La Folie Jean Clair
“Things (being things) did not go exactly as planned.” Given that, underneath it all, the prose of Jean Clair have a underlying religiosity, we liked start this little response with the Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
And, on the other hand, with his peace, things are just like that.
Jean Clair, as regularly every six months of his and our lives, has again launched on the Republic, a tirade against modernity. Modern art is all condemned, Duchamp, Picasso, Manzoni to Hirst, through Warhol and Koons. Because the market sucks, modernity is dirty, artists throw their secretions on the public: there are no more experts, historians than once. Ah, the icons!
We remember the dear Sainte -Beuve ‘ when , in 1862 , having avoided in every way to talk about it, pulled by the hair , finally decides to write an article on Baudelaire. And then, according to an article of one of the biggest critics of the time , flattered and considered, MB ” Has found a way to build , at the end of a spit of land deemed uninhabitable , beyond any known romance , a newspaper stand very ornate, yet flirty and mysterious …. that for some time attracts attention at the very tip of the KamÇakta romantic , I call it folie Boudelaire . “
Now the Kamċakta has invaded the world , with opium , the trappings , its wonders. The good Clair is building his kiosk , made of good manners and good reads , tasteful and quiet, perhaps in front of a roaring log fire with his full-bodied wine . A quiet place well lighted . The problem is : in the global market , today there is a strip of land that is outside , place of wild icons, coteries of preparations and prudish historians, fine painting with bodies cleaned and angelic ? We do not think so.
Things did not go as he wanted Jean Clair, but for this to be denied ?
We recover and expand an example of Francesco Bonami . Take three skulls : the Mitchell-Hedges Crystal in 1600 BC, the Gabriel Orozco Black Kites (1997) and For the love of God by Damien Hirst (2007) . Surely the first would be the chosen one of JC , the others would be involved in the invective on modernity . So , should we infer that the ancient Mesoamerican civilization is better than the present ? In addition, the eternal becoming hath been interrupted at one point becoming the immediate immobile lousy ? Finally, as the last two skulls far only ten years old , are immersed in the same market ? At the same Manzoni ?
In the conception of J.C. the golden age is the one that he likes . The rest is, meta-historically, perversion. Loving the icons, we wish him to live in Byzantium in agony , without those annoying episodes of the fall of the Eastern Empire all the way up to the French Revolution .
We know that at the end we recognize in Linda Lovelace , star of Deep Throat (1972) and , perhaps , having met JC In those years, we would have yelled ” repressed male , masturbated in the toilet .” Of course the example is vulgar and we apologize , but the sexuality of Linda represents modernity , with its places of pleasure moved in the throat ( there by nature, and for the first time talking about the female orgasm , today with the manner decided by the market ) otherwise by the owner “normality” that prevents their moods , Crap , such as the JC’s respectability. In our opinion, the lack of the modernity is the opposite of what JC complain . He speaks little , and only in a chic mode, of the stigmata that the market leaves on our bodies . Our moods are floating or sinking in the market , changing or evolving , and their symbolization is in business , not in sacredness. Linda and us, for various reasons, we share the mixing of our perceptions .
The aesthetics of the obscene was not invented by us. Of our stark body has been discussed for millennia , perhaps covering it with the morals of a later age at the time of writing. I wonder if Lust Brueghel (Series of the deadly sins ) in which a serpent’s tail surprise check between the bare legs of a woman would have liked to our contemporary moralizing ? Or maybe he would have written an invective against modernity , from Dante to Brueghel ? Canto XXIV Inferno “with the middle feet it gripped the stomach / and with the forward ones his arms it seized .” Who reads the Canto from start to finish, including the violence of heroic’s sinner to God, could not enjoy his vulgarity and sublimity.
Courbet’s The Origin of the World is our symbol and we are not ashamed at all if it came to the Museum after having lived in at least two bathrooms of wealthy collectors
Bad money drives out good : if there is a foundation of doubt between a real and a fake one, the fake take benefit ( Guttuso in an article that mentions JC about the false). If all contemporary art is a fake, does not mean that everything else is true. Perhaps the opposite. Also, what Jean Clair loves on icons ” formal perfection and rigorous iconographic ” is what , unfortunately, is the basis of the Market. We noted already elsewhere, such as the fashion ( the difference with the icons is that the paradigms are not expected eternal ) impose languages , styles , visual rules which must be observed not to cause repulsion of the Market. There are rules : they are decided by the market . But ” when Raphael painted the School of Athens under the dictation of Vatican theologians and philosophers of the court , he was free ? ” ( Guttuso, article cited ) .
