scope, and based on a very simple assessment: “Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the national and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar décor.”51 In other words, you get the city you deserve.

Paris is a battleground Debord’s relationship to the city has often been placed in a lineage that dates back to Baudelaire and the Surrealists,52 but this genealogy should also include military engineer Vauban53 and proto-urban guerrillero Auguste Blanqui.54 Debord’s deep interest in the practice and theory of strategy is visible in his writing, his library and his Jeu de la guerre, a strategic board game he invented in the 1950s and developed throughout his life. This important aspect of his oeuvre has often been left unexplored, and was “Critique de l’urbanisme,” Internationale situationniste no. 6 (August 1961): 9. Translated in McDonough, The Situationists and the City, 154. 50 Guy Debord, Notebook on Henri Lefebvre’s Research Group on Everyday Life, 1961. NAF 28603, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France. 51 Debord, The Society of the spectacle, 121. 52 Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006). 53 Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707) was a Marshal of France and a foremost military engineer, especially well known for designing fortifications throughout the French kingdom. See Daniel Halévy, Cecil J. C. Street, Vauban, Builder of Fortresses (New York: Lincoln MacVeagh, 1925), and Paddy Griffith, Peter Dennis, eds., The Vauban fortifications of France (Oxford: Osprey, 2006). 54 Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was a French socialist and political activist, especially known for his theory of revolutionary strategy. See Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une prise d’armes (Grenoble: Cent Pages, [1866] 2003) and Samuel Bernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). 49

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therefore a central focus of the 2013 exhibition that I co-curated at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Guy Debord. Un Art de la guerre” (Guy Debord. An Art of War), which drew on academic research around Debord’s archives and his game of war.55 Debord also saw the streets of Paris as a strategic space of communication and action. Following the Revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the bourgeois regime of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann set about redesigning the streets of Paris, opening up large boulevards that cut swathes through the lattice of small arteries in order to better enforce social order. According to the Situationists, the new conditions of urban production tended to simply eradicate the street altogether. Paragraph 172 of The Society of the spectacle sums up this process: “The effort of all established powers, since the experience of the French Revolution, to augment their means of keeping order in the street has eventually culminated in the suppression of the street itself.”56 If the streets themselves were the critical playground of the dérive, the walls of the city were also used by the Situationists as a key battleground in a war of communication that dated back to Debord’s 1952 graffiti. The reader of Potlatch, the periodical of the Lettrist International, is thus encouraged to use paint or chalk to “write in the vicinity of the Renault factory and in some banlieues … the sentence of Louis Scutenaire: you’re sleeping for your boss.”57 “Ne travaillez jamais” was far from a one-off event. Both the LI and the SI produced numerous posters, leaflets, flyers, and even stickers, which we can admire today between sheets of archival paper in libraries and museum collections, but which were then “pasted on the walls of Paris, primarily in psychogeographically favorable places.”58 This technique proved to be quite fruitful, judging by the numerous subscription requests sent to the group after a large communication campaign in 196759 that consisted of posters announcing the simultaneous publication of The Society of the Spectacle by Debord and the Treatise on Living for the Young Generations by Raoul Vaneigem, along with issue n°11 of the Internationale situationniste. These posters, visible here and there across the city, would bring Situationist activity to the attention of those who had yet to notice the appealing aluminum-coated cover of the journal glinting among the somewhat dour covers of other leftist publications at the Cluny kiosk, or in more specialized bookshops of the Latin Quarter such as La Vieille Taupe (1 rue des Fossés Saint-Jacques). The traditional historiography of the Situationist movement usually divides its history between an artistic period that lasted until the exclusion of most artists in 1961, and a political one in the run-up to May 1968. Nonetheless, the so-called “artistic” phase of the movement is reflected less in its rather sparse artistic production than in the group’s admittedly artistic membership and its specific approach to culture as a vantage point from which all aspects of society can be embraced. What’s more, when the Situationist See Laurence Le Bras, Emmanuel Guy, eds., Guy Debord. Un Art de la Guerre (Paris: BnF/Gallimard, 2013) and Guy, “‘Par tous les moyens, même artistiques,’ Guy Debord stratège. Modélisation, pratique et rhétorique stratégiques.” 56 Ibid., 121–122. 57 “Du rôle de l’écriture,” Potlatch no. 23 (October 13, 1955). Republished in Debord and Internationale lettriste, Guy Debord Présente Potlatch: 1954–1957, 203. 58 “Rédaction de nuit,” Potlatch no. 20 (May 30, 1955). Republished in ibid., 155. 59 These documents, along with others by Raoul Vaneigem, are currently held in a private collection. 55

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International later engaged in more traditional political activities, this earlier artistic phase proved its worth: the Situationists’ aura and effectiveness stemmed not only from the content of their critique but from the way in which this was delivered and communicated. We have seen how psychogeography differed from the aestheticized wanderings of the Surrealists; this former approach remained part of the Situationist arsenal even after the group took on a more explicitly and actively political character. Pyschogeography—the sensory, experiential, strategic, and political practice of the urban space—would indeed prove to be one of the central weapons of the Situationist struggle. The agenda of the seventh conference of the Situationist International in Paris, in 1966, mentions the necessity to define “a general blueprint for an insurrectional psychogeography of Paris,”60 though if such a definition was reached, its details went undocumented. Two years later, however, May 1968 would provide the opportunity to put this psychogeographical project into practice. The strategic dimension of the insurrection and the war-like ambiance of the Latin Quarter can be experienced today by listening to radio programs recorded at the time, and especially to those of Pierre Lantenac, a journalist reporting from the streets of the Latin Quarter for France Inter Radio: interrupted by explosions, sirens, and slogans, as Lantenac describes the movements of both sides in the area, one feels immersed in the atmosphere of a civil war.61 While the Situationists fought on the barricades of the rue Gay-Lussac, their participation in the events encompassed wider tactical and strategic considerations, such as how to promote the insurrection without becoming its “leaders” and how to prevent particular groups and political parties recuperating the spontaneity of the uprisings. On the evening of May 13, the “Comité Enragés-Situationnistes” participated in the occupation of the Sorbonne, and took over one of the rooms of the university, changing its name to “Salle Jules Bonnot” in memory of the famous anarchist gangster from the 1910s. Because of their absolute refusal to be recuperated by any sort of official organizations, the Situationists soon found themselves isolated from the many other leftist groups, the majority of which were linked more or less closely to the main student union, the UNEF, that was also involved in the occupation of the Sorbonne. As a result, on May 19, the Situationists moved to the National Pedagogic Institute, across the street from the École Normale Supérieure on the other side of the Panthéon. This building became the real headquarters from which their revolutionary action would continue under the name “Comité pour le Maintien des Occupations” (CMDO). The committee brought together about forty people, taking turns to occupy the building and developing communications with other groups. Posters were designed in situ and printed in Malakoff, just to the south of Paris, by the striking employees of a printing works, before being pasted overnight in the streets of the city (Figure 3.6).62 Guy Debord Archive, “CV 87, Ordre du jour de la 7ème conférence de l’IS à Paris,” Choix de documents autour de l’Internationale lettriste et de l’Internationale situationniste, NAF 28603, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France. 61 “Nuit d’émeutes au Quartier Latin, entre minuit et 3h45,” Édition spéciale (May 11, 1968), France Inter, ORTF. 62 It should be noted here that the Situationists did not take part in the printing workshops of the Ateliers Populaires of the Beaux-Arts School of Paris. This can be considered as proof of their disinterest for and disconnection from the artistic circles in the late 1960s. 60

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Figure 3.6  Comité pour le Maintien des Occupations, A bas la Société Spectaculaire Marchande, May 1968. Poster, 49.5 × 36.5 cm (19.5 × 14.3 in.).

There are some fascinating archival documents testifying to this guerrilla war of propaganda, such as lists of materials, “2 boxes of 100 posters each, bucket, glue, brush,”63 and a schedule indicating where and when each group was to paste the posters or replenish their supplies. Each member worked under a pseudonym: Debord “Fragments de plans de Paris et plan d’action pour une campagne de collage d’affiches du CMDO, Mai 68,” Bibliothèque Paul Destribats, Paris.

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is Gondi, in a reference to the Cardinal de Retz, a central figure of “La Fronde,” a seventeenth-century uprising against the monarchy led by a fringe of the French aristocracy. The blueprint also assigns each group a specific area to cover on the Left Bank, from the Sully bridge, westward to the rue Dauphine, or eastward to the rue Censier. These areas were represented by fragments of maps that looked exactly like the “unités d’ambiance” depicted on Debord’s psychogeographic maps ten years previous. Far from being consigned to their youth as a forgotten passe-temps, the dérive now emerged as a preliminary training step for the Situationists, preparing them for the war of communication integral to any urban insurrection: the playground of the city had always been a battleground.

Conclusion: Towards a strategic approach in avant-garde history From a scholarly point of view, the writing of the history of the avant-garde in general, and of the French avant-garde in particular, has been made both possible and difficult by the tendencies of such movements to be their own historiographers. Indeed, this phenomenon consequently has too often fostered an almost hagiographic approach to avant-garde activities, one which provided little more than a simple narrative. In reaction to this, recent years have seen the development of more critical approaches that have drawn on sociology, quantitative history, and related fields in the social sciences, disciplines now considered better guarantors of historic accuracy and scholarly soundness. Yet both approaches risk leaving unexamined or unmediated certain aspects of avant-garde practice: the poetics and the politics of their practice, what we might call their strategy, if we consider strategy as the discipline in which a theoretical project meets its practical conditions of realization and is affected by them in return. Strategy for Debord was a question of dialectics, that is to say a matter of the relationship between form and content, means and ends, theory and practice. For the avant-garde historian, these dialectics translate into questions around the best methods and styles to adopt in order to mediate findings. This chapter constitutes an attempt to bring together a critical perspective on the traditional narrative of avant-garde history—a perspective that is rooted in so-called scientific approaches—with a stylistic concern—a concern that stems from a more formalist and poetic attention to the very medium of academic language.

4

Pinot Gallizio’s Cavern: Re-Excavating Postwar Paris Sophie Cras

On May 13, 1959, the Italian painter Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizio premiered in Paris with an exhibition titled Une caverne de l’anti-matière (A Cavern of Antimatter), at Galerie René Drouin, rue Visconti (Figure 4.1). In May 1958, Yves Klein had famously inaugurated his Void exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert, rue des Beaux-Arts. One year and a two-minute walk separated the two events, which were decidedly

Figure 4.1  René Drouin inside A Cavern of Antimatter, May 1959. Courtesy of Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin.

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thought of together by contemporary observers.1 While there was nothing to be seen but the freshly repainted empty white walls of the gallery in Klein’s exhibition, quantities of paint saturated the space of Gallizio’s Cavern: 145 meters of canvas— according to the invitation card—entirely covered the walls, ceiling, floor, and window of the gallery. Both artists had chosen a deliberately ambiguous and even antithetic title. While Yves Klein’s La Spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée (the full title of the Void exhibition) suggested the presence of raw material (matière première) to an unsuspecting reader, Gallizio’s anti-matière evoked the absence of matter rather than the invasion of thick and smelly dark paint. In 1959 Gallizio was a member of the Situationist International (SI), a left-wing revolutionary group of writers, artists, and activists founded in 1957.2 His exhibition at René Drouin was conceived as a coup against the Parisian art world—among them Yves Klein and his supporters, considered “enemies” of the SI—and required months of careful preparation by Guy Debord, the leader of the movement, as well as Michèle Bernstein and Asger Jorn, two influential members of the group.3 Until then, Gallizio, who worked in his rather secluded town of Alba, in Piedmont, Italy, had exhibited in Turin (May 1958), Milan (July 1958) and Munich (April 1959). The show at Drouin was the first opportunity for this self-taught artist to make his debut in what was then still considered the capital of European avant-garde: Paris. In recent years, Gallizio’s Cavern has received much attention by scholars.4 This reflects a growing interest in twentieth-century leftist artists’ groups, and an effort to See, for instance, Georges Boudaille, “Caverne de l’anti-matière,” Cimaise, June–July 1959, 49. The literature on the SI is vast and has been largely enriched in the past decades. For an introduction to the movement in English see Tom Mc Donough’s The Beautiful Language of My Century; Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1954–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) as well as his edition of sources in translation: Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). See also: Fabien Danesi, Le Mythe brisé de l’internationale situationniste. L’ aventure d’une avant-garde au cœur de la culture de masse (1945–2008) (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2008) and Roberto Ohrt, Phantom Avantgarde: eine Geschichte der Situationistichen Internationale und der modernen Kunst (Hamburg: Nautilus, 1997). The most comprehensive account of the “Italian section” of the SI (Gallizio) can be found in Mirella Bandini’s important book: L’ esthétique, le politique de Cobra à l’internationale Situaionniste (Marseilles: Sulliver and via Valeriano, 1998). 3 See the numerous letters on the subject in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Vol.1, Juin 1957—août 1960, ed. Alice Debord and Patrick Mosconi (Paris: Fayard, 1999). Jorn was well connected and respected in the European painting world (he had been a member of the Cobra group (1948–1951)). He was instrumental in initially convincing Drouin to make an exhibition with Gallizio, as Debord acknowledges in his first letter mentioning the project (Letter from Debord to Gallizio, November 23 [1957], 37). Afterwards, between 1957 and 1959, Debord and Berstein seem to have acted as the main intermediaries between Drouin in Paris, and Gallizio in Italy, although a few letters testify to direct exchanges between them. See: Giorgina Bertolino, Francesca Comisso, Maria Teresa Roberto (Ed.), Pinot Gallizio Il Laboratorio Della Sctittura, The Laboratory of Writing (Milan: Charta, 2005), 59–63. 4 In particular: Frances Stacey, “The Caves of Gallizio and Hirschhorn: Excavations of the Present,” October 116 (Spring 2006): 87–100; Laurent Jeanpierre, “Pinot-Gallizio et la Caverne de l’antimatière, dans l’antichambre de l’anti-monde,” Palais 2 (Spring 2007): 4–13; Nicola Pezolet, “The Cavern of Antimatter: Guiseppe ‘Pinot’ Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International,” Grey Room 38 (Winter 2010): 62–89. The remaining canvases 1

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rethink Debord’s contribution from a more open and collective perspective.5 Authors have often analyzed Gallizio’s Parisian exhibition as the practical application of the theoretical principles elaborated by the SI, such as “unitary urbanism,” “détournement,” or “dérive.”6 The Cavern has been described as a multisensory environment that effectively subverted the gallery space and sabotaged it from the inside. These contributions have played a key role in rehabilitating this previously understudied artist, and shedding light on his original contribution to the movement. They do not satisfactorily explain, however, why the Cavern was the death knell of Gallizio’s collaboration with the SI. A year later, on May 31, 1960, he was abruptly banished from the group; his laudatory monograph, published by the SI in July 1960, came out, as a note explained, “on the occasion of his exclusion from the Situationist International.”7 To understand what went wrong with the Cavern, we need to build a more accurate historical recollection of the event, outside of the legend conveyed by the SI itself, as better access to archival evidences now allows. We also need to recover the context of the Paris art worlds in the late 1950s, toward which Debord and his friends were devising their own positioning.

From Industrial Painting to the construction of an ambiance At the end of the 1950s, Gallizio’s exhibition at Drouin was one of the major projects of the SI in the field of culture. In January 1958, Debord called it a “possibility of utmost importance”8 and warned his friend: “It is needless to remind you to what extent we are all counting on you, and how decisive your role is in this enterprise, in which our Situationist friends as well as Drouin himself are taking uncommon risks.”9 The first objective was to confront the Parisian gallery-goers with Gallizio’s revolutionary “Industrial Painting.” This was the name he gave to his long strips of canvas (or populit)—as long as 74 meters— covered with abstract motives, expressive brushstrokes of thick paint and drippings of color and resins.10 In Gallizio’s previous shows, Industrial Painting appeared in the form of long rolls of canvas, partly unrolled on tables, walls or stairs, and was sold “by the meter” by Gallizio himself on the day of the opening.11 constituting the Cavern—reconstituted as such thanks to the efforts of Liliana Martano—belong to a private collection, but are deposited at Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato. Cf. Maria Teresa Roberto, ed., Pinot Gallizio, Catalogo generale delle opere 1953–1964 (Milan: Mazzotta, 2001), 133. 5 See, among others, Jacopo Galimberti, Individuals against Individualism. Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956–1969) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017). and Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy, eds., Lire Debord (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2016). 6 On this subject, see Emmanuel Guy’s contribution in this volume: “Their Paris, Our Paris: A Situationist dérive.” 7 Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn, Pinot Gallizio (Paris: Internationale Situationniste, 1960), n.p. 8 Letter from Debord to Gallizio [January 8, 1958], Debord, Correspondance, 49. 9 Letter from Debord to Gallizio, January 30, 1958, Debord, Correspondance, 57. 10 See: Roberto, Pinot Gallizio, Catalogo generale. 11 See: Selima Niggl, Pinot Gallizio: Malerei am laufenden Meter. München 1959 und die europäische Avantgarde (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2007).

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Industrial Painting was meant to suggest an assimilation between the painter and the factory worker. The mode of production in Gallizio’s studio space (called the “SI Laboratory”) involved collective work on long tables, evoking an assembly line. The mode of selling mimicked that of standard, mass-produced products for immediate consumption. As Nicola Pezolet has made clear, however, Industrial Painting in fact constituted handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces: The extremely long rolls, despite the intentionally ambiguous word industrial, were hastily produced using elementary, mostly handheld tools … For instance, in almost all of the known photographs of the laboratory, Gallizio and the other artists are seen holding traditional studio implements such as brushes and trowels.12

Claiming a direct association with the industrial and scientific world was, Pezolet argues, not only a way to pose as members of the proletarian working class, but also an attempt to supersede Surrealism, which they accused of failing to embrace new technologies. While Breton’s “automatic writing” was only metaphorically addressing the machine age, he writes, “Debord decided to use [Gallizio] to propel in Paris a view of the SI as significantly more invested in machinist technology than surrealism.”13 Industrial Painting therefore had to fulfill the contradictory objectives of making use of the most up-to-date means of production while not giving way to functionalist processes; producing on an “industrial scale” while preserving unicity and spontaneity; being “applicable” to revolutionary purposes without being useful to the capitalist leisure industry. Their large size apart, the paintings shown in Paris did not seek any visual assimilation with industry (Figure 4.2). The format was not that of the long and rather narrow rolls of canvas of Gallizio’s earlier exhibits, which allowed a somewhat linear application of paint and repetitive motives (in particular through the use of monotypes) and appeared ready to be sold “by the meter.” Instead, the large canvas adopted the more dignified format of wall paintings. They were covered in heavy impastos of paint and resins, dominantly black and brown, but contrasted with white, yellow, red, and blue. Wide shapes, almost animal-like, emerged from the ample expressive brushstrokes and animated surfaces of color, in what was reminiscent of a dark, enigmatic cave painting (like many artists of his generation, Gallizio was fascinated by prehistoric times and himself an amateur archeologist in the early 1950s).14 Indeed, Gallizio’s Cavern was meant to fulfill a

Pezolet, “The Cavern of Antimatter,” 68. Ibid., 76. See also: Maurice Fréchuret, La Machine à peindre (Paris: Jacqueline Chambon, 1994), 35–39, 115–136. 14 See Gallizio’s “Le recenti scoperte neolitiche di Alba Pompeia,” Rivista Alba Pompeia (October 1953) and other publications in Fondo Gallizio, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, section XIV. For a discussion of the cultural resonance of prehistoric discoveries in the twentieth century, see: Maria Stavrinaki and Rémi Labrusse, eds., Modernités préhistoriques, special issue of Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 126 (Winter 2013–2014). 12 13

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Figure 4.2  Giuseppe Gallizio, Caverne de l’anti-matière (detail of the back wall), 1958–1959,

mixed techniques on canvas (oil, plastic resins, solvents, pigments, wire), 210 × 368 cm, private collection. Courtesy of Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin.

different role in the SI’s programmatic agenda than his previous exhibitions. In Paris, Industrial Painting was to find its true “application”: it was sized and arranged to cover all walls of the gallery space, creating, so the invitation card stated, an “attempt at the construction of an ambiance” (Essai de construction d’une ambiance). This pointed to some of the central concepts devised by the SI at the time: the “construction of situations” and, at a larger scale, “unitary urbanism.” Unitary urbanism is defined by the journal Internationale situationniste as “the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as means contributing to the construction of a unified milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior.”15 It implied that, on the one hand, each individual art form had to merge into a larger combination at the service of a multisensory environment; and on the other hand that art had to renounce any aesthetic aspiration and ultimately disappear into “experiments of behavior” capable of transforming everyday life. As such, the project was ambitious. The visitor would penetrate into a disorienting labyrinth entirely covered in “145 meters” of canvas painted in dark, gestural abstraction. As Laurent Jeanpierre recollected it, the project also involved “mobile lightning in several colors, including infrared and ultraviolet lamps,” as well as “spectral sounds that varied greatly in intensity and range according to the spectators’ comings and goings in the premises.” “A composite smell circulated too, while a brazier burning aromatic essences outside on the sidewalk was to announce the entrance of the gallery.” Finally, the environment was inhabited by “a young woman wearing a dress tailored “Définitions,” Internationale Situationniste 1 (June 1958): 13.

15

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from a piece of Industrial Painting” walking around at her whim.16 This description, based on the numerous projects elaborated by Debord, Gallizio, and other friends of the SI during the year and a half which separated the first plans of an exhibition at Drouin and the actual event,17 does not reflect what actually occurred in May 1959. The first pitfall of our understanding of the Cavern lies in the quantity of painting used. The “145 meters” reported by most historians—which can be traced to the invitation card of the show—implies immense rolls of painting covering expanses of walls. Now this appears quite absurd, having in mind the extreme narrowness of the Galerie Drouin rue Visconti. The floor map (Figure 4.3) that Debord sent to Gallizio in the beginning of 1958 to help him prepare his canvas is telling: it shows a single, tiny room of 10 by 3.3 meters, including a staircase.18 Visitors of the Cavern in 1959 were not duped: “145 meters of paint, Drouin says; it seems a bit excessive to me” the art critic George Limbour wrote in his review for Les Lettres nouvelles.19 Gallizio’s archives contain a number of lists giving the precise measures of the canvas used in the installation: two pieces of 1.8 by 10.5 meters for the ceiling and floor; two pieces of 2.1 by 3.7 meters for the front and back walls; and for the lateral walls, one section of 2.1 by 10 meters, and two smaller sections of 2.1 by 5 and by 8 meters (to cover the staircase). Five pieces of fabric, also covered with Industrial Painting, were produced as curtains for the gallery window (and to make the model’s dress). A quick addition reveals Debord’s trick: rolls of Industrial Painting in the Cavern are not 145 meters long but 145 meters square.20 This is no insignificant difference: considering that the Galerie Drouin was covered in rolls of painting 145 meters long (the length of canvas being Gallizio’s usual standard of measure when he sold “by the meter”) commentators have overestimated the size of the exhibition space. They have taken it for a fact that spectators could “come and go” in a labyrinthine space, wander about and get lost. Such a representation suggests the Cavern as a possible staging of the Situationist dérive, and therefore as “an example of unitary urbanism,” as Frances Stacey has argued.21 She writes:

Jeanpierre, “Pinot-Gallizio et la Caverne de l’antimatière,” 7. The exhibition was initially planned for spring 1958, then postponed to the fall of 1958, then to the beginning of 1959, then to April and finally to May 1959. These successive delays had diverse causes: the Algiers putsch of May 13 and the following political crisis that led de Gaulle to power, Debord’s deferment in sending the necessary documents to Gallizio, Gallizio’s own lateness in the preparation of the paintings, and finally Drouin’s money trouble which seemed to have prevented him from paying custom duties at their arrival in France. See Debord, Correspondance, 74, 92, 164, 182, 188, 216. 18 In a letter to Gallizio dated January 30, 1958, Debord wrote: “I will shortly measure up the room and draw a floor map,” Debord, Correspondance, 57. The premises—5 rue Visconti—are now occupied by the Galerie Yann Ferrand. The space has been enlarged by dismantling the stairs and appending a neighboring corridor and an extra room. 19 Georges Limbour, “Soleils, clowns, dragons et sages,” Les Lettres nouvelles, 27 May 1959, 32. 20 The total surface covered in “Industrial Painting,” including the curtains, sums up to 146 square meters. Typescript entitled “Distinta delle tele,” Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin, file: “Documenti—Mostre—Eventi (1956–1964).” 21 Stacey, “The Caves of Gallizio and Hirschhorn,” 88. 16 17

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Figure 4.3  Map of the Galerie Drouin sent to Gallizio by Debord in 1958. Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin, file: “Documenti—Mostre—Eventi (1956–1964).”

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France and the Visual Arts since 1945 Gallizio successfully applies and extends, within the interior space of the gallery, the principle of a Situationist urban dérive, a type of collective, aleatory drifting through a cityscape in order to solicit unfamiliar, nonhabituated responses. The cavern dweller is encouraged to lose his or her way in the murky environment, to get disorientated, tactics that promote a desire to discover a new self, where established patterns of behavior are undone.22

While the idea of evocating a virtual labyrinthine space thanks to mobile lights, mirrors and other reflective surfaces was indeed evoked by Gallizio in a letter six months prior to the exhibition, it was likely never realized—no photograph or mention of it remains.23 In any case the exiguity of the Galerie Drouin excludes the possibility that a “cavern dweller” could “lose his or her way” or even “get disorientated.”

Odors, sounds, and space in Gallizio’s Cavern What I have argued with regard to the visual environment of the Cavern (its size and lightning) applies to a certain extent to its sound and smell: again, Debord and Gallizio’s plans were far more ambitious than what they would eventually accomplish. The earliest discussions of the Cavern project already involved a musical environment.24 A first plan, which involved soliciting a composition from the avant-garde musician Walter Omo, who had been one of the founding members of the SI, failed due to the latter’s exclusion from the group in January 1958.25 Gallizio then opted for a theremin, an electronic musical instrument which emitted different ranges of sounds according to the distance between a moving body and its antenna. The artist used one during his Turin exhibition of May 1958, hidden behind a roll of Industrial Painting.26 The theremin might not have proved a satisfactory solution; in any case, it was jazz music that accompanied his Munich exhibition the following year.27 As for the Paris

Ibid., 89. Letter from Gallizio to Drouin, December 8, 1958, Fondo Gallizio, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, file X: “1958.” The SI’s interest in labyrinthine spaces is evident in their 1960 exhibition project at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, eventually unrealized. See: Bandini, L’esthétique, le politique, 151 and following. 24 Music is already mentioned in a letter from Debord to Gallizio, January 30, 1958, Debord, Correspondance, 58. 25 Letter from Debord to Gallizio, February 10, 1958, Debord, Correspondance, 61–62. 26 “Vende quadri dipinti su chilometri di tela,” Gazzetta del Popolo, May 31, 1958, page missing, press clipping in Gallizio’s Dario-Registro, Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin. 27 Wolfgang Petzet, “Die Produktion hängt meterweise im Treppenhaus,” Munchner Zeitung, n.d., n.p., and “Situationisten per meter,” Haagse Post, May 2, 1959, 13, press clippings in Gallizio’s DarioRegistro, Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin. 22 23

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exhibition, no suitable solution seemed to have been found: in March 1959 Debord categorically refused Gallizio’s suggestion that they could collaborate with Pierre Schaeffer for music, and concluded that he was “thoroughly opposed to any ambient sound at galerie Drouin,” considering that it would only “add to the confusion” about what a Situationist ambiance was supposed to mean.28 Gallizio agreed to give up the musical element, admitting that it was only a “marginal question.”29 Considering this correspondence—and contrary to what most historians presuppose—it is very unlikely that any musical environment accompanied the Cavern. No review of the time mentions music. These exchanges also suggest that Gallizio and Debord had divergent priorities. While the painter tried to reconcile his unbridled imagination with the imperious practical constraints he faced, Debord was mostly preoccupied with strategic choices about the kind of positioning the exhibition would make in the artistic and intellectual context of 1959 Paris. Likewise, one can seriously question the presence of any sophisticated smells in the exhibition space. Again, a project to conceive “new perfumes” to add an olfactory dimension to the ambiance of the Cavern was in fact discussed by Gallizio and Debord.30 But when Gallizio sent his friend a proposal for a perfume of his composition—a mixture of a selection of luxury brand perfumes—Debord’s answer was, again, quite unsupportive: “We shouldn’t trouble ourselves with the creation of a perfume in a bottle.”31 Instead, he suggested burning essences in a brazier inside and outside the gallery—a solution favored by Gallizio for his Turin exhibition in May 1958.32 Was it also the solution at Drouin’s? Again, no review of the time mentions a conspicuous odor. It is true that, as Karine Bouchard and Erika Wicky have argued, critics rarely mention odors when they report on artworks,33 but in this case, it seems quite improbable that anything could be burnt inside what Georges Limbour described as an “overheated shack, likely to set on fire any moment (smoking forbidden).”34 Thus the heavy smell of fresh paint and resins might well have been the only “olfactory ambiance” of the cavern.

Letter from Debord to Gallizio [March 1959], Debord, Correspondance, 205. Letter from Gallizio to Debord, March 11 [1959], Fondo Gallizio, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, file XI: “1959.” 30 Letter from Debord to Gallizio, January 30, 1958, Debord, Correspondance, 57. 31 Letter from Debord to Gallizio, February 10, 1958, Debord, Correspondance, 62. Gallizio’s idea was later echoed by Bertrand Lavier. For a 1997 exhibition, he spread a mix of Chanel’s N°5 and Guerlain’s Shalimar. See: Deny Riout, “Art et Olfaction. Des évocations visuelles à une présence réelle,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 116 (Summer 2011): 84–109. 32 Enzo Di Calda, “Abiti d’autori,” Marie Claire, Italian edition, September 8, 1958, n.p., press clipping in Gallizio’s Dario-Registro, Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin. 33 Karine Bouchard, Erika Wicky, “Description et olfaction de l’art contemporain: les mutations de la critique d’art,” Marges, special edition 1 (Summer 2014): 82. 34 Limbour, “Soleils, clowns, dragons et sages,” 32. 28 29

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Dealing with the dealer As Debord himself noted: About the Antimondo [the alternative title for Gallizio’s Cavern] at Drouin’s, we must speak about the construction of an ambiance, and not yet a situation (1° because the work deals only with the setting, 2° most importantly: because this setting is built inside an art gallery, that is to say a space where we can orchestrate a shocking scandal, but which is fundamentally hostile and unfavorable to us).35

While his first comment consciously addresses the Cavern’s inability to be more than a “setting” (less ambitious as most writers contend as discussed above), his second and most important observation relates to the exhibition’s inner contradiction: its pretention to reject the art institutions while partaking in them.36 To work out this contradiction, historians have argued that Gallizio’s Cavern was aimed to attack the art institutions from the inside. The exhibition would thus have been conceived almost without the gallerist René Drouin’s knowing, and to his great displeasure, as Nicola Pezolet argues: Debord and Bernstein pushed the owner (whom they considered an “enemy”) to allow them to “détourn” the gallery and convert it into a synesthetic environment … Drouin reluctantly accepted this proposal, which Debord clearly intended as a criticism of the dominant mode of art exhibition of the time.37

Debord and his friends’ correspondence, however, demonstrate that Drouin was not only fully aware, but also actively and resolutely involved in the preparation of the exhibition. The gallerist required the most “astonishing” and “shocking” of Gallizio’s paintings, proving that he was courting scandal rather than reluctant to accept it.38 It was even Drouin himself who first suggested the idea that the

Letter from Debord to Gallizio, Augusta and Melanotte [Giorgio Gallizio], [February 17, 1959], Debord, Correspondance, 191. The final name of the exhibition was not quite set yet, and Debord employed “Antimondo” to refer to A Cavern of Antimatter. 36 Such a contradiction was inherent to all exhibitions of “Industrial Painting.” Michèle Berstein and Gallizio repeated on several occasions that Industrial Painting should be sold outside, in markets, shops and public spaces rather than galleries (Cf., among others: Elogio di Pinot-Gallizio, Prima mostra di pittura industriale, exh. cat. (Turin: galleria Notizie, Associazione Arti Figurative, 1958), n.p). This argument is taken as a fact by most historians. However, while Gallizio’s work was shown in four galleries and one museum in two years (between 1958 and 1960), it was shown in a public place only once: for a fortnight in October 1958 a few meters of Industrial Painting were hung in the bar La Méthode, then operated by Debord and Berstein. At this occasion, Debord himself confirmed that it was the first time Industrial Painting had been shown outside an art institution. Cf. Letters from Debord to Gallizio, September 27; October 10, 14 and 29, 1958, Debord, Correspondance, 142, 148, 150, and 153. 37 Pezolet, “The Cavern of Antimatter,” 79. 38 Letter from Debord to Gallizio [January 8, 1958], Debord, Correspondance, 49–50. 35

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whole gallery should be entirely covered in painting.39 This appetite for “taking uncommon risks,” in Debord’s words (cited above) was consistent with the dealer’s attitude throughout his earlier career. At the end of the 1950s when, as discussed below, he was going through difficult times, he might have been especially inclined to some publicity. The art historian Frances Stacey considers the Cavern as an attempted subversion of the exhibition space, and of the art gallery as an institution. She writes: The rigid geometric entry of the gallery was canceled out (or détourned) by the cavern’s sagging canvas structure and the windows to the outside world were covered over, helping to conceal, and thereby transform, this street-level location into a metaphorically low and subterranean space … By constructing this hole into the modernist white cube, Gallizio opens a space in which the subject expands rather than is contained. In a sense he unplugs modernist architecture and by so doing reveals a hole or gap in the subject—a gap between the subject and the modernist system.40

Stacey contents that, by disrupting the modernist architecture of the gallery, Gallizio’s Cavern would jeopardize the ideology of the “white cube” such as Brian O’Doherty has described it.41 However, as historian Julie Verlaine has shown, the “white cube” aesthetics—refined white walls, cubic rooms and the demise of all ornamentation in favor of diffuse daylight coming down from the ceiling—was in fact not adopted by Parisian gallerists until the second half of the 1960s. The kind of “modernist” space that Stacey pictures is decidedly not that of the Galerie René Drouin rue Visconti. Debord’s floor map, as well as the photographs he took for Gallizio (Figure 4.4) suffice to make this clear. Shadowed, irregularly shaped with a low ceiling and dark upholstered walls, the gallery is far from being the “rigid geometric” space described by Stacey. Likewise, when commentators of the Cavern describe a “fashionable gallery on Rue Visconti in the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” they convey an inaccurate image of what was then the Galerie Drouin.42 Admittedly, Drouin’s name could evoke the glorious past of his spacious and luxurious gallery on place Vendôme where he exhibited Wols, Jean Fautrier, or Jean Dubuffet between 1943 and 1951. However, following a seizure for unpaid debts in March 1951, the dealer had to leave the premises and moved into 5 rue Visconti in November 1953. Reflecting his change of fortune, his new address lacked the elegance of the previous one: “How sad,” Geneviève Bonnefoi recalled, “to find him in the minuscule gallery of rue Visconti, after the splendor of

Letter from Debord to Augusta Rivabella-Gallizio, September 11, 1958, Debord, Correspondance, 136. Stacey, “The Caves of Gallizio and Hirschhorn,” 88–89, 93. 41 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 42 Pezolet, “The Cavern of Antimatter,” 78. 39

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Figure 4.4  Outside view of Galerie Drouin, Fall 1958. Photographs taken in preparation for A Cavern of Antimatter and sent to Gallizio by Debord. Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin, file: Gallizio’s Dario-Registro.

place Vendôme!”43 Located on the street level in a narrow street—chosen for this precise reason by Christo and Jeanne-Claude for their Iron Curtain in 1962—the little room, which Leo Castelli named “a cubbyhole,” caught almost no daylight.44 Furthermore, the evocation of the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés should not have us forget that the rue Visconti was then located in a dilapidated, decrepit area. In the early 1960s, a report of the Historical Monuments department even recommended the demolition of the 5 rue Visconti—and the adjacent buildings, numbers 7, 11, 13, and 15 of the same street—judging that “dwelling in the most shameful manner” they constituted “the most insalubrious section of the block.”45 Small, dark, and humid, the Galerie Drouin rue Visconti was definitely not a fancy modernist white cube that the Cavern would jeopardize from the inside. In a sense, it was already potentially a “cavern”—or a “cave” (“une antre”) in the recollection Geneviève Bonnefoi, “5, rue Visconti,” in René Drouin, Galeriste et éditeur d’art visionnaire, Le Spectateur des Arts, 1932–1962, exh. cat. (Les Sables d’Olonnes : Cahiers de l’ Abbaye Sainte-Croix, 2001), 151. 44 Leo Castelli, quoted in Ann Hindry, ed., Claude Berri rencontre Leo Castelli (Paris: Renn, 1990), 18. 45 Report signed by Maurice Berry, Chief Architect of the Monuments Historiques, 29. Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Fonds Maurice Berry, 95/35/14. I am grateful to Baptiste EssevazRoulet (responsible for the website www.ruevisconti.com) for providing me with this archival document. 43

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of Hubert Damisch46—and Gallizio, in full agreement with Drouin, intensified this identity more than he subverted it.

Paris art worlds in the late 1950s That Gallizio’s Cavern was not as spectacular, sophisticated or critical of its host institution as historians would have it should not come as a disappointment, or diminish our interest in its significance. Rather than reading the exhibition as an illustration of the SI’s theoretical objectives, and as institutional critique avant la lettre, we should consider it in its own historical terms. In its dialogue with Gallizio, it was Debord himself who derailed most efforts to make the exhibition at Drouin a more refined and complex environment. For all his desire to attract attention on the Paris art scene, he consistently refused to be associated with what could be perceived as a fashionable or stylish—such as a collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer, for instance. At the end of the 1950s, transforming the gallery space into an encompassing multisensory environment, including sounds, odors and “performances,” was threatening to become an avant-garde must. Already in 1938, this was the format chosen for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, at the Galerie Beaux-Arts. It included a central space designed by Marcel Duchamp, whose ceiling was obstructed by 1,200 coal sacks in suspension (according to the exhibition catalog, which visibly anticipated the SI’s inclination for inflated numbers). The feeble lightning, the carpet of leaves covering the floor and the pond with water lilies created the atmosphere of “an immense vaulted grotto,” in the writer Marcel Jean’s terms.47 While a smell of coffee perfumed the space, a phonograph released sounds of hysterical laughs. At the instigation of Salvador Dalí, an actress named Hélène Vanel performed in the space on the opening night.48 Such experiments were reactivated within the context of the 1950s Surrealist group, which, far from being relegated to the interwar past, was an indispensable point of reference for the artistic scene of the period.49 The Surrealist exhibition EROS at Galerie Cordier in 1959 was a lavish socialite event, whose magnificent inclusive thematic rooms, conceived by Pierre Faucheux and Marcel Duchamp, involving smells, sounds, and animated elements of décor, were photographed by William Klein for Vogue Hubert Damisch, “Salut l’artiste,” in René Drouin, 162. Quoted in Uwe M. Schneede, “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Paris 1938,” in L’ art de l’ exposition. Une documentation sur trente expositions exemplaires du XXe siècle, ed. Bernd Klüser and Katharina Hegewisch (Paris: éd. du Regard, 1998), 181. 48 See a full account in Schneede, “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Paris 1938,” 173–188. 49 Some of its legacy is discussed by Fabrice Flahutez in Nouveau Monde et Nouveau Mythe: mutations du surréalisme de l’ exil américain à l’Ecart absolu (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2007), and his introduction to Le lettrisme historique était une avant-garde (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2011). See also: Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les avant-gardes artistiques (1945–1968): Une histoire transnationale (Paris: Gallimard, forthcoming). 46

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magazine.50 It was such glamor that the young and still unknown Yves Klein was aiming for, from the modest premises of the small Iris Clert Gallery. He humorously devised his own pomp and circumstance, requesting the presence of Republican guards to keep the entrance and distributing blue cocktails on the opening.51 On this Parisian scene of the late 1950s, exhilarated by an unprecedented art market boom and beguiled by the sweet illusion to still stand as the unquestioned art capital of the world, divided between an established avant-garde and ambitious newcomers, the Situationists were trying to occupy a different position. They intensified their attacks against what they saw as an absorption of Surrealism by capitalist forces— the symptom of its “bitter victory”—and showed no more mercy toward the young generation perceived as careerist and reactionary.52 Purposely, they did not chose a young, aspiring, and industrious gallerist like Iris Clert, but rather a merchant who had accompanied the Surrealists’ ascension (Drouin had held an exhibition of Surrealist objects as early as 1939).53 The SI did not try to cheat a fashionable dealer, and to play a trick on him to punish him for making a fortune by selling avant-garde art. They concluded a provisionary alliance with a respected but ruined merchant, whose art gallery had gone bankrupt and was now eking out a living in a narrow room. Likewise, the SI’s hopes to make a scandalous coup in the Parisian art world did not go so far as to betray their principles of authentic simplicity, economy of means, and deliberate amateurishness. It is therefore unsurprising that critics would call Gallizio’s painting “bloody or tarry daub, hasty, viscous and trickling” or dismiss it as a realization “whose style offers no distinctive feature worth mentioning.”54 Despite all of Debord’s wishes to turn Gallizio’s exhibition into a theoretical demonstration, theory yielded before the poor, simple beauty of a decrepit Parisian street, evocative of an urban space still full of promises and the possibility of insurrection. “Right now the rue Visconti is gorgeous,” Debord wrote to Gallizio in January 1959, “with one end shut off by a construction scaffolding that we can cover up in posters and random objects.”55

Claire Boustani, “VIIIe Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (Eros), 1959–1960,” in Dictionnaire de l ’objet surréaliste, ed. Didier Ottinger (Paris: Gallimard and Centre Pompidou, 2013), 112. 51 Yves Klein, “Préparation et présentation de l’ exposition du 28 avril 1958 chez Iris Clert, 3 rue des Beaux-Arts à Paris,” in Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art et autres écrits, ed. Marie-Anne Sichère and Didier Semin (Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 2003), 84–95. 52 “Amère victoire du surréalisme,” Internationale Situationniste, 1 (June 1958): 3–4. “L’absence et ses habilleurs,” Internationale Situationniste, 2 (December 1958): 7. On the perception of Yves Klein as a careerist, see Michèle Bernstein’s declaration to Yan Ciret, quoted in: Yan Ciret, “Yves Klein, une icône du dépassement de l’art,” in Figures de la négation. Avant-gardes du dépassement de l’art, ed. Yan Ciret (Paris and Saint-Étienne: Paris Musées and Musée d’art Moderne de Saint Etienne Métropole, 2004), 115. 53 Maurice Imbert, “René Drouin: Un Itinéraire,” in René Drouin. 54 Pierre Restany, “Caverne de l’anti-matière,” Cimaise, June–July 1959, 49; Boudaille, “Caverne de l’anti-matière,” 49. 55 Letter from Debord to Gallizio, January 22, 1959, Debord, Correspondance, 182. 50

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One year after the Cavern, Gallizio was officially excluded from the SI. Debord may very well have been irritated by his friend’s growing success among the art world he hoped to fight—the Cavern was bought by the wealthy collector Marinotti, and won the respect of the art critic Pierre Restany, the curator Willem Sandberg, and the painter Georges Mathieu.56 But, rather than considering this exclusion as a sign of the failure of the Cavern, we might see it as the logical, ultimate step of a process already in action during the preparation of the exhibition, which led to the drastic reduction of its ambitions. Debord was progressively renouncing to compete with the Paris art worlds on their own ground, and maneuvering a way out.

See: Gallizio’s Dario-Registro, and typescript entitled “Distinta delle tele,” Archivio Gallizio, Galleria Martano, Turin.

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Agnès Varda’s du Côté de la Côte: Place as “Sociological Phenomenon” Rosemary O’Neill

The Commande de l’Office National du Tourisme commissioned Agnès Varda to complete a short documentary on the subject of the French Riviera in 1958 after the success of her first tourist short, Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux (O Seasons, O Castles, 1957), an official selection to the Cannes Film Festival earlier that same year. It was just months later, in July and August, that Varda traveled along the French Riviera with her notebook, le guide bleu, and “Rolleiflex around her neck” in preparation for eight weeks of filming during the height of the 1958 summer tourist season (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1  Agnès Varda, Notebook, du Côté de la Côte, 1958. © Ciné-Tamaris.

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Varda had already completed her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (The Short Point, 1954), set in her native fishing village of Sète. Her keen attention to the very materiality of place is an informative element of this narrative, a force with detectable effect on the local characters’ actions and motivations.1 Shot in black-and-white film, the tension between the main characters, a couple seeking to revive their marriage, is a parallel to the inhabitants of the town straining to maintain their regional culture despite the effects of industry and commerce signaling the demise of an existence predicated on an inextricable link with the sea. The textural quality of this film—its attention to searing light, wooden ship-making as a tradition and refuge, and the physical features and reserve of the main characters, inspired by the mid-Renaissance master Piero della Francesca in contrast with the informal expressivity of the villagers— results in a pervasive sense of existential uneasiness. This formal rigor and attention to material details are also evident in Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux, which veered away from conventional promotional travelogues by manifesting the director’s subjectivity through an articulation of the author’s voice.2 As Bill Nichols has noted, this is evidenced by “a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting.”3 Titled after an Arthur Rimbaud poem from his publication Une saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell),4 Varda devotes eight minutes of this twenty-two-minute court-métrage (short film) to the famed chateaux architecture,5 with much attention devoted to fashion models in haut couture by Jacques Heim, while commentary by groundskeepers and a voiceover of readings by famed sixteenth-century poets dispenses with any sense of documentary objectivity. These early signature elements—a focus on materials and an essayist approach— inform du Côté de la Côte (Along the Coast, 1958). She later explains in her “cousin album,” La Côte d’Azur (1961), that her aim was less “to showcase the French Riviera town by town, but rather to pose questions to the landscape itself.”6 It is through the geography of place that she seeks to uncover the motivations of tourists who crowd the region during their “window of freedom”; and to interrogate these modern tourists’ aspirations within the context of the history of travel, writing, and art along this slip of Ginette Vincendeau, 4 by Agnès Varda (New York: The Criterion Collection, film notes, 2008), no page. 2 Claudia Gorbman, “Finding a Voice: Varda’s Early Travelogues,” SubStance 41, no. 2, issue 128 (2012): 40, accessed April 22, 2014, doi: 10.1353/sub.2012.0018. 3 Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” in Film Quarterly—Forty Years: A Selection, ed. Brian Henderson and Ann Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 246–247, accessed May 26, 2015, d0e: 5582. 4 Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, filmographie par Bernard Bastide (Paris: Éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1994), 229. The film also features Antoine Bourseiller reading poems by sixteenth-century poets Pierre de Ronsard, Charles d’Orléans, François Villon, and Clément Marot. 5 Jean-André Fieschi and Claude Ollier, “A Secular Grace: Agnès Varda,” trans. T. Jefferson Klein, Cahiers du cinema 165 (April 1965), reprinted in Agnès Varda: Interviews, ed. T. Jefferson Kline (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 27. Varda states: “Worthy of a student of the Louvre Art School.” 6 Agnès Varda, La Côte d’Azur (Paris: Les Éditions du Temps, 1961), no page. 1

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Mediterranean coast. Her preparatory still photographs constitute a “picture-sequence” approach to film, where each shot can stand as a still photo and function to alter the tempo of the film sequences within the whole.7 The opening sequences distinguish the major towns from Menton to Saint-Tropez via postcards, commissioned train posters, and photographs. With a twist of wit, Varda juxtaposes a Belle Époque poster/postcard of Menton with a contemporary fashion shot taken from the same tourist vantage point, thus reinforcing the ways that modern geographic spaces are “postcarded” to identify the totality of the locale in a single enduring image8 (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2  F. Hugo d’ Alési, Menton, travel poster, 1895. Fashion photograph, Menton, du Côté de la Côte. © Ciné-Tamaris. Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), chapter 2. Naomi Schor, as quoted in Jordana Mendelson and David Prochaska, “Introduction,” Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), xii.

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Varda further signals her aim to survey the region’s identity through a play of readymade images and highly structured film sequences where humor emphasizes the incongruity and clashing perceptions of place.9 By entering the phenomenon of mass tourism through the perspective tourist geography, she also probes the locale’s underlying “place-myth,”10 the clichés associated with specific regions, to construct a “film-essay.” Varda chose the overriding theme of exoticism as the key attribute of the French Riviera. With its root in Greek word eksotikos, emphasizing the region’s foreign-ness, this “capricious outline of a coast” has a Mediterranean history of being outside, an outpost beyond French borders until 1860—with a legacy of myth and cosmopolitanism that has endured since its classical beginnings. The promotion of both recreational and cultural tourism in the post-Second World War era reaffirmed the French Riviera as an international destination rich with geographic and artistic capital. From its history as a health resort to the luxury tourism of the Belle Époque and postwar egalitarian tourism, the geographic experience played a stabilizing role in naturalizing these shifting social and political values.11 The complex relationships between residents and tourists became more pronounced as the congés payés (paid vacation), instituted on June 20, 1936, afforded state-guaranteed vacation that was expanded to three weeks in 1956, increasing government, partisan, and commercial interests in the region. The value of leisure itself became a topic of public discourse, a counterpart to changes in industrial production, as exemplified by Michel Crozier’s view that the rigidities and tensions within French society necessitated leisure time.12 With a fivefold increase in tourists along the French Riviera in the 1950s and early 1960s,13 the development of this leisure zone became inseparable from postwar consumerism, with the Côte d’Azur epitomizing an experiential commodity in popular magazines, French and American films,14 and resort fashion and product features. Varda worked with producers Anatole Dauman and Philippe Lifschitz (who appears with his wife as the couple in Eden in the film) for Argos Productions, known for their support and promotion of young vanguard directors. In this courtmétrage, Varda also interrogates her own prejudices against tourist sites, which she

Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. R. Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), 46–47. 11 Ellen Furlough, “Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970,” Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 1998, 248–249, accessed May 9, 2012, doi: 0010–4175/2454–0310. 12 Michel Crozier, as quoted in John Ardagh, The New French Revolution: A Social and Economic Survey of France, 1945–1967 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 282. 13 Ibid., 281–283. 14 Agnès Varda, La Côte d’Azur (Paris: Les Éditions du Temps, 1961), no page. Varda illustrates this point with reference to three films: La Dame de Shanghai, La Main au collet, Folies de Femmes. 9

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has admitted in relation to both of her tourist documentaries.15 One senses this bias as Varda distances herself from her subject, while using her still photographs, her script and music lyrics as a diegetic proxy to construct a narrative framework. The film begins with the refrain “azur, azur, azur,” perhaps an ode to her former Sorbonne professor Gaston Bachelard16 or to Stéphen Liégeard, who first coined the phrase “Côte d’Azur” in 1887. The bird’s-eye view of this opening sequence above the port of Nice tracks sea and sky as a continuous blue space from a classically fitted pavilion. Her use of vivid color signals awareness of a Mediterranean palette identifiable in painters from Pierre Bonnard and Matisse to Nicolas de Staël and Yves Klein, who, in 1957, decided to concentrate on the single color blue for his monochrome paintings, emblematic of his concept of pure space.17 Varda also evokes the timelessness and limitlessness of this monochromatic expanse soon brought into focus with George Delerue’s nostalgic musical homage to the charms of the coastal capitals from the resort of Menton on the Italian border with its celebrated gardens to Saint-Tropez’s picturesque port.18 Evoking the ambiance of the Belle Époque, Varda introduces the region as a mecca of the leisure class affording this string of coastal towns historical specificity with stills of promotional railroad travel posters and contemporary shots of key tourist destinations. Enlisting cinematographer Quinto Albicocco, a native of Cannes who had just filmed Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux, the choice of 35 mm Eastman color film enhances vivid effects and heightens the ocular-centric experience of tourism, which Varda described as “very baroque.”19 This visual effect, combined with Varda’s experimentation with formal elements such as abrupt juxtapositions, extended tracking shots, pan shots, and the interplay of words and images (“Living or dead, the location is ideal”—a breezy

Smith, Agnès Varda, 61. Agnès Varda, as quoted in “The Underground River: Interview with Gordon Gow,” Film and Filming (March 1970): 7. “My idea was to become a museum curator, which I didn’t. But this professor, Gaston Bachelard—he’s dead now—he really blew my mind. He was a very old man with a beard, and he had this dream of the material in people; a psychoanalysis of the material world related to people, wood, rivers, the sea, fire, wind, air, all of these things … He taught us to study writers not by the stories they told but by the material things they mentioned.” 17 There are several publications on these topics. See for example, Kenneth E. Silver, Making Paradise: Art, Modernity and the Myth of the French Riviera (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Impressions of the Riviera Monet, Renoir, Matisse and their Contemporaries, exh. cat. (Portland, OR: Portland Museum of Art, June 25–October 18, 1998); Rosemary O’Neill, Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956–1971 (Burlington, VT, and Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012). Yves Klein’s eleven identical blue monochrome paintings were first shown in Milan’s Galleria Apollinaire from January 2–12, 1957, commencing his “blue period”; this exhibition was followed in May 1957 with the exhibition “Yves: le monochrome” at Galerie Iris Clert (May 10–25) and “Pigment Pur” at Galerie Colette Allendy (May 14–23). Also see: Yves Klein, “The Monochrome Adventure,” extracts Yves Klein, 1928–1962: Selected Writings (London: Tate Gallery, 1974), 31. It is unclear whether Varda knew of Klein’s work at this time. 18 Gorbman, “Finding a Voice,” 48. Gorbman characterizes Georges Delerue’s accompaniment as “touristic music in bel canto with guitar and mandolin” set to Varda’s lyrics. 19 Fieschi and Ollier, “A Secular Grace: Agnès Varda,” 29. 15 16

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comment that links camping sites with cemeteries), her tightly structured image sequences and counterpoint script exemplify what she referred to as cinécriture.20 One of the overarching themes in this court-métrage is the stability of the geographic environment—sea, sky, trees, coastline, and an island—in contrast with a parallel cyclical production of space21—seasonal travel, fashion events, and camping. Edgar Morin observed how in the postwar era the cycle of vacations “punctuate the year and become the object of planning and imagination.”22 While for Varda the reason people choose the Côte d’Azur as the destination is not obvious, reinforcing her role as observer and agent in the production of this cinematic discourse.23 With Varda’s cinematic focus on the allure of this landscape as a tourist motivation, she quickly dispenses with some of its picturesque residents in less touristic towns such as Cogolin—“the natives are always elderly and invariably charming.” Staged as living tableaux, she dispatches them to their countryside existence along with the ox and the donkey seen pulled across the screen as if opening a stage curtain. With this tracking shot, we, too, are led into the author’s real subject, “the crowd: the tourists, sightseers, and migrants who assemble here for their interlude of freedom.”24 And with this, she describes her aim to position her film “between a documentary on the Côte d’Azur and an essay on tourism, between le guide bleu and la petite planète.”25 In her cousin album she describes her approach as a “conversation” because the Côte d’Azur is both a “place and a sociological phenomenon.”26 Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1994): 14.

20

J’ai lancé ce mot et maintenant je m’en sers pour indiquer le travail d’un cinéaste. Il renvoie à leurs cases le travail du scénariste qui écrit sans tourner et celui du réalisateur qui fait sa mise en scène. Cela peut être la même personne mais la confusion persiste souvent. J’en ai tellement assez d’entendre: C’est un film bien écrit, sachant que le compliment est pour le scénario et pour les dialogues.   Un film bien écrit est également bien tourné, les acteurs sont bien choisis, les lieux aussi. Le découpage, les mouvements, les points de vue, le rythme du tournage et du montage ont été sentis et pensés comme les choix d’un écrivain, phrases denses ou pas, type de mots, fréquence des adverbes, alinéas, parenthèses, chapitres continuant le sens du récit ou le contrariant, etc.   En écriture c’est le style. Au cinéma, le style c’est la cinécriture. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. 22 Edgar Morin, as quoted in Furlough, “Making Mass Vacations,” 264. 23 Fieschi and Ollier, “A Secular Grace: Agnès Varda,” 28. 24 Ibid., 29. “The film belongs to a genre of observation which is very indulgent as indicated by the voiceover. The idea is that people are looking for a kind of Eden which they feel they have a right to because they are so tired. It isn’t really their fault if the Eden the Côte d’Azur offers is so tacky. But whatever the reason, this tacky Eden alludes to another, the greater idea of Eden—the idea of rest for the weary which is a beautiful idea, a fundamental idea.” 25 Varda, La Côte d’Azur, no page. Also note that Varda’s close friend Chris Marker became editor of La Petite Planète published by Editions de Seuil in Paris in 1954. He avoided promotional propaganda generally associated with tourist books, favoring instead some intimate link with place through conversation with one informed about the country, corresponding with the intimacy of his film script style. Varda would become a contributor to this publication under Marker’s editorship. Anatole Dauman of Argos Films, also financed Marker’s travel documentary, Lettre de Sibérie in 1958 and Editions de Seuil briefly launched a series of “ciné-essai” with Marker’s film on North Korea. 26 Ibid. 21

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Varda initially claims that the Côte d’Azur is an English invention, providing evidence of their power in shaping Nice through urban design, postcard images and historical photographs, and the English presence in its place-names: Promenade des Anglais, l’Église Anglaise, la Pharmacie Anglaise. But she also discovers layering of diverse identities, showing the image of the “English pharmacy” on the Boulevard d’Italie below the graffiti “Le Côte d’Azur” in Nice’s Vieille Ville, revealing another side of the history.27 Varda uses visual analogies and juxtapositions to convey a sense of time. In her still photographs of the inflorescence of an Agave Americana, also known as the “century plant,” with its once-per-century flowering, she moves to an echo of this vegetal form in the electric poles’ ceramic caps, a visual trope of a musical score; this is followed by a visual shift to an approaching train along parallel wires where time is measured in departure and arrival schedules. In this sequential arrangement, she relates botanical time, musical time, and spatial time. By contrast, mass tourism mobility was enabled by an increase in postwar buying power used principally to purchase cars.28 Varda captures the optimal advertising image with her shot of a fashionable ingénue arriving at a luxury hotel in a convertible sports car to the welcome embrace of the concierge. This sequence presents a more immediate temporality where fashion, speed, and youth epitomize the contemporary moment. Through Varda’s observation of a hotel concierge in Cannes, we witness the breakdown of elegant travel. Once at the disposition of the wealth with a comportment matching their own, the concierges of luxury hotels upheld social and economic distinctions. Now this formality appears out of synch with the new realities, but reinforcement of social hierarchy soon comes into focus in the ways in which Varda films areas restricted by privatization of gated estates, hotels, and gardens. The French Riviera embodies what Arjun Appadurai calls the “touristic imaginaries,” a transnational phenomenon of “imagined vistas and mass-mediated master narratives.”29 Two areas where Varda explores these cultural narratives are in literature and the visual arts. Her research into literary figures from Dante to Françoise Sagan reinforces the importance of place in inspiring these “touristic imaginaries” over Varda’s later feature films Daguerréotypes (1975) and Mur, Murs (1980) reinforce her sensitivity to the sociological diversities of urban spaces as a “documentarist.” In Daguerréotypes, an intimate experience of her local street in the 14th arrondissement, the only still images are the “daguerreotype portraits” combined with her aim to have “the camera running all the time.” See: Mireille Amiel, “Agnès Varda Talks about the Cinema,” in Agnès Varda Interviews, ed. T. Jefferson Kline (Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 65–66. Varda describes Mur, Murs as “a 1980 ‘look’ at the murals in Los Angeles and their socio-political context.” Varda as quoted in Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 74. 28 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Re-ordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1995), 19. She points to a correlation between the modernization of production facilities for the manufacture of cars and the focus of French spending power directed to the acquisition of cars. 29 Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 201. 27

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a half-century. Yet with humor, she likens the face of Colette to the local cats and she finds the schoolboy Apollinaire among the elegant pilgrims in Monaco. This aspect of Varda’s research is expanded in the cousin album where one finds a “Tableau d’Honneur des Belles-Lettres ‘du Côté de la côte,’” a double-page featuring locket-size photographs of writers with accompanying phrases such as, “une lune de miel à Monaco … ” and a drawing of opera glasses under the photograph of Émile Zola.30 From the Divine Comedy to Tender is the Night, the effects of the region are evident in literary history. Turning to the visual arts, Varda, who studied art history at the Louvre, displays Joseph Vernet’s Vue d’Antibes (1756), a landscape showing the border area of France with a distant view of Nice, then on the Italian coast. With this pastoral scene, she shifts its modern equivalent in Picasso’s La Joie de Vivre (Antipolis) of 1946, installed in the Château Grimaldi, an idyllic memory of the town’s Greek origins set before a blue field of sea and sky celebrating the joy and sensuality of the Mediterranean. Varda’s use of still images freezes history momentarily, locking in a sense of historical time. But in a witty turn, Varda emphasizes that it is Picasso, the “baker,” who reigns having succeeded in reviving the regional ceramic production in the hill town of Vallauris, and whose local celebrity can only be challenged by the sun itself. Varda speculates that it is this pure solar power that draws the crowds to the beaches where the tanning rituals shift the beachfront into a surreal space of body fragments, plastics, beach towels, and snorkeling equipment, which she approaches with the eye of an “inquisitive anthropologist”31 and that of the art historian. Using bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye perspectives, she references the Surrealist cadavre exquis, and the technique of foreshortening as seen in Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480). Varda constructs playful juxtapositions highlighting the strangeness of beach behaviors and seashore accessories, which turns this coastal expanse into a crowded, bizarre landscape (Figure 5.3). The beachfront is also where one detects the French rapport with its own seaside through the choice of color-seasonal fashion. Expanding the blue of shoreline onto the body, the French sunbathers pay homage to their environment, while a penchant for red and yellow beachwear quickly distinguishes the English tourists, and the fashion-failure green bathing suits worn by the Germans seem to justify their placement in crowded camping grounds. The posturing of women in these scenes is reflected in accompanying music with quick upbeat notes as French women promenade in resort wear, slowing to a two-note brass musical interpretation of the sigh “uh-oh,” as the German campers circle back and forth in and out of tightly packed tents in ill-fitting bathing suits. This sequence reflects a broader sentiment that the French Riviera is French and the geography itself has now been inscribed into a national agenda. Varda quotes Paul Haag, a prefect from the Midi in her companion publication. He describes the French The rosters of literary figures in this cousin album are: Apollinaire, Zola, Colette, Nietzsche Giraudoux, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Sagan, and Dante. She includes excerpts of their works on the inside covers of this publication. 31 Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2014), 96. 30

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Figure 5.3  Sunbathing on the Riviera, still frame, du Côté de la Côte. © Ciné-Tamaris. Riviera coastline in 1949 as an “immense tri-color flag,” and a decade later, deputy mayor of Nice, Jean Médecin, defines the region as the gateway and essence of France (“la porte et synthèse de la France”). Furthermore, given the rise of La Jeunesse with greater mobile and social independence, the Côte d’Azur became a manifest symbol of France’s recovered vitality,32 exemplifying health and rejuvenation of the French nation. Celebrity icon Brigitte Bardot personifies this spirit and Varda includes a clip in which Bardot appears as a free-spirited force in the streets of Saint-Tropez. According to Simone de Beauvoir, who would soon champion Bardot as revolutionizing the image of women in postwar France, Bardot represented “eroticism brought down to earth.”33 She is also a tourist phenomenon in Varda’s film, drawing crowds to Saint-Tropez for a glimpse of her aura, even while she remains an illusion. In her absence, tourists satisfy their fantasy by lingering in cafés in hope of an appearance. Place and image united in the 1950s to redefine the Côte d’Azur as young and sensual with a modern taste distinct from that of Paris, the adult capital. Film stars featured in popular magazines and exploding paparazzi established the celebrity Ardagh, The New French Revolution, 339. Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972), 12. Originally published Esquire (August 1959) trans. Bernard Fretchman, with Reynal & Co., Inc., 1960, 24.

