#interruptionstartseverything

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François Durif, Interruption Starts Everything, Tbilisi Project, 2018 Photo : Louis Rollinde

[abridurif]

François Durif, Interruption Starts Everything, Tbilisi Project, 2018 photo : Louis rollinde

[abridurif]

François Durif, Interruption starts everything, Tbilisi Project, 2018 Photo: Louis Rollinde

[abridurif]

François Durif, Interruption Starts Everything, Tbilisi Project, 2018 Photo: Louis Rollinde

[abridurif]

François Durif, Interruption starts everything, Tbilisi Project, 2018 Photo: Louis Rollinde

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François Durif, Interruption Starts Everything, Tbilisi Art Fair, 2018 Photo: Louis Rollinde

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Everything starts

Everything starts. « Interruption starts everything. » Paul Valery, his sentence, came to my mind. How? I had no clue then about the way to go. I had to go. To Tbilisi. Just as a prescience of what was to occur: the answer to all the trouble I personally generate. When I show myself, I go through hopelessness, eagerness; yes, I do sometimes. Creating is making something out of the impossible. The finished piece is nothing but a residue. The performance in itself is but a bare construction of the mind, a reality test. Disruption and resumption. The artist moves forward in successive layers. Michaux tells me: « Loosening the situation, he frees hundreds of others, period situations, or situations in times yet only starting. » Teleported by my own imagination on a booth in Tbilisi Art Fair, I make up plans, scenari. I bump into upcoming reality: what I'd thought of instantly vanishes. It doesn't make sense. I had the idea of showing up dressed as a porter, roaming the alleys, hauling around boxes on a trolley. What the hell does that mean would've been the question in this powerfully religious country. 2003, the Rose revolution. 2004, new flag. Make white cardboard boxes with one side claiming « INTERRUPTION STARTS EVERYTHING », the other bearing a red tape: NO! Each empty box would belong to one visitor: NO! Deadline too close, I have to give up. Delivery of the 400 white cardboard boxes pallet, each box 40x30x25 cm, I give up. Nothing works! The worse the better! Shilly-shally here you go! The Paul Valery's sentence handwritten on one of the booth walls. Translated into all languages spoken there: LITHUANIAN, ARMENIAN, SPANISH, GERMAN, IRANIAN, RUSSIAN, AZERI, GEORGIAN, YES! SO THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST, INDEED! Well, let’s start it all over again.

One morning, on a Wednesday, in a sudden fit of sadness, I call l’ami Theo: Write it down, he says... the whole process! My friend is the one who takes me away from the worse, puts me back to work. I take on being an artist without a work. The artist with no work. And no dealer, he's stuck in Paris! I take that on also, I'll hold on, we'll run the booth. Christian-Louis and I, together. There I'll show myself sort of bare, busy with small things. Where is the artist’s place here, on a fair? Art fairs are not fair, so then what if I fail? But we'll fight anyway!

« An art fair is no place for an artist. An art fair is no place for an artist. » Baldessari, as quoted by my local correspondent in Moscow, Eric Schlosser, that's all fine. In the Tbilisi Art Fair, as in Baldessari's joke, I'm a kid barging into his parents’ bedroom while they’re having sex. Coitus interruptus. Primal scene the artist seizes to make something else out of it: Étant donnés.

Surrealism for Benjamin, the originally bourgeois artist’s got guts to interrupt his « artistic career » and recover some leeway in « a place a hundred per cent held by images ». There is a life outside art, a life he has access to through the gesture of renouncement. « Interrupting what has really started is ending in defeat, but not suppressing the start. » Levinas’ sentence ended my first writing in Fine Art school.

Every historical uprising consists in interrupting History. A performance is never where you expect it to be, so it is. Here, it comes down to the story told just before. The artist stripped bare by his own intentions. All that's left to do is pick yourself up, welcoming what happens, each and every unpredicted event.

On the edge of yourself, you can shed your skin.

Nothing is as unfair as a fair.

Where I can fail, there I shall sail.

TBILISI ? YES !

 Credits:

Original music by François Durif with the friendly participation of Louis Rollinde

Scansion: Theo-Mario Coppola

On an original music by Eric Schlosser

Sets: TAF

Translation: Eléonore Marie Espargilière and Hélène Ladjadj

Production: Nivet-Carzon Gallery

With the friendly cooperation of the ancestors: Marcel Duchamp, Paul Valéry, Henri Michaux, Emmanuel Levinas, Marcel Broodthaers, John Baldessari, Boris Lehman and Otar Iosseliani

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François Durif, Interruption starts everything, Tbilisi Project, 2018 Photo: Louis Rollinde