#newaesthetics

[two88am]

[johannbaronlanteigne]

Dataworship Shrine for vertical LCD.

[andreneverdie]

rust

[two88am]

[porterenaudinprogress]

STUDIO DIARY - MAY 2020

Friday 8th May 2020

The last month, I've decided to write my studio diary in English. Maybe, this decision can seem to be a pretension to look like more ''international''. But, over and above the fact that I feel my work can be better welcomed in Anglo-Saxon countries than in France, it's for me a challenge to try to create my language. I don't want to write like a native speaker -I can't- but I want to write as somebody feeling free -by ignorance of course- to organize words and sentences as he wants. For sure, any native never writes really as a native because as Deleuze said, the writer always tries to stutter the language. And as a closer friend of mine often says, English is more an intestine language than french, it's the language of empiricism and of experiential approach par excellence. I also think that this longing comes to render my expression much less ampoulé. Write in English will help me to cushion the fall of a living thought on the floor of words. Maybe, French remains for me a language use as a power to escape from my native social environment. With English, that I read every day -through John Dewey's work- I'm ready to construct my own English made of my french winding way of think. In English, I write better hic et nunc.

There's many months ago, I wanted to develop mural sculptural propositions inspired by cameo craft. My longing was to make portraits of women. In this framework, I was very interested in Juno Ludovisi. I don't know exactly the perfect sense of this longing. I think it was made of an accumulation of discoveries and feelings. It was difficult for me to assume this idea to make portraits of women because I always depreciate this kind of process often reinforcing sexist biases, especially when it's an initiative of a man. I just say that feminity isn't feminism and isn't a female being. I was excited by the power of a word that I have invented: FRAUEUER composed of two German words: Frau and Feuer. Anyway, I made an experimentation with red cement and white plaster because I wanted to interrogate the cameo aesthetic in using my current building materials. Then, I forget this idea, dropping out my experiment in the studio. And now, for me, it's obvious that what I'm developing with WIND OF CHANGE is enough mature to reinvest this exploration about my fake cameo craft. For me, I'm always interested to explore ''hackneyed" aesthetic. I like to develop a historical filiation with sculptural craft that doesn't participate in the big path of art history. And honestly, when I was a child, I remember that my mother was very keen on medallions with cameo and that, among a big broken cake in the form of singer loved by my parents -showcased in the living room- and other stuff I'll describe the next time, the cameo was one my first sculptural emotion, on the same level that the white antic sculptures of the art and history museum of my birthplace.

Sunday 10th May 2020

Yesterday, I had a talk with SIAM about my series in progress, WIND OF CHANGE. I told her my hanging difficulties questionings. Because, at first, I thought add kitchen fix behind each sculptural proposition to hang to the wall as a classic art set up and then I was afraid by the tension between the weight of the artwork and its fragility. Then I thought as a hanging used for NIHIL #1 but at the same time, this hanging device  was included, if I can say, in the aesthetic finality of artwork. By the hazard of my web researches, I discovered the artist Richard Starbuck and his series named "Sludgegiggle" and "Dirtyscratchings" paintings which is inspiring to question deeper this essential aspect of WIND OF CHANGE. And SIAM told me she found the current hanging just perfect, id est, that each sculptural proposition is leaned against the wall. And when she told me that, I discovered that was true, not just for the reason she had given me -for her, these artworks look like between steles and paying cards- but it was consistent in my sculptural genealogy of gestures, always connected with the ground.