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culture of the Cannes Film Festival, and Varda showcases a roster of international stars whose appearances at galas and along the Cannes beach celebrate this rendezvous of extravagance. But the theme of inaccessibility parallels her theme of proximity, as this Eden of the Hexagon is at once perceptible yet unattainable. So, whether a celebrity autograph or a chef-d’oeuvre by Henri Matisse, the tourist must substitute yearning with an empty alternative, and in the case of Matisse, a visit to his gravesite in Cimiez as Varda jauntily remarks, “even the dead have their following.” The specter of fatality also finds its way into the “the most spacious form of freedom,” with Varda referring to crowded campgrounds as a “giant still-life,” the counterpart to the region’s famed cemeteries. She also turns to architectural spectacles scattered from the Var to the Italian border, a pastiche of the far-flung exotic: the Chinese pagoda (Fréjus), Sudanese mosque (Fréjus—“Africa is calling you”), Middle Eastern palaces (Menton and Monte Carlo), and Nice’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral (1900). Likewise, the fabricated botanical gardens of Monte Carlo and the extravagant garden collections at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild exemplify desire for paradise-like spaces. Yet Varda portrays tourists as displaying scant interest in these botanical wonders as they file through on tours, and with rather more interest in marking their visits by scratching their initials into these exotic specimens. If the gardens provide scenic diversions, her attention to the indigenous marvels of a thousand-year-old olive tree (Beaulieu) or century-old cork oak (Saint-Cassein) showcase exceptional yet near-invisible phenomena. It was Jean-Luc Godard who first recognized the importance that wood played in Varda’s film La Pointe Courte. And her attention to these enduring trees as she lingers on their surface textures reveals a cast of nostalgia for these rare specimens as if to suggest that one can hardly register the value of nature in contemporary notions of paradise. Varda then erratically pans back and forth between the signs on hotels named “Eden,” a sequence that captures the sheer elusiveness of this collective dream. This turbulent scene breaks into the raucous claustrophobia of the Carnival in Nice, controlled disorder and, ultimately, a restoration of social order played out in the frenzy and exhaustion of this popular culture festival.34 Varda seizes on the violence of the carnival, especially the relationship between men and women, as she repeatedly juxtaposes a scantily clad reveler with a dagger-wielding papier-mâché character. Jean Vigo earlier highlighted the surreal quality of the carnival in his social documentary, À Propos de Nice (About Nice), a collaboration with cinematographer Boris Kauffman, brother of Dziga Vertov, combining a cinemaessay approach with Surrealist techniques inspired by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog).35 Both directors use repetition in their sequences of the carnival, but where Vigo uses slow motion to create a dreamlike sequence, Varda’s emphasizes the frenetic aspects and brutality through closely

David Picard and Mike Robinson, Festivals, Tourism, and Social Change: Remaking Worlds (Clevedon, Buffalo, and Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2006), 18–19. 35 When Varda’s film La Pointe Courte was first shown in 1956 at the Studio Parnasse in Paris, it was shown with Jean Vigo’s Apropos de Nice. See: Richard John Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 60. 34

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observed details. An example of this is the torching of the “king of the carnival,” filmed at close proximity to capture the fire’s intensity. An immediate counterpoint to the destruction at the carnival’s end is the calmness of dawn, as she the then proposes, “Eden exists.” With the Île de Porquerolles in the distance, we accompany the director as the camera rocks back and forth in a dinghy as the island draws near. Yet, even this sequence is not without cliché—a pair of freerunning horses in an isolated cove; close-ups of roots of native coastal pines wind and twist in a serpentine manner across the sand; a pair of abandoned espadrilles and towels signal distance from civilization; and finally, a couple in slumber, a modern Adam and Eve. This is the collective dream she imagines motivates the crowds seeking rest in their time of freedom. Instead, this côte mal taillée (badly cut coast) is an unsatisfactory compromise leaving tourists with the “false Adams” and “false Eves” in “false grottos” on exhibit in designed gardens. For Varda, Eden is nostalgia for the natural world forever lost in the inescapable rhythms of modernity. So any illusion of utopia becomes a fading dream as the summer season ends, and this false Eden shuts down that brief “interlude of freedom” in a wistful haze. George Delerue’s voice captures that sense of loss, concluding, “La fin de la fête, la fin de l’ été,” as Varda’s still photographs of gated coastlines, shuttered beach umbrellas, and the vestiges of a gala celebration underscore how intangible this dream of contemporary Eden remains (Figure 5.4). But, this persistent desire, even for a counterfeit paradise, animates the tourist cycle with its unrealized desires and collective aspirations. Marc Boyer has pointed out that meanings assigned to places are embedded in the historically contingent and shared cultural understandings of the terrain. They are a means by which we perceive and remember.36 The French Riviera, with its Mediterranean echo of arcadia and exoticism, does retain the “shared cultural meaning of its terrain” and has adapted to the desire for escape from the modern world, as a space on which dreams are projected. The Côte d’Azur is more than a scenic backdrop, with geographic agency capable of maintaining and producing meanings. Thomas Gieryn has suggested that place actually saturates social life: it is one medium (along with historical time) through which social life happens.37 Varda’s film is fully attuned to the effects of geography on the social sphere in her probing of mass tourism motivations. But what remains striking about this film is the sense that the French Riviera is both a privileged geography and an illusion that becomes tangible only seasonally. With the near-absence of residents, she implies that there is yet another place, hidden but real, with its own social life inaccessible to transient populations; but for the tourists, when the party ends, there is no one in sight. Varda’s film captures the success of mass tourism, but the pursuit of paradise does not exist within a vacuum. The realization of mass vacations along this Mediterranean coast discloses a model of postwar modernity contingent upon on social factors: the Marc Boyer, Histoire générale du tourisme du XVIe au XXIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). Thomas Gieryn, “A Place for Space in Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 463–496. http://www.jstor.org/stable/223453.

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Figure 5.4  Summer’s end, still frame, du Côté de la Côte. © Ciné-Tamaris. fulfillment of French policy (congés payés), structuring of free-time and holiday zones, emphasis on youth and recreation, and the “touristic imaginaries” that positioned this region as an Eden of the Hexagon. But the inventive finesse of Varda’s film transcends its formal rigor and counterpoints of script and music. Godard described this film as the “journal of a free-spirited woman let loose between Nice and Saint-Tropez”38 and it has an esteemed place within the history of French travel-inspired film and writing. Godard wrote: Du Côté de la côte est un film admirable. C’est France Roche multipliée par Chateaubriand (celui des Impressions d’Italie), par Delacroix (celui de Croquis africains), par Madame de Staël (celle de De l’Allemagne), par Proust (celui des Pastiches et mélanges), par Aragon (celui d’ Anicet ou le panorama), par Giraudoux (celui de La France sentimentale), et j’ en oublie.39 Jean-Luc Godard, as quoted in Varda par Agnès, 233. Ibid. In regard to this note, in a separate email to the author from Cine-Tamaris dated Thursday, November 28, 2013, Agnès Varda emphasized this exceptional citation by Jean-Luc Godard and further noted that France Roche was a journalist “très ‘en vue’” in the 1950s.

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Du Côté de la Côte was first shown at the Festival de Tours in 1958 and it received a prize for tourist documentary in Brussels in 1959. When it was released in Paris, in June 1959, it was a program selection shown with her friend Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Hiroshima, My Love).40 This pairing reminds us, as Varda herself has done in her cousin album, that it is impossible to speak of paradise without the memories of destruction. Du Côté de la Côte has pivotal significance in Varda’s oeuvre, drawing together themes of social change, and the pursuit of Eden in parallel with the presence of time and loss, with technical precision that emphasizes the materiality of place and impacts of geographic space and color.41 This court-métrage further demonstrates her ability to probe her subject and to channel cinematic discourse while deferring meaning and refusing irony.42 Varda has stated, “I only begin to see my films when they are completed,”43 suggesting that she, too, is imaginatively maneuvering in this model of cinécriture, one that is precedent-setting in her filmography.

Alain Resnais was the film editor on Varda’s La Pointe Courte. Her work has been noted as an important precedent for Resnais’ subsequent films. See Roy Armes, French Cinema Since 1946, vol. 2: The Personal Style (London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., and New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1966), 80. 41 These qualities are later evident in her feature film Le Bonheur, released in January 1965. 42 Ruth Cruickshank, as quoted in Bénézet (2014): 86–87. Also see Fieschi and Ollier, “A Secular Grace: Agnès Varda,” 29. 43 Ibid., 31. 40

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Cybernetic Bordello: Nicolas Schöffer’s Aesthetic Hygiene Hervé Vanel

Worldview “I would not hide from you that I consider myself more a programmer than a creator,” confessed proudly Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) in 1971.1 In the artist’s career, this shift from creator to programmer certainly dated back to 1954, the year he unveiled what was considered “the first spatiodynamic, cybernetic, soundequipped art structure”2 in the Parc de Saint-Cloud outside Paris. The structure was conceived with a consulting engineer from Philips Corporation (Jacques Bureau) and in collaboration with composer Pierre Henry to create a sound-producing tower responding to environmental stimuli (light, sound, atmospheric conditions).3 From then on, collaborating with engineers, physicians and composers Schöffer pursued his long-term investigation in the field of technologically oriented and “cybernetically” regulated audiovisual environments. With Chronos 3, in 1961, this took the form of another sound-equipped tower providing a full audiovisual spectacle installed in Liège, Belgium. The following year, the Department of Ambient Programming at Philips (Département d’Ambiance Programmée) actively promoted Schöffer’s Light Wall as “a tool for mood-conditioning,” while his small monitor Lumino (1968) presented a portable, domestic version of this form of sensory conditioning. Relentlessly, Schöffer attempted, more or less successfully, to implement his art in society: from televised Philippe Sers, Entretiens avec Nicolas Schöffer (Paris: Editions Belfond, 1971), 12. All translations are by the author. Hungarian-born French artist Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) is associated with the development of kinetic art in France in the 1950s and 1960s. First trained in Budapest and then Paris, where he settles in 1936, Schöffer started as an abstract painter and sculptor. His concept of a spatiodynamic sculpture, formulated at the end of the 1940s, leads him—in the mid-1950s—to elaborate a form cybernetic art capable of responding to environmental feedback. Schöffer’s limitless ambition to reform society through art will give way, in 1960s, to monumental architectural projects and extensive urban planning, supported by a generous and rather abstruse theoretical output. 2 Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture/The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 340. 3 See Jean Cassou, Guy Habasque, and Jacques Ménétrier, Nicolas Schöffer (Neuchâtel: Éditions du Griffon, coll. The Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, 1963), 45. 1

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programs designed to induce sleep to the décor of a Tropezian nightclub, down to the aborted erection of a gigantic cybernetic tower crowning the district of La Défense.4 Considered individually, however, each project does not make much sense on its own. The full measure of the artist-programmer’s ambition must take into account Schöffer’s worldview: for it is society as a whole that the artist intended to program.

Old wine, new bottle Starting in the early 1950s, Schöffer patiently unfolded his urban planning of a cybernetic city connecting districts and fixed buildings to which he had ascribed specific and exclusive functions: administrative center, learning center, unit for scientific research, “spatiodynamic” theater, etc.5 All buildings were to be distributed along three zones respectively housing seemingly immutable living functions: working, resting, and leisure time. A full-scale presentation of the artist’s design was ultimately published in 1969 under the title La ville cybernétique (The Cybernetic City). Compared to a contemporary project involving cybernetics such as Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace—conceived as a highly flexible structure integrating its planned obsolescence—Schöffer’s “visionary” design simply avoids questioning, among other things, whether “the division between work and leisure has never been more than a convenient generalization.”6 Unlike the Fun Palace, Schöffer’s vision evidently does not experiment with any alternative or innovative lifestyles; it presents, at best, a technologically upgraded version of existing normative ones. Overall, the reader of La ville cybernétique gets the uncanny sensation that the author’s prospective On Schöffer’s Tour Lumière Cybernétique and on his sedative TV programs see, respectively, the very comprehensive studies published by Arnauld Pierre, “La machine à gouverner. Art et science du cyberpouvoir selon Nicolas Schöffer,” Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, no. 116 (Summer 2011): 41–61 and “I am the Dream Machine. Les écrans hypnogènes de Nicolas Schöffer,” Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne no. 130 (Winter 2014–2015): 37–61. 5 The date 1952 appears to be the earliest one in relation to Schöffer’s city planning in the collective volume Maude Ligier, Éric Mangion, Jean-Damien Collin, Éléonore De Lavandeyra Schöffer, Nicolas Schöffer (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, Coll. Art contemporain, 2004). Some of these early drawings appear (undated) in Nicolas Schöffer, La Ville cybernétique (Paris: Ed. Tchou, 1969). For recent critical appraisal of Schöffer’s urban planning see Carlotta Darò, “Nicolas Schöffer and the Cybernetic City,” AA Files (Architectural Association School of Architecture) no. 69 (2014): 3–11. 6 Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, “The Fun Palace,” The Drama Review: TDR, 12, no. 3 (Spring, 1968): 129. “Technology is the answer,” famously stated Cedric Price, “but what was the question?” Price started the design of the Fun Palace in 1961 in collaboration with experimental theater director Joan Littlewood. A mix of leisure center and experimental theater, this complex—never realized—was meant to foster self-participatory education. Relying on technology and cybernetics to receive and generate users’ feedback, the project placed improvisation at the center of the architectural program. To maintain its capacity for ever-evolving purpose, the project was firstly defined as an expandable, highly flexible and changeable unit (“Nothing is to last for more than ten years, some things not even ten days,” wrote Littlewood). See Mary Louise Lobsinger, “Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Canadian Center of Architecture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: MIT Press, 2001): 119–139. 4

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thinking is locked in a rather past-oriented vision of the future. Schöffer may have planned the city of the future, but he forgot to question the future of the city. In the end, as a true prophet of his own coming, Schöffer concluded his volume on a cryptic note invoking the trinity of art, science and religion: Times are not far ahead when we will see the artist and the scholar [savant] reconciled in a common exploration of temporal structures. Then, at that stage of evolution, the endless inventory will be more and more widely opened to Man. Art will appear as the kernel of the energetico-temporal mass of all known and unknown universes, and as the very heartbeat of the universal pulse [le souffle même de l’universel respiration]. And the notion of a certain God will emerge clearly as a permanent and timeless phenomenon.7

To some observers, however, the artist’s very ambition to “create creation”8 may seem to have been unfairly restrained. Hence, a French critic reviewing an exhibition devoted to Schöffer’s career in the mid-2000s could not fail to notice that many of the artist’s projects have been left unrealized, including an intriguing Center for sexual leisure. Could it be, as this critic suggests, that the daring “novelty” of the artist’s work was too “difficult to accept” in its time?9 The worn-out cliché of the misunderstood genius fits Schöffer’s self-possessed vision of his art like a glove. But Schöffer’s art was not that hard to accept and his kinetic sculptures were actually dutifully admired in the 1960s for the optimistic and therefore reassuring blend of art and technology they offered (contrasting notably with the “nihilistic” version of Jean Tinguely’s machine aesthetic). Unsurprisingly, conservative and reactionary American critics such as John Canaday and Hilton Kramer awarded Schöffer’s art a very high mark. While the first critic was spellbound by the power of his rotating sculptures to “turn metals into volatile fluids and light into escaping tinted gasses,”10 the second argued that beyond the “astonishing and infinitely variable effect” of his “cybernetically programmed” creations in metal, Plexiglas, and light, Schöffer’s sculptural pieces were only the “symbolic paradigms of a new civilization” designed by the “visionary of a world that does not yet exist.”11 Concurrently, in France, influential critic and historian Michel Ragon recognized in Schöffer’s art the “most ambitious contemporary body of work, the work seeking to be the grand œuvre, seeking to be at the same time sculpture and architecture, art and science, the work seeking to be the cradle of a new world.”12 In many ways, the critics seem to have been fairly intoxicated by the old wine that Schöffer had put in a not-so-new bottle. Still, such praises articulate well enough the artist’s immoderate ambition. Insisting as they do on the prospective Schöffer, La Ville cybernétique, 170. Ibid. Schöffer’s exergue to his opus. 9 Philippe Dagen, “L’art total de Nicolas Schöffer, chantre de la modernité,” Le Monde, Paris, May 13, 2005. 10 John Canaday, “At the Galleries: Schöffer and Vasarely,” New York Times, January 13 1968, 27. 11 Hilton Kramer, “One Inventor, One Pasticheur,” New York Times, November 28 1965, X15. 12 See Michel Ragon, “Nicolas Schöffer, sculpteur ingénieur,” Jardin des Arts 162 (May 1968): 28. 7 8

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dimension of Schöffer’s art to the point of considering his artworks as an incidental by-product of his worldview, both Kramer and Ragon understood well that the artist’s purpose far exceeded the sculptural objects themselves.

Synthesis of the arts Schöffer’s eagerness to impose his art upon society finds its roots in the postwar ideal of a “synthesis of the arts” (synthèse des arts). In France, this lofty goal—“without which no civilization can assert its presence”13—was notably promoted by the engineer and architect André Bloc who, in 1951, formed the Groupe Espace.14 Among other signing members of its manifesto, Nicolas Schöffer promoted then the absolute necessity of “an Art that inscribes itself in real space, responding to functional necessities and to all of Man’s needs, from the simplest one to the highest one … caring for collective and private living conditions; an Art that would be essential even to those who are less attracted by aesthetic values.” Setting the tone for Schöffer’s lifelong ambition, the Groupe Espace urgently pressed toward “effective realizations” by active and direct involvement in the “human community.”15 Understandably, the feasibility of this ambitious program raised as many doubts as it generated hopes. One could wonder, for instance, whether a “synthesis” could actually be achieved by the mere addition of a sculpture or a mural (no matter how abstract) to a separately planned architectural setting (no matter how modern).16 In parallel, British members of the Independent Preamble to the manifesto of the Groupe Espace in Art d’aujourd’hui (Art of Today), no. 8 (October 1951): 1. Close to the members of the Groupe Espace, Paul Virilio—at the time a stained-glass painter—remembered that, during the occasional meetings of the Groupe Espace, “we were talking about multidisciplinarity, about the necessity for mingling of the arts. Painters, sculptors and architects got together to invent a sort of cultural ‘melting pot.’” Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, ed. John Armitage (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2001), 52. 14 Inspired by the Bauhaus and De Stilj, the ideal of a synthesis between architecture, painting, and sculpture formulated by the Groupe Espace was rooted in earlier collaborative efforts. André Bloc had already participated, in 1936, in the foundation of the short-lived association named L’union pour l’Art (Union for Art), in collaboration with Auguste Perret notably, and latter, in 1949, he and Le Corbusier founded l’Association pour un Synthèse des Arts Plastiques (The Association for the Synthesis of the Visual Arts), with Henri Matisse as a President. The latter association only resulted in the failure to organize a planned exhibition on the theme Arts et Architecture (See Renée Diamant-Berger, “De l’union pour l’art à l’association pour une synthèse des arts plastiques au groupe espace,” Aujourd’hui / Art et Architecture, no 59–60 (December, 1967), 4). Similarly, the level of cooperation between artists, the kind of relationship between the arts and the modalities of their ultimate “synthesis” within the Groupe Espace seem to have been a rather confusing matter. As the painter and sculptor Jean Gorin noted: “Regarding the ‘synthesis of the arts’ in general, there is a lot of confusion even in the greatest minds of our time, and this synthesis serves as a pretext for events and exhibitions from which it is completely absent.” In “La synthèse des arts majeurs est-elle possible? ‘Un problème brûlant de l’architecture moderne,’” Open letter from Jean Gorin to the members of the Groupe Espace, dated March 9, 1956. Fonds Delaunay, 105 75 /1/ 1951–1954, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris. [Box 62]. 15 Manifesto of the Groupe Espace Art d’aujourd’hui no. 8, 1. Emphasis mine. 16 Such concerns are particularly well formulated in letter from January 21, 1955 addressed to André Bloc by Hadi Bara and Tarik Carim, representing a Turkish branch of the Groupe Espace. Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris, Fonds Delaunay, 105 75 / 1 / 1951–1954 [box 62]. 13

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Group regarded suspiciously the principle of an “orthodox integration” recommended by the Groupe Espace as well as its “dogmatic ideas of a synthesis” in which “separate contributions are sympathetically bound together.”17 Conversely, explained Lawrence Alloway in an introduction to the now famous exhibition This is Tomorrow (1956), “different channels [should be] allowed to compete as well as to complement each other.”18 Such permissive philosophy, in which disjointed elements do not have to resolve into a coherent and unified totality, ran contrary to Schöffer’s confident ideology. As he formulated it in the opening line of a 1954 manifesto announcing the formation of his own artistic collective: “The goal of the Néovision movement is the suppression of the current anarchy in the field of plastic arts and the realization of the necessary conditions for a genuine and total synthesis.”19 No more, no less. Schöffer’s use of the term anarchy, inevitably evoking an absence of governmental control, is not incidental. At the time, the artist had already encountered the new science of governing (or “steering” whenever a softer etymology is needed) in Norbert Wiener’s opus Cybernétique et société (The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society, published in French in 1952) and later enthusiastically recalled that following its reading he “immediately made the decision to create, from then on, cybernetic works [of art].”20 Emblematic of what is called the “information age,” cybernetics presents itself as a mode of synthesizing a variety of inputs in order to direct actions toward the most appropriate output. As Peter Galison summarizes, Wiener’s theory originated during the Second World War when the mathematician conceived a complex calculating device [the “antiaircraft (AA) predictor”] “designed to characterize an enemy pilot’s zigzagging flight, anticipate his future position, and launch an antiaircraft shell to down his plane.”21 Subsequently, writes Galison, Wiener’s model expanded to become “a new science known after the war as ‘cybernetics,’ a science that would embrace intentionality, learning, and much else within the human mind. Finally, the AA predictor, along with its associated engineering notions of feedback systems and black boxes, became, for Wiener, the model for a cybernetic understanding of the universe itself.”22 And within a few years, indeed, cybernetics swiftly permeated all fields of knowledge: physics, technology, biology, psychology, medicine, sociology, management, linguistic, pedagogy, economy.23 Schöffer carefully situated his aesthetic programming skills at the crossroad of all those influences. Lawrence Alloway, “Design as Human Activity” (1956), reprinted in Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, ed. Richard Kalina (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 48. 18 Ibid. 19 The manifesto is reproduced in Ligier, Mangion, Collin and Lavandeyra Schöffer, Nicolas Schöffer, 122. The architect Claude Parent (also a member of the Groupe Espace) the former Cobra member Constant and the British artist Stephen Gilbert, had joined Schöffer in the Neovision venture. 20 Interview with Nicolas Schöffer by Jean-Louis Ferrier, Michèle Cotta and Frederic Towarnicki, “L’Express va plus loin avec Nicolas Schöffer,” July 7–13, 1969, 86. 21 Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn, 1994): 229. 22 Ibid. 23 See Paul Idatte, “La révolution cybernétique,” Études (September 1964), 232–233. For a contemporary exercise in applied cybernetics, see Susanne Lilar, L’ Amour au siècle de la cybernétique (Paris: Hachette, coll. L’ Avenir de notre vie, 1965). 17

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Aesthetic hygiene The influence of cybernetics could be felt everywhere indeed, more or less conspicuously. One of Schöffer’s acolytes in Neovision, for instance, the psychiatrist Paul Sivadon, promoted a cybernetically oriented theory of “mental hygiene,” when he defined it as the “optimistic theory which invites anybody to correct at any instant the line of his destiny by orienting him towards a future of social as much as individual equilibrium.”24 In this regard, Schöffer’s lifelong association with physicians, biologists, and psychiatrists, supporting the therapeutic function of his art25 is as significant as his association with engineers to insure the technological viability of his art. Strongly echoing the rhetoric of the psychiatrist, Schöffer would thus characterize his art as a massive sanitary project: Esthetic hygiene is necessary for collective societies, for any social group residing together on a large scale. How? By programming environments that obey rigorous esthetic criteria. Each time the inhabitant walks around in the city, he must bathe in a climate that creates in him a specific feeling of well-being, invoked by the massive presence of esthetic products in the environment.26

In effect, Schöffer’s mysterious (yet “rigorous”) criterion for aesthetically programming our environment is none other than equilibrium, so as to guarantee that “the sound, the smell, the heat, the moisture, the light dispensed in about [us] in balanced doses,” can generate a “vivifying ambiance.”27 Caring for our well-being, the artist’s hygienist theory also recalls the views of Dr. Jacques Ménétrier (1908–1986),28 another one of Schöffer’s long-time acquaintances. As a biologist, Ménétrier had been in 1942 the general secretary of the Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains (French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems) created under the Vichy government.29 Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) directed the institute. A 1912 Nobel laureate Paul Sivadon, “Adlerian Psychology and Mental Hygiene,” Journal of Individual Psychology 20, no. 2 (November 1st, 1964), 195. Emphasis mine. 25 As the artist states clearly in his interview with André Parinaud, “La Révolution par le Lumino,” La Galerie des Arts 63 (January 1969): 18. 26 Douglas Davis, “Nicolas Schöffer: The Cybernetic Esthetic,” Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Science, Technology and Art (New York: Præger Publishers, 1973), 121–122. 27 In Cassou, Habasque, and Ménétrier, Nicolas Schöffer, 124. Emphasis mine. 28 As a member of the Comité d’Honneur-Fondateur de l’ A.N.S. (Association Internationale des Amis de Nicolas Schöffer pionnier de l’Art Cybernétique) (Honorary-Founding Committee of the A.N.S. (International Association of the Friends of Nicolas Schöffer, Pioneer of Cybernetic Art)), Dr. Jacques Ménétrier (1908–1986) is presented as the “Président-Fondateur du Centre de Recherches Biologiques et de la Société de Médecine Fonctionnelle, inventeur des Oligoéléments, ancien secrétaire général de la Fondation Alexis Carrel.” On the website devoted to the artist housed by the Observatoire Leonardo des arts et des technosciences (www.olats.org/schoffer/archives/ans. htm) [last consulted on January 2, 2016]. 29 See Alain Drouard, “Les trois ages de la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” Population (French Edition), 38e Année, no. 6. (November–December 1983): 1017–1047. 24

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in medicine, Carrel was also a member of the collaborationist Parti Populaire Français and a promoter of eugenics. Ménétrier’s toxic views are fully developed in his 1947 treaty entitled La vie collective,30 in which—besides praising National Socialism31— he expands his theory of a complete “social Hygiene” (including “biological control”) that is nothing more than a form of “pragmatic eugenics.”32 As part of Ménétrier’s comprehensive social sanitation plan, the organization of leisure (including “all physical, mental and aesthetic activities”) includes the arts among those elements (like sport) that may “improve the quality of workers.”33 Whether or not Schöffer had read La vie collective (Collective Life), a rather pertinent topic considering his program, the artist would later enthusiastically welcome the irreversible and accelerating process of “modification of man by man” on the “physical, psychic and intellectual” planes.34 Here again, technology and cybernetics were only, according to the artist, temporarily

Jacques Ménétrier, La Vie Collective (Paris: Plon, coll. Présence, 1947). Ibid., 292–293. 32 Ibid., 128. The term “pragmatic” basically means that one may seek to exploit and improve the genetic potential of individuals but not to create a “superior” being. While being beyond the scope of this chapter, the case of Alexis Carrel is significant in terms of the kind of ideological slippage that one might observe in the formulation of Schöffer’s world view. Considered as a suspicious figure in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the legacy of Carrel’s theories became once again the object of a heated debate when the French right-wing extremist party Front National promoted the author of Man the Unknown (L’homme cet inconnu) (Paris: Plon, 1935, 1961) as a “father of ecology.” The ensuing controversy triggered a revision of Carrel’s writings and a reevaluation of his activities during the German occupation when Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy government collaborating with the enemy between 1940 and 1944, appointed him as the head of la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains. Some scholars like Alain Drouard continued to praise the outcome of the Fondation in terms of public health while covering up the revolting ideology permeating Carrel’s work. Still, Carrel’s reputation as a brilliant surgeon, research on organ transplants and recognition as a biologist could not conceal the violence of his mystical vision of a purified race: “In order to perpetuate an elite,” asserts Carrel in L’homme cet inconnu, “eugenics is indispensable. It is clear that a race must reproduce its best elements” (p. 409). Should his position on this issue be considered as an acceptable, “positive” form of eugenics? Following Patrick Tort, it appears sensible to refute the fallacious and wicked convention naming “positive eugenics” the position attempting to promote “superior” individuals without eliminating “inferior” ones (Carrel’s view) in opposition to “negative eugenics” generally suggesting the improvement of the biological quality of the race by getting rid of genetically undesirable individuals. If anything, Carrel’s additional note to the German edition of L’homme cet inconnu, added at the request of his German publisher, leaves no doubt concerning the kinship of his theories with that of the Third Reich: “The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous.” See Patrick Tort, “L’affaire Carrel: Sur la question de l’eugénisme,” Le Monde diplomatique (June 1998), 32 and Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales: La Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941–1945 (Paris : Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Collections de l’Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques), 1992. Jacques Ménétrier’s arguments in favor of “pragmatic” eugenics mirror the dubious distinction between “positive” and “negative” eugenics advanced by the supporters of Carrel’s thesis. Ménétrier might have appeared to Schöffer as a well-meaning reformer but no level of refinement in the formulation of an “aesthetic hygiene,” wrapped under an artistic guise, could really conceal the ideological slippage of the artist’s prospective theories. 33 Ibid.,163. 34 Schöffer, La Ville Cybernétique, 43. 30 31

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necessary means of achieving perfection, for “thanks to the hyper-evolved technology of hyper-evolved scientists, one will find the means of suppressing the inequality in the distribution of brainpower [matière grise]; a general disparity which, up to today, prevents a large fraction of the society to reach a certain state of evolution, culturally, aesthetically and intellectually.”35 In this prospect, Schöffer was equally seduced by the Marcusian theory of “repression.” Far beyond inhibiting our sexuality, indeed, the “bourgeois society” also dramatically lowered its aesthetic standards. On the one hand, states Schöffer, art had (mostly) fallen to the level of a speculative merchandise36 while, on the other hand, “parasitical commercial artists deprived of any significance” were only exploiting and debasing the ideas of genuine artists.37 Thus, in the 1960s, Schöffer clearly identified with those “intellectual forces” that, according to Herbert Marcuse, were ready to “contribute to realize a free society.”38 Liberation was in sight and it only required a hyper-evolved artist like Schöffer to free the arts and society from corruption by infiltrating commercial culture like a “Trojan horse.”39 A great opportunity presented itself to him in the summer 1966, with the opening of the Voom Voom, the latest nightclub in the trendy, jet-set resort town of Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera. As a churchman would describe it at the time, the town was a sort of a modern-day Lourdes: “Young people come here with all their worries and yearnings, seeking to be healed by the new religion of glamour and stardom.”40 The Voom Voom would be their temple.

Art at the speed of nightlife A bit like Las Vegas, Saint-Tropez had become a specialized town devoted to recreational activity, therefore suitably fitting Schöffer’s urban “utopia.” Every summer, Saint-Tropez provided a backdrop of folkloric authenticity (local fishermen included) to a community of international celebrities. The launch of the Voom Voom received proper and intensive media coverage. Raising investigative journalism to a hitherto unknown level, some journalists reported that it was the manager, Jean-Marie Rivière, who found this onomatopoeic name while diving in the Mediterranean wearing a floral bathing suit.41 Or, was it Jane Fonda who christened the nightclub after the sound of the countless sport cars zipping by the port during the summer?42 For Ibid., 21. See Interview with Parinaud, “La Révolution par le Lumino,” 18. 37 See Nicolas Schöffer and Dr. Vinchon, “L’artiste et la société : La Socialisation du rôle de l’artiste du point de vue psychologique,” Aujourd’hui, November 1956, 13. 38 The phrase by Marcuse comes from his 1967 Berlin talk “The End of Utopia,” and is quoted by Nicolas Schöffer, La Ville Cybernetique, Tchou, Paris, 1969, 13. 39 See Interview with Parinaud, “La Révolution par le Lumino,” 18. 40 In John Ardagh, “On the new-style Riviera,” The Observer, January 9th 1966, 32. 41 See Jacques Borgé and Nicolas De Baraudy, “Les Tropéziens en parlent,” Paris-Match no. 897, June 18 1966, 103. 42 M. B. “Dim, Dam, Dom: Vénus, Voum-Voum et Desperados,” Humanité, August 26, 1966. 35 36

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certain, the interior design of the new joint commercial venture was granted to local architect Paul Bertrand (1915–1994), a former movie-set designer mostly known for his Neo-Provençal villas.43 Bertrand furnished the décor of the new discotheque with several of Schöffer’s kinetic pieces selected under the artist’s supervision. Following the commercial success of the venue, a second Voom Voom, twice as big, opened the following year in Juan-les-Pins, 60 miles away. According to art critic Pierre Restany, Saint-Tropez’s Voom Voom was emblematic of the European “yé-yé” culture. Suitably defining the related musical genre (“yé-yé”) as a “lukewarm and watered down” version of rock and roll, Restany nonetheless credits the yé-yé nightclubs, including the Voom Voom, with a capacity to foster “collective trance.”44 Echoing photographs of a rather deserted Voom Voom, a caption depicts the new disco “designed by the architect Paul Bertrand” as follows: The walls are finished throughout in highly polished stainless steel. Two large steel sculptures by Nicolas Schoeffer rotate at a regulable speed, illuminated by coloured reflectors. Coloured lights are thrown on two large luminous plastic screens by fifty projectors, switched on and off to the music. The surfaces of the tables and bar counter are finished in anodized aluminum. (The whisky bottles lining the bar counter are labeled with their owners’ name: Françoise Sagan, Bernard Buffet, Pierre Restany).45

As the popular TV program Dim Dam Dom reported in August 1966, the place was perfectly suited to exhibit Emmanuelle Khanh’s “mode spatiale” in the line of the space-age fashion of Paco Rabanne’s plastic and metal dresses introduced few months earlier.46 Models would pose amidst Schöffer’s pieces scattered around the curved seating areas near the dance floor lined by light walls, “large screens on which smudges of pastel colors [disperse] continuously before slowly regrouping.”47 Nearby, a journalist noticed, a deep triangular niche is reserved for the elite squad of dancers, who can see their complex choreographic moves infinitely reflected on the oblique mirroring walls [Prism, 1965]. Now imagine that on a central spot of this cave, a vertical rotating mast with branches made of little mirrors and other pieces of polished Jean-Luc de Rudder, “Saint-Tropez—L’ enfer: Tout le Monde descend,” L’ Intransigeant, July 14, 1966. Pierre Restany “Breve storia dello stile YÉYÉ,” Domus, 446, 1967, 34, and 40. 45 Ibid., 40. Pierre Restany (1930–2003) was one of the most influential French critics in the 1960s, known to have coined the term Nouveau Réalisme and supported affiliated artists such as Martial Raysse, Arman, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, or Jacques Villeglé. While being mocked by many intellectuals, the figurative brand of painting developed by Bernard Buffet (1928–1999)—featuring his famous pathetic weeping clowns—was a commercial success in 1950s and 1960s France. Françoise Sagan (1935–2004), jet-setter and novelist gained fame with her first Bonjour tristesse (Hello Sadness, 1954). 46 M. B. “Dim, Dam, Dom: Vénus, Voum-Voum et Desperados.” 47 Rudder, “Saint-Tropez—L’enfer: Tout le Monde descend.” 43 44

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plastic is erected. Without interruptions, spotlights are projected on this mast, and the intense beams of light are bouncing on the walls diffracting everywhere in blinding and darting flashes.48

In this light, it may seem that the Voom Voom fits in the development of nightclubs as a site of radical experimentation.49 The model of the Pipers, for instance—a series of nightclubs that popped up throughout Italy in the mid-1960s—“consisted in a sort of immersion in a continuous flow of images, stroboscopic lights and very loud stereophonic music,” the goal of which was, according to Andrea Branzi’s, the “total estrangement of the subject, who gradually lost control of his inhibition in dance, moving toward a sort of psychomotor liberation.”50 Losing one’s sense of self may have been, in this instance, a way to find oneself. According to the motto of the American collective USCO: “You’ve got to go out of your mind to use your head.”51 Such was the LSD-fueled program of the “multi-channel night club” The World, conceived by USCO and inaugurated in April 1966. Installed in a disused aircraft hangar, USCO’s disco included a stereo sound system, slide projections, 16mm films by Jud Yalkut notably and an early video transmission feeding back real-time images to the dancers.52 The reception of this kind of individual and collective shattering of the self varied greatly. After experiencing Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable in a Chicago nightclub in June 1966, for instance, a horrified journalist reported that the artist had indeed put together a “total environment” yet, she concluded, it “actually vibrates with menace, cynicism, and perversion. To experience it is to be brutalized, helpless.”53 As the popular singer Cher is reported to have said of Warhol’s EPI: “It will replace nothing, except suicide.”54 Warhol himself took full responsibility for this sensory overdose: “If they can take it for ten minutes,” he later said of his multimedia extravaganza, “then we play it for fifteen. That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.”55 Schöffer’s concerns could not have been more remote.

Ibid. See notably Carlotta Darò, “Night-clubs et discothèques : visions d’architecture,” Intermédialités, no. 14 (2009), 85–103 and Marcos Parga, “Experimentación radical italiana en torno al night-club: Warhol-McLuhan-Price y la arquitectura eléctrica de los años 60,” Rita, no. 3 (April 2015), 112–119. 50 Andrea Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), 54. 51 See Michel Oren, “USCO: ‘Getting Out of Your Mind to Use Your Head,’” Art Journal 69, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 76–95. 52 Ibid., 86. 53 Michaela Williams, “Warhol’s Brutal Assemblage Non-Stop Horror Show,” Chicago Daily News, June 22, 1966, 34. 54 Cher, quoted in the Village Voice, September 22, 1966. 55 Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett, POPism : The Warhol ’60s (New York : Harper & Row, 1983), 154. 48 49

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Cybernetic bordello All in all, the Voom Voom may not have achieved a more convincing synthesis of the arts than the one promoted earlier by the Groupe Espace. Schöffer’s sculptures are visibly less integrated into the space than simply added to it. A variation on this setting can be seen in a two-minute-long segment of the TV show Spécial Bardot, broadcast January 1, 1968, during which the Tropezian icon sings a futurist pop song about a heartbroken creature from outer space (“Contact,” written by Serge Gainsbourg in 1967).56 Slightly more out of his mind, Jud Yalkut achieved a more intense and striking result with his 1965–1966 short abstract experimental short film Turn, Turn, Turn, editing close-ups of Schöffer’s kinetic sculptures to a point where they appear rather intangible. Yalkut’s film, which might have been screened at The World, thereby clarifies one of the artist’s unusually lucid remarks about his art: “What I have done,” he admitted in 1967, “are primitive assemblages, using techniques that are bound to be outdated. One will be able to go much further, getting rid of the object to reach the sole effect.”57 The question remains of the nature of such programmed effect. At age 54 in 1966, Schöffer had, by his own admission, no nightclubbing experience. Saint-Tropez and the Voom Voom nevertheless reminded him that, after all, “centers of sexual leisure” were included in his design for a cybernetic city58 as a place for people to “indulge in lovemaking within an aesthetic ambience, under the influence of innumerable aestheticized programs.”59 There, he insisted, “the act of love will be fully and totally transcended.”60 Located in a nondescript building by the port of SaintTropez, the nightclub was a far cry from the rosy, smooth “giant vessel shaped like a woman’s breast”61 that the artist had in mind when he envisioned his cybernetic bordello. Once inside this colossal boob, visitors would be welcomed with a “warm, fragrant audiovisual wash in a monochrome atmosphere (light red), including sound, colored lights and scents pulsating on a very slow rhythm.”62 Rising to the top in a smooth elevator, couples would then walk down a spiraling ramp, surrounded by sleek, warm palpitating abstract silhouettes and all kinds of suggestive screenings (avoiding pornography). They could also experience a zero-gravity space stimulating sexual functions.63 At last, properly aroused, couples would reach a dance hall and, if

François Reichenbach and Eddy Matalon (directors), Bob Zagury (producer), Special Bardot, 52 minutes. Archives INA [Institut national de l’audiovisuel]. Brigitte Bardot, French actress, singer, and sex symbol, had taken residence in Saint-Tropez in the late 1950s, thereby contributing to the touristic appeal of the town. 57 Pierre Descargues, “Juan-les-Pins: 800 personnes à l’intérieur d’un microtemps de Nicolas Schöffer,” Tribune de Lausanne, Dimanche 25 Juin 1967. 58 Ibid. 59 “L’Express va plus loin avec Nicolas Schöffer,” 91. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Schöffer, La Ville Cybernetique, 123. 63 Ibid. 56

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necessary, retreat in one of the available spaces of the adjoining hotel restaurant.64 As a dance hall, the Voom Voom only fulfilled a small, concluding part of Schöffer’s full program of sexual “reeducation” (even though Tropezian beaches certainly provided a suitable introductory equivalent). Still, the programmer welcomed this opportunity as a life-size experiment to test the (expected) transcending effect of his aesthetic hygiene on an undoubtedly sexually active community. Schöffer centers of sexual leisure responded, altogether, to a simplistic theory of sexuality rooted in a then-popular dynamic of repression/liberation loosely derived from Marcuse’s theory. “Once the sexual taboo demystified,” proclaimed the artist in this regard, “man—free from all false constraint—will be able to blossom, reaching a normal sexual life and encounter love.”65 At the very best, Schöffer was among those who trusted, in the 1960s, that “by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.”66 Based on the conviction that there is something like an effectively repressed “human nature,” Schöffer’s belief is that a long-awaited realization of the essence of human beings is not only necessary but also perfectly achievable. Whatever the term “normal” is supposed to mean in terms of sexual life, Schöffer’s charitable anti-repressive logic cannot conceal a normative and essentialist discourse and his liberating prospects are equally limited. When asked to describe the ambiance at the Voom Voom, in particular, Schöffer admitted that it was “irresistible” enough for he and his wife to start dancing (a borderline state, one remembers, as it follows arousal). Still, one should not go too far, and in the end, concludes Schöffer, because “the ambience is very structured, people behave. It does not turn into an orgy.”67 Whether this is wishful thinking is beside the point (Schöffer might simply not have been invited to the after-party). What matters, above all, is the infallible capacity of the artist to convince himself of the absolute efficiency of his art.

Dream machine In this regard, said the artist, the experience of the Voom Voom, was “crucial” and undeniably encouraging: “I found there the proof that what I recommended was absolutely acceptable by the general public. I moved fast from the laboratory to life itself. And it’s only a beginning.”68 Schöffer, indeed, never ceased experimenting with the potential effect of his art, occasionally conducting tests in psychiatric wards to refine his aesthetic instruments. There, subjecting individuals to the varying speed, colors, and rhythm of his Lumino, for instance, the artist only obtained what he was seeking, i.e., the confirmation that his “revolutionary” device could effectively induce Ibid. and “L’Express va plus loin avec Nicolas Schöffer,” 91. Schöffer, La Ville Cybernetique, 123. 66 Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, Coll. Bibliothèque des Histoires, 1976), 208. 67 Descargues, “Juan-les-Pins: 800 personnes à l’intérieur d’un microtemps de Nicolas Schoffer.” 68 Ibid. 64 65

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a relaxation such that, according to statistics one succeeds, in an average of two and a half minutes, to lower the state of consciousness below the threshold of vigilance … as well as triggering a strong exaltation (for those who are inclined). In other words, one can reach both the limits of excitation and the limits of relaxation.69

In these terms, Schöffer is in tune with the kind of empirical testing conducted twenty years earlier in psychiatric wards with the programming of music similarly conceived “as a means of calming the manic, stimulating the depressive, arousing the lethargic and reaching the withdrawn.”70 It is following such encouraging studies that a company like Muzak would promote its “scientific” musical programs in postwar society as a massive tool of mood conditioning.71 Taking the pervasive presence of functional music (aka muzak, or elevator music) in our environment as granted, Schöffer naturally stressed the aptitude of his creation to be “in harmony with the background music broadcasted simultaneously. Stimulating, neutral or relaxing audiovisual mood can be produced at will.”72 Urging artists to come “out of their laboratory” in order to “impose their presence and their products … in the network of consumption and in the information network,”73 Schöffer notably commercialized his Lumino, distributed by Clairol in the United States under the name of the Dream Machine. In late 1969, the infotainment “beauty” section of Vogue dutifully relayed a revealing sales pitch: “plugged in anywhere,” one reads, this “kinetic light-box … provides a non-stop light show in rich, extraordinary colours, shifting kaleidoscope patterns. Its visual delights energize the weary, tranquillize the tense, $75.”74 In treating customers like mentally ill individuals, Clairol literally brought Schöffer’s aesthetic hygiene straight from its laboratory into life itself.

Exclusion Behind the fumes of Schöffer opaque and speculative prose lies, consistently, the everexpectant desire to reach “the necessary balance required to establish a harmonious regulation of life.”75 Schöffer’s was certainly not isolated in his quest for universal well-being. Developing his own plan for a New Babylon, Constant Nieuwenhuys (aka Constant) equally anticipated that, “with a single leap,” a form of artistic synthesis could eventually “bridge the gap with society.”76 Constant, a former member of Interview avec Parinaud, “La Révolution par le Lumino,” 18. Harold Burris-Meyer and R. C. Lewis, “Music as an Aid to Healing,” The Journal of Acoustical Society of America 19, no. 4 (July 1947): 545. 71 See Hervé Vanel, Triple Entendre: Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 72 In Cassou, Habasque, and Ménétrier, Nicolas Schöffer, 131. 73 Schöffer, La ville cybernétique, 23. 74 [anonymous] “Beauty Check Out,” Vogue, December 1st, 1969, 108. 75 Schöffer, La ville cybernétique, 133. 76 Constant, “From Collaboration to Absolute Unity among the Plastic Arts” (1955) translated in Mark Wigley: Constant’s New Babylon The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: Witte de With, centre for contemporary art / 010 Publishers, 1998), 75. Emphasis mine. 69 70

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Neovision, might have kept his distance with his partner’s “mystical” approach.77 Still, his design for a New Babylon parallels Schöffer’s effort to conceive a new habitat78 understood as a “fundamental form that encompasses all facets of life.”79 Living, at last, a life of unrestrained creativity, our existence would become a permanent happening made of “spontaneous interaction among different individuals, in which the actions of one person trigger the reaction of the other.”80 In these terms, relationships between individuals resemble closely a series of moves and countermoves coming straight out of the theory of cybernetics’ self-regulating feedback mechanisms. Still, while Schöffer or Constant appeared to be at ease when it came to the planning of a harmonious and fully immersive collective participation, they only left out the (unthinkable) prospect of one’s voluntary exclusion from the system; there would simply be “no outsiders.”81 More than any other, however, the driving ideology of Schöffer’s aesthetic hygiene fits perfectly the general economy of our advanced capitalist society requiring, for the benefit of all and the profit of a few, that our state of servitude be not only complete but also, most importantly, absolutely blissful.

According to Wigley, “The Hyper-Architecture of Desire,” 25. On the importance of the notion of “Habitat” in the early 1950s among the Team X in relation to Constant, see Martin van Schaik, “Psychogeogram: An Artist’s Utopia,” in Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations 1956–1976, Martin van Schaik and Otakar Máčel eds. (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Institute of History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism, Prestel, 2005), 39–40. 79 Constant, “From Collaboration to Absolute Unity Among the Plastic Arts” (1955), 75. 80 “The City of the Future: HP-talk with Constant about New Babylon” (1966) translated in Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocation 1956–1976, 11. 81 Ibid. 77 78

7

Nouveau Réalisme in its “Longue Durée”: From the Nineteenth-Century Chiffonnier to the Remembrance of the Second World War Déborah Laks

On October 27, 1961, Nouveau Réalisme was created with a constitutive declaration signed by Yves Klein, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Pierre Restany, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques de la Villeglé. Others joined them later, including Niki de Saint Phalle. The phrase chosen to define the movement, “The Nouveaux Réalistes have realized their collective singularity. Nouveau Réalisme—new perceptive approaches of the real,”1 was as vague as possible. Even so, Arman relates that the movement’s unity did not even last twenty minutes.2 From the beginning, the tension between the collective formulation of a clear aesthetic position for Nouveau Réalisme and the disparate individual practices of its members appeared as an important characteristic of the movement. Its historiography can be divided into three main periods: (1) the constitution of the movement’s identity, from 1961 to 1978, when Pierre Restany published the first version of Le Nouveau Réalisme;3 (2) its maturity, until the 2000s, marked by the appearance of the movement in more general publications about the second half of the twentieth century;4 (3) followed by the current renewal of its critical and historiographic study.5 The first two phases were profoundly shaped by Pierre Restany, who wrote the majority of the texts, articles, and exhibition catalogs published on Nouveau Réalisme “Les Nouveaux Réalistes ont pris conscience de leur singularité collective. Nouveau Réalisme = nouvelles approches perceptives du réel,” Pierre Restany, Avec le nouveau réalisme, sur l’ autre face de l’art (Nîmes: J. Chambon, 2000). 2 Catherine Francblin, Les nouveaux réalistes (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 1997), 73. Otto Hahn, Mémoires accumulées (entretien avec Arman) (Paris: Belfond, 1992). 3 Pierre Restany, Le Nouveau Réalisme (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, coll. 10/18, 1978). 4 Pierre Cabanne, “Martial Raysse, Arman et la nature moderne,” in L’ Art du XXe siècle (Paris: Somogy, 1982); Michel Ragon, Vingt-cinq ans d’art vivant, chronique vécue de l’art contemporain de l’abstraction au pop art, 1944–1969 (1969. Reprint: Paris: Édition Galilée, coll. “écritures/figures,” 1986); Daniel Abadie, “Le Nouveau Réalisme,” in Vingt-cinq ans d’ art en France, 1960–1985, ed. Robert Maillard (Paris: Larousse, 1986). 5 The three main authors are Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Jill Carrick, and Didier Semin, as well as Kaira Cabañas. For more, see below. 1

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from before its official creation up until the 1980s when they began to appear in more general studies. His writing carefully constructed the aesthetic identity of Nouveau Réalisme as a coherent whole. Restany’s dominant position on the French art scene— both his writings and his curatorial practices made him a major influence during the shift between early postwar and 1960s art—made his cogent story the official story of the Nouveaux Réalistes.6 Consequently, the historical literature on the group has, until quite recently, showed a very united line of analysis. From the 1980s to the 2000s, histories of Nouveau Réalisme roughly followed Restany, varying only in their interpretations of the movement’s ideological orientation. For many, Nouveau Réalisme constituted an antidote to consumer society and, whether positive or negative, its relation with contemporaneity remained at the heart of every analysis.7 This line of interpretation contextualizes the group within the social changes occurring in French and other European societies during the 1960s. In particular, the rise of “consumer society” created a shift in the social and material context, to which artists reacted.8 Restany analyzed this reaction in light of the link he saw between Nouveau Réalisme and Dadaism. In the 40° au-dessus de dada (40° above Dada) manifesto (1961),9 he claimed—against the opinion of some of the members of the group at the time—that Dada was the obvious ancestor of the movement. It is true that both movements employed provocation, public events, and used scrap materials. But this reading of Nouveau Réalisme does not give a clear account for either its emergence or its distinctive artistic practices, and tends to obscure its references and contemporary as well as historical background. Restany also tended to interpret Nouveau Réalisme in the light of his own political, rather right-wing, orientation.10 As a critic, Pierre Restany wrote extensively for the French art journal Cimaise, and served as the publication director of the Henri Kramer Gallery in Paris. As a curator, he worked for the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan, but also for the Parisian Galeries Rive Droite, and J, which he co-founded with Jeannine de Goldschmidt. On Pierre Restany, see Richard Leeman, ed., Le demi-siècle de Pierre Restany (Paris: Éditions des Cendres, INHA, 2009), especially Annie Claustres, “Le rôle de Pierre Restany dans l’historiographie de l’art français après-guerre. Le mythe en question,” 467–82; Henry Périer and Pierre Restany, Pierre Restany l’ alchimiste de l’art (Paris: Cercle d’art, 1998); Pierre Restany le cœur et la raison (Morlaix: Musée des Jacobins, 1991). 7 Catherine Francblin, Les nouveaux réalistes (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 1997). Pierre Restany, Les nouveaux réalistes (Paris: Éditions Planète, 1968); Jill Carrick, Le Nouveau Réalisme: Fetishism and Consumer Spectacle in Post-War France (Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1997). Pierre Restany, 60/90 trente ans de nouveau réalisme (Paris: La Différence, 1990); Daniel Abadie, Le nouveau réalisme [Actes du colloque organisé par Daniel Abadie dans le cadre de la rétrospective Arman, Paris, Galerie nationale du Jeu de paume, 27 janvier–12 avril 1998] (Paris: Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1999). 8 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 9 À 40° au-dessus de Dada, galerie J, Paris, May 17 to June 10, 1961. The text of the exhibition catalog, written by Restany, has been seen as the second Nouveau Réalisme manifesto, and an important motive for the dissolution of the group. Arman, César, Dufrêne, Hains, Klein, Rotella, Spoerri, Tinguely, and Villeglé were presented in the exhibition. 10 Situationnists went as far as saying that “with Nouveau Réalisme, the right wing at last found its art,” Karl Feurbach, “Nouveau Réalisme et Lumpen-Proletariat,” in André Balthazar and Pol Bury, Daily Bul, no. 9 (La Louvière, 1963); see also Carrick Le Nouveau Réalisme: Fetishism and Consumer Spectacle in Post-War France (Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1997), 2. 6

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Since Dadaism was an obvious reference for Restany, the links between Nouveau Réalisme and Surrealism have been less discussed. In the 1960s and 1970s, Surrealism’s revolutionary input seemed less striking, and it became gradually institutionalized, as demonstrated by the success of the EROS exhibition of 1959–1960. But some clues, such as Arman’s titles, indicate a proximity between the two movements. Arman builds on word games, symbolism and second degree to compose titles that often constitute humorous counterpoints to the visual darkness of his artwork.11 Daniel Spoerri had a similar practice with his Word snares (1964).12 Apart from poetry and word games, Surrealism appears as an important reference for the way Nouveaux Réalistes use walking in the city as an artistic gesture and tool, collecting materials by chance and generally valuing encounters and strangeness. Their work was not concerned with dream and eccentricity, as was the Surrealists’, but with the reality of society and contemporaneity. In their work, the walks, the materials, and the idea that things are really clues about absent people, all may be linked to Surrealism. If the comparison with Surrealism points out some important part of the Nouveaux Réalistes’ work, their interest in the city, including the crowds that walk around it, the creation of encounters within it and the forging of new paths through it extends beyond a specific avant-garde. Their relationship with other avant-gardes of the early 1960s, such as Fluxus and the Situationist International, also shows common practices and interests. Expanding the movement’s dialogues with such other contemporary movements reveals some important yet often disregarded characteristics of Nouveau Réalisme. Although all these groups were established in the 1960s, they were built on a common heritage of the first half of the century’s avant-gardes. In their work, materials and forms draw dynamic links between people, times, and spaces. The idea of flux, of a kind of mundane poetry, and the agency of things play an important part in all their approaches. This idea allows us to argue that the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes responds to a much broader context than the 1960s and the rise of French consumer society. In so doing, we may suggest new interpretations of the Nouveaux Réalistes’ work. Building on the reevaluation of their proximity to Surrealism, a whole new intellectual heredity appears, linking recuperation and the use of scrap materials to the rag-picker, his activity and his role as a literary and philosophical figure.13 Described by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin as a key figure in the development of modernity, the nineteenth-century chiffonnier will be our guide through the piles of used objects and materials with which Nouveaux Réalistes compose their art.

