On Philippe Thomas with interventions by Bernadette Corporation | DIS | Emily Segal. G.C.A. at Project Native Informant
The more foreseeable outcomes of the Barthesian “death of the author” [1] are in Philippe Thomas’s case preempted by an anticipatory, quasi-Rimbaldian, multifaceted flirtation with invisibility (Adrian Dannatt’s obituary of the artist begins: “Philippe Thomas ceased to exist long before he died. Before vanishing physically, at the age of 44, he had already disappeared altogether from the art world, not through neglect but rather as a deliberate strategy.”). This flirtation with invisibility took/takes the form of a business as well as a Duchampian game; or rather, a business that was, itself, a kind of “game”: Readymades Belong To Everyone®.
One text claims that his body of work is “made up of images of reality ‘perverted’ by the effects of fiction” but images of reality are always already perverted, inherently, by the myriad valences of presentation, representation, interpretation, reinterpretation and so on.
Is it not, therefore, that which is most markedly illusory, in any account of the real, that discloses (inasmuch as it can be disclosed at all) what is real by highlighting what isn’t (itself)?
It is with these and other similar questions in mind that an ideal viewer of the show—Philippe Thomas with interventions by Bernadette Corporation | DIS | Emily Segal. G.C.A. at Project Native Informant—will co-produce the show by means of consumption.
I may not be the ideal viewer of the show (which ends 9 July 2016) for a number of reasons I need not reveal. Nevertheless, I’ve been interested—as a footnote in the press release hypothesizes Thomas was—in the deliberate division and dissemination of self, oeuvre, oeuvre-as-self, and self-as-oeuvre as a defensive measure taken to protect a fragile-and-already-fractured ipseity from institutional dismemberment.
Simplechin Shavenbald’s [2] Seesong [3] is sewn into the relational fabric of the happenstances that permeate/d Philippe Thomas’s practice; a practice that’s at once the most and the least seditious of all, perhaps, since it turns “exhibition and conservation devices, and market conventions into what is to be shown, conserved, and sold”.
Exhibition and conservation devices and market conventions are, of course, not inconsequential tools of the Endless Revelation of Art’s Selves in This World, but have been also been used to conceal Art’s Selves. This very concealment is itself an iteration one of Art’s Selves; one of the paradoxes that are ever at work in the Endless Revelation. But lest we confuse stockings for legs, Thomas and his readymade collaborators insist upon the art world’s fabrics’ [exhibition/conservation devices, market conventions] transparency. Thought-provoking and alluring as the gesture was, in its way, Christo and Jeanne-Claude [4] were right not to keep the Reichstag permanently wrapped.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
[2] Simplechin Shavenbald – From time to time, this mercurial trickster (who’s behind much of what happens in the contemporary art world) reveals himself in his multifaceted near-entirety (his multifaceted near-entirety is, in a sense, his entirety—or as close to his entirety as can be—given the semi-regrettable fact that he is, quintessentially, non-entire): Dada [anti-]art was one such instance (during his awkward teenage years) as was Fluxus (a kind of “midlife crisis”). Shavenbald has ridden the career of Jeff Koons into semi-senility, and is now not at all unlike a madness-addled jack-in-the-box darting rowdily out of this and that, singing his infamous Seesong.
[3] Seesong – A “song” imparted via art, it is Simplechin Shavenbald’s gift to all of us. It refreshes human minds by means of much-needed disorientation, destabilization, and so on. It’s an imprecise but nevertheless particular reality of the Endless Revelation of Art’s Selves in This World. Dada and Fluxus artists were particularly aware of Simplechin Shavenbald and his Seesong.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christo_and_Jeanne-Claude