I'd beginning to read a book about research-creation in art, and all the day I've thought about what's my method. For a very practical description: when I arrived at the studio, my head was confusing by this new terrific technology: robot-dog in Singapore to ''help'' to keep a good social distancing at the occasion of the current health crisis. I need to draw something, it was clear. Then I've taken a paper and I've began to form a shape on the paper with my usual material: povidone-iodine, coal, and red clay. At present, all my work is invaded by a landscape made of ''uddered'' mountains. It's not automatic but I felt that it was exactly the necessary context to let emerge my trouble. And after, I've thought about this robot-dog... I was afraid to draw a dirty kitsch -very ''literal''- robot-dog. And I thought about a book which dragged in my studio about the nature representation in Ancient Egyptian art. And I was reminded of Anubis and the shape of typical Egyptian dog. In this way appeared a very interesting mythological short circuit. Furthermore, I'm sure that an idea is better when it is connected with something participating in his past. When I was between 12 and 18 I was fascinated by ancient Egypt as a kid of course but it was enough significant to settle an aesthetic layer in my grasp of the world. I've learned from 17 to 22 the ancient hieroglyphic language. When I started drawing, I made an association with the meat-grinder pattern. At the end of my work, I discovered something really interesting to develop because it proposes a new synthesis or new way which to lead me closer to the solution. You know the solution to the problem, that each of us has and for which you have, in fine, any resolution. But you're always searching for a short cut that you never found as David Vincent in ''The Invaders''! To finish, temporarily, I know my next painting work participating in my expanded sculptural practice and I make the connexion with a recovered material: disposable paper packages for food. In my work, I have always had an obsession with the relation between my height and the golden ratio... So, I've defined a format for the coming artwork (2.25 x 14.92 ft) Now, I've to categorize all these steps, maybe to define a method.

Friday 15th May 2020

A proposition for open call about Power and Invisible lines of power

Recognition #1 is a participative and immersive sounded sculptural proposition consisting of a very basic architectural layout in space, emerging as a drawing. This shape acts as a frontier in space, a delimitation very open -because without walls and roof- and closed at the same time - because very strong and hard in reason of its materiology-.

• This space is made of concrete iron bars, anti-bird spikes plaster. It remains minimalist sculptors as Toni Grand and Eva Hesse which are masters for me.

• On the floor, inside this space, there's an accumulation of little faces made in clay with a cast of my face.

• At every exterior corners of this architecture, there's a bust, hands crossed on the chest, with bird spikes in place of the head. Every bust is sounded and plays -with an inner speaker- an electronic guitar riff in a loop. They are like towers.

• Inside the space, there are three standing meat grinders.

All the described elements are inscribed in a genealogy of my work.

• From 2015, I've used anti-bird spikes to stabilize forms evoking something between the architectural waste and the animal. These forms acted like very abstract Schmerzensmann. Anti-bird spike is typically the avatar of the expression of a border between the scene and the obscene look that builds social space. Pigeon or homeless, these elements characterize a distancing of the bodies within the social body. • In this continuity in last December, in Milan, I was very impressed by old broken statues hung in height and covered in place of the head of this anti-bird spikes. In this sculptural proposition, each corner is like a guardian, that is to say, the one who fixes the invisible lines between the world which must be visible -the scene- and the one which must be hidden -the obscene-. It guards what it must be inside and outside the line of the authorized world in which the ''rights holders'' have power. These guardians ''utter'' a repetitive riff of guitar which grows back as much as it welcomes. This riff is extracted from a song I'm working on and I'll be broadcasting soon. It's named CRISIS. For me, a sculpture can become a song and vice versa. Here the sound reinforces the holist aspect of this space acting as an environment between the sacred enclosure of a temple and the scenic space for a rock band to give its show.

• While the guardians are headless, faceless; on the floor, there's an accumulation of little faces. From 2011, I've stabilized different sculptural propositions using this form. They are part of the same time in the build-becoming of the world as a sediment made  of individualities and in the dust-becoming of the world which people disappear because reified by time. Memory is a struggle against the natural reification of conscious beings.

• The meat grinder made its first appearance in my work in 2016. Since then, it has come up regularly as the ambivalent symbol of the perpetual collapse of things. A kind of crossed-out God as the sociologist Bruno Latour would say (c.f. We Have Never Been Modern) and at the same time as a representation of the motor of thermo-industrial society which increases the capacity of individuals to individuate in treating all other beings as if they were inert matter. These three standing meat grinders are diffusers of sound matter.