For example Home sweet home (1960) is composed of a mass of disturbing-looking gas masks. Tuezles tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens (Kill them all, God will know his own, 1961) shows a pile of insecticide while referring to the sacking of Béziers, an event that took place on July 22, 1209. 12 “Together with Robert Filliou, Spoerri developed pictures along figures of speech and plays on words like, for example ‘Ça crêve les yeux’ (It’s as plain as the nose on the face, lit. it punctures the eyes): a bust, with open scissors stuck in the eyes. At: http://www.danielspoerri.org. 13 Being mostly French (apart from Tinguely and Spoerri who were Swiss and Saint Phalle who was partly American) and all French-speaking, the group shared a common background of art and literature. 11

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Nouveaux Réalistes as Chiffonniers Following Pierre Restany, Nouveaux Réalistes are often perceived and described as “sociologists.” Restany’s argument is that, by using everyday materials in their practice, they are seeking to reveal aspects of a wider social reality. Once presented as works of art, the objects are seen in all their symbolic, political, financial depth, leading the viewers to change their insight on their own surroundings, and apprehend the banality in sociological terms. This argument was influenced by the intellectual context of the early 1960s. The fast mutation of the study of the humanities at that time had created a wide understanding of what sociology is or may be. Sociology was then very fashionable, gradually taking a first-rate importance in universities and being applied to wider fields of enquiry, as well as being developed in newspapers and more scientific publications.14 In Restany’s eyes, appropriation is a sociological tool. As appropriation is the only real common ground of the Nouveaux Réalistes, it unites them around the notion of sociology and its artistic interpretation. Restany writes: “I can never insist enough on the essentiality of the notion of direct appropriation.”15 The majority of Restany’s writings on the Nouveaux Réalistes emphasize the notion of appropriation, a concept he uses to justify the existence of an otherwise disparate movement.16 Yet the reality of sociology has never been at stake, neither in Restany’s writings nor in other artists’ reception of them. For Antje Kramer, “This notion indeed appears very frequently in Restany’s texts of the time. However, without any link to the scientific field from which it derives, it shows Restany’s breadth of interpretation and the blurriness of its limits, so that ‘sociology’ becomes a synonym of both ‘urban reality,’ ‘contemporary society,’ ‘modern nature,’ etc.”17 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac emphasizes the shift between his vocabulary and his ideas: “The facts are that the sociological habitus is only used very superficially and Restany’s texts do not follow the rules of modern sociology.”18

Jean-Michel Chapoulie, “La seconde fondation de la sociologie française, les États-Unis et la classe ouvrière,” Revue française de sociologie 32 (1991): 321–364; Philippe Masson, “La fabrication des héritiers,” Revue française de sociologie 42–43 (2001): 477–507; Alain Chenu, “Une institution sans intention. La sociologie en France depuis l’après-guerre,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 141–2 (March 2002): 46–59; Gérald Houdeville, Le métier de sociologue en France depuis 1945. Renaissance d’une discipline (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007). 15 “Je n’insisterai jamais assez sur ce caractère essentiel de la notion d’appropriation directe,” Pierre Restany, Les nouveaux réalistes (Paris: Éditions Planète, 1968), 58. 16 Several secondary groups, never formalized and ever changing, exist in the Nouveau Réalisme movement. A kind of regionalism linked César, Raysse, Klein, to the École de Nice, the materials united Hains, Villeglé, Dufrêne, and Rotella as affichistes (poster artists), Tinguely and Saint Phalle often worked in close dialogue. This diversity inside the range of the defined movement underlines its rather artificial formation through the impact of Restany’s theory. A clearly established group allowed the critics and the public to identify the artists while providing them with a constructed and somewhat clear line of interpretation. 17 Antje Kramer, Les Nouveaux Réalistes en Allemagne: Réalités et fantasmes d’une néo-avant-garde européenne (1957–1963) (Ph.D. dissertation, Aix-Marseille, Université de Provence, 2009), note 68, page 337. See also the published version: Antje Kramer, L’aventure allemande du nouveau réalisme: réalités et fantasmes d’une néo-avant-garde européenne, 1957–1963 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2012). 18 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Opérations linguistiques,” in Leeman, Le demi-siècle de Pierre Restany, 442. 14

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Indeed, I would suggest that Nouveaux Réalistes resemble historians more than sociologists. Their understanding of the everyday is based upon two major concepts: time and memory. Niki de Saint Phalle, who joined Nouveau Réalisme in February 1961, is well known for her merry Nanas, but she also created more ambiguous feminine personages, such as Mariée (Bride).19 This imposing sculpture evokes the old wedding glass globes, used to preserve the relic of the bride bouquet and other symbolic artifacts. Such objects are out of fashion today, but were hugely popular in France from the 1850s to the 1950s. The bride as depicted by Saint Phalle, though presented to the viewers, clearly refers to the past. She is far from being lively and merry as would be expected. Even more, her small head appears shrunken by desiccation, the hair not unlike the dry horsehair presented in some saints’ reliquaries. But even though they are rather pitiful examples, life is represented in the dress. Rigid at the bottom, it is also silently colonized by devouring figurines. The bride appears like a corpse, and yet she bears the life of others; she thus refers at the same time to different periods. The vitality of the things, little plastic babies, flowers, and animals, directly taken from the newly garnished shelves of consumer society, is opposed to the petrified outlook of the sculpture. Different backgrounds concur here to create an intricate composition where time seems to be the main material. Past and memories, common as well as personal references and symbols show through the different layers of time assembled by Saint Phalle. In her work, as well as in that of other Nouveaux Réalistes’, the evidently used and worn materials are manipulated to suggest the passage of time. This quality of worn materials has been studied by Walter Benjamin20 and Charles Baudelaire21 through their theoretical construction of the figure of the chiffonnier.22 Born in the modern city of the nineteenth century, a chiffonnier, or rag-picker, is someone who collects rags and different kinds of refuse to sell (or resell) them.23 This strange figure personifies the marginalized. He lives on the waste of others and cleans the city, thus clarifying the

Niki de Saint Phalle, La Mariée, 1963, 200 × 200 × 100 cm, plâtre, grillage, jouets divers en plastique, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. 20 Walter Benjamin (1882–1940), German philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, exiled in France during the Second World War. He used Baudelaire’s figure of the chiffonnier in his theory of history. See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire un poète lyrique à l’apogée du capitalisme (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 1982). On his life and work, see Jean-Michel Palmier, Walter Benjamin le chiffonnier, l’ ange et le petit bossu esthétique et politique chez Walter Benjamin (Paris: Klincksieck, 2006). 21 In “Le Fanfarlo” (1847) and in The Flowers of Evil (1857), more especially in the poem “Le Vin des Chiffonniers” (Rag-picker’s wine), Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) uses the chiffonnier as a metaphor of the modern poet. In his eyes, the chiffonnier’s activity of searching the grounds and muck resembles what poets do in the city, going through every remote aspect of contemporary life. 22 I will prefer the French word chiffonier to its English equivalent “rag-picker,” which—perhaps due to my being French—does not seem to hold the same diverse meanings explored and partly composed by Baudelaire. 23 On the contemporary chiffonier and flâneur (loafer), the importance of walking as an artistic tool and a renewal of the concept of experience, see Thierry Davila, Marcher, créer. Déplacements, flâneries, dérives dans l’ art de la fin du XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2002). 19

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boundaries between order and dirt.24 With him emerges a whole new perception of the city as a living entity in need of constant care, producing enormous quantities of waste and contaminating the people who exist in its midst. The chiffonnier nourishes from passions and memory, loss and identity. In a pars pro toto logic, the most humble things unveil the world in itself.25 Thus seen from its gutters, the everyday may seem strange. But more than strangeness, the gutters reveal what is usually kept in a darkness both real (the places where refuse is stocked are remote) and symbolic (they play no role in philosophy and, until quite late, politics). To construct artworks from matter found in the margins of society may be understood as an ideological act. That is why the chiffonnier has such an important place in Walter Benjamin’s theory: it enables him to construct his theory of history: “That the highest life is to be found in the lowest places; that nothing is quantité négligeable; that the nameless victims of history should finally, one and all, be ‘cited’ and ‘chronicler,’ who, according to the Theses, ‘recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones.’”26 By reinstating Nouveau Réalisme in its “longue durée” (long duration), to use Fernand Braudel’s term, the chiffonnier appears as a key figure through which to understand the Nouveaux Réalistes’ take on contemporaneity.27

The Chiffonnier’s realm Apart from Yves Klein and Martial Raysse,28 the Nouveaux Réalistes united behind their choices of materials. They walked the city, searching its margins, and scrutinized Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). 25 For an analysis of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s chiffonier and its use of ruins, see Agnès Lontrade, “Modernité et Antiquité: le temps des ruines” ; Miguel Egaña and Olivier Schefer, Esthétique des ruines. Poïétique de la destruction (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 15–27. 26 Irving Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” New German Critique no. 39, Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn 1986), 160. Wohlfarth cites Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 5 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–1982), vol. 1, 694. 27 Fernand Braudel was one of the founders of the French Annales School, which opened history as a discipline to large-scales analysis. He demonstrates this new methodology in the published version of his Ph.D. dissertation: Fernand Braudel, La méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949. Reprint: Paris: Armand Colin, 1985). See also Fernand Braudel, Écrits sur l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1985). 28 Yves Klein—also known as “Monochrom Yves”—was interested in the totalizing qualities of the monochrom, and created his own shade of blue, the IKB. Martial Raysse marveled at the store displays and tried to reproduce the aesthetic qualities of smooth consumer society. Both held a rather special position in the Nouveau Réalisme movement. Klein was very central in the creation of the movement, mostly because of his links with Pierre Restany, and Arman with whom he first experienced the thrill of avant-garde in Nice. Klein also shared a strong friendship with Tinguely, and they worked together on several occasions. But his take on appropriation, being abstract and somewhat mystical, led him to be slightly offbeat compared to the rest of the group. Especially, his interest in reality did not include scrap materials, as space itself was his major topic. 24

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its people in quest of materials bearing the marks of previous lives—either their own or their owners. The materials chosen by the Nouveaux Réalistes are mundane and often damaged. The artists rarely buy them new, but mostly find them in secondhand stores, in flea markets or sometimes directly in the streets. As a consequence of Haussmann’s renovation of Paris,29 flea markets were constrained to the margins of the city, away from the more upmarket shopping districts. Their history is strongly linked to the avantgarde, especially to Surrealism, as it constituted a zone where strangeness could easily be encountered. The idea of the discovery is central for Surrealism, but is less present in Nouveau Réalisme: as the first valued serendipity in the encounter of an object, the latter searched for materials in all consciousness. The mundane and the derisory hold a central place in their search, shifting decisively the dynamics of the Surrealist discovery as they condemn the marvelous by creating an everlasting disappointment. The objects or pieces of objects that Nouveaux Réalistes choose for their artworks are battered: at best, they are used, at worst they are real pieces of junk, like in Arman’s Poubelles (Trash Cans, Figure 7.1). As such, rather than unveiling the marvelous of the everyday, they confront us with the pettiness of things, their ephemerality and their smallness. The secondhand quality of these objects is a potential critique of the value of commodities. It also tends to reveal places, people, habits, and activities that are usually kept well out of society’s way. Jean Tinguely bought his materials from scrap merchants. He also went directly into garbage dumps, and once, when he found a complete set of furniture for a bedroom, he explained his ideal life to the electrical engineer and artist Billy Klüver. Klüver remembers the conversation as follows: When Jean will meet a willing girl—and that, he admits, would be difficult—this is where he would live with her. “I will do it, you know,” he said. As a free man, he wanted to spend his life on this pile of junk. He would make huge complicated constructions emerge from it and little by little would persuade the vagabonds living nearby the junk pile in small cabins that he was working on magnificent projects. Maybe they would help him?30

This anecdote reveals that Tinguely’s interest does not lie with the object but, accordingly, with junk itself. His dream links him to an existence marginalized from society as his lifestyle, friends, colleagues, and occupations would be contained to the perimeter of the “pile of junk.” In line with other Nouveaux Réalistes, Tinguely did not want to transform the junk he found. The group’s position is quite clear on the matter: things are presented directly, without any filter, representation, or modification. More than an alchemist’s The Baron Haussmann has been charged to renovate and modernize Paris by the Emperor Napoléon III, starting in 1853. 30 Billy Klüver, “La Garden Party,” in Tinguely [Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, 8 décembre 1988 à 27 mars 1989], ed. Pontus Hultén (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1988), 74. My translation. 29

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Figure 7.1  Arman, Petits Déchets Bourgeois, 1959. Accumulation of household garbage in wood box with glass cover. 58.4 × 40 × 12.1 cm. APA# 8017.59.001. Image courtesy of Arman Studio Archives New York.

process, the lifestyle he envisioned clearly recalls the Baudelairian chiffonnier. In 1857, Charles Baudelaire established for the first time a long-lasting equivalence between poet and chiffonnier in “Le Vin des Chiffonniers” (The Rag-picker’s Wine): “One sees a rag-picker go by, shaking his head, / Stumbling, bumping against the walls like a

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poet.”31 In The Flowers of Evil, two symbolic figures of the poet coexist in contrast. On the one hand, the albatross relates to a conception of poetry that Benjamin describes as “the experience of aura,” because the albatross’s huge wings keep them from walking, as says Baudelaire. On the other hand, the chiffonnier opens a new era, one in which the aura disappears behind a derelict humanity deprived of any transcendence. The albatross looks at the sky, whereas the chiffonnier is bent over to the ground as his search within the refuse wears his body down. In Baudelaire’s poetry, this tragic figure stands for another symbol of the poet beside the majestic albatross and corresponds with the emergence of modernity as an artistic value. Like the Baudelairian chiffonnier, Nouveaux Réalistes turn their gaze towards the ground—towards the low and mundane. In garbage and waste, they find traces of a life well hidden: margins appear in the scraps that have been thrown away and reinstalled into a parallel market of extreme recycling and poverty. Through Baudelaire’s writings, the chiffonnier becomes not only an iconic figure but also one who proclaims a new era: the beginning of modernity, one defined as a changing and challenging horizon throughout the history of the avant-gardes. The chiffonnier evokes the time of a rural exodus and the birth of capitalism. “The time of the masses”32 induces the chiffonnier by creating modern, nonorganic waste.33 The Baudelairian identification of the chiffonnier and the poet declares the possibility of a changing paradigm in creation. Interrupting the albatross’s vertical dialogue with the muses, the divine, and the absolute, he locates the poet in a horizontal dynamic, from man to man. This violent change has important consequences. The marginalized, the fallen, and the outcast take a central place in poetry that depicts their day-to-day battles without the lens that a long-lasting search for beauty had imposed.34 Following Baudelaire, Benjamin continues to develop the figure of the chiffonnier, which became in his mind not only a typical figure of modernity, but also a type of confrontation between the poet—himself standing in for the entire artistic community—and the social reality of the everyday. It is by searching the muck or walking the streets that modernity reveals itself: one has to lose oneself in the streets and the masses to discover its reality, because it is made more apparent by the irregularities of the margins of society, their position on the edge. For Benjamin, Baudelaire shows that modernity appears when the aura has been destroyed by the experience of shock.35 Benjamin argues that the shock is produced by encountering the masses inhabiting the vast city: they represent numbers but their souls are nowhere to be found. During

Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1918), 215. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli, Histoire culturelle de la France t. 4: Le temps des masses le vingtième siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998). 33 Sabine Barles, L’invention des déchets urbains: France 1790–1970 (Seyssel, Ain: Champ Vallon, 2005). 34 This has of course been prepared by a long history, building from François Villon to Lautréamont, including all of the réalistes writers of the nineteenth century. 35 “a indiqué le prix à payer pour accéder à la sensation de la modernité: la destruction de l’aura dans l’expérience vécue du choc,” Walter Benjamin, Sur quelques thèmes baudelairiens. Œuvres III (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 390. 31 32

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such encounters individuals do not confront one another as individuals, but as illusory bodies that are animated with a collective consciousness. This notion has been largely studied in the second half of the nineteenth century by authors such as Gabriel Tarde (Les lois de l’imitation [The Laws of Imitation], 1890), who develops the idea that individuals assimilate in a crowd through a type of hypnosis. Gustave le Bon, a key intellectual for the nineteenth century and for many totalitarian regimes, goes even further in Psychologie des foules (Crowd Psychology, 1895) by claiming that crowds form a genuine unity, in which individuality disappears behind the most vulgar and debased instincts. These two visions, highly marked by a defiance towards modernity, link it to crowds and the masses. Walter Benjamin does the same, and here too, Baudelaire’s chiffonnier functions as the central figure highlighting the course of history. Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains find their materials during long and frequent walks in the city. In the 1960s, the walk constitutes a common feature: Lettrists, Situationists and Fluxus for example practice what they call “dérive” (urban drift).36 Either totally haphazard or organized as such (as in the psychogeographical walks of Guy Debord), these walks are part of a longstanding idea of the avant-garde as Bohème (Bohemian). Such practices concerning the thrill of encounters and discoveries form the heart of Surrealism, and have been largely described by André Breton in Nadja (1928). The city is for Breton and the other members of the group the place of all chances, where coincidences are really rendez-vous. When Villeglé and Hains search the streets in quest of clues of the lacéré anonyme (anonymous tearing)37—accordingly to Villeglé’s definition, a made-up individual embodying the passions of the multitude by scraping and defacing posters—they unite an interest in the city, the masses, and the margins. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac similarly situates Villeglé “on the path of chiffonnier and poet, who constitutes society’s waste as the one and only hero of the big city.”38 There is therefore a historic lineage in the use of ragged materials in modernist artistic practice. In finding them, Nouveaux Réalistes follow the steps of Dadaists, of the prewar Surrealists, and their practice echoes Situationists’ and Fluxus’: they all share the heredity of the poet as the chiffonnier, they all search the streets for the derisory and mundane. By the 1960s, art had accepted the impossibility of the transfiguration that already appears in Baudelaire’s Flowers of evil. But they do not do so as a regret, as a necessarily disappointing scarlet letter of art. On the contrary, Nouveaux Réalistes invite disappointment. They use it as one of their most powerful tools. Without any of the nihilism that was present in Dadaism, they rejoice in the qualities of the insignificant. After the Second World War, the values of heroism and greatness have suffered from their extensive use by fascist regimes. The extraordinary, the supermen On this topic, see Emmanuel Guy’s essay in this volume: “Their Paris, Our Paris: A Situationist dérive.” 37 Jacques Villeglé explains this concept in Jacques Villeglé, Le lacéré anonyme (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2008). 38 “Sur la voie du chiffonnier et du poète, qui font des déchets de la société les seuls vrais héros de la grande ville,” Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Changer de politique,” in Jacques Villeglé la comédie urbaine, ed. Sophie Duplaix (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2008), 23. 36

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have revealed their totalitarian potential. In different fields of the humanities, researchers and thinkers dedicate their work to everyday people and objects. Banality becomes a major topic in history, following the lessons and new topics of microhistory and nouvelle histoire (new history),39 as well as in philosophy, where Michel Foucault’s work on marginalization,40 and Michel de Certeau’s on the Practice of Everyday Life41 open new paths. In searching the cities, garbage and scrap markets, Nouveaux Réalistes also bypass a direct encounter with an affluent and technological image of modernity: they concern themselves with what falls out, what happens at the margins. Moreover, the secondhand quality brings incertitude and approximation into the artworks. Nouveaux Réalistes oppose the imperfect to every notion of perfection. Tinguely’s sculptures do not work as planned: their movements are erratic, and accompanied by loud creaks; Spoerri’s collections of kitchen implements are unusable; the surface of Saint Phalle’s Nanas is not smooth, and Arman even confronts the viewers with actual decay in his Poubelles. In each work, the artist’s gestures follow the nature of materials. But their materials are not the only part of their work that bears the mark of the imperfect. In using materials and debris modified by their use and circulation in society, Nouveaux Réalistes disengage themselves from a comprehensive attitude towards construction and composition. They do not plan, their forms and materials are found, and therefore artworks bear the same mundane quality as the objects used: neither the machineries nor the general aesthetics are smooth. In the Nouveaux Réalistes’ relative withdrawal of the historical role of the artist, we may see a common reaction to the Second World War. This war revealed the dark side of rationalization and organization, leading to the discovery of the amorality of modernity.42 The choice of waste as artistic material may be understood in the perspective of that crisis of meaning. As the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters said: “One can also scream in using waste, and it is what I did in gluing and nailing. I called that Merz, but it was my prayer in the victorious aftermath of war, because once more, peace had triumphed. Anyway, everything was wasted, and one had to construct new things with debris.”43 Because the debris carries the memory of disaster, it creates the possibility of a meaningful reconstruction. The wounds are apparent through waste

See for example Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans (New York: G. Braziller, 1979). Michel Foucault’s work may be analyzed as a philosophic rehabilitation of some of society’s margins. Madness and its treatment reveal the fundamental structures of society, as do criminal reclusion and sexuality. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 41 Michel de Certeau et Luce Giard, L’invention du quotidien. t.1, Arts de faire (1980. Reprint: Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard et Luce Mayol, L’invention du quotidien. t.2 Habiter, cuisiner (1980. Reprint: Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Michel de Certeau et Luce Giard, La Culture au pluriel (1974. Reprint: Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993). 42 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1973). 43 Kurt Schwitters, cited in Isabelle Ewig, “Schwitters,” in Dada, ed. Laurent Le Bon (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2005), 887. 39 40

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and scrap. In the 1960s, the memory of bombs and gas chambers made the ambiguity of modernity more striking. Marked as a tool of destruction, modernity is suggested as a fundamentally dual force in the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes. Villeglé’s and Hains’s works recall damages inflicted by time and people. They transcribe the vitality of the city where they find materials and the traces of people who marked them in the form of debris, linking energy and waste, growth and death, form and fragment. With them, the aura has been dissolved by an experience of the shock, which resides less in the encounter with the masses than in their absence.

Memory’s time In the early 2000s, we entered the third phase of the historiography of Nouveau Réalisme in which Ziva Amishai-Maisels,44 Jill Carrick,45 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac,46 and Didier Semin47 began to reevaluate the impact of the Second World War on Nouveau Réalisme. This approach was made difficult by the conditions of the collective memory and memorialization of the war from its end up until the 1990s. But recently, these conditions have changed due to increasing loss of direct witnesses and the decreasing dominance of the figure of the victim in historic scholarship.48 As shown by Denis Peschanski,49 memory enlightens what may be of use to contemporaneity. In France, for a long time, the memories of horrors were of less use than the well-constructed narrative of a country liberating itself and vastly resisting from inside. During reconstruction, France needed the myth of the French resistance to recreate unity.50 But the trauma nevertheless imposes itself. In the end, it compels us to face images and realities that always emerge at the margins of personal and societal memory and representation. And this process of progressive revelation of a memory emerging from the blur of repression is comparable to the discoveries made in piles of scrap and

Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (New York: Pergamon Press, 1993). 45 Carrick, Le Nouveau Réalisme and her article in Cécile Debray, ed., Le Nouveau réalisme [Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, March 28 to July 2, 2007, Hanovre, Sprengel Museum, September 9, 2007 to January 27, 2008] (Paris: Éditions de la RMN, 2007). 46 See Laurence Bertrand Dorléac’s article in Duplaix, Jacques Villeglé la comédie urbaine. 47 See Didier Semin’s article in ibid. 48 Simone Veil, “Réflexions sur la mémoire de la Shoah,” Historiens et Géographes no. 384 (October– November 2003): 51–59; Wieviorka Annette, Déportation et Génocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Hachette, 2003); Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin (Paris: Hachette, 2002); Annette Wieviorka, “La Mémoire, entre histoire et politique,” Cahiers français no. 303, ed. Yves Léonard (July–August 2001); “Les historiens et le travail de mémoire,” special issue of Esprit (August– September 2000). 49 Boris Cyrulnik and Denis Peschanski, Mémoire et traumatisme l’individu et la fabrique des grands récits entretien avec Boris Cyrulnik (Bry-sur-Marne: Ina, 2012). 50 Laurent Douzou, La Résistance française, une histoire périlleuse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005). 44

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gutters: people and societies alike sort through their memories, often finding those that are the most important on the edge of consciousness. As such, the Shoah and the war appear to underline an important part of the Nouveaux Réalistes’ production. The temporal ambiguity of many of their artworks allows memory not to reveal itself but to linger in the shadows. The superposition of time resulting from such a practice has been shown by Jill Carrick, and most especially in Arman’s Home sweet home (1960). Carrick writes: “Produced though they were in the face of celebratory mid-twentieth-century ideologies of modernity, the Accumulations appear to intertwine visions of the past and future into a reconfigured temporality or tense characteristic of what one might now loosely name the ‘future-recursive.’”51 The objects used in Arman’s Le village des damnés (Village of the Damned, 1962) and Home sweet home (1960), she argues, produce a temporal ambiguity (Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2  Arman, Le Village des damnés, 1962. Accumulation of dolls in store display box. 58.4 × 40 × 12.1 cm. APA# 8002.62.028. Image courtesy of Arman Studio Archives New York Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-Avant-Garde Topographies of Chance and Return (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 79.

51

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The gas masks used in Home sweet home have been read as referring back to the First World War, yet Carrick proves that they come from the reserves held in Paris for use in the event of a German attack during the Second World War. Her analysis of Village des damnés leads to the same conclusions. She underlines the fact that the dolls used by Arman are from the 1940s, even if we usually take them to be 1960s artifacts. Carrick cites the sociologist Pierre Baracca, who shows that “in the 23 first accumulations made by Arman between 1960 and 1962, 96% contain objects that existed before World War II.”52 Materials themselves unite different kinds of times and in between their scratched surfaces and recollections of a long-lost use value, one may see past and present engaged in a discrete dialogue. This dialogue may also be present in Saint Phalle’s Tirs (Shots). In this series she fires different types of guns (rifles, pistols, air guns etc.) directly towards structures hidden in plastic bags and cans stuffed with paint and other liquids or gaseous substances behind the white surface of pre-painted canvas. In all of the series, the sounds of firearms and the pockmarked surfaces suggest wounds, ruins, and the noise of the war. These pieces were produced during the Algerian War of Independence53 when France saw once again its people divided, its army engaged and its citizens targeted by terrorism.54 The proximity of the Second World War made it an inescapable background, a point of reference for all subsequent forms of war and terror. In the writings of several intellectuals of the time, the Algerian War of Independence even appears as an occasion to replay some of the choices and positions made during the Second World War.55 But Saint Phalle also chooses to face it directly in her Autel O.A.S. piece, referring by its title to OAS (Organization of the Secret Army),56 a terrorist movement active in France during 1961 and 1962 that sought to keep Algeria French. They were responsible for several attacks, assassinations, and bombing, both in Paris and Algiers. Her piece also connects the Algerian War of Independence with images of Catholic folklore, thus referring both to a right-wing position linking religion to politics and to her profound rejection of her own Catholic upbringing.57

Ibid., 82. The Algerian War of Independence lasted from 1954 to 1962. 54 On the impact of the Algerian War of Independence on the art scene, see Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2014), and Laurel Fredrickson’s essay in this volume: “Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Revolution: The French Happening, Surrealism, and the Algerian War.” 55 “One may ask if, regarding the Guerre d’Algérie and the following generation—here I refer not only to Sartre and the young people of ’68—a certain kind of activism didn’t come from the will to replay what had been already played, to replay it in an obviously less dramatic fashion than World War II,” Jacques Julliard, “Une base de masse pour l’anticolonialisme,” in La guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (Brussels, Évry: Complexe, Presses universitaires de France, 1991), 359–360. 56 OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète [Organisation of the Secret Army]), officially formed in 1961, conducted several terrorist attacks in Algeria and Metropolitan France, aiming to shake the official power of state and prevent Algeria’s independence from French colonial rule. 57 For more information see Camille Morineau, ed., Niki de Saint Phalle (Paris: Éditions de la RMN, 2014). 52 53

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If Saint Phalle approaches the Second World War through the Algerian War of Independence and Catholicism, other artists in the group are more concerned with images of death and disappearance, such as Spoerri and Arman, or of a destructive yet laughable machine, such as Tinguely and César. All their works, including Villeglé and Hains, include objects and scraps from the everyday that constantly refer to the past. Their scratches are the result of being used, by a specific hand or the succession of specific hands. Every mark is both a signature and an anonymous sign. As such, individuals are suggested in every artwork that is made from scrap. But in no Nouveaux Réalistes’ work does a single person truly appear: no names, no specificity, in short, no identity finds its way in these artworks. The human figure is treated as an absence, one that exists, even as lacunae. Materiality alone leaves a testimony of people absorbed by time and masses. By the complexity of their temporal constructions, Nouveaux Réalistes build artworks that bring together contemporaneity and its memory, in the form of banality and obsolescence, object and waste, anonymity and individual marks. While reevaluating the links between Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, and Surrealism, the refuse and the mundane appear as bearers of a very rich network of significations, historical, sociological as well as psychological. As such, the use of waste by Nouveaux Réalistes can be perceived as the path taken from trauma towards its resolution. Refuse revealed the secrets of a painful past, and as the chiffonnier bends to the ground, every scrap is a clue, every fragment is the dust of history. Absence, death, the violence of machines, and de-humanization are expressed by battered materials, marked by scrapes as deep as scars or as subtle as faded memory. Through this kind of material a discrete history is put into light: refuse composes the structure and the matter of artworks that suggest the past in its most versatile and precarious form.

8

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision of Antwerp: Movement, Time, and Kinetic Art, 1955–1959 Noémi Joly

In the spring of 1959, an untitled collective exhibition curated by young artists (Paul Van Hoeydonck along with Pol Bury and Jean Tinguely as the driving forces) took place in the cavernous attic of the Hessenhuis in Antwerp (Belgium), an old warehouse allotted by the city to G58, an association of progressive local artists founded ahead of the Brussels World’s Fair.1 The exhibition, which was initially dedicated to “motion” (Le Mouvement), brought together artists based in different European countries: Robert Breer, Pol Bury, Yves Klein, Heinz Mack, Bruno Munari, Otto Piene, Dieter Roth, Jesús Rafael Soto, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Günther Uecker, and Paul Van Hoeydonck.2 Remembered under the name of Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision, the title of this major show sounds like an incidental tribute to avant-garde artist László MoholyNagy as much as it evokes an art opened to vibrant phenomena and to new perceptual patterns.3 The event, which had limited resonance at the time, would soon be raised to the status of a legendary collective exhibition for a number of reasons. Considered from the perspective of French postwar art, Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision gives evidence of a substantial network of artists which defies the common designations of Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, or ZERO to which they would later be affiliated, and bypasses the French-speaking capitals of Paris and Brussels. Indeed, G58—an abbreviation of “Group 58”—was formed in Antwerp in 1958 by Herman Denkens, Walter Vanermen, André Comhaire, Jef Kersting, and Jef Verheyen. The G58 foundation was justified by the need to find opportunities to exhibit whereas all attention and resources were focused on Brussels preparations for the world’s fair. See: Johan Pas, “ZERO in Antwerp. Artist-Curated Group Shows, 1959–1964,” in The Artist as Curator. Collaborative Initiatives in the International ZERO Movement 1957–1967, ed. Tiziana Caianiello, and Mattijs Visser (Düsseldorf: ZERO Foundation; Ghent: MER Paper Kunsthalle, 2015), 157–159; 189. 2 Untitled [Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision], Hessenhuis, Antwerp, March 21–May 3, 1959. Uecker was invited at a later stage and for this reason his name does not appear on the invitation. Conversely, Enzo Mari, whose name is included in the invitation, was absent from the show. 3 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947), 371. Inspired by MoholyNagy, this unofficial title was coined by Marc Callewaert whose foreword in the catalog, “Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision,” was also used in the headline of his review of the show (Gazet van Antwerpen, March 24, 1959). From that point, the title caught on. 1

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the survey of Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision sheds new light on the dynamics of personal encounters, notwithstanding the frontiers and regardless of the implemented strategies of Parisian art criticism and the Parisian art market. For Tinguely, Bury, and other artists whose reliefs and sculptures had been brought to public attention following Le Mouvement, a seminal exhibition on kinetic art held at Denise René Gallery in April 1955, the detour through Antwerp was an opportunity to regain control over the presentation of their works and to put forward the plurality of views regarding the issue of motion. It is therefore not inconsequential that this pioneering show happened in Antwerp, whose local art scene was struggling for full recognition in the context of sibling rivalry with Brussels.4 This situation of competition was a breeding ground for ambitious undertakings such as Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision. There is no doubt that the participating artists aimed to make an impact through a consistent set of works of art and a self-edited catalog.5 To quote Pol Bury, co-organizer of the show: “It depends on us to make a very important exhibition. The organizers give me total freedom.”6 Though each artist conceived his own contribution without prior consultation with the others, an overall cohesion emerged from the confrontation of the works of art on display. The staging of the show, with the brightly lit works of art hanging from the beams and radiating in the dark attic, artificially emphasized a sense of global cohesion. A few months later, in the Munich-based journal Nota, Heinz Mack und Otto Piene, co-founders of ZERO magazine, noticed that: Everyone was fascinated by the juxtaposition of the multifarious realizations, which nonetheless resulted in an astoundingly cohesive overall impression … We nevertheless must note that artists from far-flung regions of the world exhibited here together for the first time, artists who had previously hardly known each other or who were perfect strangers and whose works display an astounding consistency of artistic intention.7 About the artistic competition between Antwerp and Brussels, see: Jan Ceuleers, Nieuwe Kunst in Antwerpen 1958–1962 (Antwerp: M HKA, 2012); Jan Ceuleers, “A huge amusement-park exhibition / Vision in Motion (1959),” in L’Internationale: Post-War Avant-Gardes Between 1957 and 1986, ed. Bart De Baere and Christian Höller (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2013), 275–277; Johan Pas, “ZERO in Antwerp. Artist-Curated Group Shows, 1959–1964,” in Antwerpen/Bruxelles’ 60, ed. Caianiello and Visser 157–159; Dieter Schwarz, Antwerpen/Bruxelles’ 60 (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2002). 5 The catalog, a square brochure made by Pol Bury, contains original texts and poems of the artists. Klein, Munari, Soto, Uecker are missing. But the booklet includes Emmett Williams’ Progressions (excerpts from the upcoming issue of Spoerri’s magazine Material) and Dieter Roth’s Carré dépliable (Foldout square) from a past issue of Material. 6 Pol Bury, letter to Jesús Rafael Soto, undated (1959), Archives Soto, Paris. 7 Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, “Dynamo,” Nota 4 (1960): 4–5. Reprinted and translated in English in ZERO, exh. cat., ed. Dirk Pörschmann, and Margriet Schavemaker, (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum; Düsseldorf: ZERO Foundation, 2015), 32. Between 1958 and 1961, three issues of ZERO magazine were edited by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene and published in Düsseldorf. Meanwhile, ZERO enlarged its scope and became the banner for multifarious activities, a sphere of influence which developed beyond the periodical and Germany. First a magazine, ZERO expanded into an international and mutable network. For an overview of ZERO, see: ZERO: Internationale Künstler-Avantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre (Düsseldorf: Museum Kunstpalast; Saint-Étienne: 4

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision  139 In what follows, I assume that Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision was not so much a “proto-Zero-exhibition”8 as a successful attempt by Pol Bury and Jean Tinguely to escape the influence of Denise René Gallery in Paris and Brussels and to launch an exhibition on “movement” that was a competing response to Victor Vasarely and Nicolas Schöffer’s theoretical sway on kinetic art. Against the prevailing futurism of kinetic art, Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision opened parallel tracks at the dawn of the 1960s. In Chronophobia, Pamela Lee offers some insightful observations on the subjective experience of technological change in the art of the 1960s. This issue arises through a schizophrenic and pervasive relationship to time characterized by a “see-saw motion between futurity and pastness. Pointing forward and backward simultaneously, the movement betrays an uncertainty about the presentness of kinetic art, perhaps the present tense in general.”9 And indeed, the exhibits in Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision set out an ambiguous connection with technological progress at odds with Denise René’s guiding line: the slowness in Tinguely’s and Bury’s works, the immaterial and vibratory experiments of Soto, Klein, Mack, Piene, Uecker, the anachronistic and participatory devices of Breer, Munari, Roth, and Spoerri, heralded a certain timelag, a non-contemporaneity slightly conveying a critical value towards the so-called optimism of the period.10

Against Le Mouvement (1955) and for an emancipation from Denise René Gallery At the start of 1959, Marc Callewaert, art critic for Gazet van Antwerpen (Antwerp Gazette) and chairman of G58, along with abstract artist and member of the same association, Paul Van Hoeydonck, considered organizing an exhibition on mouvement.11 Musée d’Art Moderne; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006); Dirk Pörschmann and Mattijs Visser, 4 3 2 1 ZERO, with complete reprint of ZERO magazine (Düsseldorf: Richter Fey Verlag, 2012); ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow 1950s-60s (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2014); ZERO, exh. cat., 2015. 8 Renate Wiehager in: ZERO aus Deutschland 1957–1966, und heute, exh. cat., ed. Renate Wiehager (Galerie der Stadt Esslingen and Villa Merkel; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000), 13. 9 Pamela Lee, Chronophobia. On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 101–102. 10 The art of the 1955–1965 decade (Nouveau Réalisme, Neo-Dada, Pop art, ZERO, op art, kinetic art) has long been considered optimistic, non-critical, showing adhesion to the dominant values of postwar society. For a vivid deconstruction of the positive narrative surrounding les Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975) in France, see: Céline Pessis, Sezin Topçu, and Christophe Bonneuil, eds., Une autre histoire des “Trente Glorieuses.” Modernisation, contestations et pollutions dans la France d’après-guerre (Paris: La Découverte, 2013); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). For alternative perspectives in art history, see: Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’Ordre sauvage: violence, dépense et sacré dans l’art des années 1950–1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Topographies of Chance and Return (Farnham; Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010). 11 Pas,“ZERO in Antwerp. Artist-Curated Group Shows, 1959–1964,” 159, 189 (note 17); Ceuleers, “A Huge Amusement-Park Exhibition,” 276.

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They sought assistance from Pol Bury, whose kinetic works had just been displayed in a solo exhibition at the Hessenhuis (January 17 to February 5, 1959). The planned event temporarily borrowed its title from the show Le Mouvement at Denise René Gallery in April 1955, a trailblazer in which Bury had taken part together with Jean Tinguely, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Robert Breer, all of whom would contribute to Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision.12 For the organization of the Hessenhuis event, Pol Bury got support from Jean Tinguely. They worked together from remote locations, the first in La Louvière (a village about 50 km away from Brussels), the second in Gelsenkirchen, in the German Ruhr region, where he was commissioned on the realization of two Mechanical Reliefs in the Musiktheater built by Werner Ruhnau.13 It is likely that the distance lead to misunderstandings between the local team and the other artists, which would result in a memorable fight between Tinguely and Van Hoeydonck during the opening of the exhibition, and Van Hoeydonck’s dismissal from the show.14 According to Van Hoeydonck he was derided for his leniency toward informal painting because he had attended the opening of Bert de Leeuw, an Antwerp painter and G58 member, that same evening. In response to this public shaming, Van Hoeydonck laughed at Tinguely and his consorts and belittled them as “ordinary and unoriginal neo-dadaists”:15 “It is useless to reinvent ‘Dada.’ Dada is dead and will stay buried. Our research should be serious.”16 After his brutal exclusion from the show, Van Hoeydonck received support from Henryk Berlewi, a founding figure of Polish avant-garde of the 1920s who had

Le Mouvement, Denise René Gallery, Paris, April 6–30, 1955. Artists: Agam, Bury, Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Jacobsen, Soto, Tinguely, Vasarely. At the initiative of Pontus Hultén, Victor Vasarely, and Roger Bordier, Le Mouvement is recorded as the first survey exhibition dedicated to kinetic art. It mingled different generations of artists and crossed plastic arts with cinema through an original program of film screenings at La Cinémathèque française. Robert Breer presented selected animated short films in the associated film program at La Cinémathèque française. See: Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000); Denise René, l’intrépide: une galerie dans l’aventure de l’art abstrait, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001); L’œil moteur: art optique et cinétique 1950– 1975, exh. cat. (Strasbourg: Les Musées de Strasbourg, 2005); Le Mouvement. Vom Kino zur Kinetik, exh. cat. (Basel: Museum Tinguely, 2010). 13 Jean Tinguely was appointed on the construction site in March 1959. There he worked alongside Yves Klein. Later that year, Iris Clert presented in her Parisian gallery an exhibition entitled Collaboration internationale entre artistes et architectes dans la réalisation du nouvel Opéra de Gelsenkirchen (International collaboration between artists and architects working on the new Gelsenkirchen Opera House project) and exhibited in her gallery the scale models made by the group who worked on the Opera House: Werner Ruhnau, Norbert Kricke, Jean Tinguely, Paul Dierkes, Robert Adams, and Yves Klein (May 29, 1959). See: Noit Banai, “Avant-Garde or Civil Service? Yves Klein, Werner Ruhnau and the European Situation,” in Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, vol. 1 of European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, ed. Sascha Bru and Jan Baetens (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 244–263. 14 His exclusion was notified by a formal letter written by Tinguely and co-signed by Spoerri, Klein, Bury, Mack, and Piene. Jean Tinguely, letter to Van Hoeydonck, March 22, 1959 (copy consulted in Basel, Tinguely Museum Archives). 15 Paul Van Hoeydonck, letter to Henryk Berlewi, June 24, 1959, quoted in Ceuleers, “A Huge Amusement-Park Exhibition,” 19–20. 16 Paul Van Hoeydonck, letter to an unknown address, March 25, 1959, quoted in Pas,“ZERO in Antwerp. Artist-Curated Group Shows, 1959–1964,” 172. 12

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision  141 returned to the front stage since the important exhibition Forerunners of Abstract Art (Précurseurs de l’art abstrait).17 Quickly seen to epitomize a head-on confrontation between serious Modernism and jaunty Neo-Dadaism,18 this dissension certainly opposed incompatible approaches to movement, but the ins and outs of such an argument should not be underestimated. Admittedly Tinguely fundamentally disagreed with Van Hoeydonck’s abstract art. In the short text devoted to Van Hoeydonck and published in the catalog, Maurits Bilcke, writer and defender of geometrical abstract art, tackled the issue of movement with particular regard to the changing nature of Van Hoeydonck’s white monochromatic paintings, whose surfaces change in response to the movements of spectators and the incidence of light: This monochrome and motionless painting causes in the viewer the urge to move. The painting remains unchanged in its statics but changes appearance under the action of light and depending on the angle of view. It is accordingly a flat plane which irresistibly induces movement in these works of art.19

Right after this analysis, Bilcke made a mistake and championed Van Hoeydonck as a forerunner in the still-active field of constructive abstract art: “In the evolution of constructive abstract art, we must assess this brainwave, that is this interpretation of planimetry and stereometry, as a fascinating achievement made by Van Hoeydonck.”20 In this restrictive acceptance, movement is considered as a strictly optical phenomenon within a set of rules specific to neoplasticism. However, it turns out that this geometrical abstract background corresponded to the artistic line of Denise René Gallery, a guidance actively thwarted by Tinguely, Bury, Soto, and others. Hessenhuis’s exhibition highlighted conflicting approaches to movement. The show rejected the

Henryk Berlewi, letter to Paul Van Hoeydonck, June 27, 1959. Quoted in Ceuleers, Nieuwe Kunst in Antwerpen 1958–1962, 18: “Je pense tout simplement que ces messieurs … cherchent le scandale. Ne sachant pas comment se faire valoir ils ont recours à des vieux trucs moisis pratiqués il y a une quarantaine d’années par dada. Aucune originalité. Ce sont des retardataires qui se prennent pour des novateurs.” Again, Tinguely and friends are lampooned as latecomer-Dadaists. Précurseurs de l’art abstrait en Pologne: Kazimierz Malewicz, Katarzyna Kobro, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Henryk Berlewi, Henryk Stazewski, Denise René Gallery, Paris, November 1957. See: Agata Pietrasik, “Restaging the Avant-Garde: Henryk Berlewi’s Return to Abstract Art,” OwnReality 8 (2015): accessed November 19, 2017 http://www.perspectivia.net/publikationen/ownreality/8/8_en_pdf 18 See Pas, “Zero in Antwerp. Artist-curated Group Shows, 1959–1964,” 172 and Ceuleers, “A HugeAmusement Park Exhibition,” 280. Much more interesting is Pamela Lee’s understanding of the reception of kinetic art torn between “high seriousness and sheer goofiness, daunting futuristic ambition, and infantilizing regression.” Instead of repeating the argument of an opposition between Neo-Dadaism and Modernism, she is rather interested in that sense of “undecidability”: “far from being merely pluralistic, this split also attests to a dialectical turn with marked historical reverberations.” In Lee, Chronophobia, 101. 19 Maurits Bilcke, “Van Hoeydonck,” in Breer, Bury, Klein, Mack, Mari, Munari, Necker [sic], Piene, Rot, Soto, Spoerri, Tinguely, Van Hoeydonck (Antwerp: G58, 1959), unpaged. 20 Ibid. 17

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idea of frozen movement recorded by any expressionist painting; it likewise disavowed any approach explicitly referring to the tradition of abstract art stemming from Mondrian or Malevich, strongly defended by Michel Seuphor, and supported by influential magazine Aujourd’hui, Art et Architecture (Art and Architecture Today). As Jean-Paul Ameline recalled, “for the most radical artists [of Denise René Gallery], it [was] not just a question of repeating once again the geometrical approach to art. On the contrary, they aim[ed] at breaking with the illusory tradition of an individual and autonomous work of art in order to achieve ‘open works’ of art, which integrate the sensitive components of the universe.”21 Hence the fact that Tinguely and Soto both left Denise René Gallery in 1959 to join Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, which already represented Yves Klein and would soon attract Pol Bury. One of the most sensitive points indeed concerned the contribution of Denise René Gallery to the show. Since the success of the exhibition Klar Form—Pure Form, an explicit reference to the geometrical abstract tradition—which took place in the Musée d’art wallon in Liège in 1952, Denise René Gallery had consolidated its position on the Belgian art market.22 This is why Callewaert and Van Hoeydonck arranged for its participation to be effective.23 The outright refusal of Tinguely suggests that Antwerp’s “Movement” exhibition was conceived as a counter-proposal to Le Mouvement (1955),which had been hijacked by Denise René’s favorite artist, Victor Vasarely.24 The key point in this regard was the independence of the artistic decision-making process which broke with former art dealer Denise René’s guidelines. It is significant that, in order to avoid any confusion, the contentious title “Movement” was promptly dismissed from the work documents in favor of a neutral listing of the participants.25 Vision in Motion—Motion is Vision also fiercely challenged Victor Vasarely’s and Nicolas Schöffer’s positions on movement and technology. In the foreword of the catalog, they are advocated by G58 chairman, Marc Callewaert, whose title, a tribute to László Moholy-Nagy’s posthumous book Vision in Motion (1947), would give its name to the show itself. In this text, Callewaert builds on Moholy-Nagy’s hope that the avant-garde artist seizes the opportunities of the era to raise art and technology to “a new unity and a new poetry.” It is based on the premise that “the emotional content of an age expresses itself with and through its mechanical conquests”:

Jean-Paul Ameline, “Denise René, histoire d’une galerie,” in Jean-Paul Ameline and Véronique Wiesinger, eds., Denise René, l’intrépide. Une galerie dans l’aventure de l’art abstrait. 1944–1978 (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2001). 22 Klar Form, 20 artistes de l’École de Paris, Musée d’art wallon, Liège, August 30–September 18, 1952. See: Ameline, “Denise René, histoire d’une galerie,” 29. 23 Paul Van Hoeydonck, letter to an unknown address, March 25, 1959 (copy consulted in Basel, Tinguely Museum Archives). 24 About this issue, see: Ameline, “Denise René, histoire d’une galerie,” 32–35. 25 Tinguely, letter to Pol Bury, undated (circa February 1959), quoted in Ceuleers, “A Huge AmusementPark Exhibition,” 278. In the same article, Ceuleers states that Nicolas Schöffer declined the invitation to exhibit in Antwerp because Denise René was planning a large exhibition on “Movement” and she and Vasarely did not appreciate that Vasarely was not invited in Antwerp. 21

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision  143 Responding to scientific proposals of his time and transcending them, the artist asserts his central position and his spiritual function. Less than ever he cannot live on the fringes of his time. For him, more than anyone else, science is a fertile ground for inspiration, machine is his friend.26

Such a call to bridge the gap between art and science sounds like a catchphrase. It suggests that the task of the artist is to provide new ways to confer dignity to the machine and to express the scientific revolution of Einstein’s space-time theory. Callewaert places these requirements under the heading of “spatiodynamism,” a neologism he borrows from Nicolas Schöffer, whom he neglects to mention.27 “This will naturally lead the artist to create new technical medias”—he writes again,28 taking for granted that cinema is the culmination of the most innovative art. In doing so, he endorses both Vasarely’s Notes for a Manifesto (1955) and Moholy-Nagy’s Painting Photography Film (1925).29 Callewaert reiterates the most proactive arguments of the debate between art and technology, which actually duplicates the apologetic discourses of technological progress as it usually focuses on invention and innovation. It is therefore hardly surprising that his foreword set the tone for the reviews in the local newspapers. In addition, it is clear that his text was in line with Nicolas Schöffer’s optimistic statements. In 1954, Schöffer had expressed his enthusiasm by claiming: the real and immediate scope of the sculptor remains space with its boundless possibilities and particularly in conjunction with scientific progress, which will be an inexhaustible source of formal enhancements through spatiodynamism. Look at the extraordinary structures of power stations, the attractive volumes of a jet aircraft, a radar tower with its moving components, an electronic computer. All this new and great raw material presents itself to the sculptor and the plastic artist who shall harness it, mold it, transform it like his ancestors molded clay or hammered marble.30

Yet, for most of the artists in Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision, movement and machinery were devalued and reduced to mere means not to be overestimated. A few years before, in a letter to his friend Pontus Hultén, then a young art historian and curator, Tinguely reminded him that “the machine [was] nothing more than the chassis” of his art.31 Subsequently, he attempted to qualify Hultén’s anti-machine interpretation

Marc Callewaert, “Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision,” in Breer, Bury, Klein, Mack, Mari, Munari, Necker [sic], Piene, Rot, Soto, Spoerri, Tinguely, Van Hoeydonck (Antwerp: self-published, 1959). 27 Nicolas Schöffer, Le Spatiodynamisme, text from his lecture at La Sorbonne, Amphithéâtre Turgot, June 19, 1954 (Boulogne-sur-Seine: Éditions A.A., 1955), unpaged. 28 Ibid. 29 Victor Vasarely, “Notes pour un Manifeste,” Aujourd’hui. Art et Architecture 2 (1955): 10; László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (London: Lund Humphries, 1969). 30 Schöffer, Le Spatiodynamisme, unpaged. 31 Tinguely, letter to Pontus Hultén, 1956. Basel, Tinguely Museum Archives. 26

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of his Méta-mécaniques (Meta-mechanical) sculptures, which had earned him a place in Le Mouvement (1955). Hultén had focused on the mechanical disorderliness of Tinguely’s artworks and their reliance on chance, agent of absolute anarchy. Tinguely disagreed. In 1959, in a draft version of his manifesto For Statics, Tinguely noted that “movement is therefore a means to an aim.”32 Republished in the catalog accompanying the exhibition Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision, Tinguely’s manifesto disseminates an anti-Mouvement position while asserting his own conception, as is shown in the balanced title of a first version of the manifesto: “Against Movement—For a new Statics.”33 Likewise, for the other artists of the show, movement could not be equated to the introduction of a fourth dimension to art, nor to the futuristic exaltation of machine and speed.

