Conserving and/or Altering

by Francis LaPan
Original text published in Parcours désordonné

Translation by Susan Avon

He experiences life like a tightrope walker without a net who, each time, crosses the wire of reason and of the absurd. And, each time on the wire, he is caught up in the circus, solemn, alone, elegant atop his ephemeral life. Then suddenly, right under his feet, that life becomes a sharp blade. He feels as though he is hovering on the edge of a "near death experience:" dizzy, in all senses of the word. He imagines himself dying in the arms of others then, suddenly, he loses his balance...

And as he is falling he sees his reflection growing bigger and bigger in all those strained, captive eyes. He falls into those eyes that form the gaze of the world. It is only then that he is reincarnated, that he shares and that he finds himself safe and sound.

The group

Our group of artists has gone through a three-year lab on the collection which it decided in the end to call: "Parcours désordonné," a title which, at first glance, can connote a sort of unbridled pillaging with probably a pinch of delinquency, terms often associated, rightly or wrongly, with artists who demonstrate their creativity through very diverse experiences.

As for me, I like to see in the quick consensus on the title something quite private which, in the sub-text, is along the lines of several happy findings about the collection.

These days, artists are accomplices of multiple-purpose works. It is rather the range of ideas and meanings that shifts. The era of "open work" is that of personal interpretation and of free associations... We acknowledge, at least in relation to the arts and to the act of creating, that one has to flirt with chance and trust one's instincts. It is with these principles that you have to work, that is to say, they have a role and a function in the creative process and in the meaning of the work. Hence you have to know when to play with them, to use them at the right time, it is a stance on the lookout for the right timing.

There are those artists for whom the notion of "coincidence" is the mainspring of their creative process. John Cage, for example, had a very Orientalist philosophical approach where he saw the present as a creative occurrence where everything is in sync, a moment to connect up with things and appreciate them. For him, that was the art of living. The central issue of his work lay in the imitation of nature and how it works and structures various movements: number games, multiples and random functions ("chance operation") would incite "convertible" instants of "convergence." Groupings of objects relinquish their unidimensional and utilitarian purposes to turn into things for the senses and the spirit: a perfectly inverted collection. There is a meeting of objects to celebrate the ephemeral and to preserve only its energy.

John Cage used to say that the aim of art was not "self-expression" but rather "self-alteration," in the sense that one had to become... "become more open," "change" by subsisting life-transforming experiences. He became friends with Marcel Duchamp and both shared the conviction that "the most difficult thing for everyone is to get rid of their personal notions of order and taste."

In this we are getting closer to our lab on the collection and the expression fits to translate the state of mind with which we broached the reflection on and the organization of the experience. Parcours désordonné gives the impression that we worked with a general openness toward all the primary concepts of nature and of discovery games with the objects.

But if, as creators, we now know how to get in touch with our inner child who has never left and whom we consider necessary and vital, it doesn't alter the fact that the inner child changes considerably when it meets up with the adult and the artist within. What is waiting within ourselves, what may be ready to be discovered and to reveal itself, would speak of the same movement of activity and of openness with the added dimension of the sensation and/or awareness of life's paradoxes. "Poetic wandering" would best describe this displacement. "In the experience the poet knows that the split is not between body and soul but between man and himself" says Jean-François Pirson. ^[1] "When reality is delivered (...) in the rough, the concrete is offered without unity." ^[2]

Object

Our relationship with the world is a living experience, incarnate in a situation, represented in our imagination and given media coverage by something that becomes object and exchange possibility.

Between the thing and the object, there is a world that goes from the general to the particular. Things sometimes share an undifferentiated shifting space with us. It can therefore be a question of everything that separates us and keeps us at a distance, aloof. Things do not matter to us sometimes when we are self-absorbed. At other times, in and amongst them, we are comfortable, at ease, in different neutral or floating states. They then lend a texture, a skin to our dreams and to our free thoughts, they are part of our oceanic feelings.

But as soon as a need occurs, our mood and feelings change, another perception suddenly awakens. Everything becomes abominably present.

Motionless, we stand before the world as though before a text to read. If we remain motionless in front of this world, it will resemble a mountain of accumulated stories, lives, things, heterogenous and anachronistic signs.