Recognition #1 is also a performative proposition. Before the event, I will collect sound matter in the streets of Singapore, based on a question that I will ask passers-by. When would you be ready to rise up? This question is very important to me because it directly concerns power and the shadow or light it casts on the demarcations that take place between people and social groups, these invisible lines. I draw this question from a reflection by Michel Foucault - about the role of the intellectual in society- which is very precious to me as an artist and a citizen. 

“The intellectual does not have to be the legislator, to make the law, does not have to say what must happen. I believe that its role is precisely to perpetually show how what seems to go without saying in what makes our daily life is arbitrary and fragile and that we can always rise up. And that there are perpetually and everywhere reasons not to accept it, reality as it is given and proposed to us.” (Michel Foucault)

To ask myself this question acts for me as a revealer of the invisible lines which enclose people in relationships of powers that consume them because they do not emancipate them. This collected sound matter will be accessible by turning the cranks of the meat grinders. Each visitor will be able to activate this mechanism. For the collection of this sound matter, I will, therefore, go to meet people, dressed in a suit on which I have been working for a few months. It is a full suit (shoe, mask, gloves, jumpsuit) bristling with anti-bird spikes. This costume, between zentei (ぜ ん て い) and bacteriological equipment, is being designed for the song CRISIS. 

So I foresee a performance during which I will invite two people from the public to slip into costumes similar to mine, bristling with anti-bird spikes, to join me in this sculptural and sounded space to manipulate and experience -in the rapprochement and the remoteness- of all the materials by the exhaustion of the architectural and sound structure of the space.

Recognition #1 is very inspired by the book of the philosopher Axel Honneth named Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. From the hypotheses of Lukács for whom reification “constitutes a distorting ''Stance'' or mode of behavior that is so widespread in capitalist societies that it can be described as ''second nature''” (Axel Honneth, p. 25) whom he confronts with the theories of Heidegger and John Dewey. He is interested in the question of experience which precedes knowledge and which is the essential place for all ethical or ''sympathetic'' (in the sense of empathy) relationships with the other. In short, it is a question of fighting against the processes of reification which is the process of multiplication of invisible lines through which people try to sneak. Let us have for image the jewel protected by laser beams, the thief tries to avoid them to seize the good so much coveted without giving the alarm. Here the coveted good is, let us say it naively, a better life, at the risk of which the bodies of the individuals are cut off by the multiple invisible lines which categorize and assign them, thus dispossessing them of the action and the expressiveness of the world. We suffer from the opposition too much between subject and object which is the primary cause of the reification of beings.

“Like Lukács and Heidegger, Dewey is skeptical of the traditional view according to which our primary relationship to the world is constituted by a neutral confrontation with an object to be understood. Although he neither uses the concept of reification to characterize this doctrine nor shares the pathos of Heidegger’s worldview as far as the phenomenon that he is describing is concerned, Dewey agrees with these two thinkers that the predominance of the subject-object model cannot help but leave its impression on society’s conception of itself. He asserts with Heidegger and Lukács that the longer we hold on to the traditional opposition of subject and object, the more our life practices will be damaged, since cognition and feelings, theory and practice, science and art will thereby be more and more torn apart.” (Axel Honneth, pp. 49/50)

And as such we can say that modernity is the industrial tracer of invisible lines within the experiential world from the idea that the past belongs to natural such therefore the future always promises to make us cultural, civilized:

“The asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes an asymmetry between past and future. The past was the confusion of things and men; the future is what will no longer confuse them. Modernization consists in continually exiting from an obscure age that mingled the needs of society with scientific truth, in order to enter into a new age that will finally distinguish clearly what belongs to atemporal nature and what comes from humans, what depends on things and what belongs to signs.” (Bruno Latour, p. 77) 

Today we know the disasters of the invisible lines drawn by human subjects on the one hand and non-human objects on the other, we prevent ourselves from thinking as the hybrids produced by genetic and technological power.

Recognition #1 assumes the possibility of an emotional field before knowledge, this artwork acts as a presentiment, an existential mud aiming to bring us closer to each other, to mock invisible lines, to cross them ... This artwork “is concerned with arguing for the general priority enjoyed by a particular stance of engagement or recognition over all other forms of relating to the world; here I am concerned with showing that emotional receptivity comes before the transition to cognition of intersubjectively given objects in a strictly temporal sense”. (Axel Honneth, p. 45)

These invisible lines drawn by modernity that we must cross and this all the more since we save a distance from each other, that we all assume more or more consciously the role of guardian of the invisible lines which reifies us.