Transience and deceleration within technological and timebased acceleration: Tinguely’s Manifesto For Statics and Bury’s Punctuations slow duration According to the mythology surrounding Tinguely, his leaflet For Statics was scattered from an airplane flying above Düsseldorf. Carefully staged by Charles Wilp and Tinguely himself, the photographs substantiate this account and anchor it in history. It is nevertheless difficult to confirm the specific circumstances surrounding the distribution of the manifesto leaflet. After some crosschecking, it appears that the act may never even have taken place. Rather than seeking to untangle truth from myth, it is more fundamentally important to understand that this operation arose from the deployment of a genuine communication strategy, and that the general adherence to this fiction is the manifest sign of its tactical success.34 The title, For Statics, seems to contradict the literal sense of the text, which proclaims the absolute impermanence of reality: “Everything moves, there is no immobility.”35 This emphatic celebration of movement is coupled with an exhortation to accept the fleetingness of things: “Be in time—be static, be static—with movement.” Tinguely was Tinguely, Gedanken. Entwurfe für Manifest, undated (1959). Bern, Swiss National Library, Bibliothèque nationale suisse, Daniel Spoerri Archives. 33 Ibid. 34 Für Statik was written by Jean Tinguely in early 1959, at the same time as his first solo exhibition at Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf, Tinguely: Konzert für 7 Bilder und andere Skulpturen (Tinguely: Concert for 7 Paintings and other Sculptures), which was introduced by a speech pronounced by Yves Klein dedicated to “The collaboration between creative artists.” See: Klein, “Speech Delivered on the Occasion of the Tinguely Exhibition in Düsseldorf (January 1959),” in Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, trans. Klaus Ottmann (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2007), 62. It is possible to understand it as a wish to extricate himself from Pontus Hultén’s discourse judged too simplistic, indeed as a public attempt to regain control over a “confiscated” voice. But even more it demonstrates, by its very publicity, an equal desire to insert his voice into the concert of emerging artistic propositions on the eve of the untitled exhibition of Antwerp, Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision. 35 Leaflet Für Statik, Düsseldorf, March 1959. 32

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision  145 thus an apologist for the present moment, for reality in whatever form it arrived, and against which no one should struggle: “Breathe deeply. Live in the present, live in and on time, for a full and beautiful reality.”36 At this stage, static is proposed as a necessary and saving attitude of consent in the face of change: let yourself go with the flow of time, let yourself be carried away by the undertow of movement. When Tinguely, in conjunction with his exhibition at Kaplan Gallery in London (October 15–31, 1959) presented a lecture at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in November 1959, he returned to and refined the notion of static. “Static, static, static! Be static!” he hammered out again before clarifying: be static because “movement is static.”37 This is a strange oxymoron, the key to which he provides. Movement is static precisely because it is the only conceivable certainty within reality, an incontrovertible truth to which we cling, a “fixed constant” (to use the title of one of his artworks).38 Tinguely’s manifesto expresses an inverted experience of time compared to the modernist one. On the one hand, its insistence on the thickness of the lived present enables the reader to question progress and to reconsider the farsighted technological time based on innovation and acceleration. On the other hand, the neo-Heraclitean tone of the text reverses the devitalized and mechanical movement of modernity insofar as it bears witness to an unpredictable relationship to the ever-changing world. Here, mechanical time includes all at once the repetitive and monotonous rhythms of the industrial production rates and the steady pace of time-clock discipline. For Statics urges the reader to loosen the abstract and horizontal timeline of the Moderns to dive into the real time-depth, to be carried away by the flow of time as it undergoes metamorphosis. Not much later, in a 1960 interview with the critic Calvin Tomkins, Tinguely regarded this apology for the present moment as the expression of “speculative thinking.”39 So, it did not carry the weight of critical commentary on his own works which, since 1954, had been based on the setting into motion of their constituent elements by means of small motors cobbled together by hand. In Vision in Motion— Motion in Vision, Tinguely exhibited some of his Variations with their comet tails and a few loud and heavy reliefs from the Concert. This evident discrepancy between text and artifacts should no doubt be considered one of the reasons Tinguely referred to his leaflet as the product of “speculative thinking”—quite distant, it turns out, from the inherent reality of his works. But this text also allowed Tinguely to reaffirm his hostility to kineticism as defended by Victor Vasarely or Nicolas Schöffer. As early as 1956, Tinguely had referred to Denise René’s coterie in the following terms to Pontus Hultén:

Ibid. Jean Tinguely, Art, Machines, and Motion: A Lecture by Tinguely (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, November 12, 1959). Text of the lecture Static, static, static! reproduced in Tinguely, ed. Pontus Hultén, exh. cat. (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1988), 67. 38 See Pamela Lee stimulating understanding of Jean Tinguely’s works in: Lee, Chronophobia, 84–96. 39 Interview with Calvin Tomkins, 1960. Transcription of a taped interview, Basel, Tinguely Museum Archives. 36 37

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Are you going to write me a paper that will irritate those others or not? Along the lines of: Farewell Mondrian. By stressing the Méta aspect of the thing … to infuriate Vasarely & Schöffer and their super future.40

The faith Tinguely placed in absolute presentism is characterized by a violent rejection of futurism as well as the moth-eaten past. Tinguely did not celebrate the “pure velocity” of acceleration of the contemporary world, but rather its “static” and transient double, less subject to entropy than to metamorphosis. To the technofuturistic fantasies of the kinetic avant-gardes, between cybernetics and techgnosis, Tinguely opposed an eternity conjugated in the present but out of step with the modern world. Both poetical and physical in appearance, Tinguely’s works from 1958 to 1959 were praised by art critic Pierre Restany as metaphoric images of the slow revolution of the stars and planets.41 It is in this sense that they approach the “time dilated” of Pol Bury’s Punctuations (1959).42 In front of large white monochrome paintings hanging from the ceiling in the Hessenhuis, white sheaves of metal rods flutter and emit a slight humming. The slow metamorphoses of the elements, their random projection of shadows on the white background, evoke some kind of shadow play. Bury’s Punctuations can be directly linked to the text he signed for the third and final issue of ZERO published in 1961: “The imperceptible moment … there is this imperceptible moment between motion and immobility … this moment of imperceptibility when what is moving is already at rest.”43 It all happens in this stasis, when movement turns into its near opposite. Therefore, Bury’s movement tends to be static, not in the neoHeraclitean way highlighted by Tinguely, but rather because movement reveals itself at a liminal threshold of perception. This excessive slowness is an odd feature for a former artist of Le Mouvement exhibition. It is tempting to interpret these works against the acceleration process specific to the temporal pattern in modernity, a process described by sociologist Hartmut Rosa.44 One might then consider that Bury’s Punctuations series is a clear response to the upheavals affecting modern societies. Nevertheless, Bury’s works act subtly and escape any unambiguous meaning. This dynamic slowness is less a criticism of our fascination with speed than a reflection on duration. In the catalog, André Balthazar—poet, co-publisher of the facetious review Le Daily Bûl and friend from La Louvière—notes that “Bury’s changing world … splits the instant and renews the existent.”45 Splits differ from fractions because they do not relate to a chronometric

Letter to Pontus Hultén, 1956, Basel, Tinguely Museum Archives. Pierre Restany, Tinguely am strahlenden Punkt (Düsseldorf: Galerie Schmela, 1959). 42 Pol Bury, “Time dilated,” republished in Dore Ashton, Pol Bury (Berkeley: University Art Museum, UC Berkeley, 1970), 4. 43 Pol Bury, “L’imperceptible moment,” ZERO 3 (1961). 44 Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-modern Temporality (Malmö: NSU Press, 2010). 45 André Balthazar, “Idées fixes,” in Breer, Bury, Klein, Mack, Mari, Munari, Necker [sic], Piene, Rot, Soto, Spoerri, Tinguely, Van Hoeydonck (Antwerp: Hessenhuis, 1959), unpaged. 40 41

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision  147 calculation, which would cut time in milliseconds all equal to each other. As Balthazar suggests it, there is no repetition of the same duration, but an appearance of difference and discontinuity. When time intervals stretch, transformation occurs. The mobile parts of the relief move in such a slow and erratic way that it becomes impossible to grasp the chain of micro-events in duration: each tremor clears the foregoing. Or, in other words, duration erases any landmarks and sustains amnesia: “[His works of art] leave no trace or stain,” Balthazar writes.46

Immaterial and timeless vibration: Klein, Soto, Mack, Piene, Uecker If the artist is engaged in a quest for truth, the work itself expresses a faithful relationship to reality which, according to Tinguely, is founded on the phenomenon of impermanence. This kind of attitude toward creation, regarded as a means of sensory and intuitive knowledge of reality, was echoed back to him when he encountered the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto: “Art is a way of knowing the universe that does not require proof because it is not about deducing laws but about offering subjective, intuitive knowledge,” Soto once declared.47 The two artists had already exhibited together in Le Mouvement. In early 1958, Soto proposed that Tinguely assist him in creating his two kinetic walls for the Venezuela Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, a true implementation on a monumental scale of the vibratory principle. Essentially, Soto was planning a large-scale adaptation of a principle he had introduced in 1957: the superposition of thin metallic rods on a background striped with vertical lines that distressed the spectator’s vision and provoked a wavering, moiré effect, a sort of vibratory swell. Vibration became the experimental domain of Soto who, with Tinguely’s intervention, would exhibit his Vibrations in June 1959 in the Iris Clert Gallery.48 Just as Tinguely’s motorization of his works removed them from the deadly fixedness of the structure, so optic vibration allowed Soto to counter the qualities of permanence and continuity attached to art. But, more than that, the vibration dematerialized matter and transformed it into pure energy. As Soto stated in 1966: “What interests me is the transformation of matter. Take an element, a line, a piece of wood, of iron, and transform it into pure light … transform it into vibrations … In such a way that there is not only movement, but also a transformation of the elements.”49 This exposing of the sensory, imponderable, and vibratory energy of the universe intersects with the question of the immaterial, of which it is the ultimate expression. In one of his most repeated aphorisms, Soto states: “The immaterial is the sensory Ibid. Soto, interview with Ivan Gonzalez, “Soto: liberar el material hasta que se vuelva tan libre como la musica,” Imagen 32 (1968): 10. Quoted in: Arnauld Pierre, “L’immatériel de Soto et la peinture du continuum,” in Jesús Rafael Soto, exh. cat. (Paris: Éditions du Jeu de Paume, 1997). 48 Exhibition Jesús Rafael Soto, October 3, 1959, Paris, Iris Clert Gallery. 49 Soto, interview with Carlos Diaz Sosa, “La Gran Pintura es Cosa de Progreso Historico,” El Nacional, August 1, 1966. Quoted in: Pierre, “L’immatériel de Soto et la peinture du continuum.” 46 47

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reality of the universe. Art is the sensory knowledge of the immaterial.”50 Soto’s immaterial, resonating with that of Klein, formed the common foundation for the research of the three artists. Tinguely and Klein had met in 1955, preceding the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (Parisian salon of postwar geometrical abstract art), when Klein’s monochromatic Expression de l’univers de la couleur mine orange (Expression of the Universe of the Color Orange Lead) had been refused by the Salon’s jury. Their relationships strengthened in 1958, at the time of the exhibition known as Le Vide (The Void) at Iris Clert Gallery (April 28 to May 5, 1958).51 The day after the opening reception, April 29, 1958, Tinguely introduced Klein to Soto, who would pay homage to the master of monochrome with his Blue Cobalt Vibration (1959) which he presented to Klein with a dedication to him on the back. As for Tinguely, he expressed an unreserved enthusiasm for Klein’s Vide in a letter to Pontus Hultén and announced his plan to collaborate with Klein, which happened finally with the exhibition Vitesse pure et stabilité monochrome (Pure Velocity and Monochromatic Stability) in November 1958 at Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. When Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision opened, Tinguely and Klein were working and living side by side on the site of Gelsenkirchen’s Musiktheater in the German Ruhr Region. The mutual emulation between Tinguely and Klein was not free of rivalry. And the writing of the Düsseldorf leaflet was possibly a retort to Klein who, in his speech (devoted to the theme of their collaboration) at the opening reception for Tinguely’s exhibition at Schmela Gallery, trod on terrain reserved for his acolyte: “For the past months, Jean Tinguely, here present, and I have together excavated a mine of constantly renewing wonders, that of the perplexing fundamental static motion in the universe.”52 This was the first time the theory of “static movement” was announced publicly in these terms, and Klein had claimed partial responsibility for it. Although the monochrome, for Klein, was the material medium of an ineffable, essential quality he called “pictorial immaterial sensitivity” or “cosmic sensitivity,”53 for the “Vide” exhibition he envisioned dissociating the pictorial sensibility from the painting medium in order to present it directly, in its pure state, so the viewer would be imbued with it. He would again present, but in a markedly different visual mode, a zone of immaterial sensibility at the Antwerp Hessenhuis exhibition. Shortly after the show, during his lecture at the Sorbonne entitled L’évolution de l’art vers l’immatériel (Art’s Evolution Toward the Immaterial), Klein summed up his action in these words: I travelled to Antwerp and for the opening, rather than putting a painting or any kind of visible, tangible object in the slot that I was allocated in the exhibition Jean Clay, Soto, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1969). Exhibition La spécialisation de la sensibilité picturale à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility), April 28 to May 5, 1958, Paris, Iris Clert Gallery. 52 Klein, “Speech Delivered on the Occasion of the Tinguely Exhibition in Düsseldorf (January 1959),” 64. 53 Yves Klein, “Ma position dans le combat entre la ligne et la couleur,” ZERO 1 (1958). 50 51

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision  149 space at Hessenhuis, I proclaimed loudly to the audience these words borrowed from Bachelard: “At first there is nothing, then a deep nothing, then a blue depth.” The Belgian organizer of the show asked me where my work was. I replied, “Here, here, where I am talking at this very moment.” And how much does it cost? “A kilo of gold; a one-kilo ingot of pure gold would be enough for me.”54

Photographer Charles Wilp captured the moment with his camera, showing Klein standing in the middle of his allotted space and surrounded by a few bystanders. Even if the immaterial zone was brought to the attention of the spectators through the white stenciling of Yves Klein’s name on the floor, it was primarily declared by the artist a performative statement. As Denys Riout suggested, “in the absence of any tangible preparation, only the word uttered by the authorized enunciator was able to make the work of art appear to the eyes of the mind of the audience.”55 This fascination with the vibratory energy of matter was a rallying point for the artists of Iris Clert Gallery in Paris (Klein, Soto, Tinguely) and for Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker. Let us briefly recall events: Otto Piene and Heinz Mack met Yves Klein in the spring of 1957, when the latter exhibited his Propositions monochromes (Monochrome Proposals) in Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf. They visited him in his Paris studio in 1957, and Mack contacted him again in early 1958 to propose he contribute a text to the first issue of the review ZERO and participate in the exhibition Das Rote Bild (The Red Painting) during the “seventh evening exhibition” to be held in April 1958 in Otto Piene’s studio. Klein accepted. Additionally, Mack was present in November 1958 in Tinguely’s studio on Impasse Ronsin to witness their eureka when Klein and Tinguely were building the device for Vitesses totales (Total Speeds). Just like Mack, Piene and Uecker had attended Klein’s Propositions monochromes opening at Schmela Gallery in 1957, they were present at Tinguely’s in 1959. To celebrate Klein’s and Tinguely’s presences in Düsseldorf in 1959, Günther Uecker hosted a huge party in his studio Exktase in Farbe (Ecstasy of Colors, January 30, 1959). In the wake of this encounter in Düsseldorf, Tinguely suggested Bury invite their German fellows to join in the upcoming exhibition.56 The importance of the Hessenhuis show for ZERO in history was strengthened by a narrative with mythical overtones describing the car journey back from Antwerp to Düsseldorf. Yves Klein, Heinz Mack, and Otto Piene elaborated highly imaginative projects weaving around collective experimentation, assisted experiences of levitation and flight, and brainstorming on a virtual museum, some of which were to be taken up in the third and last issue of ZERO magazine published in July 1961.57 Yves Klein, “The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial,” lecture at the Sorbonne, June 3, 1959, in: Overcoming the Problems of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein (New York: Spring publications, 2007), 73–74. 55 Denys Riout, “Imprégnations: scénarios et scénographies,” in Yves Klein. Corps, couleur, immatériel (2006), 43. 56 Pas, “Zero in Antwerp. Artist-curated Group Shows, 1959–1964,” 168; 189 (note 27). 57 Otto Piene, Vergangenes—Gegenwärtiges—Zukünftiges, (Hanover: Galerie Seide, 1960). 54

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In October 1958, the second issue of ZERO was published with the theme “Vibration.” Vibration was interpreted by Mack and Piene, as it was by their Parisian counterparts, on two levels: the formal (destruction of the compositional form) and the spiritual (release of a vital and luminous energy). In Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision, Mack’s reflecting Lichtreliefs (Lightreliefs), Piene’s white and yellow paintings from the Rasterbilder (Grid Paintings) series and Uecker’s nailed paintings and objects “give precedence to the modulation of matter in space over the creation of images on a painting’s surface.”58 In the accompanying catalog, Otto Piene defines a painting as “a field of forces … poured into the movement of color, caught within the fullness of the universe, and directed into the capillaries and open heart of the viewer.”59 The vibratory approach to art that brings together many artists in the ZERO nebula provided an insight into reality, a reality caught in a constant and paradoxically static motion. Or to put it another way, the neverbeginning, never-ending optical vibration calls forth a meditation on time, in which the present moment is a glimpse of eternity. At least that is what Heinz Mack’s oxymoron die Ruhe der Unruhe (resting restlessness)—which shows an affinity with Tinguely’s “static movement”—suggests: “Resting restlessness” is the expression of continuous movement, which we call “vibration.”60 Subsequently, vibration, repetition, and recursiveness would be symptomatic of a withdrawal from history in favor of a continuous, post-historical, present, unless we consider that “vibration” does not amount to a petrified present but is a keyword which hints at the possibility of a radical departure.

Playful interactions, objects to perform and proto-cinematic memories: Spoerri, Roth, Munari, Breer The ephemeral and impromptu supported Tinguely’s friendship with Daniel Spoerri. The Swiss compatriots had known each other since their debuts in Basel in 1950. Spoerri’s activities around 1958 and 1959 (conducted in close association with Dieter Roth, André Thomkins, and Emmett Williams) fell under the rubrics of concrete poetry, distributed via his experimental review Material, and reflections on dramaturgy from the angle of “dynamic theatre.” These two aspects of his work were not, of course, mutually exclusive. For example, for the opening reception of Jean Tinguely’s exhibition at Alfred Schmela Gallery, Daniel Spoerri was invited to give a simultaneous, thus cacophonic, reading of three separate texts61 accompanied by Claus and Nusch Bremer. Matthieu Poirier, “Heinz Mack. Spectrum. 1950–2016,” in Heinz Mack. Spectrum, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Perrotin, 2016), 16. Poirier specially emphasizes a phenomenological understanding of a so-called “perceptual art.” 59 Otto Piene, “Qu’est-ce qu’un tableau?” (trilingual text), in Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision, 1959, unpaged. 60 “Die Ruhe der Unruhe; sie ist der Ausdruck einer kontinuierlichen Bewegung, die wir Vibration nennen.” Heinz Mack, “Die Ruhe der Unruhe,” Zero 2 (1958). [English translation from: Zero, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973, 40.] 61 The three texts are reproduced in: “Simultanlesung bei einer Ausstellung von Jean Tinguely,” in Anekdotomania. Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri, exh. cat. (Basel: Museum Jean Tinguely; Ostfilder: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 65–67. 58

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision  151 It was one of the first versions of his Autotheater 62 that he would present again, in a modified form with Emmett Williams, during the Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision exhibition.63 Three supple bands of chrome-plated metal, set in motion with Tinguely’s help, reflected deformed and blurred images of the spectators. The spectator-actor found himself in the constantly changing images delivered by the reflective surfaces. In front of these mirrors, as many rolls of text, maintained at a constant velocity around a rotating cylinder, reeled off a series of directions about attitudes to strike, such as “stick out your tongue,” or “hang your head.” Daniel Spoerri stated: This is an attempt to reproduce in an unpredetermined way certain things which are predetermined. We mean by predetermined in this case typographic signs, letters, words, or phrases. By unpredetermined we mean the random selection and mixing up of these signs letters etc., when they are read simultaneously. Just as we are predetermined in our physical and psychical character and appearance, but not predetermined in the selection and mixing up of our environment and the times we live in … The audience are invited to read these texts to prove that the variations of the interpretations and acoustical mixture between these texts are infinite.64

It was Spoerri who wrote to Dieter Roth, then living in Iceland, to inform him about “a huge amusement-park exhibition of 2000 square meters in Antwerp where anybody who is interested in movement in any form should, can, and may contribute … You’re invited too.”65 Spoerri eventually built for Roth a moving object consisting of a white circle with a diameter of 1.5 meters notched with a hundred hooks on which 200 meters of a black thread hung in different ways depending on the interventions of spectators. In his account of the show, Spoerri wrote to Roth that “during the opening, people immediately started to unwind the thread in the whole room. [His] initial reaction to this was to think about an act of sabotage” before he changed his mind and legitimated the spectator’s impromptu response to the work.66 Since Spoerri and Roth’s participations intended to increase the interactive and playful part of kinetic art, Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision has been considered “the missing link between Le Mouvement (1955) and Bewogen Beweging/Rörelse I konsten at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1961–1962)” by Daniel Spoerri, “Autotheater,” ZERO 3 (1961). Titled “Is Art Beautiful?” the text from the reading is reproduced in Anekdotomania. Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri, 62–64. 64 “Three methods of being creative,” an evening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1960. “Rough Translation of directions for the Audience. ‘Texts Read from a Mobile Axis. Method invented by Daniel Spoerri,’” Bern, Swiss National Library, Bibliothèque nationale suisse, Daniel Spoerri Archives. 65 Quoted in Roth Time. A Dieter Roth Retrospective, ed. Theodora Vischer and Bernadette Walter (New York: MoMA, 2004), 85. See: Marion Daniel, ed., Dieter Roth, Processing the World (Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2014). 66 Daniel Spoerri, letter to Dieter Roth, undated, 1959. Copy consulted at ZERO Foundation, Düsseldorf. Original copy kept in Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg. 62 63

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Jan Ceuleers.67 Between these two landmarks, several of the artists who participated in Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision would also be involved in Edition MAT (standing for Multiplication d’Art Transformable, 1959), in the Festival de l’art d’avant-garde (Festival of Avant-Garde Art, 1960) and in Spoerri’s “mobile gallery”(1959–1961).68 With these ventures, the participatory and recreational approach to art found a breeding ground for experimentation, which would culminate in Bewogen Beweging (1961) and Dylaby (1962). What is at stake from Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision onwards is the attempt to think anew about the display of kinetic art beyond the exhibition of works of art that move or cause to move … For in the museum, things die slowly, even if they are driven by a motor. I [Spoerri] was searching for something that, without being art and without distracting, increases the sense of aliveness. And I believe I have found it … The exhibition would not only be just an exhibition, but also a fresh and refreshing air.69

In Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision, the notion of “aliveness” was then coupled with the yearning for play. The issue was nothing less than the reappraisal of a nonutilitarian approach to life in conjunction with the empowerment of the spectator. The elder of the show, Italian designer Bruno Munari (1907–1998), was invited to take part in the exhibition for a number of reasons. From a strategic point of view and bearing in mind that Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision was a radical attempt to break free from Denise René’s advocacy of kinetic art, it is worth noting that in 1955, immediately after Le Mouvement, a column by Vittoriano Vigano was published in the French magazine Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture in order to reassess Munari’s precedence over Vasarely. Vasarely was accused of having shamelessly borrowed many ideas from Munari for his Notes for a Manifesto, also known as Yellow Manifesto.70 Thereby, Munari’s inclusion in the Antwerp exhibition can be regarded as an attempt to redress this grievance as much as a way of diminishing Vasarely’s influence on kinetic art. In response to this, Denise René organized an exhibition of Tableaux cinétiques (Kinetic Paintings) of Vasarely in the winter of 1959. In the accompanying catalog, she reaffirmed the prominent position of her protégé, asserting that “With the Yellow Ceuleers, “A Huge Amusement-Park Exhibition,” 281. From this remark, Ceuleers severely concludes that Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision marked “the end of seriousness in art.” And he goes on to say “the journalists who labeled the latest artworks as ‘fairground attractions’ have not yet realized that in a culture dominated by mass media, visual arts have evolved into one product line among many others, and that art and the presentation of art will be judged on its entertainment value. Despite all invitations to participate, the ‘interactive’ role of the public does not transcend that of consumers in supermarkets, which, around the same time, also open their doors in Belgium,” ibid., 282. 68 See: Ulrike Schmitt, “An ‘Art-Manager’ on the Road: Daniel Spoerri and His Edition MAT,” in The Artist as Curator: Collaborative Initiatives in the International ZERO Movement 1957–1967, 193–199; Andres Pardey, “Curating Bewogen Beweging: The Exchange between Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hultén, and Willem Sandberg,” ibid., 221–235. 69 Daniel Spoerri, letter to Willem Sandberg (June 8, 1960), quoted in Anekdtotomania, 91. 70 Vittoriano Vigano, “Munari et le mouvement,” Aujourd’hui Art et architecture 4 (1955), 17. 67

Decelerating Le Mouvement of Paris with Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision  153 Manifesto published at the same time as [Le Mouvement], the beginnings of ‘plastic kineticism’ are well established. The rallying of numerous artists strengthened what can truly be called ‘le movement’ (movement), whose undisputed leader is Vasarely.”71 Munari’s participation in the show consisted of Polarized projections, a collection of abstract painted slides projected through a polarized filter. In the context of the aggiornamento of the work of art in a technological world and in recognition of the fact that technical elements (transistor, music on records, microfilms) were getting smaller, Munari took advantage of the virtual enlargement of a miniature image through its projection. Following the example of recording techniques which permit data preservation on miniaturized and mobile devices, painting on transparency gets rid of its materiality and creates something that can easily be slipped into one’s pocket. Hence, abstract painting as a slide becomes portable, available anytime, anywhere. Munari’s slides did not duplicate existing works of art but were instead considered as original handcrafted pieces. The Polarized projections stimulated the ongoing reflection on the technological reproduction of the artwork, famously advocated by László Moholy-Nagy, who had formerly called for the development of “domestic pinacotheca” with “the possibility of collecting slides just as we collect records.”72 Nonetheless, Munari was one of the first artists who dared organize public screenings of his pictorial compositions on slides from 1953 onwards.73 On occasion, Munari delegated the making of slides to the audience, as evidenced by black-and-white photographs taken by Richard Hamilton in 1960 during the evening performance of Three Methods of Being Creative organized by Daniel Spoerri at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. The recreational making of slides, the creative inspiration of a DIY project, bore the promise of the democratization of art. Munari’s projections eventually refer to an archeology of cinema. It is in that sense that they echo Robert Breer’s Mutoscope, also on display at the Hessenhuis. Realized with Tinguely’s support on welding, Breer’s Mutoscope deals with precinema technologies inasmuch as it is related to stop-motion animation techniques and recaptured popular optical instruments of the nineteenth century based on the phenomenon of the persistence of vision. The “mutoscope” was first an object designed by American Hermann Casler in 1894.74 Both an optical object and a cinematographic sculpture, Breer’s Mutoscope must be animated by an onlooker. When set in motion, Denise René, Untitled text, in Vasarely. Tableaux cinétiques, exh. Cat. (Paris: Denise René Gallery, 1959), n.p. 72 László Moholy-Nagy, Peinture photographie film (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 99. 73 Bruno Munari, Proiezioni dirette, Galleria Studio B 24, Milan, October 1953. For further information, see: Luca Zaffarano, “Bruno Munari’s Projections” (paper presented on a study day, at the occasion of the Munari Politecnico exhibition, Milan: Museo del Novecento, June 4, 2014). Accessed June 2016: http://www.arshake.com/en/le-proiezioni-di-bruno-munari-parte-i/. 74 A former version of the Mutoscope, Breer’s Folioscope (an edition of 500 multiples) was exhibited as a sculpture in Le Mouvement (1955). Not surprisingly, Breer left Denise René Gallery to join Iris Clert as Tinguely, Bury, Soto did. However, he returned from France to the United States before having had the opportunity to exhibit at Iris Clert Gallery. See: Yann Beauvais, “Une interview de Robert Breer,” in Robert Breer. Films, Floats & Panorama, exh. cat. (Annecy: Musée-Château; Montreuil: Éditions de l’oeil, 2006), 130. 71

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instead of creating an illusion of movement or a dazzling effect on the viewer, the intermittent succession of images blurs the boundaries between still and moving images and keeps illusion away. Being out of touch with state-of-the-art technology, the technical anachronisms of Breer’s modest device and of Munari’s belated appliance fall short of technological expectations. A shift away from the present day, these historical discrepancies engage participants in critical thinking. The outlines of the organization of Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision stress the numerous connections between a cluster of artists who were eager to grasp opportunities to exhibit collectively and in a consistent way, in order to respond to the provincialism of local institutions or to tackle the marketing strategies of their galleries. Initiated by Marc Callewaert and Paul Van Hoeydonck from the G58 (Antwerp), the project was initially an attempt to show how the tradition of geometrical abstract art was being renewed by the issue of movement and technology in arts, and in doing so, to anchor Antwerp as an artistic hub to compete with Brussels. However, when Pol Bury and Jean Tinguely took hold of the organization, they hijacked it and reshaped it to their own agendas, to assert their autonomy from both Parisian Denise René Gallery’s and Victor Vasarely’s theoretical control on kinetic art. From Paris to Antwerp and back again, there was a shift in a deep-rooted rivalry between the warring factions which had emerged at the time of Le Mouvement exhibition. As a consequence, most of the artists who were present in Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision were to be later showcased at the competing Iris Clert Gallery. In the light of this jarring exhibition abroad, movement was no longer considered an artistic means to make a foray into innovative technology, nor to celebrate an optimistic and farsighted experience of modern life in sync with the Trente Glorieuses (Glorious Thirty), but was on the contrary a way of exploring a transient, vibratory, unpredictable but nonetheless continuous present. Deceleration was less synonymous with a conservative attitude towards the race for modernization as exemplified through the Brussels World’s Fair, than a means of introducing a disjunction within a headlong rush forward. Likewise, technological anachronisms, objects to perform and do-it-yourself, suggested a stepto-the-side attitude toward production and consumption within planned obsolescence consumption. Neither promise of a better future, nor entertainment for present days, Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision marked a shift in approach from “the Parisian-born movement of Le Mouvement” and put forward the sense of intertwined temporalities within kinetic art.

9

The Public Art of Jean Tinguely 1959–1991: Between Performance and Permanence Elisabeth Tiso

As the self-destroying sculpture of Jean Tinguely, and others, challenged the very notion of sculpture, the vanishing monument similarly challenges the idea of monumentality and its implied corollary, permanence. James E. Young1 The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of the sculpture itself. Ever since Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York destroyed itself at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to find new ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial, or remote. Michael North2 Jean Tinguely produced some of the most prescient public artworks of the twentieth century; his work reinvented the monumental public sculpture from a static medium to one of performance and experience. Tinguely, a Swiss artist (1930–1991) who worked and lived in France for two decades (1952–1972), best known for his machines and kinetic sculptures, was a prolific producer of public art—an area not previously exclusively examined in terms of the artist’s oeuvre—causing a paradigm shift in the domain. His public art not only paralleled his interest in movement, but more importantly, was a central locus of investigation for his work and integral to his efforts to create a new type of monumental art, located in the real, non-art world. The public location of Tinguely’s sculptures prompted his efforts to create, if not an anti-monument,3 then a new form of monumental art: one that used movement, sound, and light to achieve an art of experience. Michael North, “The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament,” in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. T. J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 9. 2 James E. Young, “The Counter-Movement: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. T. J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 60. 3 An anti-monument is art in public spaces that overtly challenged established notions of public space and public art. Anti-monument is related to James E. Young’s idea of a counter-monument as a term describing artists in postwar Germany: “They are the heirs to a double-edged postwar legacy: a deep distrust of monumental forms in light of their systematic exploitation by the Nazis and a profound desire to distinguish their generation from that of the killers through memory.” See Young, “The Counter-Monument,” 53. 1

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Tinguely, like other artists of the 1960s, wanted to reinvent the public monument, which had been especially discredited through the abuse of public space by totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union during the Second World War.4 He was looking for a way to replace what he believed to be oppressive monumentality and the passive, static, and dull statues of the past and aimed to create instead a new populist, interactive, and animated art that engaged the spectator.5 He initially created “public” performances such as Für Statik (For Statics) and ICA Supercyclometamatic, both from 1959, Homage to New York (1960) and Study for an End of the World, No. 2 (1962), as well as a litany of sculptures that exhibited temporarily in public spaces such as Meta-Matic 17 (1959) at Trocadéro, Paris or Rotozaza II at the Loeb Gallery at New York University (NYU) in 1967.6 These performances, especially in the United States, have been misunderstood and dismissed as mere theatrics and publicity stunts—even buffoonery on the part of the artist.7 I argue, instead, that these performances were integral to the artist’s effort to reinvent art and sculpture in the public sphere and greatly informed his subsequent, more permanent, public works from Eureka (1962) to Cascade (1991). I argue, moreover, that Tinguely’s interest in creating an art of experience through performance was prescient and coincides with the concerns of numerous succeeding groups of artists that reflect a paradigm shift in art from Kantian selfcontainment and timelessness, to experience and real time, reflecting the writings of both Martin Heidegger and John Dewey. The ideas of the latter writer in particular were important to a generation of artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, schooled at Black Mountain College. Founded in 1933 in North Carolina, the

For more on the decline of monumental art in Europe, see Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). He argues that the inherent political nature of public art mixed with the catastrophic politics of the twentieth century contributed to its crisis. 5 In reference to the use of the term “populist,” Tinguely is quoted in the early 1960s by Calvin Tomkins as saying, “The machines I make confront the public with a new phenomenon … People like them … You know, abstract art has become very conformist without ever becoming popular. But in my case, I can honestly say that I make popular art.” Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (1965. Reprint: New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2013), 206. 6 A distinction should be made between the first group of works: Für Static, Homage to New York and Study for an End of the World, ICA Super Cyclo-graveur were one-time performances, while the second group Meta-Matics drawing machines, Rotozaza I and II, and Cyclo-graveur are examples of his permanent sculptures that perform but also required public participation, like happenings. 7 See “Jean Tinguely: Wacky Artist of Destruction,” Saturday Evening Post, April 21, 1962. Pamela Lee in Chronophobia also notes the difficulty in both the press and academic circles in placing or evaluating Tinguely’s work, and whether it was a joke. See Pamela Lee, “Study for an End of the World,” in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 85. For more on the tensions between American and European artists that arose later in the 1960s, replacing a more collaborative environment of the 1950s, and Hiroki Ikegami, The Great Migration, Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 139. Pierre Restany also discusses the fierce competition between European and American galleries to promote their art and the lack of cooperation. See Restany, “Le Nouveau Réalisme,” Flash Art, Dicembre-Gennaio 1982, 24. 4

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college used a curriculum based on the writings of Dewey and promoted his ideas of learning through doing and engaging with one’s environment and the world, as well as espousing progressive social ideas and politics.8 While Tinguely’s career transpired mostly in Europe, his friendships and collaborations with Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, David Tudor, and Cage would have made Dewey’s ideas known to him. And indeed, Tinguely’s ideas coincide with those of Dewey, who in his book Art as Experience (1934) advised artists to reject the creation of capitalist consumer objects and instead create events, to get their work out of the gallery and museum into the street, to remove art from its pedestal and free from elites and into the common realm or the community. Mark Mattern writes in his essay “John Dewey, Art and Public Life” that the philosopher “argued that the communicative capacity of art can be harnessed in the quest for community and a robust public life,” and Dewey believed that art could play a key role in democratic politics.9 Holding similar democratic ideals to these espoused by Dewey in relation to art, Tinguely wanted an art that was accessible to all not only in place, but also in content and that should be easily understood by the greater public. A more complicated idea of man’s relationship to art, but one that is pertinent to understanding and framing Tinguely’s public art and the performative, is expressed in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), which also advocated for an art based on the real world and time. Tinguely’s work relates to that of Heidegger’s ideas in its inherent qualities (movement, sound, light) that are not inanimate, stiff objects—not dead— but that “in their ever-fluctuating configurations, embody a timelessness” creating an ever-changing experience for the spectator.10 Pamela Lee, in her book Chronophobia, similarly uses Heidegger as a convenient thinker for analyzing Tinguely’s work. In the chapter “Study for an End of the World” she states that Heidegger in Being and Time (1927) and his lecture “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935) defined the world as not merely “a collection of tangible things” but rather an “intricate network of our everyday activities” and that he argued that art reveals “the relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace” are found.11 She concludes that “this Heideggerian précis stresses the notion of the work of art as world: its resonance as both an opening and a process, a ‘how’ rather than a what, a ‘worlding’ in time as

Among Tinguely’s collaborative performances with Rauschenberg and others were Variations II (Homage to John Cage) performed at the American Embassy in Paris in June 1961 and Kenneth Koch and Merce Cunningham’s The Construction of Boston the following year at Maidman Theater in New York City, as well as Hommage à New York (1960). 9 Mark Mattern, “John Dewey, Art and Public Life,” The Journal of Politics 61, no. 1 (February 1999): 56. Mattern also notes Dewey’s reverence for music as the most democratic and accessible art form in its effort to directly and simultaneously affect all listeners equally: “Meaning can be shared between performer and listener without recourse to language, in a way that produces immediate quality of experience” (58). 10 Lee, “Study for an End of the World,” 90. 11 Ibid. 8

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opposed to an enframing of a material thing in space.”12 While Lee uses Heidegger to analyze Tinguely’s self-destructing performances, the philosopher’s ideas also apply to his permanent public work, and similar ideas can be found in the artist’s manifesto Für Static (1959).13 Early in his career Tinguely was often called a performance artist and was described as an actioniste contestataire (contesting actionist) due to the series of provocative staged happenings already mentioned.14 It was in these events or performances that Tinguely first expressed his disdain for the monuments of the past. In 1959, he composed his manifesto Für Statik, a leaflet that stated that all public sculptures must be in movement, perishable, and disposable, not timeless, and that he aimed to drop from an airplane over the city of Düsseldorf.15 Later that same year, during his performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Tinguely stated, “Our fear of death has inspired the creation of beautiful works of art.” It is, he argued, “beautiful to be transitory … How lovely it is not to have to live forever … Art must die like us.”16 For Tinguely, the concept of permanence versus impermanence Ibid., 91. I am not arguing that Tinguely was exclusively influenced by Dewey and Heidegger but that they are particularly useful for understanding and framing his public work. Tinguely was also a member of numerous postwar European art movements that included Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, and groups such as Fluxus, GRAV, and the Zero Group, who experimented with unorthodox practices and new materials in order to blur the boundaries between performance and sculpture, theater and visual art, high culture and low, art and life. In particular through the influence of Yves Klein, Gaston Bachelard’s writings became important for Tinguely’s work and his idea on the immaterial, Machines de Tinguely (Paris: Centre National d’Art Contemporain, CNAC, 1971), n.p. Various versions of Für Static exist. 14 Lukas Burkhardt, Tinguely Museum Inaugural Exhibition Catalogue (Basel: Jean Tinguely Museum, 1996), 30. Pontus Hultén states that his performance at the ICA in London was perhaps the first happening, at least in Europe. See Pontus Hultén, Tinguely: Meta (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), 107. 15 Julia Robinson noted that Tinguely never actually went up in his hired plane but was simply photographed with the pamphlets in the cockpit of the aircraft. This seems likely because, as Robinson already noted, Tinguely probably couldn’t afford a flight and, as she observed, the uncropped pictures of the Manifesto Drop show the reflection of a man’s legs (presumably the photographer) on the plane’s fuselage and thus on the tarmac, solidifying this belief. But as with Yves Klein’s subsequent (1960) leap into the void that was staged and doctored, it is the idea of the event that is important. See: “Before Attitudes Became Form–New Realism: 1957–1962” in New Realism: 1957–1962 Object Strategies between Readymade and Spectacle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 32–33. A fuller version of Für Statik can be found in Hultén, Tinguely: Meta, 114–120. 16 Extract from his statement at ICA performance, London, 1959. Machines de Tinguely, 25. This performance at the ICA included Tinguely sitting on a stage while a tape recorder recited his Für Statik manifesto in poor English. Later a young girl “dressed in short skirt and fish-net stocking, vigorously chewing gum, and grinding out abstract drawing on a small, hand operated meta-matic, to the loud accompaniment of a Paul Anka recording of I am just a Lonely Boy. Then came the main event. Mounted on stage … was a Cyclo-graveur méta-matic (drawing machine) equipped with a bicycle seat, pedals, and handlebars and outfitted with a huge roll of paper. Two young me walked out … An announcer informed the audience that these athletes, both of them cycling-club champions, competed to see who could cycle away a mile of paper faster simultaneously covering paper into drawings” that spun out into the audience burying them in a pile of abstract art. Tomkins, “Tinguely,” in The Bride and the Bachelors, 224. For a fuller description see Terry Hamilton’s description in Hultén, Tinguely: Meta, 110–123. 12 13

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expressed the life–death dialectic at the heart of art itself and was crucial to his effort to transform art in the public sphere into something alive, unlike the Egyptian pyramids or French cathedrals, which he considered more dead than alive.17 He reiterated this aim again in 1973 when he proclaimed, “The definitive is the provisional,” and “art should be temporary and in motion.”18 But the question of whether his performance pieces could successfully be translated into permanent works of art in the public realm remained unanswered; for the permanent sculptures Tinguely did construct, he was torn between never wanting or expecting them to last, and the imperative that they would have to last in order to convey the idea of impermanence and time. Through a real experience for the spectator Tinguely’s sculptures were part of life and time, not static. Tinguely solved the paradox of turning the performative into the permanent through the use of movement and the inclusion of sound, water, and light—aiming both to dematerialize the public work and to activate the environment while introducing a sense of time (or real time) into the spectators’ space and experience. This seemed to be an almost oxymoronic endeavor, considering that his writings and performances of the time espoused an art of complete impermanence, dynamism, and auto-destruction. The combination of movement and noise, moreover, gave his works a life of their own that was brief, ephemeral, and performative. Inspired also by the Futurists and Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto The Art of Noise (1913), Tinguely’s sculptures extolled noise that screeched, to disturb and disrupt the viewer. Moreover, this envelopment of aurality surrounds the viewer-listener and provokes an exchange among spectators to create a joint experience. The coupling of sound and movement also presupposes a more phenomenological experience of sculpture. As Douglas Kahn has noted, “sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality,” resulting, in the case of Tinguely’s work, in a temporary but total experience for the viewer.19 The first major public work to incorporate Tinguely’s use of sound and movement to explore bodies in relation to space and art was Eureka, made for Expo64, a Swiss national exposition held in Lausanne. A world’s fair, its purpose was not primarily artistic, but rather to exhibit new and futuristic technologies as well as promote Swiss businesses and history, and the event attracted a large non-art public. Expo64 had over 10 million visitors in its six-month run, something that would have interested Tinguely who, as stated, wanted as large an audience as possible for his work (Figure 9.1). Some of Expo64’s attractions included a monorail ride, a submarine, a theater boasting a giant statue of Gulliver, a symphony played on machines (mostly typewriters, phones and radios), geodesic-type cubes the public could mount and ride, and a Tinguely, Für Statik statement, Düsseldorf, 1959, in Machines de Tinguely, 23. Margrit Hanhnloser, Museum Jean Tinguely: The Catalogue (Basel: Benteli, 1996), 99. 19 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 27. 17 18

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Figure 9.1  Jean Tinguely, Eureka, 1963–64. Expo64, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photographer: Kurt Wyss.

futuristic moonscape playground for children. Tinguely’s sculpture needed to not only compete with this panoply of rides, shows, and novelties, but also provide a role for art in this world of real wonders. Here, again, Eureka’s movement coupled with sound was key to the work’s performative essence and to the multisensory experience Tinguely intended to provoke. A hulking eight-meter-tall machine made of iron and painted entirely black, the work functioned on a much larger scale than anything he had produced before and, as such, amplified all the imposing phenomenological features already mentioned. Eureka moved vertically and laterally; it included spinning wheels, squeaking, rotating metal beams, and a tall cymbal-like metal cap that noisily ascended and descended. Eureka nevertheless managed to convey a sense of impermanence and immateriality. This was again achieved primarily through movement and the cacophony of noise emitted from its enormous sculptural frame.

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Eureka was also an event; it came alive, as Tinguely would say, three times a day, at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m., and 7:00 p.m.—a performance—an actor at the service of deconstructing the sculptural form of the past and the objectified timelessness of art, as understood by philosophers from Aristotle to Kant. The work, instead, reflected Heidegger’s idea that in order to be, the self needed to be part of the world firstly, and that being needed to include time or the temporal, and one needed to phenomenologically experience it. In his book, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Edward S. Casey, citing the work of Heidegger, argued that “time becomes present to human beings in specifically placial and spatial ways,” meaning that we can only experience time by our physical presence (phenomenology) in a place at a specific time or moment, such as is expressed in Eureka and its gyrations and movements.20 To reflect this new sense of being, art must be temporal and experienced in person. Furthermore, in this sense Eureka’s performance of movement and sound is not only in real time, but in a real place in the real world. The work is not in a timeless and artificial white cube or museum, but in a common mall, making it more of a real experience for the viewer encountering it. This is because “being-in-the world is [art’s] essential state” and a sense of place—physical and temporal—is essential.21 In 1974, almost a decade after Eureka, Tinguely produced Chaos no. 1 for a space known as “The Commons” in a civic mall in Columbus, Indiana (Figure 9.2). The civic mall included a commercial center as well as a community center and childcare facility. It was commissioned by the Miller family, owners of Cummins Engines and leading patrons of the arts and architecture. The Argentinean architect Cesar Pelli, responsible for designing the building, recommended Tinguely after seeing Eureka at Expo64. Chaos no. 1 was Tinguely’s most ambitious permanent public commission to date. The 7-ton, 30-foot-tall kinetic work sits in a pool of water, and is made up of a large industrial arc-shaped arm decorated with rivets running up its edges. A journalist at the time described it aptly as “a little bit like a motorized tree with a curving trunk. Branches to one side are wheels. A bit spirals up the other side.”22 This large industrial arm supports various elements, some similar to those found in previous works, others introduced here for the first time: a ball track, corkscrew (actually an agricultural earth turner), small cart on rails that runs back and forth, two conglomerations of wheels, a lollipop arm that rotates the red circle, a silver square, and an orange donut. While Chaos no. 1 included sound and movement, the element of time was most pronounced through its timed activation. Chaos no. 1 cycles through a series of motions to simulate a day in a life, beginning slowly at first, adding movements and then winding down again. Functioning as a clock, the work was designed to perform at its height at specific times, at noon and at six in the evening: lunchtime and dinnertime. Its movements begin and accelerate, reaching a frenzied apex of gyrations and speed at those peak hours, and then subside until completely still. The concept of time is critical: Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 277. 21 Ibid., 246. 22 Sarah Lansdell, “Turned–on Chaos: Jean Tinguely’s going-thing in Columbus, Ind., whirrs, waves, clanks (But won’t self-destruct),” The Courier–Journal & Times, June 16, 1974. 20

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Figure 9.2  Jean Tinguely, Chaos no. 1, 1972–74. Columbus, Indiana. Photo courtesy of Chris Crawl.

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it allows the artist to intrude in real life, and is vital in understanding an essential direction in the artist’s work that intertwined art and theatricality in the public sphere. While theatricality became a pejorative term in American art-historical literature with Michael Fried’s seminal piece “Art and Objecthood” published in Art Forum in 1967,23 it is an important concept to Tinguely’s oeuvre and Chaos no.1 in particular, which does not decorate the “Commons” statically, but at designated times. For up to ten minutes it performs its complicated, mechanical dance, clonking and clanging elements moving back and forth, balls spinning through the track, and as with his other works, creating each time a unique experience for the spectator in real time. The moment can never be the same and is not permanent but quickly over—it dies. Moreover, through its sound and movement it imposes on the spectator’s space, creating what Fried decried as theatricality. In his book The Sculptural Imagination, Alex Potts clarifies Fried’s use of the term theatricality as describing a sculpture that “makes us acutely aware of its physical presence in our space.”24 For Fried, according to Potts, this intrusion into our space is bad as it “betrays an acute awareness of how the illusion created by an art object, the sense that something more is there than the literal facts of its existence, is constantly in danger of collapse, particularly with sculpture.”25 This collapse, however, between the real (literal world) and “art” for the generation of Neo-Dadaist American (and minimalist) artists and Tinguely on the contrary was cultivated, in part, also due to the influence of Duchamp and his readymades. As mentioned, this theatrical nature of Tinguely’s work has been the basis for its perhaps pejorative and negative assessment in some of the leading American arthistorical literature since the 1970s, but it is interesting to note that the same literature aptly understood the intrinsic temporal qualities of the work.26 One of the first critics to address Tinguely’s sculptures in this way was Rosalind Krauss in Passages in Modern Sculpture, first published in 1977, in which she perhaps disparagingly, but correctly, described Tinguely’s machines as actors that “look like little more than animated Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art Forum (June 1967). For further discussion of Fried’s article and its “Anxiety over time” and presentness in art, see Lee, “Presenteness is Grace,” in Chronophobia, 38–81. 24 Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 188–189. 25 Ibid., 189. 26 A negative assessment of Tinguely’s work, due to its “theatrical nature,” has been a constant in arthistorical literature on the artist, the most notable voice being that of Rosalind Krauss Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). Despite this criticism, Tinguely can be said to be ahead of his time considering that the theatrical, the performative, and temporality have become fundamental concerns in the work of contemporary artists such as Carsten Höller, Roni Horn, Christian Marclay, and Doug Aitken to name but a few. Especially in the English-language literature, Tinguely is ignored as a predecessor to these practices. In The Sculptural Imagination, Alex Potts dismisses Tinguely’s work, explaining: “The designer mobiles of Calder and the elaborately dysfunctional machinery of Tinguely might momentarily have broken through the sculpture boredom barrier, but they hardly add up to a new vision of sculpture,” Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 103. The American reception of Tinguely’s work since the 1960s can arguably be considered dismissive at best. Tinguely himself, who had a great admiration for the USA and built some of his most important works there, often felt the American art establishment did not take his work seriously and he was never afforded the accolades or museum shows that he received in Europe. He has never had a major museum exhibit in the United States. 23

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junk.”27 Her position derives from Fried, her mentor, whose abovementioned article “Art and Objecthood” similarly warns against the demise of sculpture due to the introduction of theatricality.28 For both Krauss and Fried, theatricality is related to the concept of time. Krauss explains that theatricality in sculpture contains “an extended temporality, a merging of the temporal experience of sculpture with real time that disturbed him (Fried) and destroyed the integrity of sculpture and that pushes the plastic arts into the modality of theater.”29 Yet this is exactly what Tinguely wanted to achieve.30 The theatrical in sculpture meant that the relationship between the viewer as subject and the work as object, a relation that takes place in time, was shattered. Tinguely’s sculptures aimed to do this and everything Kantian formalists were against: he wanted to infringe upon the spectator’s space; he wanted a temporal, not timeless, work. For, as Heidegger noted in Logic: The Question of Truth, “I do not want to be so entirely dogmatic as to say that being can be understood only in terms of time. It may well be that tomorrow someone will discover a new possibility.”31 As Tinguely had proclaimed in his manifesto Für Statik, art must be alive not dead. And he achieved this goal with Chaos no. 1. He was not concerned that the performative aspect of the work might destroy its integrity or contaminate it by bringing it too close to life, for this was the point. A rupture of time and space between spectator and work of art provided a temporal experience for the audience (rather than a dead object to be observed) that aimed to transform public art into an experience. This performative feature is especially present in Tinguely’s fountains, the first of which he produced in the early 1960s, at the same time as his explosive Homage to New York and Study for an End of the World (1961). But his fountains replace the violent nature of these performances with a more benign expression of energy. Their upward projectile energy was replaced in his fountains, which pumped water into the air, coalescing to form a water ballet.32 Tinguely sought to use the medium of water, Krauss, “Mechanical Ballets: Light, Motion, Theater,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture, 220. The full quote reads: “In opposition to Lye’s exuberant mechanical calisthenics, one can think of Tinguely’s self-deprecating gestures expressed through sculptural objects that look like little more than animated junk. Yet these works, too, were thought of as actors in specific performances.” 28 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 203. 29 Ibid., 203–204. 30 The writings of Fried and Krauss, both students of Clement Greenberg’s formalism, were indebted to Immanuel Kant’s isolation of art as an autonomous system. Kant prescribed art as timeless, existing in its own self-contained world with its own values, removed from the everyday. 31 Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth, translated by Thomas Sheehan (Indiana University Press, 2010), 222. Or Casey, The Fate of Place, 243. 32 Tinguely’s first documented fountains were exhibited in September 1960 in the garden of the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld Germany and later in the garden of art dealer Wolfgang Hahn. Tinguely also loved fireworks and Tompkins in Bride and the Bachelors quotes him as stating: “He considers fireworks (Chinese) a powerful form of artistic expression, as ephemeral and as free as his own meta-matics,” (206) as his fountains replaced the explosive performative machines; here the medium is water rather than dynamite or fire. Tinguely often organized firework displays to celebrate openings or exhibitions. On December 4, 1972, the feast of Saint Barbara, in the garden of the art dealer Eberhard Kornfeld, Tinguely and Bernhard Luginbühl installed a series of guns that emitted fireworks and feathers. One of his most notable firework events was on the occasion of the first Hammer exhibition organized by Galerie Felix Handschin in 1978, held in an abandoned factory in Basel. It included Tinguely and his colleagues’ work and was inaugurated with a banquet and firework display. 27

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coupled with sound, to express action and movement for performative and temporal purposes. Initially Tinguely created several temporary public waterwork performances, most notably his 1962 installation at the Kurspark in Zurich, and another in 1963 at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles. His first permanent waterwork was the Fasnacht Fountain (1977) in Basel. Tinguely’s use of water may have been influenced by the work of John Cage, whom he had met in New York in 1960 and whose musical composition Water Walk: For Solo Television Performer was broadcast on an Italian quiz show in 1959 and later on US television.33 In Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Douglas Kahn states that Cage’s water compositions “heralded a larger concurrence of fluidity, water, sound and performance—the dissolution of media at midcentury in New York, which continued across the arts internationally for years to come.”34 Kahn continues, “in a simple act, Cage’s Water Music irrevocably introduced water sounds from actual water into Western art music and unlike Handel it really splashes.”35 Similarly to Cage’s work, Tinguely’s fountains splash, spit, and drip. The water of his Fasnacht Fountain defied the usual elegant, tranquil streaming of traditional examples, and instead produced nonsensical aquatic gestures and water music. Tinguely created a complex musical and visual ballet by using the medium of water to its fullest through the implementation of various nozzles and hoses that created a vast array of visual dynamism, as well as sounds. The individual characters in the Fasnacht Fountain elicited purposeful sounds: the Spitzer spits and the Dripper drips. Here once again, the artist combined visuals, sound, and movement to create a complete sensory experience. When turned off, the fountain may look banal and ugly, but once activated it creates a magical and musical water spectacle. In a 1986 interview with Pierre Descargues, Tinguely discussed the importance of water as a medium to reflect light and color, and described his constant struggle to create movement in his work.36 As an uncontrollable and unpredictable medium, water suited the artist’s temporal and performative precepts—its form ever changing and temporal like life. Tinguely’s work Cascade (finished 1991), suspended from the ceiling in the lobby of the Carillon office building in Charlotte, North Carolina, appears to be exploding in space as it crashes towards the ground, and contains all the timely and immaterial elements included in all his previous works: sound-music, movement, and water—but also light, another trope for the immaterial and the temporary. Cascade’s collection of fragmented objects defies gravity and all laws of sculpture to create a ballet-like performance in the building’s lobby. While elements suspended in midair such as

The work premiered on Lascia o Raddopia (Double or Nothing), broadcast on February 5, 1959. Cage performed the work again on I’ve Got a Secret, the popular American game show, on February 24, 1960. 34 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 242. 35 Ibid., 245–246. In response to Cage’s Water Walk, Claes Oldenburg famously observed that when Jackson Pollock stopped dripping, John Cage started pouring, making Cage for “an art that spits and drips.” Claes Oldenburg, “I am for an Art …” (1961) in: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900–1990, 727–730. 36 Pierre Descargues, Jean Tinguely: Entretiens avec Pierre Descargues, 1983, 1987, 1988 (Basel: Museum Jean Tinguely, 2001). 33

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antlers, brightly colored car parts, lights, and wheels rotate and float in space and appear to fall to the ground, the aqueous basin below bubbles up, and a small group of Tinguely’s signature wheels, skulls, and masks move through the hellish murky, dark waters. Tinguely’s public magnum opus—Le Cyclop, begun in 1969 and finished posthumously in 1994—is the culmination of his efforts to produce a monumental culture station, or what he termed a multifunctional sculpture of experience; efforts, as we have seen, that began in 1960 (Figure 9.3).37 It is his most ambitious public work and unusual for the public art domain, which is traditionally financed by governments or corporate entities, in that it was completely self-financed. It contains all the performative elements found in his previous public commissions: movement, sound, water, and light, but on a much grander scale. Unlike Tinguely’s other major public works of the same time, however, the Cyclop is a structure that in and of itself had limited movement, instead being one that the public entered into like a funhouse, housing installations and artwork that were themselves capable of movement. Though conceived by Tinguely, it was intended from its inception to

Figure 9.3  Jean Tinguely, Le Cyclop, 1969–1994. Milly-la-Forêt, France. Photo courtesy of Elisabeth Tiso. The Cyclop was conceived by Tinguely as part of an effort to create a monumental culture station or what he termed multifunctional sculptures of experience. He began investigating these ideas with Spoerri and Luginbuhl in 1960. See Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, and Bernhard Luginbühl, “First Ideas for a Dynamic Labyrinth,” (August 1960) in Daniel Spoerri From A to Z (Fondazione Mudima, 1991), 74.

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include the works of other artists—what he called “a collectif.” The roster of artists that in the end participated and contributed works to Tinguely’s vision were Arman, César, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Jesús Rafael Soto, Larry Rivers, Rico Weber, Eva Aeppli, Seppi Imhof, Giovanni Podesto, and Bernard Luginbühl. It also includes homages to Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Louise Nevelson, Yves Klein, as well as a tribute to the Eifell Tower. Located fifty kilometers south of Paris, in the forest of Fontainebleau, the Cyclop was labored over for more than two decades. It is a 22.4-meter-tall sculpture in the shape of an enormous head, its face covered in broken mirrors by Saint Phalle. The monstrous head includes a bulbous nose, gaping mouth with protruding tongue out of which water flows to a pond below, and a single eye that rotates and reflects light. Large wheels protrude from one side of the head, while on the other, a monumental ear by fellow Swiss artist Bernhard Luginbühl flaps back and forth. An iron, pinball-like tract runs in and out of the head with giant metal cannonballs circulating loudly. Its interior, painted entirely in black, houses installations, sculptures, and built environments by the various artists spread around three levels. Made of several metric tons of iron, the structure is entered by the audience at its rear, through a large round Homage to Louise Nevelson gate also by Luginbühl. Visitors then proceed up two additional levels until they reach the roof, where the flattened monster’s head, covered in a flat bed of black, reflective water, is a tribute to Yves Klein. Highlights include a centrally located theater with haunted house-style movable chairs rotating up and down, an enormous Meta-harmonie made up of large, rotating, recycled industrial wheels, a real Parisian chambre de bonne reconstructed by Spoerri and set at a 90-degree angle, and a large Penetrable sculpture by Soto that sets off a loud, clanging chime-like noise as you pass through its tubular hanging bars, as well as other works, dispersed throughout the different levels, by the collective. The Cyclop on a grand scale recreated on a more permanent basis the ethos of the happenings of the 1960s and Tinguely’s own performances of that time, and the installations have a theatrical spirit more similar to that found in a funhouse or amusement park then a museum or traditional sculpture. And, like an amusement park, it includes some spectator participation and involvement. Self-financed, it was meant to be populist and popular—for a non-elite art crowd and all ages, set in the non-art environment of the forest. Both frightening and funny, the Cyclop is a total experience—an art funhouse. Through the performative, Tinguely introduced real time and the everyday of life into his permanent sculptures—introducing the theatrical and intruding into the spectators’ world. This allowed his work to escape the Greenbergian Kant-based modernist art tradition that limits art to an aesthetic, formalist experience. Instead Tinguely created a temporal and phenomenological public art not only in an attempt to reinvent the public monument but also to engage a wider public. It was especially in the public realm, with all the messy worldliness of life, and accessibility, that the artist could achieve this. As such, Tinguely’s public works cohere to the ideas of the American philosopher John Dewey, who advocated for an aesthetic experience in the raw, where an individual situation should create a memorable experience that is

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more important than the passive gazing at a work in a gallery or museum: “Events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights that hold the crowd—the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth.”38 Tinguely’s public art, with its cacophony of sound, lights, water, and movement, aimed to similarly create a real experience for the audience, in real time that paralleled all the chaos and messiness found in real life.

Dewey, Art as Experience, 3–5, 37, and see Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 6–8.

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Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Revolution: The French Happening, Surrealism, and the Algerian War Laurel Fredrickson

Introduction In 1960, on July 14, when France celebrates its Republican values of liberté, égalité, fraternité, the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel initiated and orchestrated what came to be known as Europe’s first happening, L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely), in Venice, Italy, a collaboratively planned event.1 For this work, actions were set amidst an audience that included artists, poets, and musicians, to make them aware of themselves as participants, rather than simply observers. In the Renaissance Palazzo Contarini-Corfù, Lebel presented a ritual, entailing the symbolic torture, execution, and mourning of La Chose (The Thing, c. 1960), an assemblage by Nouveau Réaliste sculptor Jean Tinguely, and its burial in the Grand Canal (Figure 10.1). Lebel dedicated the happening to Nina Thoeren, a Venetian-American artist and student who had been sexually assaulted and murdered two days earlier by a doorto-door Bible salesman in Los Angeles, California.2 In Paris, an Algerian friend had been recently murdered. Lebel understood these events as related: resulting from a repressive religious-rational morality and the exploitative divisiveness of colonialism and market capitalism. This chapter explores Funeral of the Thing as an experiment in art as action, designed to make multiple, often contradictory, references, and as a translational adaptation of the legacies of the historical avant-gardes of Dada and Surrealism, fused with faith in sexuality as a liberatory force, and a utopian vision of collective revolution. In form and substance, Funeral of the Thing displayed a Nietzschean rejection of bourgeois Allan Kaprow, based on Lebel’s description, would identify it as a happening and include it in Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1966. It might be better understood as transitional: leading from Surrealist theater into a new medium, the happening. 2 Nina Thoeren’s (divorced) parents were Surrealist artist Manina (Tischler) and screenwriter Robert Thoeren, who settled in the United States after fleeing Germany in 1933. Manina later married Surrealist poet, novelist, and critic Alain Jouffroy and lived in Venice. See Alain Jouffroy, “La Révolution est femme,” XXe Siècle 36, no. 42 (1974). Thoeren’s screenplays included Singapore (1947), starring Ava Gardner, and the co-written Some Like It Hot (1959), directed by Billy Wilder. 1

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Figure 10.1  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Execution of the Thing,” L’Enterrement de la Chose de

Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely), July 14, 1960. Happening (detail), Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Photographer: Claudio Gallo—Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/© Carlo Pescatori.

Christian values and its morality, which censored sexuality and its expression in art, yet accepted torture as a “necessary evil.” Funeral of the Thing concluded Anti-Procès II, a group exhibition co-organized by Lebel with poet, critic, and writer Alain Jouffroy. Their manifesto called for artists to participate: “The Christian-rational civilization

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(look at the slaughterhouses which have resulted) [has produced] something that it uses to justify, defend, and glorify itself: morality, culture, religion.”3 The question was how artists, writers, and intellectuals could collectively resist without constraining their individuality. The solution would be a common front of dissent. In initiating and orchestrating Funeral of the Thing, independently of developments abroad, Lebel presented the first iteration of the happening in Europe in a period overshadowed by France’s undeclared war in Algeria and brutal refusal of Algerian independence (1954–1962), especially revelations that its military had institutionalized torture to maintain the empire that defined national identity. For Simone de Beauvoir, writing in Le Monde (June 6, 1960), France’s army had gone amok, and its people were “indifferent to the tortures being meted out in [their] name.”4 The repercussions of this “war without a name,” and of a history that the French and the Algerians still refuse to fully acknowledge and confront, haunt the present.5 For historian Benjamin Stora this is a “war without end” because “on each side of the Mediterranean, it has not been sufficiently named, analyzed, or dealt with in and by collective memory.”6 Mechanisms for “forgetting,” he argues, have “profoundly structured contemporary French political culture,” an assertion supported by postcolonial theorists.7 I propose that Lebel’s first happening (and the analysis it invokes) was an expressive refusal of a larger “forgetting” enacted by a social system of different but related repressions and suppressions, cultural and political.8 Lebel’s art was neither univocal nor direct political protest: its structure was alogical and associational, designed to provoke others to creatively undermine the silencing of dissent. As provocateur, Lebel encouraged others to defy taboo to make art a mode of healing of psyche and society through experiments in transgression.9 Lebel and Jouffroy co-organized three Anti-Procès group exhibitions/event cycles from 1960 to 1961. Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Venice Anti-Procès Manifesto, June 18, 1960,” in Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel ou l’insoumission radicale, ed. Jean-Jacques Lebel and Androula Michaël (Paris: Hazan, 2009), 266–267. 4 Quoted in Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women & Representation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 83. 5 The total of European and non-European casualties remains contested, varying according to source, Khanna notes: from 500,000 to 1,500,000 Algerians, and 50,000 to 150,000 French. Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 10. According to Benjamin Stora, official French histories minimize the number of Algerians killed and tortured, while Algerian histories exaggerate them. His estimates of the Algerian civilian dead reach into the hundreds of thousands. Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli (Paris: La Découverte, 1998.) Nicholas Atkins numbers French troop casualties as 17,456, with 64,985 wounded and 1,000 missing in action. His count for Algerians is lower, though upwards of 10,000, with 500 disappeared. Nicholas Atkins, The Fifth French Republic (Basingstoke, UK: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 50–51. 6 Benjamin Stora, “Préface à l’édition de 1998: les saignements de la mémoire,” in La Gangrène et l’ oubli (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), I. 7 Stora, “Préface,” I. For postcolonial perspectives, see essays in Public Culture 23 (2011). 8 For analyses of the negative social effects of the repression of sexuality, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); and Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946). 9 For an exploration of transgression as socially necessary, see Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966). 3

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L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely Though Lebel initiated and orchestrated Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely, his collaborators determined their own actions: Beat poet Allen Ansen, art patron Peggy Guggenheim, composer Frank Amey, artist Nina Amey, Mexican actress Pilar Pellicer, writer and aesthete Sir Harold Acton, and Venetian art collectors Paolo Barozzi and Adriano Montin (pseudonym for Adriano Carrettin). Formal invitations announced funeral services for Tinguely’s sculptural assemblage the Thing in the grand hall of the Palazzo Contarini-Corfù. The event was inspired by Tinguely’s stipulation, on agreeing to exhibit in Anti-Procès II, that should the Thing not sell, it be “buried with all honors in the Grand Canal.”10 In the darkened hall, guests, or “congregants” as Lebel considered them, at a satanic ritual, heard him dedicate the event to Nina Thoeren: “We had [determined] the date and the content of this closing mortuary ceremony [when] we received the appalling news that gave it the importance of an omen [showing us] the risks, in this rotten world where eroticism and death are fatally associated.”11 As he concluded, blackclad mourners, faces veiled by lace mantillas—Guggenheim, Amey, and Pellicer—lit candles to reveal the Thing on an antique stretcher under an embroidered cloth (Figure 10.2). To those familiar with the anthropomorphic assemblage, welded from wheels and metal, that had been displayed outside the Galleria Il Canale during Anti-Procès II, it may have suggested a corpse, whose final rites precede its final disposition. Actions—simultaneous and consecutive—ensued: an executioner in black raised a butcher knife and ritually violated and murdered the Thing. Shock at this attack on art was intensified by the news of Thoeren’s sexually motivated murder, eliciting horrified grief. (Thoeren was tied up and strangled with her stockings.) The mourners recited erotic prayers: texts by the Marquis de Sade. They moaned and cried, confusing pleasure and pain. In the cacophony attendees also distinguished sounds of leaves falling and of the city, gongs, and Amey’s electroacoustic dirge. Odors of decay, evoking nature as understood by Sade, intensified the visceral experience. Mimicking jazz call and response, through megaphones Lebel and Ansen read from blasphemous and banned novels: Lebel from Sade’s Histoire de Justine (History of Justine, 1801) and Ansen from J. K. Huysmans’ symbolist novel Là-bas (Down There, 1891), supplanting the scriptural and sacred with the literary and profane. In the selection from Justine, an aging, debauched man proclaims how to prepare children to service male libertines: Instead of morality and religion [the] pure and unadulterated principles of nature will be taught. Christianity will be banished—libertine rites and feasts celebrated— murder in debauch, incest, rape, sodomy will never be punished.12 Lebel, conversation with the author, June 13, 2015. Emphasis mine. Lebel and Androula Michaël, “L’Enterrement de la Chose,” in Happenings de JeanJacques Lebel ou l’insoumission radicale (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2009): 38 12 Lebel omitted “etc., will be reprehensible only if committed by a member of the slave castes,” but added “will never be punished.” See Lebel and Michaël, “L’Enterrement de la Chose,” 38.