We are swept along by the need to see who we are in the vastness of knowledge and we feel powerless to make sense of the babble.

Today, it happens that the world looks like rows of things. Go see in the library that the direction adheres to line, to defilade. We follow points of reference and analogies. Actions displace things, forcing a selective and contextual rereading which discloses, as and when required, possible meanings, possible orders.

(Latin, objectum) What is placed in front of of obicere "to throw (jacere) in the way." ^[3]

The problematic of an object is to suddenly be in front of a thing with which I have a distinctly separate relationship. This separation is our first condition. The object becomes a thing that receives all my projections and subjective or objective definitions because I want to be able to get as close to and/or as far from it as possible. The object defines me in the situation.

Our first relationships with the object, those experienced in infancy, are ingrained for life. ^[4] The first paradoxes, the first pains, are those of separation from the mother. The need for warmth and food is at the foundation of self in terms of the internal object as separate from the external object. This sensation is experienced as a tearing from self. The self born of the oceanic is at odds with separation, cries cantankerously, calls out with all its might to that other part of self which is leaving. He suddenly sees it as an other who threatens and inflicts pain. In fear, confusion and hate, the scream tears and kills...

At first, the imaginary is the procedure of reactionary defense, of withdrawal and of repression of the murder of the separate self. The unbearable imaginary situation results in surrender, mourning, displacement. A "transitional space" (Klein) of healing of self is created. The imaginary turns away and retains the image of the bound state with the other part (the mother), becomes the comforting zone which banishes the horrible image of the separation. In the imaginary, a series of images repeat themselves like a magic ritual, a magical call... And actually, in the concrete, there is a return to the bound state, it always returns.

The conquering self, all-powerful magician of the unity of self, is the ego which now takes over. The imaginary becomes the ritual protector of the ego's sufferings who calls upon him as soon as the unusual and insoluble appear. The cycle that repeats itself in the imaginary wins over the first paradoxes of being, a symbolic zone is created. These transitional phenomena will project themselves afterward onto the first objects close to the body in the crib. In infancy, we metaphorically replay events with transitional objects (Winnicott). From that time on, the imaginary uses real space as well as a symbolic scene where the object heals narcissistic wounds and returns cohesion to the self (Kohut).

Artists and poets are steeped in the emotive powers of those stages of development. They constantly call upon the paradoxical feelings that are the root of their most basic emotions: nostalgia for the bound oceanic state, sense of being, but also recurrence of the meetings with the object that test the creator feeling in the resolution and "material ecstasy" (Le Clézio) where the drama of the appearance and disappearance is constantly relived. The surge of the archaic self to strive for love and unity is also the struggle and the attempts to express hate towards scapegoat objects, a cathartic and sublimatory solution. Artists are therefore endowed at the start with a strong, creative metaphorical sense of the imaginary.

In general, psychoanalysis suggests that the greatest creators will necessarily be individuals who are the most likely to put up with the unpleasant emotion linked to any signifier for a longer period of time, be it fear, pain or frustration. ^[5]

Art begins with resistance, vanquished resistance. ^[6]

The artist is a resistant being whose range of emotions make their way through creative principles. The artist works on separate objects onto which he projects complex and conflicting aesthetic relationships. His art becomes the testing grounds where he reconciles unavoidable existential contradictions. The imaginary is a process that reverses, displaces, sublimates and universalizes, or which condenses the contradictory meaning in the symbol and which allows reincarnation as an individual in the world.

What runs beneath the contemporary cultural landscape, could it not just be the nostalgia of a total culture? At the root of encounters between arts and sciences would therefore be the awareness of a gap: that of a simultaneous reading of the felt and the known. Fragments of anthology, sensitive and reflective.

Paradoxical encyclopedic nostalgie? Paradoxical because everyone has known for ages that they will only acquire a tiny bit of the collected knowledge of mankind, of which the corpus is only conceivable in continual change. ^[7]

Human reality and our realities serve as a starting point but what awaits inside ourselves are free associations... and less free ones. We look for authenticity, we question the stereotypical, the cliché and the mask, progeny of associations.