• Axel Honneth Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford University Press, 2008

• Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993, (original edition in 1991),  translated by Catherine Porter

• Michel Foucault, « ENTRETIEN INEDIT AVEC MICHEL FOUCAULT 1979 par   Farès Sassine »,  in le blog de Farès Sassine  Assassines, le 22/08/2014

available at this address: https://fares-sassine.blogspot.com/2014/08/entretien-inedit-avec-michel-foucault.html- translated by my very own self!

Saturday 23rd may 2020

Artists have a political commitment when they make pieces of art and they want to commit, through them, an alterity process. When this reception has happened, in the approach of Dewey1, these pieces of art become artworks. This artist doesn't look for an immediate reception. The public cannot exist for the moment and maybe never. But, profoundly, this inner and intimate commitment distinguishes the a-politic-artist of the politic-artist. That's the reason why it is so difficult for people who aren't artists to comprehend why a politic-artist -submerged in the deepest of anonymity, needs to endeavor that his/her work be expected. These people think that the unknown politic-artist -implied for them who doesn't sell his/her pieces of art in the very narrow international corridor of art market- needs to continue to work to create this public. The artist doesn't create to satisfy people, it doesn't look for customers, even if S/he has them... No, S/he is perpetually looking for a face to which to address his/her interpretation of the world. The politic-artist has any specific message or dogma to propose, is looking for a hermeneutic community based on his/her world embodiment. That's the reason why the politic-artist doesn't create to have fun during a long Sunday. (S)He creates for all faces that S/he doesn't see but who already are gazing at him/her. The politic-artist is happy with one thing, to make sense with this quest. Who's the a-politic-artist? Maybe, this one in confusion between customers and the public or between something-we-want-to-affirm and affirm-that-something-wants... I believe all artists are politic, even if they don't meet anybody or they don't want to explain that moves him/her in this quest. S/he hasn't to be social or to have a concrete political view on human organization of this time. S/he is a mediator between ghosts. 99,99% of our environment is made of ghosts. Culture is the legacy of dead and the artist proposes a path between the living of the past and the ghosts of the future. That's how I'm an artist.

1. “A work of art no matter how old and classic is actually, not just potentially, a work of art when it lives in some individualized experience. As a piece of parchment, of marble, of canvas, it remains (subject to the ravages of time) self-identical throughout the ages. But as a work of art, it is recreated every time it is esthetically experienced. No one doubts this fact in the rendering of a musical score; no one supposes that the lines and dots on paper are more than the recorded means of evoking the work of art. But what is true of it is equally true of the Parthenon as a building. It is absurd to ask what an artist ‘’really’’ meant by his product: he himself would find different meanings in it at different days and hours and in different stages of his own development. If he could be articulate, he would say ‘’I meant just that, and that means whatever you or anyone can honestly, that is in virtue of your own vital experience, get out of it.’’ Any other idea makes the boasted ‘‘universality’’ of the work of art a synonym for

monotonous identity. The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience.”

John Dewey, Art as Experience, First Perigee Printing, 1980, (first edition in 1934), pp. 108/109

[newyorkisdead]

"Framework for a New Aesthetic in a Global Pandemic Future" Part 2: Early Lighting Experiments, Failures, Discoveries, & Collaborations #newaesthetics #covid19 #performanceart #interdisciplinary #coronafuture #pandemicfutures #adhoceconomy

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[dadasoulface]

"Untitled Unknown" 2020 Mixedmedia Original: 8" x 8" On paper . . . . . #DADASOULFACE #mixedmediaartwork #collageonpaper #newaesthetics #thoughtsofanafrosurrealist #contemporaryartwork #8x8 (at Chicago metropolitan area) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-XrWYNg0fj/?igshid=1vdsiyyo8ag47

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