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Figure 10.2  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Mourners and the Thing” (Madame Amey, Madame

Hennessy, Pilar Pellicer), L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely). Happening (detail), Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Photographer: Claudio Gallo—Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/© Carlo Pescatori.

Ansen’s passage from Huysmans described an act of gruesome sexual violence: the ritual disembowelment of a boy to pleasure a medieval satanist, a maréchal (general) of royal birth. Steeping “himself in [the] mess of filth and lukewarm entrails [the maréchal] looks

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over his shoulders [to] contemplate his victim’s final convulsions: ‘happier indulging in torture, tears, fear and blood, than in any other pleasure.’”13 Such passages set the tone. When final rites concluded, pallbearers carried the Thing, an object of art and its symbol, to gondolas on the canal (Figure 10.3). In exiting, they passed a man ostensibly masturbating behind a curtain, a natural act judged mortal sin by the church. Ritually processing along the Grand Canal, gondolas and boats with congregants formed a cortège leading to the basin near the Basilica of San Marco and the Palace of the Doges (Figure 10.4). With boats gathered in a circle, Lebel cast Tinguely’s Thing into the water; and participants tossed white flower petals in its wake. Reporters from Venetian newspapers, La Notte and Lo Speccio, wrote about the event: one praising Funeral of the Thing as a “beautiful and moving ceremony.”14

Dada, Surrealism, Sade Just as the aesthetics, theories, and politics of Lebel’s forebears in Dada and Surrealism were shaped by their historical moments, so too did Funeral of the Thing respond to the exigencies of Lebel’s historical moment, shaped by his mentors and personal experience. During the Second World War, Lebel lived in New York City as a refugee with his parents, Nina and Robert Lebel. They joined a French community in exile that included his future mentors: André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, and Patrick and Isabelle Waldberg.15 At age seventeen, Lebel published an essay attacking the popular lyrical abstraction as art for the market, and Breton invited him to join the surrealist movement.16 Dada and Surrealism, movements (sketched largely) that envisioned freedom of the imagination and nonconformity, influenced Lebel and his art: especially Dada’s aesthetics of negation and travesty of conventions of content and skill.17 The notion of the artist, defined by Richard Shiff as “countercultural deviator of a tradition or as social deviant,”18 and a revolutionary who defies authority, was a critical model.19 Kurt Schwitters’ Merz collages and assemblages informed Lebel’s strategy of juxtaposing contradictory elements, as did his Dadaist emphasis on the alogical and associational. Quoted in Lebel and Michaël, “L’Enterrement de la Chose,” 39–40. Translation from J. K. Huysmans, Là-bas: A Journey into the Self, trans. Brendan King (Gardena, CA: Sawtry, 2001), 165. Anonymous “Strano funerale in Canal Grande, Hanno sepolto una ‘cosa,’” La Notte (July 17, 1960), reprinted in Jean-Jacques Lebel (Milano: Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1999), 135–136; and Anonymous “‘La Chose’ nella laguna,” Lo Speccio (July 1960), 36. 15 An art expert and appraiser, Robert Lebel wrote about such artists as Leonardo da Vinci, and coorganized and contributed to Surrealist publications. Working with Duchamp, he authored the first monograph on the artist. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1959). 16 Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Manifeste d’un adolescent optimiste,” in Premier bilan de l’art actuel, 1937– 1953, ed. Robert Lebel (Paris: Le Soleil noir; Positions, 1953), 274. 17 Richard Shiff, “Originality,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 145. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 151. 13

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Figure 10.3  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Corpse being carried down to awaiting gondolas” (Alan Ansen, Francis Amey, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and one mourner), L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely). Happening (detail), Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Photographer: Claudio Gallo—Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/© Carlo Pescatori.

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Figure 10.4  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Gondolas Receiving the thing,” L’Enterrement de la Chose

de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely). Happening (detail), Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Photographer: Claudio Gallo—Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/© Carlo Pescatori.

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To his action-based art, Lebel also adapted the strategy of staging different actions simultaneously, of cacophony.20 Most importantly perhaps, he assumed as his own a Dada insubordination to familial, state, religious, and military authority, an example being his evading the draft to avoid deployment to Algeria.21 Surrealism’s faith in the revelatory power of dreams and the unconscious was crucial, as was the utopian vision of a liberated and liberatory imagination that furthers revolution.22 In Beat- and mescaline-inspired works such as his gestural painting Homage à Billie Holiday (1959), a hallucination of desire, Lebel exceeded the Surrealists’ compulsive obsession with “Woman” as muse and object, as he did in collage-paintings whose elements he appropriated from mass media and soft porn, making female nudity a trope for sexual liberation. The notion that experimental form and process, and multiplicity of reference obstruct the repressive control of the categorical owed something to another mentor, poet Benjamin Péret, for whom the “praxis of revolution and of poetry itself, and the impossibility of living otherwise,” was a maxim reflected in recognition that a politics of dissent is implicit to art unfettered by custom.23 Like the Surrealists, Lebel admired Sade’s writing for exemplifying freedom of the imagination and signifying the libido’s “affirmative nature [in the face of the] power of the censors and bourgeois defenders of state and family.”24 In Funeral of the Thing, when reading from Sade and Huysmans, the megaphones he and Ansen used not only magnified their voices but alluded to how police dispersed demonstrators, and Sade’s appropriation of the “pissing tube” from his prison cell in 1789 to more loudly agitate the crowd, gathering outside La Bastille. The storming of this monument of monarchic despotism two days later inaugurated a revolution to whose radical promise Lebel and his mentors adhered.

Anti-Procès Funeral of the Thing concluded the second of three Anti-Procès exhibitions and event cycles that Lebel organized with Jouffroy. The title (anti-judgment or anti-trial) For Dada texts, see Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989). For histories by Surrealists, see Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans . Richard Howard (New York: Macmillan, 1965); José Pierre, Surrealism (London: Heron, 1970); and Louis Janover, Le Surréalisme de jadis à naguère (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 2002). 21 Though this essay lacks space to engage anarchism, its politics of direct action was a key influence. 22 For an analysis of Surrealism in terms of “political agency and possibility,” see Simon Baker and Peter Lang, Surrealism, History and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and for its politics, Helena Lewis, “Surrealists, Stalinists, and Trotskyists: Theories of Art and Revolution in France between the Wars,” Art Journal 5, Political Journals and Art, 1919–40 (Spring 1993): 61–68; and Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005). 23 Lebel, “Le Jeu du cadavre exquis et la révolution surréaliste,” lecture, Centre Georges Pompidou, June 1, 2002. 24 Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 152. 20

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repudiated Surrealist authority, especially that of Breton, as well as other authorities: economic, juridical, and colonial. The poster and manifesto for the Anti-Procès I (Paris, April 1960) juxtaposed an image of a guillotine with Duchamp’s refutation of aesthetic judgment (or the optical). In participating, the manifesto pronounced, artists declared common dissent against the war in Algeria, censorship, art’s devolution to commodity, and torture, to “the morality that governments, churches, and rightthinkers [bien-pensants] inflict upon us … We affirm here our positive solidarity with individual or social movements of revolt.”25 Anti-Procès I took place at Pierre Prévert’s Cabaret des Quatres Saisons in Paris (April 29 to May 9, 1960), where to an exhibition of art by Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lam, Erró, Henri Michaux, and Victor Brauner, Lebel and Jouffroy added works by some thirty others.26 The cycle of events included sessions of simultaneous poetry and jazz, “lecture-debates,” the cris-rhymes of sound poet François Dufrêne, and actions by German architect-artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser and sculptor and designer Philippe Hiquily.27 The format of a group exhibition with films, readings, performances, and lectures was modeled on Opere esposte alla Mostra Surrealista Internazionale at the Galleria Schwarz in Milan (April 27 to May 6, 1959).28 In eliciting audience involvement through a design by Duchamp, it anticipated Lebel’s happening. The poster for Anti-Procès announced a play by Lebel, with a mise en scene by [Allan] Zion and D’Idée, with the participation of actors Erika Denzler, François Marié, and Roger Blin, a former understudy for Antonin Artaud, with music by Max Harstein’s jazz orchestra.29 Like Funeral of the Thing, the event began in darkness. Militantly, Blin demanded: “And your sister?” Another answered: “She pisses blue.” Blin responded: “Very well! When she pisses in the tricolor, you should cry: Long Live France!” This statement illogically equated the nationalistic patriotism spurring France’s efforts to forestall the dissolution of its empire with the “erotic” image of a woman urinating in the colors of the flag. Lights went on as jazz played. A woman, nude, passed through Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-Procès? Milan October 1960,” reprinted in Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Archives des happenings: L’Enterrement de la Chose,” in Happenings (Vanves: Hazan, 2009), 264. Original publication: Front Unique, 2 (1960) ed. Arturo Schwarz (Jean-Jacques Lebel) (Milan: Galleria Schwarz, 1960): 38. 26 Invitation card and poster, in JJLA. In a prior simultaneous poetry and jazz concert at La Galerie (Paris, February 1960) Gregory Corso, Robert Cordier, Jouffroy, and Lebel read their own writings, and poems by Péret, Michaux, Artaud, Desnos, and Césaire, accompanied by Max Harstein on contrebass. Radio de la France d’outre-mer transmitted the event to the colonies to support anticolonial struggles. Exhibiting artists included Manina, Phillipe Hiquily, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Jacques Prévert, Guy Harloff, and Lebel. François Dufrêne performed poésie sonore and Surrealists Jackie Farley, Max-Pol Fouchet, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Anne Leanor, and Octavio Paz read from their works. 27 Lebel, “Archives des happenings: L’Enterrement de la Chose,” 264. 28 For analyses of Surrealist exhibitions, see Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, and Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 29 Lebel and Jouffroy, “Qu’est-ce que l’ Anti-Procès,” 36. Zion later worked with Lebel in 1967 on the first staging of Picasso’s play Desir attrapé par le queue (1944). Blin began his career as Antonin Artaud’s understudy and assistant. He starred in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée, and directed Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), and Jean Genet’s Les Nègres (1959). 25

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the space, and Hundertwasser prepared nettle soup. Lebel concluded with a “collage poem,” proclaiming his insubordination—leaving without permission—to the draft and Breton. The insubordination animating this event would stimulate his contrivance of a new art of direct action: the happening. The Anti-procès Manifesto (Paris, April 29, 1960) repudiated separating art and politics, the speculative art market, and bourgeois-rational morality: Of what does our insubordination consist? In a refusal to disassociate the means of expression at our disposal. In a refusal to subordinate the activity of the spirit to commerce and propaganda. In a refusal to respect the idols and the rules of the intellectual game. In a refusal to consider moral judgment as other than an anachronistic and sterile practice. In a refusal to separate the liberty of the spirit from liberty itself. Every creative act is, first and foremost, an anti-trial. Every creator is, until there is a new order, an insubordinate.30

The final line seems a decree that an avant-garde eschewal of aesthetic convention and cultural authority necessarily produces art with a socially radical potential, and that insubordination is a creative act, as is refusal of illegitimate judgment. The manifesto denounced bourgeois-Christian morality as a coercive form of judgment that justifies the arbitrary in social and cultural realms, and aesthetes (critics) and merchants (gallerists) who embalm art “in the coffin of the banks, museums, and schools.”31 Art might be politically radical only when detached from political parties, even those of the left, whose nationalism rivaled that of the right: nothing “is more repugnant to us than France, its supposed genius and its ‘liberal traditions.’ We reject with all our strength the chauvinistic and slave-loving Flame, which hides behind the tricolor dishrag.”32 After comparing flag to discolored rag, the authors insisted: “We emphasize our total insubordination as artists to the exigencies of colonialism, fascism, and their prolongation in cultural life.”33 To have placed the phrase “continuations in cultural life,” after “exigencies of colonialism, fascism” seems a harsh accusation of Breton as being colonialist and fascist, forces he had contested since the 1920s.34 This drew counterattacks in letters published in the journal Arts from March 30 to April 14, 1960. Surrealists lambasted Lebel for Signatories included Bona, Roland Bouvier, Jean Duvignaud, Bernard Dufour, Dufrêne, Jacques Gambier de la Forterie, Max-Pol Fouchet, Hiquily, Jouffroy, Lebel, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Manina, André-Poujet, and René de Solier. See Lebel and Jouffroy, “Anti-Procès 29 April 1960,” in Happenings, 286. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Lebel, in Patrick Schindler, “Le Grand Tableau antifasciste collectif,” Monde Libertaire, January 4, 2001: 4–5. 34 See notes to “[Mise au Point],” in Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives. Compléments au tome 2 (1940–1969), ed. José Pierre (Paris: Champs des activités surréalistes, 1983), 385. 30

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bragging in “Sept Jours à l’heure de Paris” (Arts March 30, 1960), of talking on a radio panel about Duchamp, attending elite social events, lunching with Mexican poetstatesman Octavio Paz, and fraudulently posing as a spokesman for the movement, and judged him deceitful and exploitative.35 Breton’s dressing-down of Lebel was skillfully savage (and Surrealist): With the mien of the bastard of a weasel and a traveling salesman, mental confusion heightened to the level of a raison d’être, unscrupulous, cosmopolitan striving for success misinterpreted as desire to abolish frontiers, the lack of culture hidden behind the veil of fog of wrong references, the unexpected quoting of private remarks, interspersed with smarmy flatteries to the most varied important people, all these have already exhausted the indulgence [we could show] JeanJacques Lebel … a character whose ambulatory fever and verbal incontinence only serve to commercialize a less and less defensible painting and poetry.36

Surrealists further censured Lebel for flitting from soirée to revolutionary meeting via the offices of Paris-Presse and France Observateur in order, they accused, to enhance the marketability of his art.37 These criticisms, though cruelly couched, do not seem totally off the mark: like Breton in the 1920s and 1930s, Lebel exploited the media of his time to promote his interests, political and personal. On May 28, 1960, Surrealists published “Tir de barrage” (Barrage of Artillery Fire), illustrated with a drawing by Alfred Kubin of two monkeys, which charged Jouffroy with calculated opportunism and dismissed the younger Lebel as “impressionable,” suggesting that he was less than responsible.38 It charged Anti-procès with insulting artists and writers as “game players” and naively characterizing morality as sterile and anachronistic: “Is it necessary to bring back to one’s attention that it is moral judgment that permits us in the present hour to condemn Carryl Chessmann’s torturers, as it permitted us not long ago to condemn the Soviet massacres in Budapest.”39 Surrealists also objected to a reference to a trial in the Transvaal, when black South Africans refused to plead guilty or not guilty before a colonial tribunal they judged illegitimate, as an abuse of confidence, masquerading as anti-racist, because the reference did not contextualize, only appropriate: a cynical exploitation of anticolonial struggles.40 [Mise au point] Letter to André Parinaud, Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 1922– 1939, 195. 36 Ibid. 37 Pierre, [Mise au point] “Mise en garde,” 196. 38 Alyce Mahon, “Outrage aux bonnes mœurs : Jean-Jacques Lebel and the Marquis de Sade,” in Jean-Jacques Lebel : Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen (Vienna : Museum Moderner Kuntst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1998), 99. 39 “Tir de barrage,” in Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 1922–1939, 198. Chessman, whose confession was forced through torture, was executed for a non-lethal crime in 1960, after writing a series of books that brought California’s death penalty laws into question and aroused international outrage. 40 Ibid., 199. 35

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Breton was equally incensed at being called a juridical policeman of culture, and for the conjoining on the Anti-Procès poster of a guillotine with Duchamp’s statement, “One must abolish the idea of judgment,” a juxtaposition that oversimplified its meaning.41 The column in Arts that announced Lebel’s expulsion from Surrealism (illogically) called it proof of the movement’s vitality: Surrealism not dead. André Breton, with the help of four of his friends lets us know that he excommunicates Jean-Jacques Lebel, guilty of having claimed to belong to a movement of which he is no longer a part. [We] agreed with this pronouncement which is proof of the vitality of Surrealism more and more concerned with adventure.42

Arts also published Lebel’s response—carefully delineating between the movement and its leadership, caustically dismissed as dried up old men: I agree totally with the Surrealist bureaucrats, not be confused with the movement of the same name, we have nothing more in common. Their total lack of critical and creative spirit, their judgmental vanity isolates them from everything. [To] these dried fruit, I answer: small simplifications lead to big dictatorships.43

Like Breton, Lebel made valid points. Breton did compare to a dictator, a “pope” who excommunicated those who displeased him from the movement. That said, Lebel learned from his mentor how to attract attention to himself, his art, and his political causes. Lebel claimed that anti-war activism and his decision to evade the draft prepared him for revolt: “I was a deserter from the French army, I had an almost suicidal need for action. They couldn’t stand that I was autonomous [They] did me a favor by kicking me out—that really liberated me.”44 On July 28, two weeks after Funeral of the Thing, Lebel audaciously boasted to France Observateur that his practice was revolutionary, aimed at destroying the morality of master and slave, and the cultural and psychological forces that sustain social exploitation.45 He again cited Duchamp: “If we wish that someday man will have the right and the power to dispose of himself, one must sooner or later ‘abolish the idea of judgment.’” This use of quotation typified Lebel’s collagist approach to art and writing: juxtaposing images and texts in collages, and intermixing quotes from different sources in texts—an appropriative strategy. Mahon, “Outrages au bonne mœurs,” 100. “Les Surréalistes s’écrivent,” Arts (May 26, 1960). JJLA 43 Ibid. 44 Mahon, “Lebel and the Marquis de Sade,” 97. 45 Lebel, “Letter to the Editor,” France Observateur, July 28, 1960. 41 42

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The Venice Biennale Lebel and Jouffroy scheduled Anti-Procès II—from June 18 to July 8—to coincide with the 30th Venice Biennale (June 18 to October 16, 1960) to oppose the nationalist and commercial orientation of this international exhibition.46 Their Anti-Procès manifesto announced that the Biennale demonstrated that artists and viewers [a reference to Duchamp] no longer created art, it was critics and buyers. They called on artists to exhibit in Anti-Procès II, to accelerate a rupture with official art: “The Venice Biennale has opened its doors: it satisfies no one, except the Laureates and their merchants.”47 By exhibiting in the anti-biennale, artists would demonstrate their eschewal of convention, and how they experimented with art to change life, “by all means which seem to us poetic.”48 Art’s function exceeded monetary transaction: “We believe in the absolute necessity for an art which makes of painting, of poetry, of music, a single ‘organic cry of man’ … [the] only revolutionary art is that which challenges the world in favor of true freedom.”49 The Anti-Procès exhibition was to be such a unified cry. The exhibition, wrote Lebel and Jouffroy, disputed the values of the Biennale: organized by national pavilion and emphasizing individual artists’ signature styles and gestures. The internationalism and eclecticism of Anti-Procès superseded cultural and political frontiers.50 Deriding curatorial distinctions between genres and styles as anachronistic, they urged distrust of “all imperatives and aesthetic exclusives.”51 Art historian Laurence Bertrand Dorléac has called the anarchic organization of AntiProcès—demonstrated by the avoidance of categorization by nationality, movement, style, media, or gender—unprecedented.52 A painting by Manina could hang next to one by Hundertwasser. For Lebel, an exhibition accompanied by readings, lectures, debates, and performances, subverted the Biennale’s reduction of art to commodity.53 As Lebel recalled, Anti-Procès linked artists without standardizing them: Participants ranged from Brauner to Hundertwasser, Lam, and Lebel, to Enrico Baj, Miriam BatJosef, Roberto Crippa, Meret Oppenheim, and Tinguely. Anti-Procès III followed at the Arturo Schwarz Gallery and Galleria Brera in Milan, in June 1961 (June 5 to 30). On June 14 police seized several works for “blasphemy” and “obscenity.” Schwarz was the primary dealer of Dada and Surrealist art in Italy, and a publisher, of, for instance, the first catalog raisonné of art by Duchamp and reproductions of his readymades. 47 Lebel and Jouffroy, “Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-Procès” and “Statement.” Also, “Jean-Jacques Lebel and Alain Jouffroy, “Statement.” Front unique, 2 (1960), 38, JJLA. 48 Ibid. 49 Lebel and Jouffroy, “Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-Procès,” 38. 50 Lebel and Michaël, “L’Enterrement de la Chose,” 36. 51 Poster for Anti-Procès, JJLA. 52 She defines Anti-Procès II as a counter-exhibition because it was not organized by nationality, movement, or medium, and included [some] art by women and artists of non-European origin, thereby challenging the Biennale that was legitimizing art for the market. Her claim of the originality of the form of Anti-Procès seems exaggerated. The Surrealist EROS exhibition (1959) included works by seventy-five artists with differing styles, nationalities, and genders. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Un Tableau,” in Grand Tableau antifasciste collectif, ed. Laurent Chollet (Paris: Éditions Dagorno, 2000), 45. 53 Lebel, “Letter to the Editor.” 46

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Everyone was completely free to do whatever he or she wanted. They were just supposed to proclaim their opposition to the Algerian War together. [We] all said no together … [we] were not doing social realism or even politically committed art.54

Lebel made clear his wish to maintain art’s liberty from doctrinal aesthetic dictates, while providing a forum for collective dissent. As counter to the Biennale, Anti-Procès was preceded in 1903 by Esposizione di alcuni artisti rifiutati alla Biennale veneziana [Exhibition of some artists who declined the Venice Biennale] in 1914, and a “protest exhibition” at the Galleria Geria Borovalia in 1920.55 In 1945, the writers, journalists, and artists of L’ARCO presented debates and theatrical pieces, demonstrating “a radical anti-fascist political commitment,” and painter Giorgio di Chirico mounted a counter-exhibition.56 As Nico Stringa wrote, Anti-Procès in 1960 “instituted a clear parallel between revolutionary action of the historical avant-garde and the necessity for an art that was neither painting nor poetry, but an organic human scream,” quoting in part from the Anti-Procès manifesto.57 The exhibition and action event linked the values and strategies of Lebel’s forebears to those of his contemporaries.

Colonialism and (De)colonialism Lebel’s move to art as action in Funeral of the Thing must be considered in relation to the Algerian War of liberation and postwar anticolonial movements. An unpublished list of actions in the event, including a poem by Ansen, indicates its interplay of the poetic and the political: IV. Execution with or without drum roll. Scream. V. Angelic music con attegiamenti di preghiera [with an attitude of prayer]. VI. Poem read by Allan Ansen: “Words and notes can be burned or forgotten But as for stone, canvas, wood, metal, To rid oneself of the intolerable created act Means Congo spasms of violence Hewings and rubbings and heavings, Ere the wrought and tiresome thing Plops into the massive night afternoon.”58 Schindler, “Le Grand Tableau antifasciste collectif,” 5. See Nico Stringa, “Venezia ‘900: Il secolo delle mostre’” [20th Century Venice expositions], Laboratoire Italien: Politique et Société 15 (2014): 167–178. [Reprinted online: http:/laboratoireitalien. revuew.org. Accessed: December 3, 2015]. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Lebel, unpublished notes, JJLA. 54 55

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Ansen’s ambiguous likening of the Thing—wrought and tiresome thing—to the institution of art as object and commodity: the “intolerable created act,” followed by “Congo spasms of violence,” implied that to cast off this intolerable creation was akin to anticolonial revolution. The reference was topical: two weeks earlier, on June 30, Patrice Lumumba became the first democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of Congo, ending Belgian rule. Months of violence preceded his inauguration, and his polemical speech referred to these struggles, to the displeasure of the Belgians.59 Such audacious refusal to placate the erstwhile colonizing power proved a compelling model of insubordination, just as anticolonial struggles stimulated Lebel and his peers to take action, in part to heal their own cultures. Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Aimé Césaire (who dedicated Discours sur le colonialisme to Lebel) wrote how the Manichean divisions of colonialism perverted the culture and psyches of oppressors and oppressed.60 They rejected compromise, especially Césaire, a Surrealist poet, who, like Lebel, abjured any presumption that the convergence of art and politics would cause the imagination to lose its independence.61 French brutality in Algeria made such positions moot. For some the war for independence began on VE Day, May 8, 1945, when, while in France people danced in the streets to celebrate the “victory of democratic and universalist republican values,” Algerians protested the colonial presence.62 In Sétif, a town in Constantine, native Algerians who had fought for France were permitted to assemble and celebrate if they did not “articulate an overt political platform.”63 When a few among the thousands chanted for the release of anticolonialist Messali Hadj, after years of prison, and seeing a nationalist flag, police shot into the crowd. The ensuing retaliation by Algerian tribesmen ended in the death of one hundred settlers.64 Settlers and militias stationed in Guelma, authorized by General de Gaulle to “restore peace,” attacked Sétif and nearby villages: “A veritable war of reprisals, a massacre organized against the civil population, provoking the death of 10,000 to 15,000 in the weeks that

Lumumba spoke about the anticolonial struggles of the Congolese and their suffering. The Guardian (Friday July 1, 1960), http://www.theguardian.com/. Accessed July 14, 2015. 60 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote prefaces for Alfred Memmi’s Portrait du colonisé (1957) and Franz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961). On anticolonialism and existentialism, see Winifred Woodhull, “Mohammed Dib and the French Question,” Yale French Studies, no. 98 (2000): 67. 61 For histories, see Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Making of the Modern World) (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Eric Savares, Algérie, la guerre des mémoires (Paris: Non Lieu, 2007); Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Alistair Horne, Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2006); and Benjamin Stora, Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1994). 62 Roger Celestin, “(De)colonization,” in France from 1851 to the Present, ed. Roger Celestin and Eliane DalMolin (Basingstoke, UK: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 261. 63 Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962. Objects/Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 4. 64 Celestin, “(De)colonization,” 261. 59

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followed.”65 This reveals, art historian Hannah Feldman argues, the problem of the periodization “post-war,” for as France celebrated “liberation from Fascism [its] forces were already being deployed [against, not for] a population [ostensibly] governed under France’s authority and flag,” accorded only partial rights of citizenship.66 As historian Roger Celestin writes, “Colonial ideology could allow only for a selective application of the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity that lay at the very roots of the French Republic; the result was a paradox: freedom at home and domination abroad.”67 A “virulent racism” made change “unthinkable” for most European settlers.68 That Lebel denounced these massacres is demonstrated by his painting the words Sétif, Guelma, and Constantine on the collaborative painting Grand Tableau antifasciste, collectif (1961), which he instigated for Anti-Procès 3.69 Earlier, on November 1, 1954, with Lebel near the age of conscription, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) set off coordinated attacks on settlers and sabotage, launching an anticolonial war.70 For Stora, this explosion of violence resulted from “the profound inequality of the colonial system that reigned in Algeria: on the one side a minority of a million settlers of European origin, and on the other the ‘indigenous’ or Muslim Arab majority of nine million.”71 “Politically, they were like false citizens of a Republic that proclaimed, however, the equality of all men.”72 Lacking arms and facing “complete annihilation” in what postcolonial feminist Ranjana Khanna judges a “war against civilians,” the only means to fight were “terrorism, ambushes, and harassing the enemy.”73 As Fanon had understood, the logic of colonialism itself called forth the “unifying violence of revolution” in order for the colonized to return themselves to history.74 The massacre of 123 settlers, near the town of Phillippeville in 1955, incited an “orgy of killing by army personnel, the police, and by civilian vigilante groups.”75 Estimates of the dead range from 1,000 to 12,000; the war intensified.76 In 1956 the socialistled parliament passed the “special powers” decree, permitting the military to use any means “necessary” to “keep Algeria French,” and licensing censorship of texts deemed Algerians claim 45,000 victims. Benjamin Stora, “(Special Algérie): La Guerre d’Algérie expliquée à tous,” 3. http://www.grands-reporters.com. Accessed: June 4, 2015. 66 Feldman, From a Nation Torn, 4. She argues that 1954 did not mark the end of the war in Vietnam, but consolidated a “pattern of intervention,” often repeated to maintain France’s empire. 67 Celestin, “(De)colonization,” 261, 262. The inferior status of Algerians dispossessed of lands and rights was codified in 1881 with the passage of the Code de l’Indigénat (Native Code), whose laws made “them colonial ‘subjects’ with no formal representation. while those of European descent were full-fledged ‘citizens,’ with representatives in Paris.” 68 Ibid., 262. 69 Dorléac discusses this work in “Un Tableau.” 70 Celestin, France, 264. 71 Stora, “Guerre d’Algérie,” 3. 72 Ibid. 73 Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 84. 74 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 75 Celestin, France, 264. 76 The French gave the lower estimate, the FLN the higher. Ibid, 264. 65

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dangerous to public order: those which inscribed “‘events’ within a logic of war.”77 This included La Question (1958), the prison journal of Henri Alleg, the French-Algerian editor of the newspaper Alger Républicain, which he wrote during the period when he was repeatedly tortured by army officers. Having read such publications, smuggled page by page to publishers in Paris, and experiencing the shock, horror, and nausea that descriptions contained therein provoke, Lebel responded with art as action. In this context, Huysmans’ reading in Funeral of the Thing about sexual murder perpetrated to pleasure a general implicated the generals who oversaw the “pacification” of Algeria, who institutionalized torture78 and authorized summary executions and “disappearances,” and the internship of 2 million civilians in camps by 1959.79 From the Battle of Algiers of 1956–1957, the military systematically used such means to “unmask an unidentifiable adversary,” able to melt “into the population.”80 The threat of torture engendered greater terror than the Algerian adversary, who killed those suspected of aiding France.81 French career military officers, determined to restore France’s honor after the “humiliating” loss of Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu,82 led an inexperienced army of draftees and recalled reservists, whom they taught to treat the colonized as uncivilized and barbaric, meriting violent discipline.83 When reports reached France in 1957, the scandal, declared historian Robert Gildea, exposed “the cult of the French liberating and civilizing mission for the sham that it was and precipitated a painful reconsideration of French national identity [for] the French were using the same tactics as the Gestapo.”84 The excerpt by Huysmans that was read by Ansen in Funeral of the Thing brought in other generals. Huysmans based his general on an actual maréchal, Gilles de Rais (Barbe bleu), who led Joan of Arc’s guard in battles with the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Returned to his chateau, he killed some 140 peasant children in satanic sexual rituals, yet remained a devout Catholic. Fittingly, Lebel read from Sade, for whom Christian taboo called forth transgression. As Georges Bataille speculated about the case of Gilles de Rais, “Perhaps Christianity [has a] pressing demand for crime [for] the horror that [it] needs in order to forgive [and] bound to an archaic human nature [is] open Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 26. General Jacques Massu had “free ren” to fight FLN urban guerrillas in Algiers, using “methods similar to those he was fighting against and against what he had fought in the war against Nazi Germany: intimidation, terror, torture, including the use of electroshock and rape.” Celestin, France, 265. Celestin quotes historian Tyler Stovall: “The prospect of a Socialist government permitting a military reign of terror on what was technically French soil showed how little relevance Resistance notions of liberty had in France’s colonies. Clearly the selective application of republican principles did not apply in Algeria.” 79 Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 34. French officials at the highest levels were fully aware of these developments. 80 Ibid., 30. 81 Ibid. 82 John E. Talbott, The War without a Name: France in Algeria, 1954–1962 (New York: Knopf: 1980), 86–87. 83 Phillip Chiviges Naylor, France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of Florida, 2000), 18. 84 Robert Gildea, France Since 1945 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24. 77 78

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to violence?”85 Gilles’ crimes fascinate, Bataille asserted, because they touch the extremes of human behavior.86 In a manner not unlike Sade, “Gilles de Rais wanted to be dazzling, to the point of ruinous expenditure”; his crimes were those of a “sacred monster unbound to the limits of ordinary life.”87 Gilles compares to the rapacious libertines in Sade’s 120 Days of Sodomy, delighted by the spectacle of sexual violence against children. It is possible that French officers who observed (or participated) in the violation and torture of Algerian children and women found such abuse arousing.88 It is just as likely that the soldiers were traumatized by witnessing and taking part in such acts.89 The choice to read about the satanic maréchal may also have alluded to General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Army, and Maréchal Pétain, leader of the Vichy régime, each of whom adopted the nationalist symbol of Saint Joan of Arc.90 For Lebel, Breton, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Paul Sartre, de Gaulle came to power illegitimately. In May 1958, Colonel Massu threatened to order his parachutists to drop into Paris and take over government buildings if de Gaulle were not made president.91 For a new constitution and a new republic (the Fifth), with greatly augmented presidential powers, de Gaulle agreed.92 After the war, he used this privilege to rapidly transform France into a society of mass production and consumerism, and a nuclear power, through administrative methods developed under colonialism.93 One can take the metaphor of the general further. In 1799, General Napoléon Bonaparte overthrew the First Republic, as the military in 1958 made de Gaulle president and overthrew the Fourth. In 1801, Napoléon imprisoned Sade for immorality and signed the concordat that revoked the separation of church and state. In 1966, under order of Maurice Papon, who de Gaulle had appointed Paris prefect of police in 1958, Lebel was arrested for “outrage to good morals” for a happening. Lebel saw the Gaullist régime as theocratic, whose repressive social policies were aligned to bourgeois and Catholic morality. In such a situation, resistance through “treasonous” action presented, as existentialist Francis Jeanson stated, but one choice: “To be with them, against what my country was doing in a sense against itself.”94 He and others formed groups to assist the FLN: Georges Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais: Documents Presented by Georges Bataille, trans . Richard Robinson (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1991), 16. 86 Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, 13. 87 Ibid., 14, 18. 88 For analyses of rape as a weapon of war, see Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, ed., Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide (New York: Paragon House, 2012). 89 A woman in Aix-en-Provence told me how since returning from Algeria, her brother has screamed each night as he sleeps. 90 Marine le Pen, leader of the extreme right-wing National Front has adopted the Saint, now symbolic of her party’s xenophobic anti-immigrant social policies. 91 Atkins, Fifth French Republic, 34, 37. 92 Ibid., 35–36. 93 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 94 Original emphasis. Francis Jeanson, “Francis Jeanson,” in Les Porteurs d’éspoir: les réseaux de soutien au FLN pendant la guerre d’Algérie: les acteurs parlent, ed. Jacques Charby (Paris: Découverte, 2004), 34. See also Jeanson and Colette Tzanck (Jeanson), L’Algérie hors la loi (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955).

85

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procuring identity papers, and smuggling arms, funds, publications, and deserters across borders. (Lebel joined this underground: Jeune Resistance and “anarchist groups,” but gives no details.95) The title Anti-Procès (anti-trial or anti-judgment) gains added meaning if understood in part as a reference to the eighteen activists from Jeanson’s “network” who were arrested in February 1960, awaiting trial in a military court to begin on September 1. When Lebel and Jouffroy presented the Anti-Procès I and II exhibitions, Surrealists and existentialists were collaborating on “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria,” which they asked Blanchot to write.96 The declaration declared desertion and anti-war actions to be ethical and legal in the face of an illegal and immoral war.97 Citizens had the right to refuse to serve in the military and to assist the independence struggle: for the “cause of the Algerian people, which contributes in a decisive way to the downfall of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.”98 Having deserted and assisted the FLN, Lebel took more risk by garnering additional signatures for the declaration in Italy, after September 1, when it was published and banned, and he defied censorship by printing it in full in Front unique 2 (1960).99 He risked arrest for treason, had he been repatriated to France. (In 1955, Lebel went to Florence, Italy to study art, and evade the draft.) In “Avis,” his introduction to Front unique 2 the journal of art, poetry, and politics, edited and produced by Lebel from 1959 to 1960, he called on Italian youth, artists, and intellectuals to act, and alluded to the anti-war underground. “Avis” condemned the parties of the left for inaction, de Gaulle for exploiting the crisis of 1958 to reestablish theocracy,100 and André Malraux’s cultural policies, as well as art’s commercialization, and pretentions of national grandeur for having “gangrened” France.101 Justice had lost Ibid., 204. He states that to do so might jeopardize others. There seems little reason to doubt, given his public dissent to the war. Lebel, interview with the author, June 13, 2015. 96 Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, ed. Alison Anderson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 593–594. It is also called “The Manifesto of the 121” for the original number of signatories. They included Breton, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Leiris, Alain Resnais, and Simone Signoret. 97 Maurice Blanchot, “Dossier 7.3: ‘Manifesto of the 121’ against the Algerian War” (September 6, 1960),” in Celestin and DalMolin, France from 1851 to the Present, 270–271. 98 Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings (French Voices), trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 15–17. 99 Situationist International members Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein signed the Declaration. Like Lebel and other militants, they rejected the organized left. The SI platform of 1956 called for “a new sensibility and a new culture, a struggle which is itself part of the general revolutionary resurgence.” They differed from Lebel in acting outside the realm of art, while Lebel remained allied to the art world, though disputing its values. See Situationist International, Situationist Chronology (Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech, 2005 [cited November 4, 2005]); The Lettrist International, “The Alba Platform,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 15; and (Guy Debord), “Editorial Notes: The Avant-Garde of Presence,” October, no. 79 (1997): 136. 100 Front unique, 2 (1960), 1–2. De Gaulle named Malraux Minister of Culture in 1958. For contemporary texts that reveal the prescience of Lebel’s critique of Malraux, who fabricated a mythology of himself with little basis in reality, see Stefan Collier, “Grand Illusion,” The Nation (February 28, 2005); and Olivier Todd, Malraux: A Life, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, 2005). 101 Lebel, “Avis,” Front Unique 2 (1960): 4. 95

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its meaning in a country based on “the rights of man and of the citizen” fighting a colonial war: “We are ashamed.”102 At such a moment, as art fairs such as the Venice Biennale were escalating art’s devolution to commodity, Lebel declared art a mode of investigation and “intuitive way of knowing.”103 Experimental practices offered ways of knowing, alternative to the rationalism and suspect morality that legitimized the colonial state and brought art into market circulation. The final essay in Front unique, 2 “Le Futur,” conveys how Lebel’s views anticipated those held more broadly in the 1960s. He denounced work, the family, patriotism, religion, and the media for imposing the moral servitude of slaves on the French, and called on revolutionaries to use art to demoralize and demystify.104 (In its juxtaposition of quotes from the likes of Bakunin, Nietzsche, Sartre, Breton, and Trotsky, the structure of the essay compares to a happening or a collage.) Lebel cited Breton and Trotsky’s manifesto of 1938 to condemn conventional morality as an ideological socializing force and, with a quote from Bakunin, called artists and writers to action: it was time to interconnect emancipation of spirit and world, and recognize the indissociability of “Love, Poetry, Liberty.”105

Concluding thoughts By beginning to integrate viewers as participants, Funeral of the Thing began to rob them of the “objective” distance of critic or colonizer, using varied means to confuse and obstruct the ordering by logic, which instills a sense of control over emotion and political events. Such affective address aimed, I suggest, to undermine the psychic hold of socioreligious taboos and a technocratic rationalism that makes “judgment a function of specialized or ‘expert’ knowledge.”106 For Lebel, as he learned from Duchamp, the artist does not complete the artwork, it is the viewer, and it is also the viewer who brings the art into posterity. It is also in the viewer, as postcolonialist Achille Mbembe observes, that “stereotypes and inferiorizing practices” shape perceptions of “others” as “Other,” through fantasizing “irreducible alterity” to justify coercive exploitation.107 Lebel and his collaborators took up arms through art in 1960: making it a weapon to attack entrenched psychological structures and social norms that promote and accept the barbarity of colonialism and its relations. Drawing on the avant-garde strategies of disruption and disorientation that he had been taught by Duchamp, Breton, and Péret, Lebel began to create situations Ibid. Lebel and Edouard Jaguer, “Albatros et pigeons,” Direzioni, rassegna d’arte e di poesia d’avanguardia (1959): n.p., in JJLA. 104 Lebel, “Devenir,” Front unique 2, 34. 105 Ibid., 34. 106 I adapt this formulation from Dana Villa, “Oakeshott and the Cold War Critique of Political Rationalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott, ed. Ephraim Podoksik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 321. 107 Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 94. 102 103

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for collective experimental action, framed as art: free spaces in which to invent new modes of perception and behavior. Though not yet fully a happening, Funeral of the Thing instigated a process that involved artists and audiences as collaborators to release the social (collective) psyche from what a contemporary, Michel Foucault, theorized as a power that “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.”108 Though the war in Algeria was only one factor that motivated Lebel to experiment with art as event, and begin the transition from Surrealist theater to happenings, imagine the impact of learning what the French, whose revolution initiated an enlightened social order, would do in the name of a “civilizing mission.” To understand Lebel’s art, it seems essential to consider taboos affective forms of censorship, silencing debate that is integral to forging collectivities. To suppress free expression in art, such as Sade’s excessive but fictive forays into the violently coprophagic, impedes explorations of what might be but is not yet (or even should not be), stimulating creativity that propels change. As Stora observed about the paucity of images from the Algerian War, as compared to the many from the US war in Vietnam: “It is a matter here of the major mechanisms of concealing the reality of the war, put into place very early by censorship, self-censorship and fabricating images for propaganda.”109 To such silencing, Lebel made art collaborative, and breached taboo to engage the forbidden. As he put it in 1968: To this mercantile, state-controlled conception of culture, we oppose a combative art, fully conscious of its prerogatives: an art that does not shrink from stating its position, from direct action, from transmutation. The happening interpolates actual experience directly into a mythical context … [It] is avant-garde art that liberates latent myths; it transfigures and changes our conception of life.110

It is indeed our conception of life that determines our perception and treatment of others, something that is increasingly clear.

Acknowledgements I must first express my gratitude to Jean-Jacques Lebel for access to his archives and interviews. There are many people to thank for their help during the long process of bringing this chapter to fruition: the editor of this volume, Catherine Dossin and the anonymous readers; those who read drafts, especially Jacob Haubenreich and Hélène Fredrickson, and members of two writing groups Natasha Zaretsky, Joseph Shapiro, and Sarah Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon. 1980), 30. 109 Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 37. 110 Lebel, “On the Necessity of Violation,” The Drama Review: TDR 13 (1968): 92–93, 101. 108

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Schroth, Marianne Wardle, and Margaret Wu. This study would not have been possible without the guidance and mentorship of my dissertation advisor at Duke University, Kristine Stiles, and the guidance of Michael Hardt, Fredric Jameson, Patricia Leighten, and Richard J. Powell, as well as Hannah Higgins, at the University of Illinois Chicago, who introduced me to Fluxus and happenings and changed my life. Research at the Bibliothèque nationale and the Palais de la Porte Dorée—Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, and the Archives nationale d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence was made possible by support from the Graduate School at Duke, start-up funds from Southern Illinois University, travel support from the School of Art and Design and the Art History Fund, and the Research, Scholarly, Creative Activity Joint Award for a Woman Assistant Professor, from the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the University Women’s Professional Advancement. Finally, I thank my son Carl for inspiring me to persevere. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. JeanJacques Lebel’s Archives are referred to as JJLA.

11

Reimagining Communism after 1968: The Case of Grapus Sami Siegelbaum

In early 2013, to little fanfare, the French Communist Party (PCF) decided to drop the hammer and sickle from its membership cards and official imagery and replace it with a star whose five points represent the parties of the Left Front coalition to which the PCF has belonged since 2009. Within the party there was some grumbling from traditionalists but, as national secretary Pierre Laurent explained, “We want to turn towards the future … [The hammer and sickle] doesn’t represent the reality of who we are today. It isn’t so relevant to a new generation of communists.”1 Though the hammer and sickle had been the official insignia of the party since its establishment in 1920, by 2013 the notion that logo rebranding might update the PCF’s image among the French populace seemed naïve at best. Membership and electoral fortunes had been in steady decline since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958. In the general election of 2012, the Left Front managed 6.9 percent of the national vote—far behind the extreme right-wing National Front. What seemed to be at issue with the logo change was an attempt by the party to shed certain associations that inhibited its appeal for younger workers and partisans. Certain of those compromised associations were explicit. The industrial and agricultural labor iconographically denoted had long ago ceased to comprise the majority of waged labor in France.2 There was also, of course, the outmodedness of the symbol’s connection to the Soviet Union and twentieth-century geopolitics. However, the decision to abandon such a venerable component of the party’s visual identity evinced an ambivalence about the role of the party within contemporary France that had characterized the PCF throughout the history of the Fifth Republic. It was also not the first time that graphic design had attempted to address that ambivalence and respond to the changing of cultural winds. This was the task undertaken by Grapus, a collective of communist graphic designers born from the maelstrom of 1968 who, over the course of the 1970s, attempted to update the image of the PCF and its affiliated labor union, the Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labor, CGT) by harnessing the spirit of youthful revolt that had emerged from 1968 and which was in marked contrast to the organizational Kim Willsher, “French Communist Party Says Adieu to the Hammer and Sickle,” The Guardian, (February 10, 2013) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/10/french-communist-partyhammer-and-sickle. 2 The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, Vol. 2: 1870 to the Present, ed. Stephen Broadberry and Kevin H. O’Rourke (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2010), 210–211. 1

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structure and ideological orientation of these venerable institutions. The contradictions of this pursuit would mark the group’s interactions with the PCF and CGT as well as the images they created, thereby producing some of the most historically rich visual responses to the events of May 1968.3 Typically overshadowed in the historiography on French leftist visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s by, on the one hand, the posters and graffiti produced during the May events, and on the other, by experimental practices such as those of artists associated with groups like BMPT,4 the Situationist International,5 or Supports/Surfaces,6 Grapus offers a more sustained focus on how images struggled to cope with the changes the left confronted and underwent during this period. By the mid-1980s, however, the contradictions could no longer be sustained and Grapus’s engagement with the PCF and CGT came to an end. The few considerations of this endeavor that exist stress the inflexibility of PCF structure and dogma, contrasting the strictly political goals of the party with the creative artistic liberty of Grapus.7 I will argue, however, that the designs Grapus developed for the Communist Party and labor union as well as their eventual foundering stemmed from the incompatibility of a fragmenting French left to representation in the wake of 1968. That is, May 1968 posed a direct challenge to the authority of signs, institutions, and organizations to refer to or speak for shifting material conditions and subjectivities. Rather than rehearsing the conflict between reductive binaries of art/politics, autonomy/subordination, or creativity/dogma, the case of Grapus should be seen as one of images attempting to negotiate the centrifugal forces of the post-1968 period. Grapus was founded in 1970 by three graphic designers and PCF members: Pierre Bernard, François Miehe, and Gérard Paris-Clavel. Bernard and Paris-Clavel had previously spent time in Warsaw, studying poster design with Henryk Tomaszewski, pioneer of the Polish Poster School style.8 All three had played a central role in the A clear narrative account and assessment of the interpretations of the student-worker protest movement and general strike of May–June 1968 is provided in Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Le moment 68: Une histoire contestée (Paris: Seuil, 2008). 4 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Group That Was (Not) One: Daniel Buren and BMPT,” Artforum International, 46, No. 9 (May 2008): 310–314; Sami Siegelbaum, “The Riddle of May ’68: Collectivity and Protest in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2012): 53–77. 5 Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Vincent Kauffman, Guy Debord: La révolution au service de la poésie (Paris: Fayard, 2001). 6 Catherine Millet, Contemporary Art in France, trans. Charles Penwarden (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 117–155; Raphael Rubenstein, “The Painting Undone,” Art in America 79, no. 11 (November 1991):134–143, 167. 7 Hugues Boekraad, My Work is Not My Work: Pierre Bernard, Design for the Public Domain (Baden: Lars Müller, 2008), 104–105; Jacqueline Wesselius, “Grapus: The Image of Pleasure and the Pleasure of the Image,” in Grapus 85 (Utrecht: Reflex, 1985) n.p.; François Barré, “Grapus: A Poster Designer’s Collective,” Graphis 213 (1981): 58–63. 8 Tomaszewski’s posters broke with both the official dictates of Socialist Realism and modernist orthodoxies by developing a dynamic fusion of text and image, while also emphasizing spontaneity, playfulness, and irregularity through, for example, simple freehand-drawn elements. Rhetorically, what particularly struck Bernard and Paris-Clavel was how Tomaszewski’s posters for films, theaters, and cultural events communicated meaning through the design itself rather than using design as a means to transparently arrange or present information about pre-existing meanings or referents. See The Master of Design: Pierre Bernard, ed. Jianping He (Singapore: Page One, 2006), 9–11. 3

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silkscreen poster workshop established in the occupied École des Arts-Décoratifs during May and June 1968. The central mission of Grapus was to develop a role for graphic design in the public sphere in support of left-wing causes. By 1976 Alex Jordan and Jean-Paul Bachollet had joined the core group as younger designers moved into and out of the studio. Miehe left Grapus in 1978 and the group began to take on more commissions from cultural institutions. Struggling to support itself financially, Grapus officially disbanded in 1990 when an invitation to participate in the design of the Louvre’s new graphic identity split the group.9 The question of political representation had already surfaced before the outbreak of French student and worker uprisings in May–June 1968. Prior to 1968 the PCF was France’s largest left-wing political party while the CGT, as France’s largest and oldest labor union, could credibly claim to represent the economic interests of the working class.10 This, however, did not cover the exponentially growing student population of the postwar period or the ranks of the expanding white-collar workforce they were being trained to enter.11 This was a cohort that didn’t necessarily identify with the PCF’s workerist rhetoric and, even when expressing leftist orientations, was in turn viewed with suspicion by the party. Politicized university students were often more apt to support anti-imperialist struggles occurring in Algeria and Vietnam than an organization whose bureaucratic hierarchy and allegiance to the Soviet Union were seen as intransigently Stalinist.12 If any general grievance united leftist students, militants, and young workers, it was opposition to Gaullist dirigisme, the government’s highly centralized political, economic, and cultural policy of planned modernization.13 The PCF and CGT were thus also implicated in this critique for their own rigid structures and roles as loyal opposition within dirigisme. When the protests and strikes erupted in May 1968, calls for autogestion (worker self-management) proliferated amongst leftists and radicalized Leo Favier, Comment, tu ne connais pas Grapus? (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2014). However, all of the primary former members of Grapus continued to pursue the original mission of graphic design in the service of socially progressive political causes. Bernard founded the Atelier de création graphique (Graphic Design Workshop) while Jordan founded Nous travaillons ensemble (We Work Together) as quasi-continuations of Grapus. Paris-Clavel helped establish the activist design group Ne pas plier (Do Not Bend). Miehe continued to design posters for political causes such as Palestinian liberation and nuclear disarmament. 10 Already prior to 1968, however, the PCF had confronted emerging challenges as, domestically, it opposed Gaullist modernization as exploitative while promoting it as essential to working-class unity and, internationally, it continued to obey the Soviet Union’s directives, refusing to support many anti-imperialist liberation struggles that were finding increasing favor amongst French intellectuals and leftists. See Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 39–42. 11 Enrollment in French universities increased by over 200 percent during the 1960s (James D. Wilkinson and Stuart H. Hughes, Contemporary Europe: A History, 8th edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 1998), 426). 12 See, for example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Le Gauchisme: Remède à la maladie sénile du communisme (Paris: Seuil, 1968). 13 “Gaullism” refers primarily to the policies of the French state under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle (in office 1958–1969), which attempted to modernize the economy through a program of centralized incentives to private industry. 9

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workers as alternatives to the monopolistic arrangements between the state, parties, corporations, and unions.14 This was paralleled in the political realm through a process that Michel de Certeau characterized as a “capture of speech,” in which subjects ignored the institutionalized processes, media, and representatives of established political expression and experimented with new forms of direct democracy.15 Not only were protests, wildcat strikes, sit-ins, and occupations often beyond the control of parties or unions, but many were openly anticommunist. This was particularly the case amongst the so-called groupuscules of young activists of various gauchiste (“leftist”) tendencies—Maoist, Trotskyist, Situationist, anarchist—who sought more radically qualitative and immediately revolutionary goals than the PCF.16 The rebellious spirit of the gauchiste groups characterized the emblematic visual culture of May 1968, from the iconic posters and poetic graffiti that spread throughout Paris and other cities, to the sensational photos of rioting protesters. The specific ways these spectacular expressions of insurrection were differentiated from or replaced established media paralleled the circumvention of the authority of unions, political parties, or individual leaders.17 As the government reestablished order, the CGT jockeyed with other unions, such as the gauchiste-sympathizing Confédération française démocratique du travail (French Democratic Federation of Labor, CFDT), for control of the radicalized workers’ movement while the PCF struggled to address the recomposition of the French working class and new kinds of political demands that had emerged in May.18 Both organizations, however, pursued the same fundamental goals they had prior to 1968: the conquest of bread-and-butter concessions from the government and private businesses as opposed to calls for autogestion, and the formation of a united front of left-wing parties under the hegemony of the PCF, a goal that was realized from 1972 to 1977. One key move in this direction was the PCF’s tepid criticism of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968—a symbolic though not insignificant

On this topic see Ruth Erickson’s contribution to this volume. Michel de Certeau, La prise de parole, et autres écrits politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1994). 16 Though drawing on a variety of historical currents in leftist thought, postwar gauchisme can be seen as a reaction to four key historical factors particular to France: 1) the centralized paternalism of the French state under Charles de Gaulle; 2) the agonized experience of decolonization; 3) the rapid growth in university student and non-industrial worker populations; and, 4) the perceived sclerosis of the PCF. See, Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 8. 17 See Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, and Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, MO: Telos, 1981), 164–184. Despite the frequent association of the celebrated silkscreen posters produced at the occupied art schools and other sites with gauchisme, there were virtually no posters produced which were overtly critical of the PCF or CGT. For information about the silkscreen poster workshops of May ’68 see Mai 68: les mouvements étudiants en France et dans le monde, ed. Genevieve Dreyfus-Armand and Laurent Gervereau (Nanterre: BDIC, 1998). On the association between the silkscreen posters and gauchisme see Victoria H. F. Scott, “May ’68 and the Question of the Image,” Rutgers Art Review 24, (Fall 2008); and Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 91–161. 18 George Ross, Workers and Communists in France: From Popular Front to Eurocommunism (Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1982) 215–223.

14

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attempt to distance the party from charges of Stalinist subservience, and one which convinced sympathetic artists such as Pierre Bernard and Gérard Paris-Clavel to officially join.19 Individual and historical circumstances converged remarkably in the founding of Grapus, positioning it for the task of harnessing the energies of May 1968 to advance the goals of the PCF and CGT. Pierre Bernard and Gérard Paris-Clavel met François Miehe, a design student and Communist Party member, in the midst of the May events when they occupied and helped organize a silkscreen poster workshop in the École des Arts-Décoratifs, following the lead of artists and students at the École des Beaux-Arts who had established a poster workshop renamed the Atelier Populaire a few days earlier. As at the Beaux-Arts, poster design and production at the ArtsDéco was organized in collectivist fashion. Anyone could propose a design, while slogans were often solicited from union representatives. A daily general assembly would vote on designs which would then be silkscreened in assembly-line fashion and pasted to the walls of the Latin Quarter and other key sites. However, in contrast to the heavily attended general assemblies at the Beaux-Arts, the Arts-Déco gained a reputation for greater political homogeneity largely thanks to Miehe’s experience as a PCF organizer.20 Correspondingly, there was more aesthetic consistency amongst the Arts-Déco posters than with the Beaux-Arts posters, which tended to emphasize slogans and display an explicitly childlike or cartoonish hand-drawn style. Arts-Déco posters, such as those designed or printed by the future members of Grapus, demonstrated a stronger graphic sensibility.21 A celebrated and notorious example is the one showing Hitler removing a de Gaulle mask (Figure 11.1). The absence of text and the realism of the depiction are shocking precisely because their mimetic competence makes it harder to associate the crude message with youthful zealousness or spontaneity. This stylistic proficiency is also apparent in another example in which a Gaullist cross is screwed into an outline of a head in profile. The economy of the design conveys a precision absent from most May 1968 posters. Police shut down the Arts-Déco poster workshop at the end of June 1968, putting an abrupt end to Bernard, Paris-Clavel, and Miehe’s militant activity. At the university level, the immediate post-May period was characterized by attempts at institutional and pedagogical reform. One manifestation of this was the founding of a short-lived interdisciplinary school, the Institut de l’Environnement, in November 1969. It was The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, ending a period of democratic liberalization under the government of reformer Alexander Dubček. 20 “L’atelier des Arts décoratifs. Entretien avec François Miehe et Gérard Paris-Clavel,” in DreyfusArmand and Gervereau, Mai 68, 192–193. 21 Like the Atelier Populaire at the Beaux-Arts, the Arts-Déco workshop maintained a strict ethic of anonymity in poster design. However, certain designs have subsequently been attributed to individuals such as Bernard (see Rick Poynor, “Utopian Image: Politics and Posters,” Design Observer 3/10/13 (http://designobserver.com/feature/utopian-image-politics-and-posters/37739/)). Nonetheless, all designs were subject to general assembly approval and modification and were considered collective productions. 19

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Figure 11.1  Atelier des Arts-Décoratifs, 1968. Silkscreen poster. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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within this experimental context that Bernard, Paris-Clavel, and Miehe regrouped to undertake a research project on the use of political media in the public sphere. Influenced by their reading of Roland Barthes’ semiology, they formed Grapus in 1970 to continue what they had done at the Arts-Déco in May and June 1968 on a more systematic basis. The name was a play on the insult, “crapule stalinienne” (“Stalinist scum”), which had been hurled at communists by gauchistes during and after May. Grapus committed itself to working exclusively for left-wing political and cultural causes and organizations. In keeping with the ethos of the May 1968 poster workshops, Grapus operated as a collective entity. Members did not pursue individual projects but each commission and design was discussed and approved by the group. A central pillar of Grapus’s endeavor was, as Bernard explained, the “production of images of ‘pleasure,’ with the idea of thereby transmitting to activists the energy and desire to act.”22 This emphasis on pleasure was perhaps the most palpable impact of May 1968 on the reformulation of leftist identity. As countless commentators have noted, what was novel about the events was a reconfiguration of political values combining a social critique of exploitation and inequality with an aesthetic critique of repressed desire— class struggle combined with individual pleasure.23 Grapus’s posters would attempt to visually sustain this contradiction by picturing “pleasure” as an inclusive invitation to the viewer to partake in the process of imagining communism. The lack of an established graphic design culture in France hindered Grapus’s case for appealing to political organizations such as the PCF. The state, parties, unions, and other organizations came up with text and slogans but typically left design considerations to the printer whose task it was to arrange the furnished content in the most legible way possible according to the established conventions of public media. Occasionally a sympathetic artist might be commissioned to produce an image for the organization but there was no systematic involvement of graphic design in civic life as existed in countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, or Germany and Grapus essentially sought to single-handedly carve this role for themselves. At the same time, the absence of institutionalized conventions in France left open the possibility for experiments launched in the heat of extraordinary political circumstances to fill the void. It also allowed Grapus to draw on and combine heterogeneous sources, from Tomaszewski’s aesthetics to classic French commercial designers such as Savignac to the posters and graffiti of May 1968.24 Pierre Bernard, email to author, 3/4/2015. For an analysis that reads May 1968 in terms of an irruption of hedonistic individualism, see JeanPierre Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 2006). The notion of May 1968 as a combination of “social” critique and “artistic” critique is advanced by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 241–251. For a reading of May 1968 as a transition from the dominance of political economy to concerns over personal rights, see Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queens University, 2007), 19–44. 24 Raymond Savignac (1907–2002) was a celebrated French commercial graphic designer prominent in the 1940s and 1950s, known for his simple and humorous advertisements for consumer products. 22 23

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Through Miehe’s party connections, Grapus began to work with local chapters of the PCF on various campaigns. Several posters from 1971 and 1972 focus on promoting the formation of a union of the left under a common program and advertise public debates with PCF officials. These examples all eschew both the ouvriérisme (workerism) and national iconography of postwar modernization that characterized PCF (though not only PCF) propaganda prior to 1968. Instead, the posters employ disjunctive fonts and dynamic placements of text, features that would become hallmarks of the Grapus aesthetic. Often, this would involve a juxtaposition or playful interaction of typeset fonts with handwritten text that recalled the graffiti of May 1968. In several of these early posters, photographic imagery, rather than seeming to transparently depict subject matter, is stylized in such a way as to call attention to the mediation of visual expression. This is, for example, achieved through the filtering of the image through a colored and enlarged printing matrix, reminiscent of the exaggerated ben-day dots in Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book-inspired paintings. Notably addressing key postMay concerns such as women’s rights, the environment, or the media, these posters demonstrate the impact of Grapus’s reading of Barthesian semiology. In his classic 1964 essay, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes dissects an advertisement for pasta to explain how visual and textual signs are arranged to naturalize symbolic meanings for a given purpose. In Barthes’ reading, denotative meanings of a photograph, for example, of tomatoes, onions, pasta, a shopping bag, are used to support and convey connotative meanings (freshness, home cooking, “Italianicity,” etc.) which can then be “anchored” with the signifier of the brand.25 The cultural meanings transmitted are made to seem natural or unmediated because of their grounding in the transparency of denotative meanings which are “messages without a code.” In Grapus’s early PCF posters, photographs are presented in ways that inhibit immediate denotative readings through interventions such as color filters, distortions, and layers that present the image as inherently “coded.” One such poster for the PCF analogizes this rhetoric of the image to comment on media censorship at the ORTF, the public radio and television agency (Figure 11.2). A key issue raised by May 1968 protesters and addressed in numerous Atelier Populaire and Arts-Déco posters, including those designed by future Grapus members, was the government’s manipulation of information at the ORTF. Gauchistes called for its dissolution as a mouthpiece of repressive state propaganda and supported the continuation of a major strike by ORTF workers in June 1968.26 In explicit contrast to state-run radio and television, graffiti, silkscreened posters and “wall journals” were positioned as more authentic, spontaneous, and unmediated forms of communication.27 The PCF, however, adopted a reformist position and encouraged a negotiated end to Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32–51. 26 The ORTF strike was one of the longest and most politicized, lasting from mid-May until early July. 27 See Sami Siegelbaum, “Authentic Mediation: Art, Media, and Public Space in May ‘68,” Kunstlicht 32, no. 3 (2011), 39–49. 25

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Figure 11.2  Grapus, Pour assainir l’ORTF il faut le démocratiser (Parti communiste français), 1972. Offset print poster. Courtesy of Pierre Bernard.

