Table Of ContentContemporary French Art 1
FAUX TITRE
317
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises
publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman,
Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
Contemporary French Art 1
Eleven Studies
Michael Bishop
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2008
Maquette couverture : Aart Jan Bergshoeff
Illustration cover and page 6: Ben Vautier, Portrait de Duchamp (1986),
mixed technique on wood, 137 x 152 cm. Collection Dagny and
Jan Runnquist. By courtesy of the artist.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2418-2
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Printed in The Netherlands
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ..........................................................................................7
Truth and Infinity: Ben Vautier .....................................................9
Shooting for Transcendence: Niki de Saint Phalle .......................21
Baroque Minimalist?: François Morellet .....................................35
Sublimation, the Irreducible and the Sacred: Louise Bourgeois ....49
Seeing Being: Alexandre Hollan .................................................65
Spiralling, Infinity, Tautology: Claude Viallat .............................79
Ritual, Desire, Dys-Covering: Sophie Calle .................................95
Raggedness, Fusion and Silence: Bernard Pagès ........................111
Structure, Sensuality, Fable, Accompaniment:
Jean-Pierre Pincemin .................................................................127
Chimera, Caress, Sacred Implosion: Annette Messager .............143
Absence and Melancholia, Meaning and Beauty:
Gérard Titus-Carmel .................................................................159
Bibliography .............................................................................177
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PREFACE
A book such as this, composed of eleven studies devoted to
some of France’s greatest artists of the past fifty or so years, requires
arguably nothing or, at most, very little by way of introduction, and I
thus opt for the latter minimality. As I write this, I am just beginning
a second volume of such studies, centred similarly upon the work of
some eleven or twelve artists of comparable stature, intensity of pur-
pose and capacity – from Gérard Garouste, Colette Deblé and Geor-
ges Rousse to Christian Jaccard, Geneviève Asse and Philippe Favier.
Any conclusions of a global kind, moreover, I shall reserve until the
completion of this second volume. If I duck the issue here, it is
hardly, I trust it will be appreciated, out of idleness. I wish merely to
form a more ample picture in my mind before tackling a matter
which, I nevertheless confess, only marginally appeals and which I
shall ultimately assume as some self-imposed final critical duty. In-
dividuality, uniqueness, visceral and spiritual subjectivity, these are
what has drawn me to offer these eleven studies of artists who, more-
over, along with the many galleries and museums that reveal their
work, have, over the past two or three years, shown me great gener-
osities, even friendships, as well as considerable patience. Without
such extensive and continuing help, this book could not have been
written and my gratitude to all those who have so freely offered it is
correspondingly great. It is a book whose several studies, despite their
compactness, thus seek to do justice to such gestures of confidence
and exchange, delving, beyond yet essential evocation of the what of
surface and form, into the dramas of process, production, the how of
art, but, still more significantly by far, the swirling ontologies under-
pinning such doing, such stunningly personally lived, felt and con-
ceived poiein. In this, I have sought no reductive theorems or stable
equations, whilst remaining ever sensitive to Yves Bonnefoy’s for
me, fundamental cautionary self-querying: “Why write? Why paint?”
It is hoped that the pages that follow can help the reader, as they have
helped me, to sense the vast complexities and, at times, paradoxes to
which such questioning may alert us, thereby ever opening our medi-
tative parentheses rather than closing them.
Michael Bishop
Halifax, Nova Scotia
November, 2007
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TRUTH AND INFINITY: BEN VAUTIER
To look at, and even briefly explore, the extraordinary web-
site of Ben Vautier, a work of art in itself, both compositionally and
with respect to its capacity to encourage an ever newly burgeoning
appreciation of the self’s gently anarchical consciousness, is to realise
immediately something of the endlessly deferred and becoming truth
such (self-)consciousness can lay before us. The École de Nice, Psy,
Fluxus, The Incredible Catalogue raisonné, Radio Disinformation,
Daily Joke, Ben Poet, Unlimited Projects, Found Images, Bazart
Photos, Other People’s Archives, Ethnic Matters by Ben, Ben, For-
eign Affairs Minister, Contemporary Art and Theory, The Ivory
Coast, Ben Angry, My Journal, Become an Artist: such are a few of
the hundreds of microsites on offer, each containing teeming images
and thoughts, all creations, provocative and/or serious, ironic and/or
funky, poetic and/or kitschy, a stunning cascade of elements all testi-
fying to a life-long and lived desire to know the truth of an individual
freedom experienced in relation to what we choose to call the world,
others – and, most centrally, self. Did not Pierre Reverdy, revered by
those who may be less inclined to savour the quirky, ludic pushiness
of Ben Vautier, not write that his most crucial encounter by far was
that, ever ongoing, with himself?
Such an encounter with the truth of self Vautier seeks from
the earliest moments, in the 1950’s, with his painted writings that
continue today to play a major role in his poietic endeavours – poiein:
to do, make, without pre-established criteria or perspectives: “they
were objective truths, subjective truths, etc”, he comments with char-
acteristically serious off-handedness, adding, at once soberly and
undauntedly, that “truth is not easy to find” (CV, 50).1 This is not too
surprising, in effect, given Vautier’s own ongoing hesitations in re-
gard to what truth is, can be, whether it can be, whether what he is
doing, namely art, or being, namely himself, can be deemed truth or
untruth. Pas d’art sans vérité one of his often, and consciously, pur-
posedly, undated word-paintings tells us, 2 just as To Tell the Truth
argues his own determination to do so, be “truthful” – “natural” (Etre
1 CV: Je cherche la vérité . See the Selected Bibliography for full details of refer-
ences.
2 Tongue-in-cheek dates are often given in catalogues: cf. Pas datée (1965) despite,
elsewhere, the injunction: anti-dater.
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