Lab

The best way to make an elephant disappear is to look the other way.

(Old Hindu proverb)

The lab on the collection presented the challenge of examining, through exercises, our gazes and our views on things and to discuss them together. What makes us see or make an object, how and why do we include it in the whole? More specifically, what is at stake in our artistic practice? What gets us personally from intimate symbolic expression to public work of art, into culture and perhaps toward collections? What are those multiple gazes that are part of us?

What gaze do I cast on the other and how do I reproduce the gaze that I cast on the other in the artwork? What place do I give to the other in the artwork? ^[8]

Confronting what motivates us to produce works of art while looking through the eyes of a discerning observer requires real concentration. This removed gaze is reawakened when attempting to formulate and articulate one's discoveries to share them in discussion.

It is while dreaming and by metaphor that thought is organized, that is where problems find their solution. Dreaming is what keeps man from going insane. That is why our era, on the verge of apocalyptic insanity, needs to recognize the powers of dreaming. ^[9]

The collection is also founded by all the pursuits and projections of the gaze, all the perceptual mechanisms, their permutations, their transformations into streams of thought, by the different understandings of the world and by everything that gives reference points or moorings to security, to identity and to ownership.

Our gazes are the transits of our states of mind, our memories and our judgments. Our gazes invent the objects that are memories of metaphor or of dreaming. Our vulnerable gazes look for talismans. And our gazes pursue "in spite of," they are the carriers of objects "yet invented." Even that of science which tends to have the most strict methods of observation. That stalking gaze seeks to confirm questions, theses and discourses. "It is his method of measure rather than the object of his measure that the scholar describes. (...) The scholar believes more in the realism of the measure than in the reality of the object." ^[10]

The gaze is carrier of the heritage of perception. The convergence of gazes permits us to see. "We inherit a perception of the world. The work of famous artists is in our subconscious." ^[11] Our gazes therefore have the possibility to open up throughout the experience. The work of others changes us despite ourselves.

"Reaching a specific point in life(...) Being receptive? For that you have to clear your mind, to empty yourself first, so that you can really hear certain things(...) There are times to let go, there are transforming voids. Emptying to make room becomes a continuity for receiving... The wheel turns, it is the movement that holds our curiosity, interest in the temporary..." as Irene F. Whittome said so well during her workshop.

At the other end, objective observation in the collection is upheld by a continual questionning that seeks the intelligibility and the understanding of the object "per se" and its place. We try to make sense of our dreams and to put them in order. The fabricated object does not matter, it carries the dream within.

Modern technology makes possible dreams of thousands of years ago: flight, which sorcerers and seers have always talked about, ubiquity, by the multiplication of sounds and images, or even the apocalypse, to which mankind has never been as close. All the famed dreams, exhilirating or dreadful, modern technology places them in the concrete. ^[12]

What escapes collection? ^[13] From the groupings of objects placed in primitive tombs to the treasures and spoils of war, from the bizarre and secret objects in children's drawers to the most whimsical private collections and all nature of cultural collections, in all of that can be found displacement, permutation, transparency of the nature of relationships with objects.

The collection presents itself as the conscious and/or unconscious link that the human being establishes with different forms of groupings of objects to question and to signify an order of things to which he relates. Henceforth he will know where he is (presence, place, values, identity and participation in the world). These groupings testify to the development of man and of society from mythology to the scientific, from infancy to adulthood.

The relationships with objects formed from early childhood, and the subjective and objective organization in the cognitive and symbolic continuum, are illustrated in this phenomenon. A careful examination also reveals the use of natural methods or of systems at the root of language, of thought, of concepts of the world, of discourses, of institutions and of societies.

Our discourse on reality is structured by these objects; it's a matter of describing them, and to describe the connections that exist between them, connections which become "objects of study" themselves. ^[14]

The "exact sciences" managed to categorize things through methods which use the principle of negligibility. That is, to define the nature of something, we adhere to a unidimensional and linear level.