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the ORTF strike, predictably prompting charges of counterrevolutionary collaboration from gauchistes.28 Grapus’s 1972 poster calling for “democratization” of the ORTF incorporates the May 1968 critique of censorship while challenging the notion of unmediated communication. A blue-tinted photograph of a protest by ORTF workers is partially overlaid with a rectangular box which further distorts the image, representing the graininess of a television screen. The mouths of individuals within the box are blacked out and the words “scandales censures arbitraires” (arbitrary censorship scandals) appear in white. Black-on-white text appears diagonally below the television screen box, reading, “To reclaim the ORTF, it must be democratized.” This text is printed as if collaged, ransom-note style, from cut-out fragments, an explicit rejection of professional typesetting and evoking the creative manipulation of official information. As such, it visually creates a distinction between the official language, or what Ferdinand de Saussure termed langue, and a specific speech act, which Saussure termed parole.29 The tinted photograph and collaged text present visual and textual information as always already mediated, yet subject to manipulation. The poster thus adopts the PCF’s reformist position by demanding that journalists and editors be given more say over content rather than proposing an alternative, more spontaneous, or “freer” form of communication. Barthes’ dissection of advertising rhetoric, and particularly the use of photography in advertising, provided Grapus with a powerful theoretical tool with which to develop strategies to advertise for a political cause while critiquing the codes of commercial advertising.30 Even the ORTF poster, however, is uncommon for Grapus due to its representation of worker militancy, redolent of the pre-1968 masculinized ouvriérisme that characterized the PCF and CGT and which was subjected to feminist critique after May 1968.31 Not only is there a notable prevalence of posters specifically addressing women’s rights, but in the few images of workers that the group designed, such as in the logo for the Paris chapter of the CGT, gender is ambiguously or diversely represented (Figure 11.3). The 1972 logo depicts four abstracted figures of indeterminate gender embracing each other and supported by the massive letters CGT. Behind the figures, a simplified Jean-Pierre Filiu, “La crise de l’ORTF en mai-juillet 1968,” Bulletin du comité d’histoire de la télévision (January 1986). 29 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 3rd edition, trans. Richard Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 1986), 9–15. 30 Also instrumental for Grapus in this regard was Serge Tchakhotine’s Le Viol des foules par la propagande politique (translated into English in 1940 as The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda), first published in 1939 and suppressed during the occupation. It was republished in the early 1950s and its psychological analysis of propaganda became highly influential. Pierre Bernard, email to author, 3/4/2015. 31 The PCF’s position on la condition féminine (the status of women) pre-1968, while progressive compared to other political parties, was stringently economistic and often outright scornful of the sorts of concerns raised by the nascent women’s movement. After 1968, the women’s movement became a key test case for the PCF’s ability to address expanded political concerns. See Jane Jenson, “The French Communist Party and Feminism,” The Socialist Register 17 (1980): 121–147; and Michel Garbez, “La question féminine dans le discours du parti communiste française,” in Discours et Idéologie (Paris: PUF, 1980), 301–393. 28

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Figure 11.3  Grapus, CGT, Paris, 1973. Offset print poster. Courtesy of Pierre Bernard.

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silhouette of the Eiffel Tower with pillowy clouds floating by conveys an image of urban optimism. One of the two clouds, however, is positioned behind the head of one of the figures and simultaneously reads as windblown hair. That this element is present in earlier proposals for the design, before the inclusion of the Eiffel Tower and other clouds, supports the suggestion that the figure is a woman. Furthermore, the traditional signs of worker solidarity and militancy, such as the raised fist, handshake, or picket sign—still evident in many May 1968 posters—have been replaced by the affective touching of supportive bodies which together form a unified yet informal mass with the rightmost figure resting a relaxed arm over the top of the “T.” The move towards a graphic language of pleasure became more pronounced with the formation of the Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left) in 1972. This coalition of leftist parties had been one of the PCF’s major political objectives both prior to and after 1968. However, frictions surfaced almost instantly as the PCF and the more modernate Socialist Party (PS) attempted to outmaneuver each other for electoral gains and ideological control within the union.32 The Socialists, embracing the gauchiste rhetoric of autogestion, made significant gains in the 1974 presidential election. The PCF hastily organized the 21st Party Congress in which General Secretary Georges Marchais outlined a new platform for the coalition, entitled Union du peuple de France (Union of the People of France), as an attempt to outflank the Socialists’ appeal to younger workers and gauchistes. According to Marchais, the ranks of clerical and managerial workers that had swelled in the postwar period would eventually gravitate to the communists as they became conscious of their status as waged labor. Though continuing to grant political primacy to the industrial working class, Union du peuple de France included within that category technicians, engineers, and other intellectual workers who had previously been classified as “white collar.” Many of these workers had been students in 1968, were politicized by concepts such as autogestion, or were simply impacted by the cultural transformations spawned by the May movement. They were thus more inclined to identify with the less traditionally Marxist dimension of revolt expressed in celebrated 1968 graffiti such as “sous les pavés la plage” (“beneath the paving stones lies the beach”). Grapus’s designs for the Union du peuple de France campaign marked its fullest involvement with the PCF and resulted in some of the collective’s most widespread imagery, consisting of a childlike drawing of a radiating sun with Union du peuple de France pour le changement démocratique (Union of the People of France for Democratic Change) in the simple handwriting that was becoming a hallmark of the group’s style (Figure 11.4). As Bernard explained, “We had a theory that handwriting would be better than typography at making it easy for the observer to make the message his or her own.”33 The PS was founded in 1969, largely replacing the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) whose reputation had suffered from indecisiveness on Algerian independence and compromises with Gaullism. 33 As quoted in Boekraad, My work is not my work, 105–106. 32

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Figure 11.4  Grapus, Union du peuple de France (Parti communiste français), 1973. Offset print poster. Courtesy of Pierre Bernard.

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Thus the indexicality of handwriting was intended to refer to an expressive subject rather than a bureaucratic organization. Like the graffiti and posters of May 1968, the handwritten style was meant to distinguish itself from both commercial advertising and official political imagery. “After all,” Bernard noted, “typography is associated with the world of products and institutions. We thought we were taking a step towards a general image for the party.” This general image avoided any specific markers of class or gender while proposing a youthful, vibrantly humanistic sensibility for an organization that was continuing to characterize itself as the revolutionary party of the working class, albeit one that could accommodate an expanded definition of that identity. Grapus’s Union du peuple de France design—produced for posters, billboards, brochures, stickers, buttons, T-shirts, and even membership applications—suggested that the Communist Party in fact led the way to the beach that had been glimpsed in May 1968. The posters Grapus produced for the PCF in the mid-1970s extended the playful cheeriness of the Union du peuple de France imagery, often combining it with countercultural elements such as their poster depicting Marx as a hitchhiking hippie, thumb pointing left, for the party’s youth movement. Grapus’s expectation that such “images of pleasure” might become the “general image” of the French Communist Party appears, at least in retrospect, as naïvely hopeful as the message these images communicated. And yet they highlight the complex and uncertain position that the PCF, and indeed the French left in general, found itself in after 1968. In May 1968, students and workers of vastly different circumstances sought to transcend the distances between their social and spatial locations.34 The paradox was that while the antagonists they targeted were the historical organizations and institutions of class politics, the common ground they found was the inherited language of class struggle; 1968 thus appears, in retrospect, as the last gasp of a shared language of the left.35 The Union de la Gauche was an attempt to face this challenge, yet it contributed to the further fragmentation of the left as communists and socialists now jostled for control of an increasingly amorphous demographic. Under criticism and internal dissent over its continuing loyalty to the Soviet Union following the French publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the PCF abandoned its commitment to the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in 1976 and affirmed a democratic route to socialism. However, in the 1976 elections, the PS gained considerably more seats than the PCF. Conflicted about whether to continue to liberalize or whether to consolidate its traditional yet shrinking base, the PCF chose both, openly criticizing the Soviet Union and flirting with Eurocommunism while denouncing the PS’s “right-wing turn” and quietly scrapping the Union du peuple de France. See Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, 2-18. As philosopher Alain Badiou has recently noted, despite the disagreements between various factions in May 1968, “everyone spoke a common language, and the red flag was everyone’s emblem,” but that despite its amazing efflorescence in May, this language was “beginning to die out because May ’68, and even more so the years that followed, was a huge challenge to the legitimacy of the historical organizations of the left, of unions, parties and famous leaders.” Alain Badiou, “May ’68 Revisited, 40 Years On,” in The Communist Hypothesis, trans . David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010), 41–42.

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Figure 11.5  Grapus, On y va (Mouvement de la jeunesse communiste de France), 1977. Offset print poster. Courtesy of Pierre Bernard.

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Grapus’s celebrated 1977 poster for the PCF’s youth organization (Figure 11.5) can be seen as an attempt to negotiate this uncertainty by integrating 1968-inspired tropes of spontaneity and individuality into official party propaganda. Block letters reading ON Y VA (Let’s Go) appear in a spectrum of colors against a black ground. Despite the letter’s typographical precision and boldness, the status of the phrase is slightly ambiguous, its tone depending on whether one reads the color scheme as suggestive of sunrise or sunset. As if to intervene in this uncertainty, handwritten letters in white play around the block letters, directing the phrase towards more specific meanings by incorporating certain letters of the original phrase into a new one reading ON Y VA Tous à IVRY à la fête Vers le changement! (Let’s all go to Ivry for the festival towards change!). The handwriting personalizes the expression as indices of individual spontaneity in the vein of May 1968 graffiti and poster détournement. Tom McDonough has described détournement, the key critical strategy developed by the Situationist International, as “the production of an unalienated writing” that could overcome the impasse of postwar leftist political expression.36 This impasse was exemplified, McDonough argues, in Roger Garaudy’s 1951 description of communist propaganda which, according to Garaudy, was characterized by “its simplicity and purity,” and in which “words stick close to facts and actions.”37 Because détournement re-routed the meanings of disparate utterances by introducing play, fragmentation, and polyphony into a text, it constituted, according to Guy Debord, “the flexible language of anti-ideology.”38 Détournement’s uncoupling of signs from their dominant ideological significations was seen as the invention of a new language—a dialectical one that “knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty,” unlike Garaudy’s description of the transparency of party propaganda.39 Grapus’s On y va poster draws on the aesthetics of détournement to challenge the authority of the standardized typeface in the same way that the Situationists, and Situationist-inspired protesters in 1968, challenged the orthodoxy of the Communist Party’s language and its ability to transparently represent social truth. And yet, that party language is also Grapus’s, who are in essence enacting a détournement of their own poster for the PCF. Rather than a critical strategy of dialectical negation, Grapus’s use of détournement reaffirms and specifies the party’s message, but in a way that could address the split in the post-1968 leftist subject. Tom McDonough, The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 25. Détournement was defined by the Situationist International as “the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu.” “Definitions” (1958), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 45. Typically, this has been understood as the re-routing of messages towards new critical ones through the manipulation of existing or appropriated visual and textual elements. 37 Roger Garaudy, “Propagande de guerre et propagande communiste,” La Nouvelle critique (March 1951), quoted in McDonough, The Beautiful Language of My Century, 43. 38 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, n.c.), §208. 39 Ibid.

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The use of détournement acknowledges the tension between “old” and “new” left, refusing to synthesize the two. This is in contrast to the image of the hitchhiking Marx from the earlier poster for the Mouvement de la jeunesse communiste (Communist Youth Movement), which reappears as a small icon in the upper right corner of the On y va poster. In fact, the party had rejected an earlier design for the poster featuring a hippie Lenin. Attempting to balance the pressures of democratization and deSovietization with the necessity of averting Socialist Party dominance of the left, the PCF’s language required all the flexibility that their pre-1968 propaganda had denied. The Union de la Gauche had been an attempt to articulate a broad leftist political force in the wake of 1968. However, what leftist politics consisted of became increasingly unclear, particularly as the economic crisis of the mid-1970s further split the PCF and PS on issues such as nationalization of industry and the minimum wage.40 As issue-specific forms of political identification increasingly characterized the French electorate, the PCF’s continued insistence on the primacy of economic questions appeared outmoded to scores of younger voters whose political horizons had multiplied during and after 1968. The socialists’ flexibility in this regard made them more appealing to ex-gauchistes and centrists alike. The Parti Socialiste, born after May 1968 and having less of an established image or identity to reinvent, was better adapted to the post-1968 environment. In the fall of 1977, the Union de la Gauche collapsed and the PCF renewed its ouvriériste orientation, alienating many reformers within the party. By many accounts, 1978 was the year French Communism suffered its decisive defeat.41 The failed Union de la Gauche, rather than bringing the PCF to power, had only legitimized the PS as a non-communist left-wing alternative. The collapse of a united front predictably split the left vote, and the governing center-right maintained its majority. For the first time since 1936 the Communist Party received fewer votes than the Socialists. That same year, founding member François Miehe left Grapus as financial and ideological pressures began to mount. The group designed numerous further posters for PCF and CGT campaigns and communist-dominated municipal councils, particularly in the “red belt” of working-class suburbs surrounding Paris. Though frequently employing the combination of typeset with handwritten text that had become a signature of their style, they largely abandoned the pursuit of a new general image for the party and began to take on more commissions for cultural organizations. As Jean-Paul Bachollet, who joined the group in 1976, put it, “The French Communist Party does not want that we, Grapus, renew its image, since the party itself has no idea what image it should have.”42 Ross, Workers and Communists in France, 266–267. D. S. Bell and Byron Criddle, The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 104–107. 41 Bell and Criddle, The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic, 99–107; Bernard Puda, Un monde défait: Les communistes français de 1956 à nos jours (Broissieux: Croquant, 2009), 99–106; Ross, Workers and Communists in France, 280–298. 42 Wesselius, “Grapus,” n.p.

40

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The socialists’ political victory in the 1981 presidential elections prompted the appointment of communists to ministerial posts for the first time since their banishment from the government in 1947 and gave new hope to a left that had struggled to define itself in the aftermath of 1968. However, now more directly under the thumb of the PS, the PCF saw its support shrink even more rapidly than it had during the 1970s and they chose to leave the cabinet in 1984 as François Mitterrand’s government pivoted further rightward. That same year, Grapus ended its collaboration with the PCF and CGT, and with it the attempt to update the image of the party by fusing the energies of May 1968 with the historical organizations of the left. And yet, the longevity and productivity of the collaboration is remarkable. Grapus’s commitment to the Communist Party stands in marked contrast to the dominant characterization of the era as one of cultural rebellion against traditional institutions. The case of Grapus reveals that the post-May period, rather than witnessing a flight from politics, saw sustained experiments in articulating a new political language, one informed by critical theories of representation, collectivist ethics, and countercultural styles, which instead of seeking to overcome the contradictions and contingencies of transformative historical processes, sought images that allowed space for the viewer to feel that she had a role to play.

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Autogestion in French Art after 1968: A Case Study of the Sociological Art Collective Ruth Erickson

All life, all culture, all art is only one vast learning process. The technique and the ability of organization constantly transform the means of production, the capabilities of communication, the habits of work, the conditions of creation and life. Sociological Art Collective, “Sociological Art: An Art of Organization,” c. 1976.1

Autogestion May 1968 marked the dawn of the age of autogestion (workers’ self-management).2 Or so argue countless historians, who link the uprisings of May and June to the subsequent blossoming of small-scale collective endeavors in journalism, publishing, and politics, and to events such as the takeover of the LIP watch factory by workers in 1973. In the period between the founding of the journal Autogestion in December 1966 and the election of the socialist François Mitterrand in 1981, autogestion became indispensable to leftist re-imaginings of France and modern life.3 Labor groups, political parties, newspapers, journals, factory workers, and activists throughout France discussed

“Toute vie, toute culture, tout art n’est qu’un seul et vaste processus d’apprentissage. La technique et la faculté d’organisation transforment sans cesse les moyens de production, les possibilités de communication, les habitudes de travail, les conditions de création et de vie.” Fonds Fred Forest, Inathèque, Paris. 2 Pierre Rosanvallon, L’Age de l’  autogestion (Paris: Seuil, 1976). While there had been many experiments in the management of an organization by its workforce—the basis of autogestion, in 1960s and 1970s France, it was the example of Titoist socialism in Yugoslavia, which since the 1950s had promoted an economy based on workers’ self-management, that captured the attention of the labor movement, theorists, and many others in France. For instance, “autogestion” finds its way into the 1970 program of the trade union CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail). For an excellent account of the history and emergence of this term in France, see Franck Georgi, “L’ autogestion en France, des ‘années 1968’ aux années 1980. Essor et déclin d’une utopie politique,” La Pensée, no. 356 (December 2008): 87–101. 3 Other key journals that explored and championed models of autogestion were Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Internationale situationniste, and Cause commune, as did a number of influential sociologists, including Edgar Morin, Alain Touraine, and Jean Duvignaud. 1

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autogestion as an alternative to capitalist society.4 This thriving discourse fueled dissatisfied workers and frustrated students to demand greater control over the institutions that governed their lives. “Autogestion,” writes the French historian Pierre Rosanvallon, “traversed the French political sky like a meteor in the 1970s.”5 What is missing from these important accounts of the years following May 1968 in France is an assessment of the many ways that artists and art workers harnessed the powerful idea of autogestion to transform their practices, and how this embrace of autogestion, in turn, has shaped art and art history over the past fifty years. In this chapter, I trace the formation and early collaborative endeavors of the Sociological Art Collective (Collectif d’art sociologique) in order to illuminate the emergence of two key forms in the 1970s that connected the theory of autogestion with its practice in the arts: the artist collective and the artist-curated exhibition. The management and organization of both collectives and exhibitions offered artists key tactics to challenge conventional notions of authorship, invert power hierarchies in the art world, and redefine artistic labor. Even when these modes of self-management led to the proliferation and internalization of the very institutional impulses originally resisted (hierarchy, bureaucracy, systematization, and so forth), the act of self-governance was political, however compromised. Before looking more closely at the collective and artist-curated exhibition through the Sociological Art Collective, it is helpful to recall the overarching shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy after the Second World War. There have been many compelling accounts of the ways that this economic transformation led to the valuation of a different set of skills.6 Rather than producing products, workers— and increasingly artists—tended to manage, arrange, and implement services and information, leading to the emergence of white-collar artistic labor. “Many artists (like their working and professional counterparts) no longer felt compelled to offer a discrete object produced by hand,” writes art historian Helen Molesworth. “Rather, they explored ways of producing art that were analogous to other forms of labor.”7 In Work Ethic, Molesworth examines artists as workers, managers, and experience makers, connecting instances of novel artistic labor—erasing a drawing, commissioning a painting, drinking beer, or playing ping-pong—with the broader deskilling (or rather reskilling) of Western work forces in the 1960s and 1970s. Discourses of autogestion, Lucien Goldmann and Serge Mallet discuss the breadth of interest in autogestion in “Débat sur l’autogestion,” Autogestion 7 (December 1968): 57–75. Kristin Ross outlines the proliferation of small-scale collective endeavors and argues that these attest to the impact of May 1968 on social organization. May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. 25. 5 “Cette autogestion a traversé comme une météore le ciel politique français des années 1970.” Pierre Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée. Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 385, quoted in Franck Georgi, “L’ autogestion en France, des ‘années 1968’ aux années 1980,” 101. 6 Most trenchant in tracing this shift is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their influential book Empire (2000), which outlines the metamorphosis from productive to immaterial labor, citing the increasing predominance of affective and creative work. 7 Helen Molesworth, Work Ethic (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 18. 4

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especially as they inflect artistic labor, become bound up with the privileging of services and experiences, hallmarks of our neoliberal economy. Indeed, distinctions between resistance and collusion seem to grow ever more inchoate during the waning radicalism of the late 1970s.8 While these complex economic and cultural changes are not the subject of this chapter, they provide an essential ground on which to begin a closer investigation of sociological art as “an art of organization.” When the collective formed in 1974, the activity of organizing crisscrossed economic, political, and artistic spheres, merging, at once, with the immaterial labor of late capitalism, with leftist conceptions of autogestion, and with the most advanced artistic practices of the period.

The collective Three young French artists, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thenot, declared the formation of the Sociological Art Collective in October of 1974 by publishing a manifesto in the arts section of Le Monde (The World).9 This act marked a definitive turning point within a community of artists and critics in Paris. Foremost in this community were the art critics Pierre Restany and François Pluchart, who began to integrate references to sociology into their writing about art just after the uprisings of May 1968.10 Restany and Pluchart had been intimately involved in the contestations of May, publishing an article that called for the resignation of the Minister of Culture, André Malraux, in the leftist journal Combat, and leading, with the critic Otto Hahn, about 200 artists to occupy and temporarily close the Musée d’art moderne on May 18, 1968.11 On the occasion of the protest, they wrote, “The student revolt opens our eyes. All cultural sectors are in solidarity. We must denounce power’s ‘new-look’ culture, the false and promotional politics.” No longer the “marginal maker of ‘beautiful products,’” artists must realize their “new social function that will shape the future society.”12 Restany For example, Terry Eagleton describes the late 1970s as “post-radical” in “Afterword,” Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, originally published in 1983), 190–195. 9 Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot, “Collectif d’art sociologique, manifeste 1,” Le Monde, Arts section, October 10, 1974, 21. 10 Pierre Restany (French, b. 1930, d. 2003) wrote art criticism for a wide range of magazines, including Libre propos, Combat, Cimaise, and Domus, and curated exhibitions throughout Europe from the mid-1950s until his death. During his life, Restany tended to launch artistic movements—including “Espaces Imaginaires,” “Nouveau Réalisme,” and “Mechanical art” (or “Mec’Art”)—by identifying commonalities among the work of contemporary artists to form a group and then authoring manifestos and organizing exhibitions in that group’s name. See Restany’s account of his life in Une vie dans l’art: entretiens avec Jean-François Bory (Paris: Neuchatel, 1983). François Pluchart (French, b. 1937, d. 1988) began writing art criticism in 1959 for the journal Combat and in its pages criticized the late Surrealist and lyrical abstraction of the École de Paris. See a selection of Pluchart’s writings with commentary in Sylvie Mokhtari, ed., L’art: un acte de participation au monde, François Pluchart (Nîmes: CNAP and Éditions Jacquiline Chambon, 2002). 11 They envisioned this action as in solidarity with the May 16 occupation of the Odéon theater and the May 13 occupation and transformation of the École des Beaux-Arts into the Atelier Populaire. See Pluchart’s overview of the events in “Les Hyènes du musée d’art moderne,” Combat, May 27, 1968, 10. 12 François Pluchart and Pierre Restany, “Une autre Bastille à abattre: le Musée d’art moderne,” Combat, May 18–19, 1968, 16. 8

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and Pluchart envisioned a radical overhaul of the art world that included reforming art education, abolishing the art market, re-imaging galleries and museums, and redefining their own roles as critics.13 Marking this potent moment, their critical lexicon began to change. They increasingly assessed art according to its utility, accessibility, and acknowledgement of the physical, social, and economic environments. Sociologique (sociology, most often in its adjectival form) populated their writing about art. While the term sociologique was initially used inconsistently, it gradually became aligned with a loose group of little-known Parisian artists working with their bodies, performance, mass media, video, and expanded forms of event- and concept-based practices.14 It was out of this micro-milieu that the Sociological Art Collective formed. In addition to providing much of the theoretical grounding, Pluchart and, to a lesser degree, Restany also fostered these emerging artists by creating what the critics termed a “parallel network”: sites for critical discourse, exhibition, and promotion that operated parallel to institutionally sanctioned ones.15 Most importantly, Pluchart founded the experimental art magazine arTitudes in the fall of 1971 and then opened Espace 640, a small gallery in Saint-Jeannet outside Nice, in May 1972, and through these he sought to constitute a “socio-corporeal” group.16 Then, in the fall of 1973, he organized a conversation on the topic with artists Michel Journiac, Gina Pane, Fischer, and Thenot and published the transcript in arTitudes.17 In many ways, this conversation planted the seeds for the collective, which would form just a year later. While the discussion grew heated at times, the artists agreed on the social orientation and critical function of their approaches and frequently employed the collective “nous” (“we”) to convey their affinity. Their positions diverged, however, according to the methods employed and the rationality of art sociologique associated with Fischer and Thenot in contrast to the subjectivity of art corporel (body art) associated with Pane and Journiac. In Fischer’s summary, “Gina Pane and Michel Journiac criticize the language that they are trying to surpass at the level of the suffering of the body, at the level of the cry, at the level of the lived thing. Me, I critique the artistic imaginary, subjectivity, sentimentality, and the domain of the irrational through a reduction to the level of rational analyses.”18 Despite these apparent differences, the conversation revealed a common ethic and set By Pluchart, see “Les flics de l’art moderne,” Combat, May 21, 1968, 7; “Le système des galeries est à abolir,” Combat, May, 28, 1968, 11; “Le combat commence!” Combat, June 3, 1968, 9; “Non à la culture calibre 22,” Combat, June 17, 1968, 11; “La Biennale de Venise est morte,” Combat, June 25, 1968, 11; and “Les derniers points chauds rendus au pouvoir,” Combat, July 8, 1969, 10. See a summary of Restany’s writing during this time in Rosemary Buteault, “L’ Activité critique de Pierre Restany” (master’s thesis, University of Rennes 2, 1990–1991). Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 14 C.f. “[L]a force indiscutable et essentielle de Journiac réside dans le caractère sociologique de son travail.” François Pluchart, “Au Non de Journiac,” Combat, May 4, 1970, 8–9. 15 Pierre Restany calls for a “parallel network” in “Pour l’avenir d’un réseau parallèle,” Combat, October 14, 1968, 8–9. 16 Jean Forneris, Artitudes de François Pluchart: une revue international à Nice (Nice: Galerie d’art contemporain des musées, 1978). 17 The conversation took place on November 18, 1973 at the apartment of Pane and was published in “Dix questions sur l’art sociologique,” arTitudes no. 6/8 (December 1973–March 1974): 4–17. 18 Ibid., 6. 13

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of concerns about art’s relationship to society, which became the organizing impulse for a series of meetings that Journiac convened at his apartment the following summer. The first meeting took place in the beginning of July and was followed by meetings on September 16 and October 11, 1974, at Journiac’s apartment on rue Le Regrattier on Ile Saint-Louis. In addition to the five participants of the arTitudes discussion, the group included Forest, the Spanish-born video artist Joan Rabascall, text artist Jean-François Bory, sculptors Thierry Agullo and Betrand Lavier, as well as Serge Oldenbourg, Jocelyne Hervé, and Bernard Teyssèdre.19 The meetings (signs in and of themselves of a shared desire to determine new working relations among artists) focused on the French trajectory of what had become a global phenomenon of socially engaged art, pursued in such recent European exhibitions as Harald Szeemann’s Documenta 5 (June–October 1972), entitled 100 Days of Inquiry into Reality, and Kunst im Politischen Kampf (Art in the Political Struggle), first shown in 1973 at the Kunstverein Hanover. The group of Paris-based artists and critics hoped to foment a French movement of socially committed work and plan a series of related exhibitions. Sometime in late September 1974, the trio of Fischer, Forest, and Thenot, jaundiced by the larger group’s apparent lack of action, decided to splinter and form a collective. The three artists arrived at the October 11 group meeting with a copy of the previous day’s Le Monde newspaper in their hands. On page twenty-one of the Arts et spectacles (Arts and Entertainment) section, in a simple black box nestled among the advertisements for performances and art supplies, they had published a manifesto declaring the formation of the “Collectif d’ art sociologique” (Sociological Art Collective)20 (Figure 12.1). Through the declarative stance of the manifesto—the celebrated platform of the modernist avant-garde—Forest, Fischer, and Thenot set out the principles of their socially engaged art. And even if those principles remained relatively vague, the exclusion of certain approaches, especially art corporel and conceptual art, demarcated divisions between the trio and the other artists who had been meeting since July. Rabascall described the manifesto as the “mini coup d’état of Forest–Fischer–Thenot.” “We were all aware that sociological art existed,” he wrote; “it was simply a reality that necessitated being rendered evident.”21 Sociological art’s formalization marked a turning point in a long process that began sometime after May 1968 through Pluchart and Restany’s work as critics and curators. The collective emerged from and against

The first meeting in early July brought together Jean-François Bory, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jocelyne Hervé, Michel Journiac, Gina Pane, and Jean-Paul Thenot. The second on September 16 included Thierry Agullo, Jean-François Bory, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jocelyne Hervé, Michel Journiac, Bertrand Lavier, Gina Pane, Jean-Paul Thenot, and François Pluchart. The third took place on October 11 and included Thierry Agullo, Jean-François Bory, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jocelyne Hervé, Michel Journiac, Bertrand Lavier, Serge Oldenbourg, Gina Pane, Joan Rabascall, Jean-Paul Thenot, and Bernard Teyssèdre (with whom the collective would work closely). 20 Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot, “Collectif d’art sociologique, manifeste 1,” October 10, 1974, 21. 21 Joan Rabascall, “Mini coup d’état de Forest-Fischer-Thenot,” as quoted in Blaise Galland, L’Art sociologique (Genève: Georg, 1987), 119. 19

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Figure 12.1  Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot, “Collectif d’art sociologique, manifeste I,” Le Monde, October 10, 1974. Courtesy Jean-Paul Thenot. © 2016 Jean-Paul Thenot. this alternative arts milieu, fracturing the larger community and sparking six years of collaboration. Printed in the advertisements section of the “Arts and Entertainment” section of Le Monde, the manifesto begins, “[We] have decided to constitute a Collective of

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Sociological Art that can operate as a refuge and a working group for all whose research and artistic practice concern social facts and the link between art and society.”22 It goes on to describe the collective’s intent to use the theory and methods of sociology to develop an active practice of inquiry, animation, and pedagogy. By announcing the Sociological Art Collective, the manifesto formalized existing allegiances, but it also revealed a deep tension between the collective as an open versus closed entity, especially as it related to the immediate Parisian community. While the first paragraph conveys a receptive spirit (the authors describe the collective as a structure d’ accueil, literally a “structure of reception”), the subsequent paragraphs outline the group’s agenda to elaborate “a sociological theory of art” through recourse to the “theory and methods of the social sciences.”23 In a short text written weeks after publishing the manifesto, the members of the collective sought to remedy this indeterminacy by declaring the group’s inclusion of artists (“especially foreign”) working in the direction of sociological art. The “working cell” (cellule de travail, a description often used in the sciences), the artists explain, is “destined to rapidly grow on the basis of a shared theory that privileges sociological research.”24 These early documents evidence the artists’ aspirations to identify a common orientation and ethic called sociological art and to strengthen the identity of the collective, all the while preserving their individual approaches. Frictions between these two levels (the individual and the group as well as the collective and a broader movement of sociological art) ultimately eroded the collective’s exterior relationships as well as interior cohesion. But let us return to the decision by the artists to constitute the collective in the first place. The group’s formation occurred amid a frenzy of new collective models that accompanied the break-up of the French Communist Party and subsequent growth of smaller leftist groups—or groupuscules. When the collective officially incorporated on November 13, 1974, under France’s association law of 1901, it was one of about 24,000 groups created in that year alone, compared to 20,000 created in the preceding sixtynine-year period.25 One important though generally overlooked subcategory of groups is the artist collective. Indeed, even a partial list of artist groups formed in this period attests to an unprecedented energy in this direction: Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) (1960–1968) (Julio Le Parc, Sobrino, Jean-Pierre Yvaral, François Morellet, Joël Stein, Horacio Garcia-Rossi); BMPT (1966–1967) (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, Niele Toroni); Groupe Automat (1967–?) (Berthale, Gamarra, Lanati, Marces, Vanarsky); Utopie (1967–1978) (Jean Aubert, Isabelle Auricoste, Jean Baudrillard, Catherine Cot, Charles Goldblum, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Henri Lefebvre, René Lourau, Antoine Stinco, and Hubert

Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot, “Collectif d’art sociologique, manifeste 1,”October 10, 1974, 21. 23 “Le collectif d’art sociologique, par sa pratique artistique, tend à mettre l’art en question, à mettre en évidence les faits sociologiques et à ‘visualiser’ l’ élaboration d’une théorie sociologique de l’art. Il recourt fondamentalement à la théorie et aux méthodes des sciences sociales.” Ibid. 24 See unpublished “Individual/Group Text” (Fall 1974) in Fonds Fred Forest, Inathèque. 25 Michèle Grandlaudon-Leblanc and Michel Leblanc, “Associations Loi 1901: gestionnaires ou citoyennes?” in Pour une Nouvelle Donnée Associative (Paris: ESF Editeur, 2001), 155–157. 22

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Tonka); Atelier A (1969–?) (François Arnal, Olivier Boissière, Serge Benbouhouche); Coopérative des Malassis (1970–1977) (Henri Cueco, Lucien Fleury, Jean-Claude Latil, Michel Parré, Gérard Tisserand, Christian Zeimert); Supports/Surface (1970–1974) (Claude Viallat, Marc Devade, Philippe Solers, Marcelin Pleynet, Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, etc.); Vidéo Out (1970–1981) (Carole and Paul Roussopoulos); Groupe DDP (1971–1998) (François Derivery, Michel Dupré, Raymond Perrot); Les Cents Fleurs (1973–1981) (Martine Barrar, Annie Caro, Danielle Jaeggi); Collectif antifasciste (1974–1977); Vidéa (1974–1976) (Anne-Marie Faure, Isabelle Fraisse, Syn Guerin, Catherine Lahourcade); Untel (1975–1980) (Jean-Paul Albinet, Philippe Cazal, Alain Snyers); and Les Insoumuses (1975–1982) (Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, Ioana Wieder). Such an inventory makes clear the fertile period between 1968 and the early 1980s, during which more than a dozen artist groups formed and disbanded.26 The curators of the 1969 Paris Biennale recognized this emerging trend, devoting the biennial to art collectives. “Today,” they wrote, “there is a natural movement that pushes artists to group together, to complement each other, or to contradict each other in order to move beyond the expression of individual sentiments and to encounter the collective demands of a new society in formation.”27 The dramatic increase in the association of groups in the early 1970s paralleled the expansion of discourses around alternative management and governing structures. In France, the freedom of individuals to form groups without royal or governmental authorization was made a law in 1901 (Loi d’association de 1901) and made a constitutional right in 1971. The law—part of a suite of laws enacted during the Third Republic that assured the basic rights of man—stipulated that groups had to have two or more members and a non-profit agenda.28 In the months after May 1968, a flood of declarations of small-scale, radical political groups drew the attention of the government. In 1970, the Minister of the Interior, Raymond Marcellin (retained by Pompidou from de Gaulle’s cabinet), attempted to stem the proliferation of groups by modifying the law to require administrative authorization.29 These changes led to the outlawing of the Gauche Prolétarienne (GP, Proletarian Left) on May 27, 1970, a Maoist-inspired, far-left workers’ association formed in September 1968 by militants from Nanterre and authors of the paper La Cause du peuple (The People’s Cause). Eleven days after the dissolution of GP, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Leiris, and Simone de Beauvoir deposited a request for an association called Les Amis de la Cause du Peuple (The Friends of the People’s Cause) that Marcellin intervened to deny. The dispute was ultimately brought before the National Assembly, and on July 16, 1971, the François Derivery reaffirms this period of heightened collective activity in the 1970s. François Derivery, Art et travail collectif suivi de la politique d’art officiel en France (Paris: E.C. Éditions, 2001), 20–23. 27 Jacques Lassaigne, ed., Sixième biennale de Paris, manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes du 2 octobre au 2 novembre 1969 (Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1969), 11. 28 Jean-Claude Bardout, L’Histoire étonnante de la loi 1901: le droit d’association en France avant et après Waldeck–Rousseau (Lyon: Édition Juris-Service, 2000), 145–146. 29 Ibid., 211–219.

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constitutional council declared the Loi d’association a constitutional right. Detractors of the constitutional change warned that “tomorrow, the government will have to approve groups proposing to encourage drug addiction, promote homosexuality, or simply overturn the Republic.”30 This episode in the early 1970s illustrates the perceived threats that such small-scale groups posed to controlling bodies, but the unequivocal affirmation of the right to associate fostered their ongoing formation. To form a collective thus constituted a political act, even as that act was simultaneously impinged by the kinds of bureaucratic operations that accompanied group formation and governance. This is an important distinction because during the Sociological Art Collective’s eight years of existence, the artists undertook only a handful of truly collective projects that had identities distinct from the members’ individual work. These included a series of manifestos and exhibitions, a two-week intervention in the town Perpignan in 1976, a project at the Venice Biennale in 1976, and the creation of the École Sociologique Interrogative in 1977 (Figure 12.2). More often, the collective served as an identity and framework to refocus the artists’ individual pursuits. Indeed, maintaining the collective—whether internal relations among the

Figure 12.2  Photograph of the Sociological Art Collective at the Venice Biennale, July 1976. Courtesy Fred Forest. © 2016 Fred Forest.

Jean Foyer, “Déclaration de 16 juillet 1971,” Le Monde (July 18–19, 1971), quoted in Bardout, L’Histoire étonnante de la loi 1901, 220.

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threesome or external recognition from without—entailed an immense amount of self-organization, management, and promotion. The artists spent their time planning, meeting, budgeting, conducting research, writing and editing, and performing a series of other white-collar tasks that largely replaced traditional artistic labor. The collective’s central purpose in its first years was to establish and maintain itself as a collective, an act that, in and of itself, models autogestion.

The artist-curated exhibition The first projects undertaken by the Sociological Art Collective consisted of a series of group exhibitions. The conception and implementation of these exhibitions were central to the group developing its working relations and its understanding of sociological art practice. The artist-curated exhibition—a tool to signal opposition and wrest power from forces within the art world—has a long history, especially in France. Most famously, in 1855, Gustave Courbet erected a temporary exhibition space for his work, which he designated the pavillon du Réalisme (pavilion of Realism), just outside the grounds of the Exposition Universelle (World Exhibition) after some of his canvases were rejected by the jury. By the 1970s, the arrangement and rearrangement of preexisting content was quickly becoming a recognized creative strategy and artistic practice. Artists such as Marcel Broodthaers utilized the artist-created museum and artist-curated exhibition as critical and expressive mediums (a trend that continued into the 1980s and 1990s with New York-based collectives such as CoLab and Group Material and artists like Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, and so forth). Furthermore, artists closely associated with the emergence of institutional critique used museums, galleries, and systems of display and explanation such as vitrines and labels as platforms for their work. In France, the model of the “artist-curator” attracted artists who felt dispossessed by an art system that was still strongly hierarchical despite efforts toward more horizontal or egalitarian arrangements in the post-1968 period. By taking over the role of curator, artists could subsume the powerful role of judge and arbiter of taste and, in so doing, change the nature of curatorial practice and exhibitions. The 1970s are populated by many examples of artists organizing exhibitions, opening galleries, launching magazines, and writing criticism as attempts to participate in the institutions and discourses that structured their professional lives. The collective’s first thematic exhibitions functioned foremost as spaces of research. Through these projects, the artists investigated issues and searched out artists that they perceived as interrelated with sociological art and from which they would draw inspiration for subsequent projects. The first exhibition, Art et ses structures socio-économiques (Arts and Its Socioeconomic Structures, January 9–28, 1975, Gallery Germain, Paris), brought together documents, videos, and performances by thirteen artists who considered art’s relationships to the financial market and speculation.31 Many of these artists, including The included artists were Art & Language, Willy Bongard, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Hans Haacke, John Latharn, Les Levine, Léa Lublin, Jacques Pineau, Adrian Piper, Klaus Staeck, Bernard Teyssèdre, and Jean-Paul Thenot.

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Willi Bongard, Bernard Teyssèdre, and Hans Haacke, employed discursive and researchbased approaches in their work, often to analyze the art market. Other artists, such as the New York branch of Art & Language and John Latham, reflected on the economic repercussions of their involvement in the art world. Such economic questions and critical practices would become central to the collective’s work. In the second exhibition, Problèmes et méthodes de l’ art sociologique (Problems and Methods of Sociological Art, March 5–22, 1975, Galerie Mathias Fels, Paris), the collective explicitly sought out artists with interests close to the group’s own, assembling work by seventeen artists, many of whom were included in the first exhibition, including Art & Language, Hans Haacke, Les Levine, and Léa Lublin. The collective hoped to catalog possible strategies of sociological art.32 The three primary trajectories that emerge in Problèmes et méthodes de l’ art sociologique—participation, socially engaged media, and urban intervention— would come together to form the basis of the collective’s most significant subsequent projects, including the group’s work in the towns and communities of Neuenkirchen (July 1975) and Perpignan (September 1976), its proposal for the Venice Biennale (June 1976), and its formation of the École Interrogative Sociologique (May 1976). The openness of these early exhibitions soon narrowed as the collective focused its curatorial projects on the work and theories of the three members. By late spring and early summer of 1975, the collective initiated a series of solo presentations. Art et communication (Art and Communication, May 6–31, 1975, Institut Français, Cologne) included only work by the three artists, as did subsequent exhibitions at the International Cultural Centrum (ICC), Anvers, Belgium, in April 1975 and Musée Galliera, Paris, in June 1975. Once the collective had strengthened its bonds, working methods, and profile, exhibitions became platforms for the promotion rather than formulation of “sociological art.” Although difficult to reconstruct, the processes by which the collective located, selected, and presented the artworks reiterates the informational functions of the exhibitions themselves. In addition to the micro-milieu of French artists with whom the collective was already familiar, the members actively researched artists from other countries, discovering them by word of mouth, magazines, mail art, and other exhibitions. The collective ultimately constructed the displays through its investigative process. Adrian Piper, for instance, had exhibited as a very young artist in the 1971 Paris Biennale, and the collective included Piper’s statement about no longer attending art world events (Withdrawal Statement, 1970) in Art et ses structures socioéconomiques (Art and Its Socioeconomic Structures).33 A copy of her statement may The included artists were Art & Language, Jean-François Bory, Jacques Charlier, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Hans Haacke, Les Lévine, Léa Lublin, Antonio Muntadas, Joan Rabascall, Maurice Roquet, Jean Roualdes, Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Sacha Sosno, Jean-Paul Thenot, Tomek Kawiak, and Horacio Zabala. 33 Piper was included in the “Concept” section of the Biennale, and she contributed an instruction piece (“Paris Proposal for Biennale et International”) to be performed during the course of the exhibition. She proposed that twelve volunteers make physical alterations to their bodies and then go about their everyday activities. The alterations, both of which Piper had herself undertaken in New York City, were to “stuff as much cloth as possible into cheeks” and “tie large pillows around hips, stomach, thighs, calves under street clothes.” Georges Boudaille, ed., Septième Biennale de Paris, Manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes du 24 septembre au 1er novembre 1971, Parc Floral de Paris, Bois de Vincennes (Paris: A. Lerouge, 1971): 58. 32

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have been taken from Lucy Lippard’s 1973 book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York: Praeger, 1973). Although not translated into French, the book had an immediate and international following because Lippard and John Chandler had published an essay by the same name (the starting point of the book) in Art International in February 1968.34 After securing a copy of the recently published book, the collective could have produced an enlarged version at a local copy shop and to this reproduction attached a short explanatory text to create the exhibition panel.35 As for Wolf Vostell, a German Fluxus artist known for his happenings and environments, the artists probably knew of his work before his first major retrospective at ARC from December 17, 1974 to January 27, 1975, a show that both Fischer and Forest saw.36 The collective corresponded intermittently with Vostell, who was active in European mail art and sympathetic to the idea of sociological art, as evidenced by his response to Forest’s 1976 questionnaire published in Art Sociologique.37 For the January exhibition, Vostell may have sent the group a copy of his photomontage Drive-in Museum (1970) or possibly brought a copy with him on a visit to Paris. Such procedures of procurement, enlargement, and preparation—rarely recalled in detail by the artists—must have taken place for every object or document displayed in the collective’s exhibitions. Although none of the display panels of these early exhibitions have been conserved, a few installation photographs as well as the remaining panels from the collective’s solo exhibition at Musée Galliera convey a sense of the rudimentary arrangements and unadorned aesthetic of the shows. Gray cardstock panels of about four feet by three feet covered with black-and-white photographs, texts, and diagrams lined the walls (Figures 12.3 and 12.4). Additional documents, pamphlets, and books were laid out in an orderly fashion on tables in the center of the space, and although not pictured in any of the remaining installation shots, a smattering of small-scale monitors placed on pedestals or directly on the floor transmitted artists’ videos. The visual poverty of the objects coincided with their informational richness; content and didacticism overpowered pleasure and aestheticism. The young collective organized these group exhibitions as provisional explorations of sociological art, as study materials to be digested and then discarded, and the exhibitions had a direct impact on the group’s nascent conception and practice of sociological art. The collective’s exhibitions did not garner much of a reaction in the art press, but they put the artists in touch with an international network of likeminded artists, spread word of this marginal artistic movement afoot in Paris through

Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36. 35 These are my speculations based on photographs of the exhibition panels. For the most part, the artists do not recall how they acquired the works by non-French artists. Beginning in the early 1970s, photocopiers were present in France. 36 I assume the artists saw his exhibition based on the fact that the card announcing the exhibition is located in the archives of both Forest and Fischer. For more information on Vostell’s work throughout Europe, see Rolf Wedewer, ed., Vostell. Ausstellungen, Bonn, Köln, Leverkusen, Mannheim, Mülheim an Der Ruhr (Heidelberg: Braus, 1992). 37 Fred Forest, Art Sociologique vidéo: Dossier (Paris: Union générale d’ éditions, 1977), 347–350. 34

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Figure 12.3  Installation photograph of Art et ses structures socio-économiques (Art and Its Socioeconomic Structures), January 9–28, 1975, Gallery Germain, Paris. Courtesy Jean-Paul Thenot. © 2016 Jean-Paul Thenot.

Figure 12.4  Installation photograph of Art et ses structures socio-économiques (Artand

Its Socioeconomic Structures), January 9–28, 1975, Gallery Germain, Paris. Courtesy Jean-Paul Thenot. © 2016 Jean-Paul Thenot.

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the distribution of cheaply produced catalogs, and endowed the collective with a stronger conception of sociological art.38 For the collective, these exhibitions and the curatorial process served as open arenas of research and as platforms for selfpromotion and legitimation.

Conclusion The energy that Fischer, Forest, and Thenot expended in the mid-1970s to form and to promote the Sociological Art Collective’s institutional identity was immense. By “institutional identity,” I mean an identity that eclipsed the individual trajectories of the three artists and telegraphed that greater vision to an expanded public. The artists were often criticized by their peers for zealous self-promotion in the name of the collective rather than in the service of sociological art, understood as an ethical and artistic set of practices. However, viewed in the context of politicized and communitybased organizing efforts, the artists’ organizational work and its related ephemera (the multitude of budgets, letters, pamphlets, photos, posters, media events, exhibitions, discussions, and so forth) speak powerfully to a desire on the part of the artists to manage their representations in a demonstrably hierarchical and unequal art world. Writing about Art & Language, a group founded in 1968 and in frequent contact with Sociological Art Collective member Hervé Fischer, Chris Gilbert has insightfully proposed what he terms a “postwar institutional collectivity.” Gilbert argues that while the group may have replicated bureaucratic and administered culture (or in Benjamin Buchloh’s influential words, “the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivist instrumentality”), it does so in order to achieve an oppositional self-sustaining freedom.39 “The group’s key purpose,” writes Gilbert about Art & Language, “was to assert its own institutional character as ongoing resistance to a larger sociality within which it would otherwise be, and was to a large extent, inscribed.”40 The impulse to The artists carried on correspondence with numerous artists, such as John Latham, Art & Language, and Les Levine, included in these early exhibitions. See “Correspondences” in Fonds Hervé Fischer, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris, and “Correspondence 1970–1979” in Fonds Fred Forest, Inathèque, Paris. The group mailed the cheaply produced catalogs to museums, libraries, and artists throughout the world. See, for example, the “Artist Files” for Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thenot at the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 39 Chris Gilbert, “Art & Language and the Institutional Form in Anglo-American Collectivism,” in Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945, ed. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 77–93. Gilbert writes, “What [Buchloh’s] account does not seem to allow for, and would follow from the arguments above, is that appropriation of hegemonic bureaucratic or administrative methods was not simply a move against aesthetic transcendence. It remained, I have contended, an ethical move and a strategy that, while at times mimetic of the culture it opposed, was certainly also carried out in the name of and with a view toward forming a resistant self-determination” (89). See, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–143. 40 Chris Gilbert, “Art & Language and the Institutional Form in Anglo-American Collectivism,” Collectivism After Modernism, 79. 38

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self-determination was an end in itself. Taking into account Gilbert’s argument, acts of administration may well be a “methodology of resistant organizational form,” even as they replicate aspects of dominant organizational forms.41 The collective’s formation and organization of exhibitions—as well as the labor and promotion of these efforts—might be viewed as coterminous with rather than in opposition to the collective’s critical and socially committed artistic practice. Such a position gains even more potency when situated within the specific cultural policies of the Fifth Republic and the state’s many attempts to treat, as a 1971 policy states, “cultural action as a social action.”42 Given this political and cultural climate, the existence and work of the Sociological Art Collective should be seen as important, though little-known, acts of autogestion.

Ibid., 89. This proposal seeks to avert the rather unproductive cul-de-sac regarding whether or not (and to what degree) the artistic and political left recapitulate the structures they initially resisted, a process documented, discussed, and disparaged by numerous writers. In the early 2000s, the artist Andrea Fraser and others described the “institutionalization of institutional critique”—that is, the request for artists to proffer critique about institutions by those very institutions. 42 “Comme l’a dit jeudi soir M. Duhamel, ‘avec le VIe Plan se dégage l’idée de traiter l’action culturelle comme une action sociale.’ Vue sous cet angle, la culture va au-delà des arts traditionnels, s’élargit à tout ce qui concourt à ‘la qualité de vie’ à l’aménagement de l’espace, à l’architecture, au logement et à la culture scientifique, etc.” “L’action culturelle conçue comme une action sociale.” Le Monde, May 8, 1971. This article is archived in “BVC MI pol 1960–1973 / Politique culturelle en France / Presse 1960–1973 / Les années Pompidou, Duhamel, Droun …” Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris. 41

13

André Cadere’s Disorderly Conduct Lily Woodruff

On January 22, 1977, artist André Cadere hosted an anti-artist’s talk that he titled Établir le désordre (Establishing Disorder), at art agent Ghislain Mollet-Viéville’s apartment. In the style of self-evidence that characterized much conceptual art of the period, he began by describing the technical manufacture of his signature objects, which he called “barres de bois rond” (round bars of wood); he then commented on the décor of Mollet-Viéville’s apartment; and he observed the sociological likelihood that the attendees had come due to Mollet-Viéville and Cadere’s art-world authority.1 After only three minutes of speaking, he suggested the guests themselves should “establish disorder” by leaving. In the decades since the artist’s death, the photogenic and displayfriendly round bars of wood are the works for which Cadere has become best known. In the period during which Cadere himself showed them, however, this visibility had functioned as one requisite element in a constantly evolving series of display tactics that allowed him to access the subject of his critique: art-world social codes and boundaries.2 In a seeming limit-test of the visibility required to make his critiques, he showed none of his bars at Mollet-Viéville’s apartment and thereby focused attention on the role of expectation and participation in upholding institutional convention, and their corresponding usefulness in establishing disorder.

The research for this chapter began as part of a dissertation that I defended in 2012. Hannah Feldman and Éric Michaud provided invaluable guidance throughout that process, while funding from the bourses Chateaubriand and Jeanne Marandon allowed me to conduct research in France. I would like to thank Michèle Cadere-Pierrel and Hervé Bize for their insights and generosity, and Catherine Dossin and an anonymous reviewer for their very thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. André Cadere, Histoire d’un travail (Gent: Herbert–Gewad, 1982), § 44. Cadere assembled this book as a sort of catalog raisonné of his bars and display practices. It includes notes on his display concepts, in some cases who was present, and any controversy that the display might have caused, as well as notation on the composition of the bars themselves, newspaper clippings, exhibition invitations, and photographs of exhibitions. Unlike the catalog raisonné published on the occasion of the 2008 exhibition André Cadere: Unlimited Painting, Histoire d’un travail does not emphasize the visual appearance of the bars themselves. 2 Most notable among these posthumous exhibitions are the retrospectives André Cadere (1934–1978) at PS1 in New York (1989), and André Cadere: Unlimited Painting at the Musée d'A Moderne de la Ville de Paris—MAM/ARC, Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, and Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (2008). 1

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The bars were the point of focus, and alibi, for the great majority of Cadere’s activities. While approximately half of the exhibitions that the artist mounted during his lifetime were gallery-authorized and took place in white-cube environments, he designed the round bars of wood so that they could be carried in hand and easily displayed nearly anywhere at any time, including in the streets, at cafés, or, most notoriously, uninvited at other artists’ exhibition openings (Figure 13.1).

Figure 13.1  Cadere with Blaise Gautier (holding the bar) and Pavlos at Pol Bury opening at CNAC, November 14 1972. Gelatin silver print. Centre Pompidou—Mnam—Bibliothèque Kandinsky. Photographer: André Morain.