Things get complicated when it is a matter of the multidimensional relationship to human objects. From the exact sciences to the humanities, the use of laws, of discourses that build proofs of cause and effect are often used. Too often we content ourselves with unproven statements. "We make up truth to use reality like we create mechanical devices to use the forces of nature," René Thom reminds us. In the name of progress, "in the name of accomplishment, we want to believe that an order exists that would enable us to have direct access to knowledge. In the name of the unfathomable, we want to believe that order and disorder are identical words signifying chance..." ^[15]

Cultural experience, says Foucault ^[16], is experienced between a daily existence governed by cultural codes, habits and practices, and a way of thinking that defines, authorizes and establishes the order of things. Cultural experience is also all the tensions inherent in the paradoxes of the order imposed by our era.

To begin with, the artist is in touch with the baser instincts, with the nature of human reality. If his work/collection questions with suspicion the cultural order, the hierarchy of values and the trends, it permits him above all to face and to symbolize an existential crises into which he is plunged. That would happen sometimes in a lifetime. Self-cohesiveness, necessity, we are far from the effects of chance, consciously or unconsciously we remain in coincidence...

Parcours désordonné could therefore be the title given to the sideroads and to skirting obstacles, to the pitfalls in the cohesiveness of meaning, to the different directions taken by everyone. It reflects our waverings, the subtle confrontation of our beliefs, our divergent points of view, our tolerances and their fluctuations, in summary, our limits.

I remember one of our first meetings. With enthusiasm, we had anticipated positive effects of the lab on our discussions but, already, a whole series of questions expressed our concerns and our doubts: parallel to a deepening of contemplative reflection, would there be a "new" articulation of the critical mind and another understanding of what distinguishes everyone's work. Within the project, would we be able to deal with, analyse and discuss our ideas, our values and our convictions as though it were a matter of objects listed in our artistic personalities? Was THE fundamental collection not right there? At that time, the following two quotations were shared and solemnly read aloud:

Both collections and identity are products of struggles and convergences of personal and social history, control, gender, taste, education, pleasure and/or economics. Both are constructed in a state of conflict, emerging out of sliding, shifting, intersecting zones that compose culture. ^[16]

The way we position ourselves amongst our objects may be where our "voices" are most obvious, where our practices speak louder than our words. ^[17]

We are artists whose medium, methods, practices and processes are very different, but we are together. We were at the start and are at the end a funny collection of individuals (collective/collection...). Is it not the same for all groups, for society or even for the world?

The question was asked on several occasions when comparing all the human collectivities to collections. What makes things hold together? By what methods and systems can we make up a collection with groupings of objects whose identities are all different and whose families and natures we know nothing of?

The collection begins with the end of things, the one that watches over our very being. Vulnerable to the different tones, the heart opens itself up again to the scents.

Notes

1. Free translation. Lecture given by Jean-Francois Pirson au musée d'art de Joliette, may 1994.

2. Free Translation from Albert Camus.
3. Free Translation from Le Nouveau Petit Robert, Paris, Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1994.
4. The remainder of the text is inspired by the object theories of Klein and Winnicott as well as Kohut theories of self.
5. Free Translation from Fernande Saint-Martin, «Sémiologie psychanalytique et esthétique»,De l'interprétation en arts visuels, Montréal, Triptyque, 1994, p. 166.
6. «Résistance», Le Nouveau Petit Robert,.
7. Free Translation from Claude Faure,«Une nostalgie d'encyclopédie», Autrement, no 158, octobre 1995, p. 191 et 192.
8. Free Translation of questions raised by Jean-François Pirson during his first workshop in March 1994.
9. Free Translation from Thierry Gaudin, Pouvoirs du rêve, Centre de recherche sur la culture technique, 1984, p.13.
10. Free Translation, Gaston Bachelard.
11. Free Translation, Yoko Ono, John Cage, PBS, 11 septembre 1990.
12. Free Translation, Gaudin, p.13.
13. Free Translation, Laurier Lacroix, question asked of exchange group, 1994.
14. Free Translation, Albert Jacquard,« L'unidimensionnalité, condition de la hiérarchie », Le genre humain, Paris, Fayard, 1982, p. 11.
15. René Thom.
16. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses.
17. Jennifer Fisher, «Coincidental re-collections, exhibition of the self», Parachute , no 54, mars-juin 1989, p. 56-57.

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