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The portability of the bar made it possible for him to traverse boundaries between public and private spaces and “establish disorder” within the walls of the most reputable and affluent exhibition venues in the city. In this way, he was able to show his work at prestigious patrimonial venues like the Louvre, where in 1975 he loitered in the museum’s high-traffic Darue stairwell with a small bar in hand and conversed with both intentional and accidental visitors to his exhibition. Frequently, however, his display tactics put him in direct conflict with curators, gallery employees, and security guards. Such was the case in 1973 when, with the publicity aid of experimental gallerist Ida Biard, he held an exhibition, uninvited, at an opening for the celebrated Italian painter Valerio Adami at the Maeght Gallery, an institution that was instrumental in attempting to return Paris to its prewar cultural stature by exhibiting an international selection of young artists whose works resonated with those of the historical avantgarde.3 When a Maeght employee confiscated the large round bar of wood that Cadere had come with, he shook a smaller, hidden bar out of his pant leg, thereby attracting even greater attention to his work. This infiltration came a year after security guards had escorted Cadere away from the Grand Palais—a monumental exhibition space and site of key moments in the history of modern art and innovation—where he had come to show his work at a retrospective for Barnett Newman two years after the American painter’s death. The reason given for his ejection was a nineteenth-century law that forbade umbrellas in museums. In many instances however, Cadere’s display practice involved breaking with institutional structures altogether to simply walk with his bars through streets far from galleries and museums—a practice that he continued even into the last weeks of his life before dying of cancer at 44 in 1978. Through his unflagging commitment to his unconventional display practices, he demarcated an alternative artworld that challenged the hegemony of institutional landmarks by moving among the public at large. As Cadere saw it, engagement with the public was programmed into the formal decisions that he made in constructing his bars. This was the argument that he made at a lecture titled “Presentation of a Work, Utilization of a Work,” which critic Bernard Marcelis helped him organize for the department of Philosophy and Letters at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium in 1974. With a bar propped against one of the walls of the lecture room, he explained how the basic construction of the bar produced its social function such that its very presentation could be considered its utilization. He listed “V”s, “J”s and “B”s across the chalkboard to signify the different colors that he might use to paint the individual wooden segments that composed the bars, and explained that the colors had no meaning in themselves, but were merely intended to signify difference among the segments.4 To minimize connotation and ensure

For this he was officially represented by Ida Biard’s experimental Galerie des Locataires, which had sent out exhibition announcements in advance alerting people to Cadere’s guerilla exhibition at the Adami exhibition. 4 The bar that was actually present in the room for the exhibition consisted of the four colors blue, white, red, and yellow. André Cadere, Présentation d’un travail/Utilisation d’un travail (Hamburg: Hossmann/ Brussels,MTL, 1975), 7. This text is available at the Bibliothèque Kandisnky. 3

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consistency from one bar to the next he took his colors from cans of house paint, limiting them to the colors of the rainbow plus white and black. The spools came in a range of sizes with the largest measuring 10 cm across. He fixed the height-to-diameter ratio of the segments at 1:1, and glued them together using wooden dowels that fit into holes that he drilled through each spool. The number of spools that made up the length of each bar was determined by fixed mathematical systems of permutations of either three or four colors that he sequentially reordered until exhausted. In a gesture that resonates with his display practices, he then disordered this system by switching the placement of two spools or introducing what he called an “error.”5 This programmatic rigor in construction was intended to maximize interaction around the art object by subverting what Cadere described as “the refuge in comforting subjectivity,” that would be invited by “recourse to literature and sentimentality.”6 As he explained during the lecture, “We put two people in relation in presenting one to the other. This placing in relation normally leads to a conversation. This evening the situation is different: we present an object, a thing. The point is to see, and the seeing, here, leads to a discussion.” By maintaining the objective autonomy of the artwork, he noted, “all the components, all the presented coordinates, can be discussed.” Cadere’s minimal abstractions and impassive rule-based designs resonate with other conceptual practices that an international network of artists exhibited throughout the 1960s and 1970s.7 His repetitions of imperfect serial structures recall Sol LeWitt’s obsessional systems of lines and cubes based on the subversive “idea of error.”8 His juxtaposition of the display of the object against the power that resides in the locale of the museum or gallery draws strongly on Daniel Buren’s site-specific critiques of institutional power. His democratic impulse recalls Lawrence Weiner’s concern to make his work available to anyone who might want to reproduce it at home or elsewhere. As Weiner stated in his 1968 “Declaration of Intent,” “The artist may construct the piece,” and “the piece may be fabricated,” but crucially, “the piece need not be built.” This total openness would then create what Weiner called “a universal common possibility of availability.”9 The idea of universality was similarly critical to Cadere’s work, which sought to broaden its spaces of visibility. However, unlike Weiner, he did not allow anyone to construct any of his predetermined configurations, and his insistence that they be seen meant that their dissemination could not bypass the challenges of materiality as could Weiner’s pure concepts. Although Cadere’s preestablished system of construction meant that his entire life’s work was preconceived,

An excellent formal analysis of the bars can be found in Matt Jolly, “The Barred Colors of Andre Cadere,” October 144 (Spring 2013): 115–48. 6 Cadere, Présentation d’un travail, 5. 7 For descriptions of the positions and interactions among many of these artists see Sophie Richard, Unconcealed: The International Network of Conceptual Artists 1967–1977: Dealers, Exhibitions and Public Collection, ed. Lynda Morris (London: Ridinghouse, 2009). 8 Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” October (1978), 56–60. 9 Benjamin Buchloh and Lawrence Weiner, “Conversation with Lawrence Weiner,” in Lawrence Weiner, ed. Alexander Alberro (London: Phaidon, 1998), 19. 5

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the social purpose of the bars necessitated that they take form as visual objects since, as I am arguing, their cause was to highlight the availability of the universal by pointing to the relations between the actors who compose it. More than universality, Cadere was interested in contingency. His institutional protest took the form of vandalism in a series of graffiti actions in 1972. Most spectacular among these, and the event that probably brought him the widest notoriety, was a protest in which he crudely spray-painted red, yellow, and blue circles outside the secretariat at Documenta 5 after being excluded from exhibiting at the last minute for refusing the director, Harald Szeemann’s, attempt to force him to play the role of Romanian “pilgrim” and travel from Paris to Kassel on foot.10 The graffiti marked the absence of his round bar of wood and the artist from the exhibition at the same time that it inserted Cadere into this community of artists by inviting them to imagine the presence of his work via a painted visual cue. Back in Paris, the graffiti marks that he left across the city corresponded more to his meanderings as he composed something like an imagined community of an extra-institutional art world. The locations were diverse and decentralized. He sprayed representations of his bars along a perimeter fence in the middle-class neighborhood surrounding the Parc Montsouris; in the heart of the Saint-Germain Gallery district on the rue Visconti; and on a hoarding set among high-rises in a popular neighborhood of an outer arrondissement. The marks of the spray-paint left a record of Cadere’s presence, an abstract mode of communicating, “Cadere was here.” Just as taggers use spray-paint to give private names to, and claim, public spaces, so Cadere’s graffiti acted as a signature that recorded the human presence that animates a city. Although the bands of color did not display an overt message, the very gesture of producing graffiti recalled the slogans that had been sprayed across the city four years earlier during May 1968.11 With the movement’s imperative that the everyday citizen should “seize speech,” the public began using the walls to encourage each other to “live without dead time,” experience unshackled joy, and exhume the ludic leisure that has been paved over by the drab necessity of daily life. As philosopher Maurice Blanchot reflected, the authorless phrases of May’s public graffiti offered instances in which “despite the differences and the incessant controversies, each person recognized himself or herself.”12 The ambient association that Blanchot evokes is not so different from Cadere’s stated ambition of bringing people together in dialogue. The social

Szeemann’s idea would have placed Cadere in the over-determined lineage of his compatriot, Constantin Brancusi, who famously walked from Romania to France in 1903. People have frequently likened Cadere’s works to Bracusi’s wooden sculpture, citing in particular Bracusi’s Endless Column (1938), which, like Cadere’s bars, was composed of a progression of segments. 11 Analyses of the way that graffiti has figured in the historical recounting of May 1968 can be found in Julian Bourg, “Writing on the Wall: 1968 as Event and Representation,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 289–94; and Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10, 147, 186–7. 12 Maurice Blanchot, Les intellectuels en question (Paris: Fourbis, 1996), 60, cited in Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 175. 10

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encounter might not be immediate, but the graffiti creates the image of an imagined potential conversation taking place among a community linked to a particular space. Cadere’s relationship to the sort of public engagement that his work would generate was ambivalent, however, as it reflected the heightened engagement of the public in 1968, but also concerns over President Georges Pompidou’s post-1968 cultural plans that, as some argued, aimed to draw street culture into a controlled space. Pompidou’s proposed new National Museum of Modern Art was attacked as a technocratic effort to modernize the city that would destroy the historical and cultural significance played by the neighboring Les Halles markets. The extensive community of vendors, restauranteurs, prostitutes, street sweepers, and others that radiated out from Victor Baltard’s nineteenth-century glass and cast-iron architecture came under threat when the iconic building was torn down in 1969 after years of battles.13 The new Centre Pompidou, as the museum came to be called after the president’s death, was built on the annexed lot of the former Les Halles. Its architects, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, designed the space to function as spectacular architectural packaging for the street life that animated the city, and as a result, the building was condemned by artists and critics alike for providing a way to regroup and control cultural manifestations while transforming them into opportunities for commercial gain.14 As the building was still under construction in 1974, Jean Clair, the editor of the influential popular magazine Chroniques de l’ art vivant (Chronicles of Living Art), publicly accused the project of asphyxiating and ransacking popular culture. Calling it the finial of “capitalist multinational societies,” he reflected that one witnessed the construction of Pompidou’s museum as “a micro-cultural genocide.”15 This cultural climate then brings into relief the poignancy of Cadere’s solicitation of public audience and debate to complete his work as a mode of institutional critique. Cadere, in fact, made reference to the opening of the museum, as though in passing, during his talk at Mollet-Viéville’s apartment. “I tell myself that chance does things well, and there is, perhaps, a relationship between establishing disorder and the opening of the Beaubourg museum,” he said, using a moniker that emphasized the neighborhood in which the structure was built rather than the name of the president who commissioned it. By inviting the audience to “establish disorder” by leaving and returning home, his anti-spectacular event invited participation by non-participation, and implied that this disorder was a conscientious act of refusal. In a 1973 interview for Opus International, critic Claude Bouyeyre points to anti-participatory tendencies in Cadere’s work. After accusing him of violating an unsuspecting public by accosting them in the streets, however, Cadere turned the judgment around, countering, Louis Chevalier, L’ Assassinat de Paris (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977), translated by David P. Jordan as The Assassination of Paris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 210–263. A historian of Paris, Chevalier tells the story of how technocrats under de Gaulle transformed the city into a museum of its former eccentricity and grandeur. 14 Nathan Silver, The Making of Beaubourg: A Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou, Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 104. Notable among criticisms of the building project is Jean Baudrillard, “L’Effet Beaubourg” (1977), trans. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson as “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” October, no. 20 (1982): 3-13. 15 Jean Clair, “Les arts de la rue,” Chroniques de l’art vivant 46 (February 1974): 2–3. 13

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“Just the existence of the museums and galleries is an assault … One can insult me, throw me from the doors of the museum, sequester my work: in this way one proves without ambiguity that ‘Beauty, Art’ are imposed with the police … Of course from the point of view of power I deceive. But as I am saying, the rules of the game are not to be respected.”16

In order to make his independence from institutions functional, Cadere engaged in the types of hijinks that made him a recognizable figure, or in his self-affirming words, “a star.” He hoped that his efforts to work independently of arts institutions of the time would surpass those of other institutionally critical artists with whom he exhibited such as Marcel Broodthaers, Buren, or Hans Haacke, who designed their artworks to engage museum history, politics, and power within the spaces of museums themselves, and whose audiences were largely circumscribed by those who made up the art world. Cadere’s methods for not respecting institutional rules, of course, necessarily worked with regard to them nonetheless. The individualist stance that he took could be seen as surprising given that, as Michel Foucault demonstrated, it is useless to try and escape a system based on sovereignty through a liberal invocation of rights because doing so will always ultimately legitimize that system’s basic values.17 Art institutions that depend on the concept of the autonomous artist will not be overthrown by an artist whose central preoccupation is to be autonomous with regard to that system. The individualism of Cadere’s institutional critique should be understood in terms of his background as an artist who migrated to Western Europe to escape persecution he suffered in communist Romania. Because his father had been a diplomat under the monarchy of King Carol II, his family was stripped of its livelihood when the communists came to power and the young Cadere’s ambitions to attend university as a philology student were quashed, due to his “unhealthy social background.”18 In the following years, he gained artistic training working for official artists as an assistant and life model, and by attending an underground salon where non-aligned intelligentsia gathered for music recitals and readings of literature in an effort to keep alive the humanist culture that was otherwise being censored.19 In 1967, he left Romania for Paris, where he developed a new, more conceptual mode of art production that resembled the anti-authoritarian politics of those on the left during May 1968, yet he Cadere and Bouyeyre, “Cadere,” Opus International, no. 47 (November 1973): 63. Michel Foucault, “14 January 1976” in “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey T (New York: Picador, 2003), 29–30. 18 Magda Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 63–80, and Ioana Vlasiu, “Andrei Cădere: The Exercise of Marginality Before 1967,” 133 in André Cadere/Andrei Cădere, ed. Magda Radu (Bucharest: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011). Unlike French and English-language publications that only discuss Cadere’s work after he moved to Paris, this book goes into detail about his time in Romania and the influence that his experiences as a youth had on his art production. It includes essays by art historians, critics, and curators who were friends of the artist and who came from both Eastern and Western Europe. 19 Radu, André Cadere/Andrei Cădere, 90. 16 17

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explicitly rejected the Marxist politics that others embraced.20 Indeed, as art historian, and fellow Romanian émigré Sanda Agalides has noted, it would have made sense for Cadere to begin making art for art’s sake once he arrived in the West and was no longer constrained by state prohibitions.21 The abstractions that he made in Paris might not be described this way, but it could be argued that the relationship between art and autonomy was Cadere’s primary concern. Rather than making works of art that are aloof from the interests of the world, however, he concerned himself with his own autonomy as an artist unburdened by the codes and cues of art-world politics and graces. These power negotiations were made available to him specifically because of the confrontation between his personal history and Western expectations of that history’s meaning. Cadere was explicit about this during his Leuven lecture. “It should be pointed out that the author comes from an Eastern country,” he said. “This represents a determining factor. Can we imagine an American artist bringing his work to an exhibition without being invited? The Western mentality, nourished by pride, by intellectual scorn (and material comfort), makes such an attitude inconceivable; except to those who, coming from marginal countries, have nothing to lose.”22 Yet, the role of Cadere’s background in his work is ambivalent. As Magda Radu argues, nationality played a negative role as he mostly “rejected autobiography” and overt association with national identity (such as Szeemann attempted to impose upon him), preferring instead to embrace the cosmopolitan fluidity of a contemporary artist negotiating the currents of the international exhibition circuit.23 As Cadere claimed in an interview with Lynda Morris, it was only in “international situations” that he did not feel like a “stranger.”24 Agalides uses the term “frontier position” to describe this combination of a lack of sentimentality toward his homeland and a lack of interest in capitulating to the models offered by institutions in the West. Aware, on one hand, of “the difference between revolutionary promise and lived reality,” he was equally attentive to the ways that “democratic freedom in Western Europe was largely a vague approximation of true freedom.”25 The freedom that he aggressively sought to assert vis-à-vis the gallery system was a way of correcting for the lack of freedom that he found in Paris, Kassel, and elsewhere in the West.

Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 72. Andre Cadere and Sylvère Lotringer, “Boy with Stick” [1978] Schizoculture: The Book, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2013), 144. Romanian artists and intellectuals began to leave the country after 1965, when the death of the General Secretary of the Communist Party Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and the rise of Nicolae Ceausescu led to a relaxation on travel and other restrictions. 21 Sanda Agalides, “Cold War Cadere,” in André Cadere/Andrei Cădere, ed. Radu, 195. 22 Cadere, Histoire d’un travail, § 13. Quote cited in Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 76. 23 Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 72–73. 24 André Cadere in “Andre Cadere. Talking with Lynda Morris,” André Cadere: Peinture sans fin (Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: W. König, Köln, 2007), 33. 25 Agalides, “Cold War Cadere,” 195–196. 20

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That he would adopt such a strategy comes as self-evident to Radu, who argues that the reason he built his identity on marginality in the West was not because he was from the East, but because marginality already described his condition of existence in Romania.26 The form of autonomy that Cadere pursued in the West resembled his experiences of the Romanian salons and other “zones of autonomy” in which, as writer and literary theorist Matei Călinescu described it, “What we were doing was an attempt to construct a parallel universe and an identity … completely alien to the reality of those years of Stalinist Russification of the country and our (false) public identity.”27 Against this stacking of the associated binaries true/false, with freedom/ ideology, with private/public, Cadere did not align only with one side or the other, but instead chose to pursue a “true freedom” that pointed to, and resisted, such binaries. This movement across the frontiers of the art world, between public and private spaces, while frequently playing the role of the uninvited guest, created an “insider/ outsider” position that Agalides argues is “an index of crisis.”28 In Western Europe this contradiction of occupying an impossible position did not resolve into stability; rather, it took a new form as that of a “displaced person,” and eventually became the logical basis of Cadere’s institutional critique. In Jean-Pierre Criqui’s analysis, his new “place was that of a man who has no place, who infiltrates the interior in order to embody the exterior.”29 Whereas in Romania he negotiated his marginal position by taking up whatever jobs were available to him and working within the constraints of the system, in the West he moved purposely and visibly across positions of exteriority and interiority to invent a place for himself that perpetuated negotiation of the boundaries that delimited institutions rather than assimilating into the system as it existed. One of the defining themes of May 1968 was its rejection of political representation, and its promotion of both direct democracy in politics and self-management in the workplace. Cadere used an uncommon degree of individual self-management to undermine the conventions of participation as practiced in the art world. By becoming a recognizable figure, he stated, “I hope to integrate myself into the system—a system that exists because painters make the machine work.”30 In his view, improving the system meant granting the artist more independence, and more responsibility. “Stardom,” in his imagining, would ideally displace culpability from the museum to the artist himself. “Establishing Disorder” was a one-time event, but more than this, the expression describes his entire practice. It is an apparently paradoxical proposition that caused both himself and his public to reassess and reinvent the art world—that is, to participate in it more consciously, more actively. Showing his work where it did Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 76. Matei Călinescu and Ion Vianu, Amintiri în dialog (Jassy, Romania: Polirom, 1998), 75, quoted in Ibid., 80. 28 Agalides, “Cold War Cadere,” 200. 29 Jean-Pierre Criqui, “Meditations on a Round Bar of Wood (and Several Other Matters),” in André Cadere: All Walks of Life, ed. Carole Kismaric, Chris Dercon, and Bernard Marcelis (New York: Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1, Museum; Paris: Le Chambre, 1992), 139. 30 Cadere and Bouyeyre, “Cadere,” 63. 26 27

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not belong created a state of perpetual uncertainty, of undermined structures, but also of dynamism that would result from such conspicuously unstructured situations. The presentation–utilization of the round bar of wood had not only to do with the aura of the object, but moreover with its ability to organize a situation without predetermined content. This is not to say that his work had no message. Rather, his ceaseless pursuit of autonomy figured an ideal liberal art world in which every individual is free to exhibit equally and on their own terms without being constrained by the conventions of artistic exhibition.

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Places of Memory and Locus: Ernest Pignon-Ernest Jacopo Galimberti

This is how one pictures the angel of history … Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead. Walter Benjamin, These on the Philosophy of History, 1940.1 On February 16, 1972 the French radical art magazine Bulletin Paroissial du Curé Meslier (Parish Bulletin of Curé Meslier) organized a debate titled “Painting the revolution or revolutionizing painting?”2 This opposed two left-wing factions of the Parisian art scene: some artists related to the Salon de la Jeune Peinture (Salon of Young Painting) and Supports/Surfaces.3 Both were loosely connected groups of painters who were confronted with the growing influence of conceptual art and the decline of Paris as an art center. The latter was being countered by top-down policies masterminded by the French president and art collector Georges Pompidou, which included the construction of the Pompidou Center and the Grand Palais exhibition Expo’ 72.4 A few months prior to the debate, some of the participants had founded the Front des artistes plasticiens (Front of Visual Artists), an association of artists struggling to prevent Expo’ 72 from opening. The groups’ shared opponents allowed them to come together and seek common ground.

Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press [1973], 1992), p. 249. 2 “Révolutionner la peinture ou peindre la révolution?” Bulletin Paroissial du Curé Meslier 4 (1972): 1–11. 3 For the history of this salon, see Parent Francis and Perrot Raymond, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Une histoire 1950–1980 (Montreuil: Jeune Peinture, 1983); Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Catherine Dossin, “The Jeune Peinture: The Parisian Third Way of the 1960s,” in Sweet Sixties. Specters and Spirits of a Parallel Avant-garde, ed. Georg Schoellhammer and Ruben Arevshatyan (Berlin, New York: Sternberg Press, 2014), 276–288. For Supports/Surfaces, see Bernard Ceysson, Déborah Laks, Le moment Supports/Surfaces (Roche la Molière: Initiative Art Conseil Éditions 2015). 4 François Derivery, L’exposition 72–72 (Paris: E.C. Éditions, 2001). 1

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The Salon de la Jeune Peinture painters wished to portray “the revolution” through a political figuration that was intelligible to a large audience. They partly achieved this during the upheavals of May and June 1968, when they acted as instigators of the Atelier Populaire (Popular Workshop) and its posters. Supports/Surfaces claimed a degree of autonomy for painting and advocated “the revolution of painting practice,” which they pursued through a dialogue with post-structuralist philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. From a political perspective, most of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture painters disparaged the PCF’s (French Communist Party) reformism.5 By contrast, in February 1972, the Supports/Surfaces artists who edited Cahiers. Peinture (Notebooks. Painting) still saw the PCF as the avant-garde of the proletariat.6 Daniel Buren was absent from the debate organized by the Bulletin Paroissial du Curé Meslier. Although he had polemically shown his work at the 1967 Salon de la Jeune Peinture and he knew many Supports/Surfaces practitioners, Buren was the most prominent French conceptual artist in 1972.7 His approach significantly diverged from those of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and Supports/Surfaces, not least because of his rejection of painting. In the same year as the debate, art critic Jean Clair published a book about contemporary art, the cover of which summarized the polarization of France-based artists in terms of the primacy given to the aesthetic and the political.8 An innovative route to a political form of art was being developed by an artist based in Nice, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, who was missing from the diagram of Clair’s book. His work combined elements present in the work and art practice of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Supports/Surfaces and Buren. In France, Ernest Pignon-Ernest is now regarded as a forerunner of street art.9 This genealogy will be touched upon in the final section. His work is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, so any discussion of it requires contextualization in a historical perspective. Ernest PignonErnest’s lack of renown in North America and the United Kingdom is unfortunate. Not only is Ernest Pignon-Ernest a popular artist in his home country and one of the few who have been capable of appealing to artists, intellectuals including Jacques Derrida and Paul Virilio, and the lay public, but his work was also appreciated and studied by Francis Bacon in the 1970s.10 This narrative will describe the origins of Ernest Pignon-

Gino G. Raymond, The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic: A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 6 Comité de rédaction [Vincent Bioulès, Louis Cane, Marc Devade, Daniel Dezeuze], “Positions,” Peinture: cahiers théoriques, no. 8 (May 1971): 8. 7 Sami Siegelbaum, “The Riddle of May’ 68: Collectivity and Protest in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2012): 53–73. 8 Jean Clair, Art en France: une nouvelle génération (Paris: Chêne, 1972). 9 For example, Cathy Blisson, “Ernest Pignon-Ernest, À fleur de façades,” Graffitiart, 14 (2012): 76– 83; Stephanie Lemoine, Julien Terral, In situ: un panorama de l’ art urbain de 1975 à nos jours (Paris: Alternatives, 2005), 22–23, 71, 113. 10 See the survey “Les artistes préférés des artistes” conducted among 13,500 France-based artists, whose results were published in Art absolument (May–June 2010): particularly 24–25; Paul Virilio, “Ecce Homo,” in Ernest Pignon-Ernest: Neapel, ed. Johann Georg Prinz Von Hohenzollern (Munich: Neue Pinakothek 1995), 33–37. 5

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Ernest’s work in the mid-1960s and examine some of his subsequent works. His art practice will be interpreted in light of the notions of locus, elaborated by architect Aldo Rossi, and that of places of memory, coined by historian Pierre Nora.

Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s specificity The pseudonym Ernest Pignon-Ernest reveals the self-effacing attitude of Ernest Pignon, the artist’s real name. Whereas the choice of a pseudonym for an artist suggests a self-creating act, Ernest Pignon’s artistic persona results from the ambiguity of the signature “E. Pignon” on political petitions, which caused some readers to assume it was that of the painter Eduard Pignon. On the occasion of an exhibition including both him and Eduard Pignon, Ernest Pignon decided to prevent any further misunderstanding by putting a hyphen between “Pignon” and “Ernest,” which meant that his name should not be abbreviated. But the editor of the catalog misinterpreted it as a double-barreled surname. Since he liked the alliterative sound of “Ernest PignonErnest,” he decided to keep it.11 Ernest Pignon (1942) was born into a working-class family of Nice and is a selftaught artist. The first work of his 2007 catalog raisonné is a drawing after Picasso that he made on a newspaper during his military service in Algeria in 1962.12 Ernest PignonErnest’s interest in Picasso persisted even when he began to make acquaintances in the art scene of Nice, one of the liveliest hubs of early 1960s Western European art. There he met Nice-based Fluxus artist Ben, his friends Robert Filliou and George Brecht, and another Nice-born artist, Arman, with whom Ernest Pignon-Ernest remained on friendly terms for the rest of his life. The first example of the kind of work he would pursue up to the present day dates from 1966. In protest against the installation of nuclear weapons in the Plateau d’Albion, Ernest Pignon-Ernest undertook a series of actions. He set out to vitrify and burn vegetation, and he stenciled the shadows of two bodies incinerated by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and immortalized by an iconic photograph. He also pasted up political posters. The editorial board of the communist weekly Le Patriote (The Patriot) noticed these posters and commissioned him to produce some covers for their magazine. This pushed Ernest Pignon-Ernest to consider carefully the readability of images, a task that would prove useful for the rest of his career. Meanwhile, his main source of income was work in the theater. He cooperated with theater director André Benedetto, creating the set design for his political plays staged in Avignon. This encouraged Ernest PignonErnest to think through the visual translations of political concepts.13 During these years he refined his artistic interventions on the street and started using his drawing Marcelin Pleynet and Ernest Pignon-Ernest, L’homme habite poétiquement: entretiens (Arles: Actes Sud, 1993), 11. André Velter, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Jean Rouaud, eds., Ernest Pignon-Ernest (Geneva: BärtschiSalomon, 2007), 30–31. 13 “Ernest. Le trottoir libéré,” L’idiot international, no. 21 (September–October1971): 17–18. 11

12

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skills to make silkscreen prints of life-size portraits, which were then illegally pasted up in public spaces. Insofar as he thought of his works as site-specific ephemeral happenings, he did not take photographs of them. While the work of numerous 1970s North American artists engaging with site- and issue-specific installations tended to evolve out of minimalism, conceptual art and institutional critique, the work of Ernest shows an alternative route to site and issue specificity. His commitment to this form of art practice is contemporary to, and even anticipates, these trends; it originates in the mid-1960s and stems from Fluxus as well as the tradition of political theater.

Awakening the dead Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s first documented work was devoted to the centenary of the Paris Commune. In May 1971, Ernest Pignon-Ernest headed to Paris, where he accidentally met a friend who owned a camera. The resulting photographs (Figure 14.1) are due to this chance encounter; since then, Ernest Pignon-Ernest has photographed his works. In Paris, he made hundreds of silkscreen prints representing a dead Communard that he had drawn beforehand. The macabre image depicts the recumbent corpse of a man who, even in death, commands a sense of strength. His shirt is white, his fists are tightly clenched and his head rests on its side, perhaps to conceal the hole made by the bullet that slew him. During the night Ernest Pignon-Ernest placed the prints in Parisian locations related to the history of the Commune, the radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris from mid-March to the end of May 1871, when it was crushed by the regular forces. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s prints were located in Butte aux Cailles, the Père Lachaise cemetery and the Sacré-Cœur, the church that was built to celebrate the defeat of the Commune. He also placed the prints in front of Charonne, the metro station where nine protesters were killed during a 1962 march against the war in Algeria, which had begun in 1954 and ended in 1962 with the country gaining independence from France. Similarly, the silkscreen prints also were laid along the Seine to remember the dozens of Algerian demonstrators who were murdered and thrown into the river by the French police during a march on October 17, 1961.14 The image of the dead Communard could also be found at the locations of the barricades of 1944, erected during the liberation of Paris. The notion of places of memory provides tools to understand some of Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s works. Historian Nora defines a place of memory (lieu de mémoire) as a material or immaterial entity that has become a symbol of the memorial heritage of a community. Drawing from the notion of collective memory, as developed by Maurice Halbwach, Nora edited a multi-volume publication that examined the

Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Figure 14.1  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Paris Commune, 1971. Sacré-Cœur, Paris, silkscreen print, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

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histories of France through memory.15 This undertaking went beyond the dichotomy between memory, seen as subjective and unreliable, and history, cast as objective and neutral. Rather than downplay the role of memory, Nora’s project valorizes the distortions memory operates, viewing its vulnerability to appropriations as a resource for historians. Some of Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s works exhume recollections in urban spaces, expressing the need to transform them into places of memory. In this sense, the work on the Commune is paradigmatic. The memory of the French civil war had long been obfuscated, at times forcibly. Following the 1870s executions, repression and exile of Communards, few images of the Paris Commune were produced and even fewer survived in the ensuing decades, to the point that an art historian has wondered whether, because of this ban and the short life of the Commune, it is possible to see it as a “revolution without images.”16 Today, places such as the Butte aux Cailles or the area surrounding Père Lachaise are residential boroughs carrying little memory of their violent past. Even the Sacré-Cœur, which initially embodied a riven country and symbolized the return of order and religion in a working-class area, is now perceived mostly as just one of Montmartre’s quaint buildings. Ernest Pignon-Ernest attempted to unearth the hidden histories of these places, forcing passersby to think of quiet urban areas as former battlefields haunted by specters. However, Ernest Pignon-Ernest utilized cheap paper as a support and the ground as a surface, evoking the fragile material of which memory is made. Memories, he implicitly contends, can only be perpetuated if they are constantly activated, reenacted, and related to the present. His performance encapsulates a tension, typifying both the will of and the impossibility for an individual to anchor collective memory to a place. Without a community memorializing its past, an individual alone cannot prevent street cleaners from throwing the image of dead revolutionaries in the bins of Paris just as quickly as any other waste paper. The need to appropriate memories and to bind them up with the present is crucial to unpacking the logic that pushed Ernest Pignon-Ernest to place his prints in locations constituting potential repositories of memory for other historical events. He selected places whose common denominator was violence and state terror: the Algerian War and the experience of the Second World War in France. Similarly to the Paris Commune, he transformed these urban locations into ephemeral places of memory where the remembrance of bloody conflicts and torture within a community or a nation has been foreclosed. Suffice it to mention the massacre of dozens of

Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998). The French edition includes seven volumes and was published between 1984 and 1992. See also Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); the essays featured in this book were first published between 1977 and 1982. 16 Bertrand Tillier, La Commune de Paris, révolution sans images?: politique et représentations dans la France républicaine (1871–1914) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004); Bertrand Tillier, “Les corps piétinés de la Commune: figures de la provocation chez Ernest Pignon-Ernest,” in La provocation, une dimension de l’ art contemporain: XIXe-XXe siècles, ed. Eric Darragon and Marianne Jakobi (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), 301–311. 15

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peaceful Algerian protesters on October 17, 1961, which was long expunged from public visibility.17 Likewise, the liberation of Paris marked the collapse of the Vichy collaborationist government, whose responsibilities in the rounding-up of French Jews remained a taboo in institutional discourses until the 1990s. Although Ernest Pignon-Ernest found mild support in local Communist Party sections, and some party activists helped him lay his prints, it would be wrong to infer that his performance was subordinate to the goal of tracing a counter-history of the wretched of the earth that the PCF tried to subsume. In the 1970s, the recollections of the Paris Commune and those of the Algerian War were too divisive and too loosely related to communism to serve the electoral strategies of the PCF. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s evanescent dead resist a definitive interpretation, eschewing a merely didactic function. The underlying line reconnecting Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s dead men can hardly be construed as gesturing towards an overarching leftist grand narrative. Rather, the ties his prints establish, if only for a night, between the Commune, the liberation of Paris in 1944 and the crushing of dissent by de Gaulle’s government, form a fragmented story suggesting that, in some respects, certain moments of the past have not actually come to pass. Going against the grain of the totalizing logic of master narratives, the partisan way in which Ernest Pignon-Ernest delineates genealogies and analogies can be fruitfully related to the works and historical methodology of two intellectuals: film director Chris Marker and historian of ancient Rome Paul Veyne. In 1977, Marker made an essay film about the 1960s–1970s emergence of the new left; it was called Le fond de l’air est rouge (literally, “The Essence of the Air is Red”). Much like Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s untitled performance, Marker’s film is chiefly concerned with the underlying legacies between left-wing political struggles that were at times very distant, in both place and rationale. The tone of Le fond de l’air est rouge is surely disillusioned, but it nonetheless evokes the empowerment inherent in the reactivation of history through its artistic rendering. Despite all its bitterness, Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s 1971 action cannot but convey this hope. The link between Paul Veyne and Ernest Pignon-Ernest is not merely speculative, as they are on friendly terms and Veyne even wrote a short text about Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s work.18 Without necessarily positing a direct influence of Veyne’s historical methodology on Ernest Pignon-Ernest, it is interesting to note that the latter’s performance for the Paris Commune is attuned to a book Veyne published in the same year, Comment on écrit l’histoire19 (How to Write History). Veyne’s epistemological essay countered predominant structuralist trends and “vulgar” Marxism, as well as the emerging quantitative methods in the discipline. In his book-length essay, he deployed a skeptical approach, decrying the scientific pretensions and reductive causal links of many 1960s historical accounts. Veyne instead likened the narratives devised by him and his colleagues to the plots House and MacMaster, Paris 1961. Paul Veyne wrote the foreword to Elisabeth Couturier, ed., Ernest Pignon-Ernest (Paris: Herscher, 1990). 19 Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essays on Epistemology (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984). 17 18

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created by writers. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s highly subjective construction of a chain of events, and the narrative that is its corollary, were in keeping with Veyne’s contemporary debunking of residual forms of positivist and theological history. Following the success of his action concerning the Paris Commune, which was reviewed in the influential art monthly Opus International, Ernest Pignon-Ernest was invited to exhibit in the 1972 Salon de la Jeune Peinture. This showcase, a salon at the Grand Palais in Paris, was a risk for Ernest Pignon-Ernest, as it implicitly encouraged him to renounce his site- and issue-specific art practice in order to align his work with that of painters. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s exhibit leveled a critique of some members of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Unlike the majority of the exhibitors, Ernest Pignon-Ernest came from a working-class family of the province, and in 1972 he probably lacked the acquaintances and social skills of his Parisian counterparts. Maoists were the predominant political faction at the 1972 edition of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Through his exhibit, Ernest distanced himself from gauchiste (leftist) rhetoric and from what he perceived as the Maoists’ “exotic” image of factory workers.20 He highlighted how the pristine space of the museum room that was allocated to him could be seen as the place where the artistic community enacted its identity and its separateness from the hardship of labor, while at the same time glorifying it in the canvases. Ernest Pignon-Ernest decided to address the issue of workplace accidents. In the room, he pasted dozens of life-size silkscreen images representing the same naked male body. Every time a worker died in the workplace in France, Ernest placed a cross on one of these figures, allowing the society outside the premises of the Grand Palais to shape the work. It became increasingly evident that the viewers entering the room were confronted with a silent massacre. Between November 22 and December 5, 1972, 156 workers died and 9,700 suffered from work-related injuries. The French word “lieu” does not directly translate to the word “place.” In Nora’s work, a lieu de mémoire does not necessarily describe a place; it can also be an artifact onto which a community projects its memory and identity. The notion of the place of memory can thus be applied to several works of Ernest Pignon-Ernest. For example, during the dictatorship in Chile, the artist made a silkscreen image of communist poet Pablo Neruda, who died a few days after the 1973 coup. In the image, the poet wears a poncho, a typical South American garment. Activists appropriated this portrait and used the deliberately large empty space on the poncho, as well as Neruda’s fist, to insert comments, graffiti and flags, transforming the print into a site for the enactment of repressed leftist identities. Ernest Pignon-Ernest transformed a well-known image into a place of memory in South Africa. In the 1970s and 1980s he joined the camp of the struggles against the racial segregation in South Africa, where he befriended post-structuralist philosopher Derrida, for whom he would later illustrate a book.21 Along with him and the Spanish Marie-Odile Briot and Catherine Humblot, eds., Ernest Pignon-Ernest: la peau des murs (Paris: L’image, 1980), 54. 21 Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Bennington, Veils (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 20

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painter Antonio Saura, he created an “itinerant museum” against apartheid. In the mid1990s, he went to South Africa to offer the museum collection to Nelson Mandela’s government, in a gesture that was reminiscent of Picasso’s will to exile his 1937 painting Guernica until the return of democracy in Spain. In 2002, Ernest PignonErnest would return to South Africa, where he met local communities and people of different social and cultural backgrounds to explore issues that might constitute the subject of his intervention. His interlocutors tended to solicit for a work on the HIV/ AIDS pandemic, in a country where approximately 18 percent of the adult population is affected by it. Ernest Pignon-Ernest reworked a poignant photograph of the 1976 anti-apartheid Soweto uprising (a student protest that was met with police brutality and resulted in hundreds of deaths), transforming it into a Pietà (Figure 14.2). The 1976 photograph and Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s 2002 reworking are presented side by side, in different scales. In his drawing, however, a black woman replaced the man carrying the corpse of a teenager, Hector Petterson, killed by the police in 1976. Her identity is left deliberately unclear: she might be the mother of the adolescent, a nurse, or the symbol of the South African quest for freedom. With the help of locals, the artist pasted up the resulting silkscreen prints in Soweto and Durban. At the beginning of the 1970s Ernest Pignon-Ernest was a largely unknown artist from Nice, and this accounts for his absence from the debate about revolutionary art

Figure 14.2  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, African Pietà, 2002. Durban (Warwick) South Africa, silkscreen print, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

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that took place in Paris. These discussions would have profited from knowledge of his art practice, as it may have met the aspirations of both Supports/Surfaces, with its meditations on the media of painting, and the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, with its stress on a readable figuration. Not least, Ernest Pignon-Ernest may have appealed to Buren, whose outdoor works resonated with Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s site-specific interventions. In the early 1970s, Ernest Pignon-Ernest moved to his current Parisian residency, La Ruche, a house of artists that accommodated several painters of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture. However, the 1972 edition was the only time he participated in the salon. To a certain extent, he is still an outsider in the Parisian art scene, although he is the only living French artist to have a contract with one of the most influential and international Parisian galleries, the Lelong Gallery, which sells his preparatory drawings and large-format photographs of his work. This gallery has recently organized an exhibition of his latest works, which witnesses his ongoing commitment to the places of memory. The artist was invited to work in the Saint-Paul prison, Lyon, which is no longer in use and will soon be transformed into a campus. Several political activists were imprisoned and at times tortured there, including anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, Resistance hero Jean Moulin, female partisans such as Berty Albrecht, historian of the Annales School of social history and partisan Marc Bloch, as well as thousands of unknown prisoners. Ernest Pignon-Ernest pasted up drawings attempting to make the walls of the prison exude their memories. However, the bitter outcome is similar to that of his work for the Paris Commune. The revenants he conjures up fail to haunt the present, as they remain locked within the confines of a secluded space which is doomed to disappear.

Wreckage upon wreckage Born in Nice, Ernest Pignon-Ernest has always felt an affinity with Mediterranean countries, whether in Europe, Asia, or North Africa. The shared cultural traits of populations living in the coastal areas of the Mediterranean have been at the core of what anthropologists call “Mediterranean cultures,” categorizing ethnic groups living by this sea, irrespective of their religions or lack thereof.22 Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ernest Pignon-Ernest created two series of images—one about death, the other about the figure of the woman—which he made and pasted up in Naples. The type of study he conducted, mostly through books and by living in Naples for an extended period of time, can be defined as an investigation of a locus. The notion of locus (in Latin) was developed by Aldo Rossi in the mid-1960s, and it was one of the key concepts of his seminal book, Architecture of the City.23 David D. Gilmore, “Anthropology of the Mediterranean area,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology, no. 11 (1982): 175–205. 23 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 22

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Rossi argues that cities are the sites par excellence for the enactment of collective memory. Architects should, therefore, valorize the way in which urban areas intertwine different historical layers and material cultures. In Rossi’s terminology, locus describes a place from the angle of the relationship between a pre-existing site and the urban artifacts that are located in the site, as well as the events occurring there. For instance, the locus defines the encounter between the pre-existing urban structure of a city, the geography of a place, the construction materials an area makes available and the current urban artifacts. In Rossi’s theories the notion of locus serves to indicate the irreducible, if elusive, specificity of a place. Ernest Pignon-Ernest devises images that allow the locus to surface. This investigation is different yet compatible with that focusing on the places of memory. When these two types of analyses foster each other Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s work is at his best, as in the case of Naples. The series focusing on death is the result of a careful examination of Neapolitan history, which Ernest Pignon-Ernest describes as imbued with death. Vesuvius is one of the most dangerous volcanoes of the world, because of the 3 million people living nearby; Pompeii and Herculaneum still bear testament to its threatening power. In Pozzuoli, near Naples, there is another volcano called Solfatara; although dormant, it still emits jets of steam and sulfurous fumes. Naples’ city center is built on several necropolises, and in the Aeneid Virgil locates hell under the city. In front of an inn located among the tapering alleys of the center, one of Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s favorite artists, Caravaggio, was stabbed by killers and laid close to death. But the invisibility and omnipresence of death is also a pressing issue today. Complicit authorities have recently released the fact that, for decades, criminal organizations have hidden toxic waste materials in the ground of the so-called “triangle of death,” only a few miles from Naples, which has resulted in a large number of cancer deaths in the area. Ernest Pignon-Ernest pasted up both silkscreen prints and original drawings largely relying on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Neapolitan painting, architecture, and sculpture. Caravaggio is the source for a large drawing set against a blood-red scraped wall (Figure 14.3). The self-portrait of Caravaggio as Goliath, seen in Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, is coupled with that of a beheaded Pier Paolo Pasolini. What brings Caravaggio and Pasolini close together is their ruthless deaths by the Mediterranean. The former died from a fever in the harbor of Porto Ercole after a sea journey while on his way to Rome, where he had hoped to receive a papal pardon for the manslaughter he committed in 1606. Pasolini, for his part, died on the beach of Ostia in 1975, where he was murdered in mysterious circumstances by a male prostitute. The series of images about death, to which this drawing belongs, was pasted on Maundy Thursday, and only where the city streets were covered with massive dark slabs of Vesuvian lava. As Ernest Pignon-Ernest noted, Easter is a valuable instance of the Christian appropriation of pagan cults. Indeed, his Neapolitan drawings after Ribera’s and

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Figure 14.3  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, David with the Head of Goliath, after Caravaggio, 1988, Naples, black stone drawing, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

Caravaggio’s Pietà (Figure 14.4) are conceived of as potential places of memory, wherein reverberate the echoes of Aphrodite’s lament over Adonis’ lifeless body in her arms.24 Without mentioning it explicitly, Ernest Pignon-Ernest references Aby Warburg’s notion of Pathosformel; that is, the afterlife of religious motifs and their recurrence across centuries and civilizations.25 Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s interest in the stratification of settlements is reflected in his use of Neapolitan walls. In his works, walls occasionally become both symbols and indexes of the unremitting syncretism informing this locus. This is epitomized by a print representing a bleeding “Lamb of God,” (Figure 14.5) which directs the attention of passersby to a wall revealing a trait typical of several coastal cities in southern Italy: the superposition of Greek and Roman construction stones and, finally, those used during the seventeenth-century rule of the Spanish viceroys. The series of images devoted to women is similarly focused on concealed clues uncovering the struggle between the survival and extinction of the past. It encompasses

Pleynet and Pignon-Ernest, L’homme habite, 108–114. Marcus Andrew Hurttig et al., eds., Die entfesselte Antike: Aby Warburg und die Geburt der Pathosformel (Cologne: Walther König, 2012).

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Figure 14.4  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, The Entombment of Christ, after Caravaggio, 1988. Naples, black stone drawing, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

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Figure 14.5  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Lamb, 1988. Naples, silkscreen print, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

the motif of the womb, cast as a sinister memento mori (Figure 14.6), but also female saints, Demeter, the siren Parthenópē, the mythological founder of Naples, and the Cumaean Sibyl—all figures enabling Ernest Pignon-Ernest to investigate the transfers between cultures, as well as the afterlife of sacred images, their Nachleben, to borrow Warburg’s term.26 A sardonic humor is occasionally apparent, as in the choice to paste up a drawing of a veiled phallus nearby Santa Maria di Piedigrotta, a church that enshrines a statute of Mary that is worshipped by women wishing to have a child. The image of the phallus alludes to the decision to build the church on the ruins of an ancient temple dedicated to Priapus, who was venerated for the fertility he was supposedly capable of infusing. Despite Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s atheism, this connection should not be seen as a parody of Catholicism. Ernest Pignon-Ernest is a representative of that form of humanism that is not unconditionally opposed to religion, which the PCF and several fellow travelers embraced in the 1960s, particularly after the Second Vatican Council. A drawing belonging to both the series about death and that about women deserves closer analysis, for it illustrates Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s complex research. While in Naples, he saw two elderly ladies selling cloths and smuggled cigarettes in front of a chapel. The street they were on is called spaccanapoli, which means “cleaving Naples,” Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante: histoire de l’ art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002).

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Figure 14.6  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Pelvis, 1990. Naples, black stone drawing, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

as the street splits the city into two parts. Ernest Pignon-Ernest learnt a bit of the Neapolitan dialect, and knew that some expressions play on the image of the “cleft” as suggestive of the female sex. Many issues converged on this locus, which was at once sacred and profane, lively and gloomy, public and clandestine. The artist reworked The Death of the Virgin, a painting by Caravaggio which presents similar characteristics. Caravaggio’s canvas portrays the death of Mary, but the artist was rumored to have modeled the figure on the corpse of a drowned prostitute. Aside from singling a detail (Figure 14.7), Ernest Pignon-Ernest slightly altered the point of view of the large painting to allow passersby to grasp the image in one glimpse.27 The structural features of Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s work have changed little since the late 1960s. Exceptions are rare. One is a 1983–1984 work that indirectly establishes a dialogue with the contemporary artists who are informed by environmentalist concerns. The work did not derogate from the principal of site-specificity, but originated in sculptures that the artist realized with the assistance of Claude Gudin, a leading biotechnologist. Ernest Pignon-Ernest made molds of human bodies, which he filled with expanding polyurethane foam that contains vegetable cells. This type of polyurethane is devoid of toxic elements and allows for the penetration of water and sunlight, enabling the cells to produce oxygen through photosynthesis. The resulting Luca Avanzini has recently made a video titled La pasqua secondo Ernest Pignon-Ernest, which focuses on the memory of Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s work in Naples (http://vimeo.com/81929974 password: cinereel).

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Figure 14.7  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Death of the Virgin, after Caravaggio, 1990. Naples, black stone drawing, destroyed. Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

sculptures (Figure 14.8), entitled Arbrorigènes, were placed in some French parks. Over the course of time they have merged with the vegetation, generating a sort of twofold metamorphosis—from human into vegetable, and from light and water into oxygen—whereby the artist intended to call to mind the myth of Apollo and Daphne.

Is Ernest Pignon-Ernest a street artist? Over the past few years Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s work has been associated with the street art trend. Street art is too composite a phenomenon to argue that he can be considered a forebear of this trend as a whole. It seems more reasonable to narrow his legacy to street art that engages with ephemeral, site- and issue-specific work developed with no help from institutions. Ernest Pignon-Ernest has always been wary of institutions and, until recently, he has limited his collaborations to organizations and individuals with which he is decidedly sympathetic. His cooperation with museums and cultural institutions have intensified in the last few years partly due to his age, which is hardly compatible with his highly dynamic and tiring art practice. With regard to legality, it is noteworthy that his works have often been pasted up illegally; in fact, he has received hundreds of fines. The principle of illegality is what prevented him from working in New York. After his interventions in Naples, he wished to extend his research into

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Figure 14.8  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Arborigènes, 1984. Jardin des Plantes, Paris, polyurethane foam and vegetable cells, Courtesy of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

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urban loci to New York, but the advent of Rudolf Giuliani’s administration, and the fact that he does not speak English, made him fear he would have been unable to find the same tolerance he has occasionally found with French policemen during his nocturnal pasting up of drawings and prints. This is unfortunate, as the 1980s–1990s emergence of graffiti art and that of projects such as the show Culture in Action created an ideal platform to understand and to discuss his practice in the USA.28 However, the contingencies of artistic labor complicate the issue of filiation. During a recent visit to London, Ernest Pignon-Ernest was accompanied by the author to a location where street artist Shepard Fairey was executing a wall painting with the help of assistants and a scissor-lift. The fact that the work had the sponsorship of the city council made Ernest Pignon-Ernest remark that it seemingly shared nothing with his. Yet, when Shepard Fairey came down from the scissor-lift and talked about the interminable, physically demanding hours spent making silkscreen prints in the early days of his career, the two agreed about the latent resemblances in their works, if not on the level of the output then at least in initial intentions. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s late-1960s works presented an innovative way to incorporate the political in the aesthetic without collapsing the former into the latter. Today he pursues this research. If in the 1980s he created an itinerant museum against the apartheid in South Africa, Ernest Pignon-Ernest is now committed to the Palestinian cause and is currently cooperating in the creation of a National Art Museum that he hopes to see open in Jerusalem. In recent years, he has also begun working on a series of images he would like to produce and paste up in Jerusalem in an action that is destined to continue his exploration of Mediterranean cultures, resuming the memory of their ongoing and vertiginous syncretism.

Eva M. Olson, Michael Brenson, and Mary Jane Jacob, eds., Culture in Action (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).

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Questioning the Void: Sophie Calle’s Archival Subversions Rachel Boate

Pairs of photographs and text fragments hang in thick frames on gallery walls like unhinged and misshapen diptychs in Sophie Calle’s installation of Last Seen … / Dislocations … of 1991. Her large-scale photograph Last Seen: Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Lady and Gentleman in Black (Figure 15.1) depicts the shimmering, green brocadelined walls of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where the stolen

Figure 15.1  Sophie Calle, Last Seen: Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Lady and Gentleman in Black, 1991. Ektachrome photograph with text sheet. Photograph (97 × 62 in. or 246.4 × 157.5 cm). © 2015 Sophie Calle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

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Rembrandt referenced in the work’s title once hung. Like a funerary shroud marking a loss, a curtain of rich silk damask festooned with an ornate motif drapes over the gallery’s gaping void. And the accompanying text—resembling an oversized exhibition wall label—communicates anonymously recounted and conflicting descriptions of the painting’s previous presence in the museum’s Dutch Room, recollections gathered by the artist in a series of interviews conducted with members of the museum’s staff. The types of absence so literally framed here as a means of challenging the singularity of collective memory form the focus of Calle’s “phototextual” works of the 1990s. Extensive fieldwork—in the form of interviews and the mining of institutional archives for informational records—yields an assemblage of chronicled testimonials and documentary photographs that fill or replace the physical voids and cultural absences interrogated in Calle’s work. Her projects not only draw upon existing archives of information and conventional archiving methodologies, but see her create archived collections as well. Archiving, therefore, not only serves as her working method but also her artistic product. In Last Seen … of 1991, Calle situates the art museum as an archive, asking random employees at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to describe and verbally recreate stolen artworks from memory. She makes use of this same collaborative approach in The Detachment/Souvenirs de Berlin-Est (or Die Entfernung) of 1996, where personal remembrances recorded with passersby metaphorically fill in the physical voids left by the removal of communist-era monuments that once dotted the everyday topography of former East Berlin. In both projects, personal recollections and subjective responses—in place of institutional decrees—reconstruct the meaning behind these missing objects. As such, Calle uses the archive’s inherent materials and practices to subvert its institutional status as an objective repository of historical information, rather than preserve the archive’s status as a cultural authority.1 Her juxtapositions of collected reminiscences and official directives ultimately call into doubt the way in which history is transcribed. Conflating fact and fiction reveals the power relations embedded in the construction of a singular remembered narrative, and suggests that individual memory should play a more critical role in the documentation of cultural accounts. We generally think of the archive as a neutral or passive storeroom that safeguards textual and photographic records of past events. Calle’s practice partakes in the broader postwar drive not only to remember, but to collect and preserve concrete markers of memory. Theorists like Andreas Huyssen have situated this contemporary cultural obsession with historical memorialization as a bulwark “against obsolescence and disappearance, to counter our deep anxiety about the speed of change and the ever-shrinking horizons of time and space.”2 Archiving, Sophie Calle has always worked with information, and began using investigative and surveillance techniques in the 1980s to glean information about strangers and construct their identities. In the 1990s, she began extending these practices to explore the relationship between public and private in institutional contexts. Much of her work considers memory, absence, identity, and intimacy by making use of methods typically associated with archivist, ethnographic, and even scientific approaches. 2 Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 33. Similar arguments are made in Huyssen, “Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Media,” in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), 13–36. 1

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remembrance, and “musealization,” for Huyssen, operate as defense mechanisms against perceptions of destabilizing temporal change. And in turn, the contemporary push to remember has led to a conception of the archive as a testament to the presence of the past and an authority on historical documentation. But like any other cultural institution, the processes of selection that go into the collection, taxonomy and circulation of historical information offer an authorial interpretation and specific historical narrative of the event recounted. Such an understanding of institutional power has even led Jacques Derrida to observe in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression that the archival process “produces as much as it records the event.”3 Despite understandings of the archive as a democratic collection, power structures implicit in its organization inevitably shape the master narratives through which history or artworks are read. Calle confronts this flagrant presence of absence as a way to spotlight these abuses of power and draw attention to the constructed nature of all historical accounts. By situating herself simultaneously as author, artist, editor, and archivist, Calle’s work exists between objects, images, and texts, as she challenges us to unravel the processes that go into the construction of documentary evidence. She treats the art museum as an art-historical archive in Last Seen … where she asks museum staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to metaphorically fill in blank gallery walls with verbal descriptions of missing artworks. On March 18, 1990, five drawings by Degas, a vase, Napoleonic eagle, and six oil paintings by Rembrandt, Flinck, Manet, and Vermeer were violently cut from their frames and stolen from the institution in Boston, Massachusetts.4 Gardner, the founder of the institution, had stipulated in her will that nothing should be altered within the museum’s holdings following her death, including the replacement of stolen works.5 Calle therefore begins Last Seen … with a copy of Gardner’s last will and testament, a vital piece of archival evidence that makes tangible the embedded power structures within institutional authority. Rather than augment the collection, which was originally intended to enrich the cultural education of Boston’s public, bare gallery walls and empty frames (like those documented in Calle’s photographs) become vestigial proof of Gardner’s powerful social status and the preservation of a single woman’s view.6 As such, the opulent exhibition space now features “the sites of faded tapestry and the nails that make visible the original position Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 17. See Sophie Calle, Disparitions, tableaux volés (Arles: Actes Sud, 2000). The FBI describes the heist as the “largest property crime in U.S. history,” offering a $5 million reward for the return of the thirteen missing works. The case information details: “On March 18, 1990, two men disguised as police officers gained access to the Gardner Museum. Once inside, they tied up the security guards and proceeded to steal 13 objects, including rare paintings by Rembrandt, Degas, and Vermeer, valued at approximately $500 million.” Gardner Museum Thefts, www.fbi.gov. For an virtual tour of partially bare gallery walls, see www.gardnermuseum.org/resources/theft/. 5 “Isabella Stewart Gardner, qui avait vécu là avant de léguer la maison à la ville, avait expressément stipulé dans son testament que rien ne devrait être touché après sa mort.” See Calle, Disparitions. 6 Gardner stipulates in her will, “le fonds d’un musée pour l’éducation et le plaisir du public sans limite de temps.” Ibid. 3

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of the artworks and their current absence.”7 It is Gardner’s will that renders this display of absence so palpable. Rather than seek to recreate the missing works precisely, Calle focuses on individual reception, so that fragmented remembrances of and responses to the pieces inform the stolen works’ continued existence. Recollected details of Rembrandt’s A Lady and Gentleman in Black of 1633 differ widely. Some of Calle’s interlocutors describe the missing canvas in remarkably empirical detail: “In the foreground, on the right-hand side of the painting,” one participant recalls, “there was a woman sitting, gazing towards the left. Behind her, in the center, was a man … He was wearing a black cape and a hat. He had a pair of gloves, wearing one and holding the other … There were stairs nearby and a reference to travel with a map hanging on a wall in the background.”8 Another contributor describes the stolen artwork in terms of its iconographic historiography, explaining that the canvas had once been X-rayed, revealing that Rembrandt had originally included the image of a child within the composition. This participant, probably a curator or conservator, describes the exact placement of this erased figure, specifying its posture and gesture.9 Regardless of how such information was received by each participant, knowledge of the earlier compositional iteration informs the way the canvas was appreciated. One woman goes on to clarify that the child initially depicted in the painting had died, leading Rembrandt to replace the boy with a chair after his death. She explains that she had recently given birth and would spend time with the painting in the Dutch gallery, as though communing with friends and understanding their loss.10 This participant suggests that many of those interviewed related aspects of their own lives to the imagined dramas endured by the figures painted within the frame. Calle’s finished documentation of the missing artworks juxtaposes enlarged photographic reproductions of the Museum’s framed voids with textual compositions of her collected statements, hung side by side on the gallery walls. The size and format of the framed texts match the dimensions of the original, stolen artwork. Despite resembling a didactic museum wall label, here it is personal memory that interprets the missing artworks, and not an institutionally driven analysis. Each participant remains anonymous, beginning his or her statement with “I” in a way that mirrors its precursor. Subverting the conventions of the institutionalized oral archive, Calle chooses not to distinguish between interviewed curators or conservators and quotidian museum staff, giving a voice to those typically excluded from interpreting an institution’s collection. Her display methods elevate personal memory to the status of public document. She treats every memory equally as source material, while also revealing the discrepancies inherent to all documentary evidence, whether archival or acquired by word of mouth. “Les emplacements délavés de la tapisserie et les clous rendent visible la position originale du tableau et par conséquent son absence.” Ibid. Ibid. 9 “When they x-rayed the painting, they found that there had been a child in the picture, between the two figures, holding onto his mother’s hand and clutching something that looked like a whip.” Ibid. 10 Ibid. 7 8

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In her assessment of Last Seen … , performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan specifies that while the art historian values a cogent and precise historical analysis of a work of art, Calle intentionally emphasizes subjective associations and responses; “The description itself does not reproduce the object,” writes Phelan, “it rather helps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost. The descriptions remind us how loss acquires meaning and generates recovery—not only of and for the object, but for the one who remembers.”11 By asking participants to express their memories verbally, Calle permits them to revisit the pictorial scenes mentally, to offer their own interpretive voice and remember imprecisely. Meaning is generated through a subjective response, rather than imposed by an institutional framework. Giving voice to memory grants the stolen artworks a continued presence, while also revealing that relations between object and viewer persist beyond the physical canvas. Scholar David Greetham has added to this discussion by suggesting that archives and institutions present constructed narratives of collective history, forging a single account rather than embracing the plurality inherent to various memories and experiences.12 Even when a work is missing, the framework offered by the exhibiting institution imposes a singular interpretive narrative. This is particularly the case in a space like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the institution provides an in situ viewing experience, where Gardner’s collection of decorative arts and domestic furnishings not only enhance the contextual lens through which the objects are read, but also continue to drive the way they are interpreted. Calle’s reconstruction of Rembrandt seems to address this idea of institutional hegemony, since her final composition actually highlights the museum’s framing devices. Her photograph does not simply invoke the viewer to examine the gallery’s outlined void, but also spotlights the interior’s lush tapestries, ornately gilded picture frame, and delicate volutes of hanging candelabra. Calle takes the playful mise en abyme as her subject—the picture of a (absent) picture—as well as the institution’s physical interpretive support. Calle’s Last Seen … ultimately suggests that only once the artwork disappears does the frame’s inherent “constructedness”—the institutional framework—become apparent. She follows in a long line of postwar French artists interested in embedding institutional critique within their practice: namely by manipulating the visual and spatial to challenge the ways in which art is conventionally exhibited in the museum or gallery system. Just twenty years prior, French conceptual artist Daniel Buren had defined the Museum as “the frame and effective support upon which the work is inscribed/composed. It is at once the center in which the action takes place and the single (topographical and cultural) viewpoint for the work.”13 Buren’s assertion becomes a textual analog to Calle’s photograph, where institution and frame are Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 147. David Greetham, “Who’s In, Who’s Out”: The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion, Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 1 (1999): 9. 13 Daniel Buren, “Function of the Museum” for “Position–Proposition,” trans. Laurent Sauerwein (Munich: Museum of München Gladbach, 1971), 58. Buren and Calle are friends and collaborators. Most recently, Calle selected Buren as a curator for the installation of her Take Care of Yourself for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. 11 12

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one. Institutional power, therefore, leaves its mark literally on every work exhibited. As such, the museum inevitably mediates every viewing experience, imposing curatorial taste and official readings on every interaction between viewer and work. Although she takes on the role of curator and archivist in Last Seen … , her working methods reveal an interest in decentering the artwork from a single authorial interpretation and departing from the accepted understanding that a legitimate authority exists. An archive or museum exercises power in the very acts of accumulation and collection; deciding what to collect, preserve, and exhibit obliquely conveys a level of taste that is then imposed on a viewing public. But Calle subverts the power of institutional collecting, since her assemblages include new interpretive sources—anonymous voices with disparate levels of art-historical knowledge. “The [ostensible] unity of an archive,” Allan Sekula rationalizes, “is first and foremost that imposed by ownership.”14 By acknowledging this intrinsic claim to ownership, Calle exposes the ways in which institutions mark and control the cultural landscape and how it is understood. This same tactic operates in Calle’s The Detachment of 1996, where she extends her examination of constructed cultural meaning to question specific historical documents. In her 1996 project, Calle interrogates absences within the topography of former East Berlin, voided sites that mark the removal of prior GDR monuments in the German capital.15 The wave of collective optimism following the fall of the Berlin Wall had quickly given rise to the graver discussion surrounding the reunification of a nation with a divided history. With the surge in proposals for state-sponsored commemorative public projects, leaders in the early 1990s grappled with the task of erecting monuments that venerated two former “Germanys” with remarkably disparate histories. As the German political landscape shifted following reunification in the 1990s, the new Federal Republic covertly “relativized” those East German symbols that it saw as ideologically incompatible with the image of the new German nation. Yet, this normalization effort not only dismantled the emblems of the dissolved communist East, but also expunged the quotidian signs comprising individual histories Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labor and Capital,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2003), 443–453, 444. Sekula was an American photographer, filmmaker, and cultural theorist who wrote extensively on photography as both an aesthetic and documentary medium, often exploring its relationship to critical theory and political Modernism. For Sekula’s work related to the archive, see also: Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984); Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 343–389. 15 First created and exhibited at Arndt & Partner in Berlin in 1996, Calle then published Die Entfernung in 1997 as a dual-language edition, known as The Detachment in English, and later as Souvenirs de Berlin-Est in French. See Sophie Calle, The Detachment/Die Entfernung (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), and later, Sophie Calle, Souvenirs de Berlin-Est (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999). Sophie Calle is one of several artists who produced site-specific projects exploring cultural memory in former East Germany following the end of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall. See, for example: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag (1995); Christian Boltanski’s Missing House (1990); Shimon Attie’s The Writing on the Wall (1992–1992) and Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects: Installations and Photographs (Vermont: Verve Éditions, 1998); Tacita Dean’s work like Palast (2004) and Die Regimentstochter (2005). 14

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and cultures, leaving behind only traces of a former country. “To record this process,” writes Calle, “I visited places from which symbols of GDR history have been effaced. I asked passers-by and residents to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces. I photographed the absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories.”16 The finished project juxtaposes photographs of each commemorative site before and after the fall of the wall, alongside a page of text that recapitulates the divergent memories shared by those interviewed. Calle’s visual dialectic between visibility and invisibility ultimately challenges the historical discourse offered by the reunified state, whereby the personal meanings attributed to each GDR object undercut the demand for their official removal; such a process, German studies scholar Lyn Marven explains, had functioned “to demonstrate the power of the state (now the unified Federal Republic) not only over public space but also over the meaning of the monuments and the narrative of history that they represent.”17 Calle procured ordinances from the Abgeordentenhaus, the parliament for the state of Berlin, of which the city of Berlin is the capital.18 These ordinances included a list of twelve monuments to be dismantled, removed or reworded in an effort to rebuild the recently reunified state (and city) of Berlin with a uniform set of public symbols and insignia. Her collection of individual memories contrasts sharply with sanctioned directives and counters the forms of history they represent. And her photographic juxtapositions literalize this fissure in the historical narrative. By contrasting the contemporary images of negation in color film with the older photographs of the intact monuments in black and white, she makes an aesthetic statement about the transition in time from monument to absence. Her simple photographic compositions document the life of memorials without regard to the heroic monumentality prescribed to these structures by history. Instead, she contextualizes them in everyday experience, debunking their mythical status in plain documentary form. Her choice to work in color film refuses the texture of historicity that attaches itself to the black-and-white originals, so reminiscent of jaded textbook snapshots. Rather than situating her color photographs as historical evidence corroborating a particular narrative, she treats her prints as detached artifacts, choosing to exclude details concerning physical size or materials used. Rather, the disparity between “official” account and personal memory guides the historical story. The Detachment compels society to actively remember and make sense of the void, in lieu of passively accepting it as a symptom of historical progression.

Malene Vest Hansen, “Public Places - Private Spaces, Conceptualism, Feminism and Public Art: Notes on Sophie Calle’s The Detachment,” Journal of Art History 71, no. 4 (2002): 197. 17 Lyn Marven, “History, Photos, and Form in Texts by Daniela Dahn, Irina Liebmann, and Sophie Calle,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 43, no. 2 (May, 2007): 229. 18 The Abgeordentenhaus equates roughly to the American House of Representatives and functions as the parliament for the state of Berlin. Its power was restricted following the Second World War, as decisions had to be confirmed by the Western Allied forces. Since reunification, the Abgeordentenhaus’ primary responsibilities have included passing legislation, selecting city mayors, and drafting the government budget. 16

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Such is the case in Friedenstaube (Nikolaiviertel) from Calle’s The Detachment.19 The original image from the 1980s reveals the wall of a communist-era housing project, upon which hangs the metal form of a dove in flight and text that reads Berlin Stadt des Friedens (Berlin City of Peace). The Nikolaiviertel refers to the oldest city quarter in former East Berlin, which had received the peace dove in 1979 as a token of recognition from the Soviet World Peace Council. Following reunification, however, many such signs “were converted or equipped with an additional inscription,” explains Peter Carrier, in his research on postwar monuments and memory—“either in order to modify their political content, or else turn them into ironic public citations of the former state ideology by highlighting their origins as an ideological product of a defunct regime.”20 Calle’s 1996 image (Figure 15.2) reveals this editorial process. Her composition highlights the two concave hollows that scar the building’s façade, inconspicuous vestiges of the former iconography. The replacement sign reads NIKOLAIVIERTEL in a bold, flashy print, labeling the neighborhood for the sake of tourism, alongside an advertisement that broadcasts the district’s commercial offerings: a shop selling denim jeans, an Argentinian steakhouse, a gimmicky inn that proposes “hearty” German cuisine, and a salon. Calle’s photograph points to the ways in which the neighborhood’s identity has been erased throughout history, supplanting it with capitalist amenities that would have been completely foreign to the socialist GDR. Those surveyed about the change in imagery diverge vastly in their recollections. In terms of the dove, descriptions oscillate: “It was a big dove, kind of ‘Picassoesque,’ with this twig in its beak”; or, “It was all gold, somewhat pretentious.” Some found the Friedenstaube beautiful, honorable, or precious, while others remember the bird as cynical and annoying. But regardless of remembered disparities in physical characteristics, Calle’s reportage conveys consensus in terms of the circumstances surrounding the dove’s removal, with one participant citing frankly: “We don’t just go to West Berlin and remove things, do we? … I hardly recognize my old Berlin. But you can’t put it back, the symbolism was ruined by taking it off.”21 The act of erasure documented in Bibliothek (Bebelplatz) has left more politically charged wounds in the city’s landscape. A tarnished, early twentieth-century plaque appears in the earlier image of this work, reading, “In the year 1895 Lenin worked in

Friedenstaube is German for “peace dove,” and refers to the sculptural token of recognition given to the city of East Berlin after having been selected as the venue for the Special Session of the World Peace Council conference from February 2 to February 5, 1979. The World Peace Council (WPC) was founded in 1950 by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a means to promote world peace and more specifically, to oppose the propagandistic-driven perception of American violence and warfare. As part of the Cold War ideological divide, the WPC communist doctrine understood the world as divided between peace advocates in the Soviet Union and warmongering capitalism in the United States. See Phillip Deery, “The Dove Flies East: Whitehall, Warsaw and the 1950 World Peace Congress,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 48, no. 4 (December 2002): 449–468. 20 Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 33. 21 All quotations taken from Sophie Calle, The Detachment/Die Entfernung (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), 55–58. 19

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Figure 15.2  Sophie Calle, Friedenstaube (Nikolaiviertel)/Peace Dove (Nikolaiviertel), Souvenirs de Berlin-Est, 1996. C-Print, framed and installed in a book. Without frame: 46 7/8 × 35 1/16 in. (119 × 89 cm). With frame 51 7/8 × 40 1/16 × 1 3/16 in. (131.7 × 101.8 × 3 cm). © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Nørgaard paa Strøget. No photo credit.

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this building, formerly Königliche Bibliothek.”22 Calle’s later photograph (Figure 15.3) depicts the empty, recessed spatial niche where those words once lay; it fills the frame entirely. Crude holes in the aged concrete become the only indexical trace of the original commemoration, suggesting that no one bothered to fill them in—let alone replace the plaque with an updated tribute. Despite the fact that the installment of this particular plaque took place well before the founding of the GDR, its reference to Lenin was perceived by reunified Germany as a threatening trace of Eastern communism. The accompanying reminiscences symbolically fill the pictorial void, offering hypotheses as to why the unassuming plaque necessitated removal in the first place. Some speculate it was destroyed following a petition, while another suggests it was stolen. One remembers it as a commemoration to Karl Marx, and another posits that the library had not yet been constructed during Lenin’s time in Berlin. The most insightful witness reaches the crux of Calle’s aim: “I don’t think there was anything on it that couldn’t have remained there. It was part of the building’s history, there are so few opportunities to remember. Now that it’s gone, I miss it.”23 Calle’s project, however, precisely provides an opportunity to recollect. The radical inconsistencies present in the text speak both to the fallibility of human memory, and the fact that no single collective memory exists. Rather, Calle’s collections assert that memory-making is socially constructed and temporal mediation occurs on an individuated basis. To underscore this quality, Calle compiled the sites documented in The Detachment as a travel guide. Reproductions of each memory site appear in the form of a postcard, and complementary maps of Berlin allow the visitor (or rememberer) to steer a personal trip down memory lane, partaking in a literal remapping of Berlin’s historical landscape. These photographed postcards become a collection of souvenirs of an absent East Berlin, where each image and caption describes the missing objects and insignia. Rejecting physical materiality in favor of showcasing absence ensures that society holds the agency to make memories of its own by filling in the void—no matter how pedestrian or unheroic these conceptually commemorated sites may be. Instead of submissively affirming the historical snapshot imposed by a conventional state-sponsored monument, Calle’s collaborative process permits a nation’s people to experience time and place on its own terms. In both projects, Calle employs the medium of documentary photography to further subvert the archive. Inextricably linked to the concept of historical evidence, the photograph’s journalistic texture focuses more on the image as an active archival record or piece of documentary evidence than purely aesthetic object. Furthermore, documentary photography, and even the amateur pictorial aesthetic Calle employs, is widely understood as objective for its erasure of the artist’s hand and detachment from more clearly subjective artistic processes. John Roberts calls this quality “historical

The German on the plaque reads “Lenin arbeitete im Jahre 1895 diesem Gebäude, ehemals Königliche Bibliothek,” Calle, The Detachment/Die Entfernung, 27. Calle, The Detachment/Die Entfernung, 25–27.

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Figure 15.3  Sophie Calle, Bibliothek (Bebelplatz)/Library (Bebelplatz), Souvenirs de Berlin-Est, 1996. C-print, framed and installed with a book. Without frame: 23 5/8 × 31 1/2 in. (60 × 80 cm). With frame: 28 7/16 × 36 1/4 × 1 3/16 in. (72.3 × 92 × 3 cm). © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Nørgaard paa Strøget. No photo credit.

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disclosure,” where photography’s “cut into the continuum of experience … recovers for us the ‘pastness’ of the past, and as such—as the discursive life of the image unfolds in time—the moment’s historical textuality.”24 This understanding of photography as “truth telling” explains why the medium holds such a privileged position in relation to historical knowledge or evidence. Yet, the subjects Calle chooses to photograph, alongside the textual recollections she gathers, mock the constructed neutrality associated with the medium. By manipulating photography’s cool, detached tone, her photographs interrogate the reliability of the medium as a historical source and raise doubts about the accuracy of historical documents more broadly. Photography also exists as a medium that typically defies absence, since it generates a printed image that captures a visual presence. The photograph compensates for a temporal loss (the disappearance of a moment that occurs when a photo is snapped) by emphasizing its visual verisimilitude and material presence. Thierry de Duve, a Belgian theorist and scholar of philosophical aesthetics, argues that although “the photograph is seen either as natural evidence and live witness (picture) of a vanished past, or as an abrupt artifact (event),” subjectivity and processes of selection remain intrinsic.25 Typically, the viewer of a photograph encounters a performed movement or ephemeral moment, which is then made to look naturally frozen or eternal by the printing process. But photographs are not objective evidence or reliable snapshots of a historical instant; “they can only provide evidence of stories,” cites Philip Gourevitch, “and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation. Looked at in this way, as evidence of something beyond itself, a photograph can best be understood not as an answer or an end to inquiry, but as an invitation to look more closely, and to ask questions.”26 Calle’s photographs become invitations to revisit the past in a similar way. Questions about the transmission and communication of information are precisely what Calle poses in each of these phototextual projects. In his work on historicism, Sekula explains that “the archive confirms the existence of a linear progression from past to present, and offers the possibility of an easy and unproblematic retrieval of the past from the transcendent position offered by the present.”27 But Calle’s work—her fusion of the recollected and the factual—suggests that the notion of such historical progression is just one interpretation of many. She collects first-hand accounts and archival materials to question the very nature of the archive and reveals that all authorial documents, no matter how “official” or “reliable,” are based on memories and subjective positions. Historical “perception exists only in theory, because it is continually invaded by memory,” cites film and media scholar Mary Ann Doane.28 Doane goes on to explain John Roberts, “Photography after the Photograph: Event, Archive, and the Non-Symbolic,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 2 (2009): 281. 25 Thierry De Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2006), 109. 26 Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 148. 27 Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 447. 28 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 77. 24

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that the ostensible neutrality of observation or a well-researched analysis are always rooted in memory or based in intuition. Memory, of course, subsists as a perpetually fluid phenomenon that ties past to present. Always fluctuating and never stabilized, it stands as the absolute antithesis to notions of dependability and facticity associated with the authority of archival documents. Documentary photography, however, has become inextricably linked to understandings of visual records as accurate and objective. Michael Roth expresses this accepted incompatibility: “With the triumph of photography’s capturing events of the past we can no longer find our way in history—no longer navigate within our own personal memories—without the filter of photo-like images. The triumph of the photographic means the past has become accessible, but only accessible in image-like terms.”29 Conceptualizing the photograph as a precise replica or indexical proof of the real conflates personal recollection with images seen. As such, the documentary photograph, a product of the archive, is understood as closer to the truth than a mere remembered utterance. Calle complicates this hierarchy by including photographs of empty space or nothingness (sites of authorial manipulation) on the same plane as quotidian recollections. “Photography,” alleges philosopher Stanley Cavell, “maintains the presence of the world by accepting our absence from it. The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it.”30 Therefore, the image viewed exists in a markedly detached realm from the viewing subject, a much greater division than that which separates an individual from his or her memories. Calle’s fieldwork, whether in the space of a museum, or on a city street, seems to address this divide, questioning why we assign visual evidence great value, while considering recollections with such skepticism. Calle subverts the power of the archive by suggesting that accepted documentation, quoted opinion and historical proof are just as fictionalized and fallible as collected personal memories.31 This aspect of her work proves additionally significant with the knowledge that the artist frequently incorporates lies or self-fabricated snippets of “evidence” in each of her collaborative projects. When asked in an interview with Swiss art historian Bice Curiger: “What is your relation to the false and the real?” Calle admitted that “So every time there is a lie, and generally there is only one in each work: it is what I would have liked to find and didn’t.”32 But Calle goes on to explain that

Michael S. Roth, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December, 2009): 94. 30 Stanley Cavell, The Word Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 23. 31 For more on the relationship between history and fiction, see Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit 3: Le temps raconté (Paris: Seuil, 1985). Ricoeur explores the ways in which different modes of fictional narrative and storytelling shape the construction of narrative discourse more broadly, even arguing that it is fictional narratives that offer a more profound understanding of historical time than purely historical forms of narrative. 32 Bice Curiger, “Sophie Calle in Conversation,” Sophie Calle: A Reader (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009), 49–58. 29

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the presence of a lie does not alter the “truth value” of her project, since all truths are subjective interpretations. If Huyssen asserts that “the mode of memory is recherche [research] rather than recuperation,”33 Calle seems to imply that the transmission of historical material is equally rooted in subjectivity. The lapses she emphasizes between the subjective and objective in Last Seen … and The Detachment reveal the extent to which memories remain precluded from historical accounts, and suggest the constructed and uncertain nature behind all archival material. Calle underscores the personal and lets memory reconstruct the history of artworks and a nation, while history becomes the fodder for playful, phototextual installations. She imposes the subjective techniques on her empirical, research-driven projects to emphasize the presence of “narrativity” and selfreflexivity inherent to all (art) historical accounts. Ultimately, Calle collects personal memories. Her practice offers an additional framework through which cultural objects and the circumstances surrounding their removal can be interpreted—frameworks that supplement the institutionally driven physical voids recorded in her photographs. Many of the individuals who participated in Calle’s projects have noted a deep appreciation for her works. For many, Calle’s process shifted the focus away from the sadness and loss associated with the violent act of removal, and instead, returned attention to the very intimate act of personal recollection.34 With Last Seen … in particular, interviewed participants felt that Calle helped the museum staff to recall and reacquaint themselves with the collection, rather than simply dwell on the aggressive act that left behind the documented absences. The success of Last Seen … even led the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum to invite back Calle in 2012 for a second engagement with the stolen works. In this later iteration, What Do You See?, Calle asked staff members and anonymous visitors simply to describe their surroundings in the Dutch Room gallery. The resulting texts were exhibited next to photographs of each interlocutor anonymously photographed from behind, standing before an empty frame. In a sense, then, the traces and voids Calle photographs have continued to become invitations to remember—no matter how inconsistently—but also poignant memorials to that which has been lost. Archiving these varied memories and including unconventional documentary sources function to reclaim and rewrite the narratives generated by institutional frameworks. Calle’s projects suggest that uncertainty and fabrication are the only constants when dealing with the medium of recounted information, whether researched in an archive or gathered from a stranger on the street.

Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 3. See Elena Stylianou, “Artists’ Photographic Reflections: Imag(in)ing the Art Museum through Fictional Narratives,” Photographies 7, no. 2 (2014): 117–129.

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What would it mean for an art practice to redeem its avant-garde forbears in today’s globalized, speculation-driven field of contemporary art? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that multiple meanings spring from two etymons: the Latin redemptiōn, a purchase of a contract or act of ransoming; and the later Anglo-Norman redempcioun, a deliverance from sin and its consequences. Modern financial usage stems from the antique origin—cashing out an investment or the exchange of something for a promised money value—while ethical connotations flow from the later Christian usage. These meanings converge in a series of 2013 exhibitions by the French neo-conceptual collective Claire Fontaine, titled Redemptions and Some Redemptions held at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco and Metro Pictures Gallery in New York. In these exhibitions Claire Fontaine extended the Duchampian association of readymade and redeemed (rédimé) objects across aesthetic and economic fields, staging the use-value of Duchamp’s anti-art legacy at a moment when the readymade seems to have lost critical relevance for contemporary artists in France and beyond. Both exhibitions centered on clear plastic bags filled with aluminum cans gathered for recycling: in Redemptions (January–February 2013) these were suspended from the ceiling at a uniform height, with enough clearance to walk underneath (Figures 16.1 and 16.2). Illuminated from above, the bags created a glimmering play of light and shadow; however, the smell of stale beer and soda made it difficult to enjoy the disco-ball effect in the gallery for very long. To the left of the gallery entrance, the viewer encountered materials seemingly abandoned on the floor by a do-it-yourself smelter: a modified helium cylinder and gasoline can, butane bottles and a lump of melted aluminum. For the second exhibition, Some Redemptions (May–August 2013) Claire Fontaine exhibited a smaller number of bags suspended at varied heights, with a few descending into the space of the viewer (Figure 16.3). These bags rotated slowly on disco-ball motors above another DIY smelter, and were flanked by twenty-five gleaming aluminum ingots stacked and stamped with the word “redemptions,” and a forged iron brand leaning in the corner. Installed on the wall was a ten-dollar bill folded onto itself to create the word “tears” from the truncated text along the bottom of the banknote. Both of these exhibitions presented the readymade artist qua can collector and DIY aluminum smelter, inviting the viewer

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Figure 16.1  Claire Fontaine, Redemptions, CCA Wattis, 2013. Installation view. Courtesy of Claire Fontaine.

Figure 16.2  Claire Fontaine, Redemptions, CCA Wattis, 2013. Installation view. Courtesy of Claire Fontaine.

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Figure 16.3  Claire Fontaine, Some Redemptions, Metro Pictures, 2013. Installation view. Courtesy of Claire Fontaine, Paris and Metro Pictures.

to step into this role by melting down or redeeming the cans constituting the artwork. However, this material transformation was imbued with a recursive symbolism as the sacks and gleaming ingots, derived from the work of Marcel Duchamp, Cady Noland, Marcel Broodthaers and others, held the contemporary use-value of previous avantgarde practices in literal and figurative suspension. As a result the symbolic economy of contemporary art was mapped onto the contradictions of a capitalist economy driven by speculation and exchange. From the Nouveaux Réalistes’ object accumulations and Daniel Buren’s readymade awning stripes, to Philippe Thomas’ art agency Readymades belong to everyone®, French artists have grappled with the discursive implications of Duchamp’s humble objects of the 1910s. However, few have extended the readymade across objective and subjective realms as Claire Fontaine has.1 Established in 2004 by her “assistants”—the Italian-British artist duo Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill—Claire Fontaine is at once a fictional identity and a “readymade artist” ready to receive input from her assistants. She assumes French identity by living in France, engaging the legacy of the French avant-garde, and by taking her name from a brand of French stationery that is

On this point see Jaleh Mansoor, “‘Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike’ or From Autonomy to Strike,” in Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 202.

1

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itself named after a popular French children’s song.2 The corporate moniker suggests that “the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—as displaced, deprived of use-value, and exchangeable as the products she makes.”3 Instead the artist deploys the tactic of “human strike”—a strike from subjective and political identifications, including dissident formations that are easily recuperated.4 While the interwar avant-garde collectives strove to remake subjectivity and representation, Claire Fontaine evacuates these categories, leading Pamela Lee to describe her as a “pseudo-collective”: a shell identity, a realpolitik and a “speculative gambit” premised on ambivalent restagings of past avant-garde forms.5 As in New York’s fashion-poetryconceptual art group Bernadette Corporation, or Walid Raad’s parafictional Lebanese collective The Atlas Group, in Claire Fontaine “the identities of the gambler and the historian converge, where banking on the prospects of the future is relative to the outcomes of the past.”6 In contrast with other such groups, however, Claire Fontaine confronts the symbolic exchange of art with the suggestion of menacing use-values. Many of Claire Fontaine’s works present modified exchange tokens. Change (2006; Figure 16.4), consists of twelve US quarters fitted with retractable box-cutter switchblades. This work removes money from circulation and construes the artwork as a concealed weapon, inviting the viewer to contemplate the disturbing implications of the coins’ hypothetical use, and generating discomfiting associations after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which brought the circulation of capital, goods and bodies to a momentary halt.7 The blades that protrude from these coins are reminiscent of the

Coming from backgrounds in Italian feminist theory and neo-conceptual art, Carnevale and Thornhill conceive of themselves as Claire Fontaine’s “assistants” in order to distance their control of the readymade group: “Claire Fontaine is composed only of assistants, its management is an empty center.” “Claire Fontaine Interviewed by John Kelsey.” Online: http://www.clairefontaine.ws/ pdf/jk_interview_eng.pdf. À la claire fontaine is a children’s song that tells the story of a man who goes to a mountain pond to lament a lost love. The Duchampian resonances of this song deepen the meaning to the group’s title. I thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. 3 Claire Fontaine, bio, Paris, 2009. Online: http://www.clairefontaine.ws/bio_fr.html (web pub). 4 Claire Fontaine writes, “Human strike attacks the economic, affective, sexual and emotional positions within which subjects are imprisoned. It provides the answer to the question ‘how do we become something other than what we are?’” “Human Strike Has Already Begun,” Human Strike Has Already Begun and Other Writings (Berlin: Mute, 2013), 29. 5 Lee writes, “An acute withdrawal of such representation is part of the collective’s speculative gambit and pragmatic organization; neither moralizing nor judgment is implied in naming such gestures ‘pseudo-collective.’ On the contrary, they are a form of realpolitik, an inversion of those long-cherished values accorded the terms of representation within the public sphere.” “On PseudoCollectivism, or, How to Be a Collective in the Age of the Consumer Sovereign,” Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 151–152. 6 Lee, Forgetting the Art World, 170. See Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years (Cologne: Walter König: 2014), and Walid Raad, Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped: The Raad Files in The Atlas Group Archive (Cologne: Walter König, 2007). 7 On this point see Ruba Katrib, Claire Fontaine: Economies (Miami: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2010), 15–40. 2

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Figure 16.4  Claire Fontaine, Change, 2006. Modified US quarters. Courtesy of Claire

Fontaine.

defamiliarizing effects of Surrealist objects such as Man Ray’s Gift (1921), which draws on the viewer’s tactile familiarity with the object. However, Change also juxtaposes the physical threat of the object with the abstraction of money and exchange, and collapses pocket change and political change by associating violence, money, and politics. The double entendre of the lapidary title thus reflects the physical transformation of the object, a recurring feature of Claire Fontaine’s works. Trust (Helene Winer) (2010; Figure 16.5) also construes the artwork as a financial transaction, and exposes aspects of the relationship between artist, dealer, and collector that are normally hidden from view. The work consists of a blank check signed by Helen Winer of Metro Pictures gallery, mounted and framed for display. Departing again from a lexical source, Trust (Helene Winer) gives the collector unconstrained access to the funds in the Metro Pictures bank account, and puts sensitive information such as the gallerist’s signature, account and routing numbers on display. The collector is presented with a choice: whether to withdraw funds from the gallery and thereby destroy the artwork, or to preserve it in a relationship of trust with the gallery. The collector speculates on the work’s potential for appreciation, the trust of funds available in the Metro Pictures bank account, and the value of their relationship with the dealer.

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Figure 16.5  Claire Fontaine, Trust (Helene Winer), 2010. Pen on printed paper, 16 1/4 × 12 1/4 in. (frame size). Courtesy of Claire Fontaine.

Although Trust (Helene Winer) denotes a specific set of temporal and financial relationships, it redeems the symbolic value of Duchamp’s famous Dada drawing Tzanck Check of 1919 (Figure 16.6). In order to pay his dentist in Paris, Duchamp

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Figure 16.6  Marcel Duchamp, Tzanck Check, 1919. Ink and rubberstamps on paper, 8 1/4

× 15 1/16 in. Copyright Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016.

famously drew the check at double its normal size, making out $115 from a fictive account at “The Teeth’s Loan & Trust Company Consolidated.” In a fair approximation of mechanical print, Duchamp drew the check by hand, including the red lettering marking it “original,” but in an ironic twist he used a stamp to create the background pattern that spells out “theteeth’sloanandtrustcompanyconsolida ted.” Duchamp’s signature authenticates the drawing, and authorizes the fictional promissory note. The check was clearly a forgery—the size, ridiculously named bank and similarity of the font and Duchamp’s handwriting were humorous giveaways. And whether or not it was worth any real money in 1919 was uncertain. However, Duchamp bought the drawing back from Tzanck twenty years later for the sum of 1,000 francs—a gesture that can be seen as a further manipulation of the work’s value, raising the question of whether Tzanck Check would have garnered the same price on the open market, or whether Tzanck would have sold it to anyone other than Duchamp.8 Tzanck Check deployed the symbolic alchemy of the readymade (an “imitated rectified readymade”—i.e., a handmade, altered readymade) without exposing Duchamp to any real financial risk, drawing instead on the trust (in both senses of the word) between artist and patron.9 Thierry de Duve has described Tzanck See Calvin Tompkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 220. Olav Velthuis associates Duchamp’s “trust” with the financial and aesthetic value of his “fiduciary” works: “The financial documents emphasize the fact that both money and art work are dependent on trust, while both need a social setting in order to function. Just as the paper money and checks we use in everyday transactions are fiduciary and do not embody any value themselves, Duchamp’s checks destroy any illusions we may still have had about the intrinsic value of art.” “Duchamp’s Financial Documents: Exchange as a Source of Value,” tout-fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online

8 9

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Check as an act of aesthetic and financial speculation departing from Duchamp’s aspiration to “make works that are not works of ‘art’”—to produce works without creating art as such, much as financiers at the time were inflating asset prices beyond their value in the unregulated interwar stock market. De Duve writes that if Tzanck accepted Duchamp’s drawing, it was because “the collector in him instinctively recognized the speculative potential of the deal.”10 George Baker has noted that a bank check has no inherent value, but like Duchamp’s “delay in glass” represents “a delay of exchange, a concretization of exchange as a process of delay and of postponement.”11 Most fundamentally, Jean-Joseph Goux has suggested that Tzanck Check literalizes Duchamp’s critique of painting and its symbolic economy as “a sort of scriptural, nominal currency whose value is entirely dependent on the theoretical and critical credit given to the one who issues and signs it.” Goux argues that the anti-aesthetic of the readymade vitiates ideal categories such as beauty with “aesthetico-financial” speculation on the contingency of value.12 Trust (Helen Winer), a work whose symbolic value places real money at risk, turns Duchamp’s ironic proposition from nearly a century before on its head; once again, the negativity of the anti-art precedent is reconstrued as a weaponized use-value lying dormant in the artwork. Redemptions continues Claire Fontaine’s expropriation of other artists’ forms, as well as her juxtaposition of use- and exchange-value at different stages of materialization and delay. As Tom McDonough has noted, the bags of aluminum cans in Redemptions evoke hanging sculptures by constructivists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Katarzyna Kobro, morphing them into fields of suspended refuse; Cady Noland’s This Piece Has No Title Yet (1989), Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (1966), as well as Carl Andre’s aluminum ingots and Broodthaers’ never-completed project Contract proposed by the financial section of the Department of Eagles concerning the sale of a kilogram of fine gold in the ingot (1971)—gold bars that doubled in value once stamped as artworks—are also close at hand.13 However, once again the proximate comparison is with Duchamp—in particular his design for the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, which included his work titled Twelve Hundred Coal Bags (Figure 16.7) that suspended 1,200 sacks over a coal brazier stove. The sacks Journal 1, no. 2 (May, 2000) (online: http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/velthuis. html). See also Francis Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: Money is no Object,” Art in America 91 no. 3 (March, 2003), 67–73 and “Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Defying the Art Market,” tout-fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal 2, no. 5 (April, 2003) (online: http://www.toutfait.com/ issues/volume2/issue_5/news/naumann/naumann2.html). 10 Thierry De Duve, Rosalind Krauss trans., “Marcel Duchamp, or The ‘Phynancier’ of Modern Life,” October 52 (Spring, 1990): 71. 11 George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2007), 131. On the aesthetics of speculation in relation to the readymade, see Pamela Lee, “How Money Looks: Man Ray’s ‘Perpetual Motif ’ and the Economy of Time,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics no. 36, Factura (Autumn, 1999): 243–252. 12 Jean-Joseph Goux, “Banking on Painting,” Qui Parle 5/1 (Fall/Winter 1991): 8, 4. 13 See Tom McDonough, “Expropriating Expropriation,” in Katrib, ed., Claire Fontaine: Economies, 7–12. On Broodthaers’ Contract see Maria Gilissen and Konrad Fischer, eds., Musée d’Art Moderne, Section Financière, Département des Aigles (Düsseldorf: Galerie Konrad Fischer, 1987).

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Figure 16.7  Marcel Duchamp, Twelve Hundred Coal Bags, 1938. International Surrealist Exhibition, Paris, installation view. Copyright Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016. were filled not with coal, but with newspaper and coal dust that sprinkled down into the gallery space; the stove was the only source of illumination in Duchamp’s “grotto,” and viewers were given flashlights with which to inspect the Surrealist pictures hung from department-store revolving doors that served as the exhibition architecture. Mannequins punctuated the space, along with an artificial lake and beach, beds and a soundtrack that mixed together insane asylum cries and German marching music.14 Duchamp transformed the elegantly appointed Galerie des Beaux-Arts into an upended industrial space, with heavy coal on the ceiling and lamp on the floor, countering Surrealist dream imagery and body doubles with industrial wage labor and commodity exchange (conjured by coal sacks and revolving doors).15 See Duchamp’s description in Pierre Cabanne: Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Viking Press, 1971) 80–81. See also Benjamin Buchloh, “The Dialectics of Design and Destruction: The Degenerate Art Exhibition (1937) and the Exhibition internationale du Surréalisme (1938),” October 150 (Fall, 2014): 49–62. 15 David Hopkins gives this confrontation between labor and the unconscious important historical context: “The 1930s in France had been a period of constant industrial unrest—which included coalminers’ strikes—and the period immediately prior to the 1938 exhibition saw the demise of 14

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While Duchamp’s coal sacks and stove were ironic inversions—the stove is illuminated with electric light, the sacks are filled with newspaper and dust—that gestured towards the industrial real, Claire Fontaine’s aluminum sacks bring industrial recycling into the gallery in a decidedly more literal fashion. Redemptions evokes a multitude of soda, beer, juice, and energy-drink consumers, contrasting the products’ promised satisfaction with their waste production, yet it also charts the transformation of aluminum from raw material to beverage container and back through the recycling economy. Much as Broodthaers attempted to map a field of speculative valuation by stamping a gold ingot as an artwork in the same year Nixon left the gold standard for a system of fiat money and floating exchange rates (1971), Redemptions contrasts the speculative valuations of art with the material value of raw aluminum. However, inasmuch as Claire Fontaine’s juxtaposition of tactical use-values and symbolic exchange is, in the end, subsumed and aestheticized by the art system, the value of raw materials such as aluminum is undermined by the real abstraction—the disruption of material conditions of existence by exchange relations—of twenty-first century finance capital, as a chance convergence in the aesthetico-financial field makes clear.16 On July 20, 2013, the New York Times published a story revealing speculative disruptions of the aluminum market and supply by the investment firm Goldman Sachs. When Goldman acquired Metro International in 2010—a Detroit company that warehouses more than a quarter of the aluminum in the United States—delivery times for raw aluminum ingots weighing three-quarters of a ton increased tenfold from six weeks to sixteen months. Goldman profited from this delay in two ways: by generating revenue from storage fees at the warehouses it owned, and by driving up aluminum prices across the economy. Most of the aluminum at Metro was owned not by manufacturers, but by speculators with short-term financing deals that they were incentivized to renew once their metal came due for shipment. The London Metal Exchange, which oversees metal markets, stipulated that at least 3,000 tons of aluminum must be moved from the Detroit warehouses each day, yet Goldman complied by moving the aluminum owned by speculators from one warehouse to another in “merry-go-round” deals to renew their financing instead of shipping on to manufacturing facilities. The New York Times wrote, “Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.” These renewals and consequent

the Popular Front, unable to cope with the general industrial and economic downturn. It could be argued that it is precisely this external world that was imported by Duchamp into the Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938, producing a weird collision of the symbolisation of inner (unconscious) space and brute social reality.” “Duchamp, Childhood, Work and Play: The Vernissage for First Papers of Surrealism, New York, 1942,” Tate Papers, no. 22 (Autumn, 2014). 16 Alberto Toscano describes real abstraction as “abstraction not as a mere mask, fantasy, or diversion, but as a force operative in the world … abstractions are not mental categories that ideally precede the concrete totality; they are real abstractions that are truly caught up in the social whole, the social relation.” “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction” Rethinking Marxism 20, no. 2 (March, 2008): 274–275.

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shipping delays raised the amount of rent charged to all customers, and because storage fees are factored into the spot price on the Exchange, Goldman’s baleful maneuver raised aluminum prices for producers and for consumers, increasing the price of a canned beverage by a fraction of a cent. Multiplied by the 90 billion aluminum cans consumed in the United States each year, the New York Times calculated that Goldman’s manipulations had cost consumers $5 billion over the previous three years.17 The revelation of Goldman’s vested interest in aluminum triggered a two-year investigation by a US Senate subcommittee into speculation by investment banks in commodities markets. Before the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act in 1999, banks were prohibited from owning non-financial businesses and from trading in commodities; however, recent deregulation has allowed banks to once again buy commodity-trading assets with approval from the Federal Reserve, giving them a physical stake in the circulation of commodities they securitize. Controlling points of circulation such as warehouses, pipelines, or ports gives banks ground-level, non-public information that would constitute illegal insider trading in the stock market.18 As one trader commented to the New York Times: “Information is worth money in the trading world and in commodities, the only way you get it is by being in the physical market.”19 In other words, Goldman’s physical control of the aluminum underlier and its circulation gave them a privileged position in the speculative markets.20 The New York Times exposé led to congressional hearings, a class action lawsuit from aluminum consumers, and Goldman’s eventual sale of Metro International to a Swiss investment firm.21 David Kocieniewski, “A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold,” New York Times, July 20, 2013, accessed June 1, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-aluminumbut-to-banks-pure-gold.html?pagewanted=all. 18 According to a report issued after a two-year investigation by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Increases in the Detroit queue length were highly correlated with increases in the Midwest Premium, which ultimately affected the entire aluminum market. Goldman, through its employees on the Metro Board of Directors, reviewed and approved each of the merry-go-round deals that lengthened the queue, and throughout the years in which the merry-go-round transactions took place, Goldman actively traded aluminum,” and, “Higher aluminum prices increased the value of aluminum stockpiles and could also be used to benefit trading activities in the aluminum market.” United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Wall Street Bank Involvement with Physical Commodities, Majority and Minority Staff Report,” released in conjunction with The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations November 20 and 21, 2014 hearing, 195, 199, accessed June 1, 2016, http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/media/subcommitteefinds-wall-street-commodities-actions-add-risk-to-economy-businesses-consumers. 19 New York Times, “A Shuffle of Aluminum.” 20 The Senate report concluded, “Goldman’s aluminum activities and its ownership of Metro illustrate troubling issues involving conflicts of interest, market distortions, and the potential to gain unfair trading advantages from non-public information, all of which can arise when a financial holding company owns a commodity-related business at the same time it is actively trading the same commodities. Since being acquired by Goldman, Metro’s practices have likely added billions of dollars in costs to a wide range of aluminum users, from beer makers to car manufacturers to defense companies that make warships for the Navy. It is past time for the Federal Reserve and other regulators, including the LME, to adopt and enforce needed safeguards on this high risk physical commodity activity,” 226. 21 See Christian Berthelsen and Ira Iosebashvili, “Goldman Sachs Sells Aluminum Business to Swiss Firm,” The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2014, accessed June 1, 2017, http://www.wsj.com/ articles/goldman-sachs-sells-aluminum-business-to-swiss-firm-1419279027. 17

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The ubiquity of aluminum in the global economy, its embeddedness in temporalities of industrial mining and product flows, makes it an attractive material underlier for speculative investments by firms such as Goldman Sachs. However, by disrupting circulation in order to drive up the price on the Exchange, Goldman acted against the very attribute that made aluminum the quintessentially future-oriented material of the twentieth century. Even before it was used on an industrial scale, aluminum was a symbol for speed, lightness and mobility: Jules Verne’s 1865 science fiction story From the Earth to the Moon envisions a spaceship made from aluminum because “it is easily wrought, it is very widely distributed, forming the basis of most of the rocks, [and it] is three times lighter than iron.”22 Indeed, the historical weight of steel in the nineteenth century finds its corollary in the gravity-defying effects of aluminum in automobiles, airplanes, spaceships, and computers during the twentieth century. Apple’s fetish for anodized aluminum surfaces, for instance, aptly conveys the metal’s significance for the contemporary technological sublime. Goldman thus not only subjugated material circulation to immaterial assets by blocking the supply of aluminum to producers, but subsumed a twentieth-century symbol of capitalist expansion into the specter of exchange value skyrocketing free from its material foundation. Alongside this exposé, Claire Fontaine’s Redemptions proffered a decidedly more down-to-earth means of redeeming the value of aluminum. California’s state-operated Redemptions (recycling) Centers return the five-cent deposit consumers pay for each aluminum can. In San Francisco the private recycling company Recology purchases the cans and melts them down with industrial smelters, removing impurities before forging them into industrial ingots. As aluminum beverage cans are made from a high-grade aluminum alloy, ingots made from recycled cans are in high demand, and are exponentially more valuable than the equivalent mass of scrap cans. (For instance, Recology opened a $38 million plant in San Francisco in 2003 to process the city’s 750 tons of single-stream recycling per day, which generates $220 million in revenues annually.)23 This profit-driven model suggests that aluminum cans are worth more than the five-cent California redemption legally tendered, a fact that has not escaped hobbyists, DIYers, survivalists, and other urban scavengers.24 Claire Fontaine’s improvised smelter points towards their tactics to redeem waste cans for more than their recycling value: by melting cans into small ingots and selling them to local Jules Verne, De la Terre à la Lune (Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1865). Cited in Mimi Sheller, Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 65. “Round and round it goes,” The Economist, February 26, 2009, accessed April 22, 2014, http:// www.economist.com/node/13135337. See also Luke Thomas, “Whistleblower: San Francisco Garbage Company Defrauded State of California Out of Millions,” FogcityJournal.com, May 30, 2012, accessed April 22, 2014, http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/4590/whistleblower-sanfrancisco-garbage-company-defrauded-state-of-california-out-of-millions/. 24 Survivalism is a movement stemming from the Cold War that emphasizes self-reliance and individual preparation for social or environmental catastrophe. “Do it yourself ” is an ethic of building, fixing, or modifying things without the aid of professionals or experts. See Richard G. Mitchell, Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Deric Shannon, The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012). 22

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machine shops, hardware stores, and smiths, these smelters are able to charge up to five times the spot price based on delivery of tons of pure metal ingots. According to one analysis of this inverted economy of scale, shops pay roughly five dollars per pound for aluminum ingot, whereas recycling companies pay fifty cents per pound for aluminum cans.25 In other words, by controlling their own means of production, home smelters are able to realize more value than they would by selling cans to industrial recycling companies. With this context we can see that Claire Fontaine’s redemption of avant-garde forms mimics the tactics that DIY smelters employ to resist subsumption by corporate recycling. Michel de Certeau’s notion of tactics as an “art of the weak” for those subjugated by coercive, territorializing institutions is relevant here: clever tricks of evasion, détournement (misappropriation) and mobility constitute a means of “making do” for those without access to the strategies that delimit and uphold the spaces and power.26 While Claire Fontaine’s tactics notionally undermine private ownership of artistic forms, de Certeau’s theory also captures the allegorical superimposition of downtrodden can collector and over-educated contemporary artist, establishing an avant-garde lineage that stretches beyond Duchamp to the nineteenth-century conflation of the bohemian and the urban scavenger. Charles Baudelaire famously described the rag-picker as a collector of “refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of industry.”27 “Stumbling like a poet in lost dreams,” the rag-picker survived by collecting the waste of Parisian society much as symbolist poets redeemed throwaway images and sensations from urban life.28 For Baudelaire and other nineteenth-century bohemians, whose privations strengthened their identification with society’s downtrodden, the rag-picker afforded a symbolic release from bourgeois sociality.29 Romantic associations notwithstanding, the rag-picker

See http://www.thefoundryzone.com/Income&Profits.htm. Accessed March 2014. “The space of the tactic is the space of the other … It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse. In short, a tactic is an art of the weak.” Michel de Certeau, “Making Do: Uses and Tactics,” The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 37. 27 Baudelaire, “On Wine and Hashish,” 1851, quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 48. 28 Charles Baudelaire, “Ragpickers’ Wine,” trans. C. F. MacIntyre. Accessed June 1, 2017, https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/54376. 29 As well as an etymological source of the term “lumpenproletariat,” for Marx rag-picking was emblematic of the viral depredations of capital: “One of the most shameful, dirtiest and worst paid jobs, a kind of labour on which women and young girls are by preference employed, is the sorting of rags. It is well known that Great Britain, apart from its own immense store of rags, is the emporium for the rag trade of the whole world. The rags flow in from Japan, from the most remote countries of South America, and from the Canary Islands. But the chief sources of supply are Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Belgium and Holland. They are used for manure, for making bed-flocks, for shoddy, and they serve as the raw material of paper. The rag-sorters are carriers for the spread of small-pox and other infectious diseases, and they themselves are the first victims.” Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 592–593. 25 26

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also served as an icon of Marx’s “lumpenproletariat,” the pseudo-class of “tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars” whose interests Louis Bonaparte expropriated to install the Second Empire’s finance aristocracy.30 The rag-picker thus symbolized romantic license and political impotence in equal measure, leading Benjamin to write of Baudelaire’s Second Empire bohemians, “The poets find the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse. This means that a common type is, as it were, superimposed upon their illustrious type. This new type is permeated by the features of the rag picker.”31 These references and resonances bring us to the difficult conclusion that Claire Fontaine is urging today’s art-world lumpenproletariat to redeem the aluminum in Redemptions and destroy the artwork in the name of class solidarity. However while Redemptions superimposes the can collector and the contemporary artist, use- and exchange-value, Goldman’s intervention in aluminum markets highlights the threat that speculation poses to considerations of materiality and use in today’s symbolic economy. Along with the double etymon, then, Redemptions offers a double episteme: on one hand a prospective politicization of Duchamp’s anti-art legacy, on the other symbolic surplus and value added of historical delay.32 Yet every impasse presents a choice: while we continue to speculate on the use-value of French avant-garde forms, Claire Fontaine invites us to cash Duchamp’s check, to redeem the readymade.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 75. 31 Walter Benjamin, “Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 8, 48. For a powerful contemporary use of this concept see Benjamin Buchloh, “Farewell to an Identity,” Artforum (December 2012), online: https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201210&id=37479. 32 On the double epistemology of speculation see Ole Bjerg, Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2014). 30

Index Adami, Valerio (1935) 229 Aeppli, Eva (1925–2015) 167 Aillaud, Gilles (1928–2005) 20–1 Althusser, Louis (1918–1990) 20, 195 n.10 Ansen, Allen (1922–2006) 172–3, 175, 177, 183–4 Aragon, Louis (1897–1982) 23 n.2, 26–7, 68, 104 Arman (born Armand Fernandez, 1928–2005) 115 n.45, 121–3, 126 n.28, 127–8, 131, 133–5, 167, 239 Arnason, H. Harvard 8–11 Arroyo, Eduardo (1937) 20 Atlan, Jean-Michel (1913–1960) 27, 33 Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962) 97, 149, 158 n.13 Bachollet, Jean-Paul 195, 209 Baj, Enrico (1924–2003) 19, 182 n.46 Bardot, Brigitte (1934) 101, 117 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980) 22, 199, 200, 202 Baselitz, Georg (1938) 9–12 Bataille, Georges (1897–1962) 186–7 Baudelaire, Charles (1821–1867) 45, 68, 71, 123, 125, 128–30, 281–82 Bazaine, Jean (1904–2001) 5, 15, 27 Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–1986) 15, 64, 101, 171, 188 n.96, 218 Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940) 123, 125–6, 129–30, 237, 282 Berlewi, Henryk (1894–1967) 140–41 Bernard, Pierre (1942–2015) 194 n.8, 195 n.9, 197, 199, 204, 206 Bernstein, Michèle (1932) 55, 78, 86, 188 n.99 Bertrand Dorléac, Laurence (1957) 124, 130, 132, 182 Blanchot, Maurice (1907–2003) 187–8, 231 Blanqui, Auguste (1805–1881) 71

Bloc, André (1896–1966) 110 Boltanski, Christian (1944) 16, 260 n.15 Bonaparte, Napoléon (1769–1821) 187 Bongard, Willi (1931–1985) 220 n.31, 221 Bonnard, Pierre (1867–1947) 4, 14, 97 Braque, Georges (1882–1963) 4, 14–15 Braudel, Fernand (1902–1985) 126 Breer, Robert (1926–2011) 137, 139–40, 150, 153–4 Breton, André (1896–1966) 27, 39 n.4, 80, 130, 174, 178–81, 187, 188 n.96, 189 Broodthaers, Marcel (1924–1976) 220, 233, 271, 276, 278 Buffet, Bernard (1928–1999) 10, 65, 87, 115 Buñuel, Luis (1900–1983) 43, 48, 102 Buren, Daniel (1938) 217, 230, 233, 238, 246, 259, 271 Bury, Pol (1922–2005) 137–42, 144, 146, 149, 153 n.74, 154, 228 Cadere, André (1934–1978) 227–36 Cage, John (1912–1992) 156–7, 165 Calle, Sophie (1953) 255–67 Callewaert, Marc (1927) 137 n.3, 139, 142–3, 154 Carrick, Jill 16, 121 n.5, 132–4 Castelli, Leo (1907–1999) 88 Certeau, Michel de (1926–1986) 131, 196, 281 Césaire, Aimé (1913–2008) 34, 178 n.26, 184 César (born César Baldaccini, 1921–1998) 122 n.9, 124 n.16, 135, 167 Chirac, Jacques (1932) 16 Christo (born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, 1935) and Jeanne-Claude (born Jeanne-Claude Denat, 1935–2009) 10, 88 Clair, Jean (born Gérard Régnier, 1938) 232, 238

284

Index

Claire Fontaine (Fulvia Carnevale, 1975 and James Thornhill 1967) 269–82 Clébert, Jean-Paul (1926–2011) 66–7 Clert, Iris (1917–1986) 65, 77, 90, 140 n.13, 142, 147–9, 153 n.74, 154 Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963) 6, 43, 47, 49, 51, 178 n.29 Corneille (born Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo, 1922–2010) 27 Courbet, Gustave (1819–1877) 24, 220 Dali, Salvador (1904–1989) 89, 102 Danto, Arthur (1924–2013) 1–2, 4, 7–8 David, Jacques-Louis (1748–1825) 24 Debord, Guy (1931–1994) 45, 48–52, 53–75, 78–80, 82–91, 130, 188 n.99, 208 Degas, Edgar (1834–1917) 257 Delerue, George (1925–1992) 97, 103 Denise-René (born Denise Bleibtreu, 1913–2012) 138–42, 145, 152 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004) 22, 238, 244, 257 Descargues, Pierre (1925–2012) 13, 165 Dewasne, Jean (1921–1999) 27, 32, 34 Dewey, John (1859–1952) 156–8, 167 Diop, Cheikh Anta (1923–1986) 34 Dorival, Bernard (1914–2003) 15 Dotremont, Christian (1922–1979) 27 Drouin, René (1905–1979) 77–9, 82–90 Dubuffet, Jean (1901–1985) 65, 87 Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968) 11, 89, 140 n.12, 163, 167, 174, 178, 180–82, 189, 269, 271–78, 281–82 Dufrêne, François (1930–1982) 41 n.9, 48, 52, 121–22, 124 n.16, 178, 179 n.30 Eisenstein, Sergei (1898–1948) 43 Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895) 29 Fairey, Shepard (1970) 254 Fautrier, Jean (1898–1964) 16, 87 Feldman, Hannah 19, 40 n.8, 48, 227 Filliou, Robert (1926–1987) 123 n.12, 239 Fischer, Hervé (1941) 213–25 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–1980) 63, 100 n.30

Fontana, Lucio (1899–1968) 10, 158 n.13 Forest, Fred (1933) 211–25 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984) 20, 22, 131, 190, 233 Fougeron, André (1913–1998) 11, 24, 26–7, 35–6 Francastel, Pierre (1900–1970) 15 Franco, Francisco (1892–1975) 14 Fried, Michael (1939) 163–4 Garaudy, Roger (1913–2012) 25, 208 Gaulle, Charles de (1890–1970) 17–18, 53, 68, 184, 187–8, 196 n.16, 197, 218, 232 n.13, 243 Godard, Jean-Luc (1930) 18, 102–4 Greco, Juliette (1927) 64 Greenberg, Clement (1909–1994) 3–4, 20–1, 164 n.30, 167 Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) 158 n.13, 217 Guggenheim, Peggy (1898–1979) 172 Guilbaut, Serge (1943) 12 Haacke, Hans (1936) 220 n.31, 221, 233 Hadj, Messali (1898–1974) 66, 184 Hahn, Otto (1928–1996) 213 Hains, Raymond (1926–2005) 67, 121, 122 n.9, 124 n.16, 130, 132, 135 Hartung, Hans (1904–1989) 27, 33–4 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène (Baron, 1809–1891) 68, 72, 127 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976) 156–8, 161, 164 Hess, Thomas (1920–1978) 6 Hundertwasser, Friedensreich (1928– 2000) 178–9, 182 Huysmans, Joris-Karl (1848–1916) 172–4, 177, 186 Huyssen, Andreas (1942) 256–7, 268 Isou, Isidore (born Jean-Isidor Goldstein, 1925–2007) 39–52, 55 Joan of Arc (1412–1431) 186–7 Johns, Jasper (1930) 157 Jorn, Asger (1914–1973) 27, 54 n.4, 55, 65, 68, 78–9

Index Jouffroy, Alain (1928–2015) 19, 169 n.2, 170, 171 n.3, 177–80, 182, 188 Journiac, Michel (1935–1995) 214–15 Judd, Donald (1928–1994) 7 Khanh, Emmanuelle (1937–2017) 115 Klein, Yves (1928–1962) 10–11, 65, 77–8, 89–90, 97, 115 n.45, 121, 122 n.9, 124 n.16, 126, 137, 138 n.5, 139, 140 n.13, 142, 144 n.34, 147–9, 158 n.13, 158 n.15, 167 Klüver, Billy (1927–2004) 127 Kobro, Katarzyna (1898–1951) 276 Kooning, Willem de (1904–1997) 5 Kramer, Hilton (1928–2012) 109–10 Krauss, Rosalind (1941) 163–4 Langlois, Henri (1914–1977) 44 Lapicque, Charles (1898–1988) 27 Lebel, Jean-Jacques (1936) 19, 169–91 Lecoeur, Auguste (1911–1992) 26–7, 35–6 Lee, Pamela 139, 141 n.18, 157–8, 272 Lefebvre, Henri (1901–1991) 29, 71, 188 n.96, 217 Léger, Fernand (1881–1955) 24, 27–8 Leiris, Michel (1901–1990) 188 n.96, 218 Lemaître, Maurice (1926) 41 n.9, 42–3, 45, 48–9 Levine, Les (1935) 220 n.31, 221, 224 n.38 LeWitt, Sol (1928–2007) 230 Limbour, Georges (1900–1970) 82, 85 Lublin, Léa (1929–1999) 220 n.31, 221 Luginbühl, Bernhard (1929–2011) 164 n.32, 166 n.37, 167 Mack, Heinz (1931) 137–40, 147–50 Malle, Louis (1932–1995) 16 Malraux, André (1901–1976) 68, 188, 213 Mandela, Nelson (1918–2013) 245 Manessier, Alfred (1911–1993) 15 Manet, Édouard (1832–1883) 257 Marcellin, Raymond (1914–2004) 218 Marchais, Georges (1920–1997) 204 Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979) 114, 118 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1876–1944) 39 Marker, Chris (1921–2012) 98 n.25, 243

285

Marx, Karl (1818–1883) 29, 34, 206, 209, 264, 281 n.29, 282 Massu, Jacques (1908–2002) 186 n.78, 187 Mathieu, Georges (1921–2012) 65, 91 Matisse, Henri (1869–1954) 4, 11, 14–15, 24, 28, 97, 102, 110 n.14 Maurois, André (1885–1967) 49 Man Ray (1890–1976) 174, 273 McDonough, Tom 208, 276 Ménétrier, Jacques (1908–1986) 112–13 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–1961) 20 Miehe, François 194–5, 197, 199–200, 209 Mitterrand, François (1916–1996) 42, 210, 211 Mollet-Viéville, Ghislain (1945) 227, 232 Morin, Edgar (1921) 98, 211 n.3 Motherwell, Robert (1915–1991) 6–7 Moulin, Jean (1899–1943) 246 Munari, Bruno (1907–1998) 137, 138 n.5, 139, 150–54 Neruda, Pablo (1904–1973) 244 Nevelson, Louise (1899–1988) 167 Newman, Barnett (1905–1970) 5, 229 Noiret, Joseph (1927–2012) 27 Nora, Pierre (1931) 239–40, 242, 244 O’Doherty, Brian (1928) 87 Oldenburg, Claes (1929) 165 n.35 Pane, Gina (1939–1990) 214–15 Papon, Maurice (1981–1997) 16, 187 Paris-Clavel, Gérard (1943) 194–9 Paz, Octavio (1914–1998) 178 n.26, 180 Pellicer, Pilar (1938) 172–3 Pétain, Philippe (1856–1951) 14, 113 n.32, 187 Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973) 4, 10, 17, 24, 26–8, 33, 98, 178 n.29, 239, 245, 262 Piene, Otto (1928–2014) 137–9, 140 n.14, 147–50 Piero della Francesca (1416–1492) 94 Pignon-Ernest, Ernest (1942) 19 n.59, 237–54 Pinot Gallizio, Giuseppe (1902–1964) 55, 77–91 Piper, Adrian (1948) 220 n.31, 221

286

Index

Plekhanov, Georgi (1856–1918) 30, 34 Pluchart, François (1937–1988) 213–15 Poliakoff, Serge (1906–1969) 5 Pollock, Jackson (1912–1956) 5, 165 n.35 Pomerand, Gabriel (born Pomerans, 1926–1972) 39 Pompidou, Georges (1911–1974) 218, 232, 237 Prévert, Pierre (1906–1988) 178 Rabanne, Paco (1934) 115 Ragon, Michel (1924) 6–7, 109–10 Rahv, Philip (1908–1973) 4 Rais, Gilles de (1405–1440) 186–7 Rauschenberg, Robert (1925–2008) 6, 11, 156–7 Raysse, Martial (1936) 115 n.45, 121, 124 n.16, 126 Recalcati, Antonio (1938) 19 Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) 255–9 Renoir, Jean (1894–1979) 44 Resnais, Alain (1922–2014) 33 n.52, 105, 188 n.96 Restany, Pierre (1930–2003) 23 n.3, 52, 91, 115, 121–24, 126 n.28, 146, 156 n.7, 213–15 Rimbaud, Arthur (1854–1891) 94 Rivers, Larry (1923–2002) 11, 167 Rivière, Jean-Marie (1926–1996) 114 Rodchencko, Aleksandr (1891–1956) 276 Roth, Dieter (1930–1998) 137, 138 n.5, 139, 150–54 Rothko, Mark (1903–1970) 5 Rousseau, Madeleine (1895–1980) 25, 27–8, 33–6 Ruhnau, Werner (1922–2015) 140 Ruhrberg, Karl (1924–2006) 8–11 Russolo, Luigi (1885–1947) 159 Sade, Marquis de (1740–1814) 62, 172, 174–7, 186–7, 190 Sagan, Françoise (1935–2004) 99–100, 115 Saint Phalle, Niki de (1930–2002) 121, 123 n.13, 124 n.16, 125, 131, 134–5, 167 Sandler, Irving (1925) 12 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980) 20, 64, 134 n.55, 187, 188 n.96, 189, 218

Saura, Antonio (1930–1998) 245 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913) 202 Savignac, Raymond (1907–2002) 199 Schöffer, Nicolas (1912–1992) 107–20, 139, 142–6 Schwitters, Kurt (1948) 131, 167, 174 Seuphor, Michel (1901–1999) 142 Solomon, Alan (1907–1970) 6 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1918–2008) 206 Soto, Jesús Rafael (1923–2005) 137, 138 n.5, 139–42, 147–50, 153 n.74, 167 Soulages, Pierre (1919) 5, 27 Soutif, Daniel 8, 10–11 Spoerri, Daniel (1930) 121, 122 n.9, 123, 131, 135, 137–40, 150–53, 166 n.37, 167 Staël, Nicolas de (1914–1955) 5, 97, 104 Stalin, Joseph (1978–1953) 23, 26–7, 30–1 Stil, André (1921–2004) 35–6 Szeemann, Harald (1933–2005) 215, 231, 234 Tal Coat, Pierre (1905–1985) 5 Tapié, Michel (1909–1987) 65 Taslitzky, Boris (1911–2005) 24, 28 n.28 Teyssèdre, Bernard (1930) 215, 220 n.31, 221 Thenot, Jean-Paul (1943) 213–25 Thoeren, Nina (1939–1960) 169, 172 Thorez, Maurice (1900–1964) 26, 28, 31, 34, 36 Tinguely, Jean (1925–1991) 109, 115 n.45, 121–28, 131, 135, 137–44, 153–66, 169–76, 182 n.46 Tomaszewski, Henryk (1914–2005) 194, 199 Tworkov, Jack (1900–1982) 4 Tzara, Tristan (1996–1953) 39 Uecker, Günther (1930) 137–9, 147–50 Van Hoeydonck, Paul (1925) 137–43, 154 Vaneigem, Raoul (1934) 55, 59, 72 Varda, Agnès (1928) 93–105 Vasarely, Victor (1906–1997) 139, 140 n.12, 142–3, 145–6, 152–4 Verne, Jules (1828–1905) 280 Veyne, Paul (1930) 243–4

Index Vieira da Silva, Maria Helena (1908–1992) 5 Villeglé, Jacques (born Mahé de la Villeglé, 1926) 67, 115 n.45, 121–22, 124 n.16, 130, 132, 135 Virilio, Paul (1932) 110 n.13, 238 Vostell, Wolf (1932–1998) 222 Warburg, Aby (1866–1929) 248, 250 Warhol, Andy (1928–1987) 116, 276

287

Weiner, Lawrence (1942) 230 Wiener, Norbert (1894–1964) 111 Wilde, Edy de (1919–2005) 5 Wilson, Sarah 14–15 Wols (born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, 1913–1951) 10–11, 87 Zhdanov, Andrei (1896–1948) 26, 29–30 Zola, Émile (1840–1902) 100