It is worth asking whether the criticism of JC is external to the market . At the end of his career , reputation and influence of our own derived from these positions . According to us, simply and cleverly , has occupied a place in the cultural industry , came to such a level of abstraction to overcome the show. To be herself , and even their critics. Valorising both. At the bottom of JC has not been exiled from the great academies such as Baudelaire , simply began publishing in economic series to sell more .
In the words of Manu Chao, maybe JC sees “too much promiscuity ,” but does not realize that in the text of the song, however, rightly rhymes with “too much hypocrisy .” icons cry.
Sketch of family
Cieux, son erreur! Temps, sa ruine!
Et l’Abime animal, bèant!..
Quelle chute dans l’origine
Etincelle au lieu nèant!…
Paul Valery
Let’s start from the draft snake Valery because here, precisely here, is the being who appears out of nowhere, taking his place. Because in Valery, in the beginning of everything, the defect is being and not nothing. It gets dovetails between the “ego sum” of the snake (the most misleading of Animals), who speaks “as God, in the place of God” (Derrida) and the subsequent “I am he that change.”. In the birth of the snake is the beginning of life from nothing, and he is deceptive, but also is the one who changes.
He don’t wait, he do not hide. It tells you right away what you could do better, than what you do, in spite of his and our imperfection, our being-defective. Today, the snake would tell you to sin or to live in the family is just and right? Because market has not so clearly told what is right and wrong: not being accomplished, is the realm of neurosis, in the contradiction between what you describe as good and what seems mandatory. With Zizek we imagine a confessional in which a good man, says, “Father, now I’m in love with my wife.” In response would, we think, at least 10 Hail Marys a day.
In fact, to us and to the Serpent, the family like an Istitute has a little interest, if not in its historically given mutation, particularly in the contemporary market. In our Market, that now, from twenty years, told us clearly to be the principle of all things, and that would have changed our bodies, our ideas, our dreams, our flesh through deception and changing our emotions.
As said prophetically Subsonica in ’99, Aurora: “Dream a synthetic flesh / New attributes and a microchip emotional / dreams of a scalpel friend who makes it / Something out of the ordinary.” Market whispers to you just what you want to hear.
In 1988, a Carpenter’s film comes out in Cinema: They Live. In the film John Nada discovers that wearing sunglasses special you can discover the secret message that aliens who rule the world hiding behind everything. Every newspaper, every billboard, hide a subliminal message that rule the lives of people affected by strange zombie, also discovered with glasses, that covertly control us. Behind the advertising “came to the Caribbean” is the word “Marry and Reproduce.” Consume, buy, obey, married and riproduciti. 30 years ago this was the Big Brother. But today? The market would say the same? A lasting love, now, it is too authoritarian (Zizek).
Self-quotation : “The market and the family are the two institutions that pierce us from birth, in which we are immediately immersed and that influence us not only from a cultural point of view , but it does impact in our” bare life . “
The fashion and education , for example, are the superficial signs of the market and the family. How we dress , how we act or speak in the table are the manifestation of this influence .
But in zoe ( in what Agamben calls ” the simple fact of living common to all living beings), the non-conscious nor obvious , we have deeper scars ” .
In other markets, the family was more honest . No one thought of nothing but to build an interlocking marriages that would lead , at the end , after many generations , to enrich, or at least maintain , the starting capital . Scientific operation and crystal clear , with some pre-marital sex in order to reach the goal. Family and property in the Kingdom of Naples (Gerard Delille – Einaudi) is the compendium of this strategy. The family has stuttered from birth, but at least he had something to say.
Among the various Holy Family by Titian, while the three are resting under a tree , Joseph hold the stick on which rests inclined. The dear Panofsky argues that serves to enliven the scene , in other cases monumental . And it is the fragility of the Father, which moves everything . And ‘ certain that this is his destiny ? And on the other hand how many Annunciations happen every day ? Against all logic , against the evidence of the lives of the girls, against a clear view of the fate of parents more and more fragile at the invitation of the market , every night the angel comes to bring the message of households passed . Married, reproduce , be a good girl and go home early. Everything together is the message of our past reactionary who does not accept the reality of the market .
The pain of the contrast between the family and the different possibilities offered by contemporary is plastically represented by Lidl, the well-known supermarket chain . One day the poor Lassalle wrote the Franz von Sickingen . Worse still asked for a review of Marx and Engels. The two panned it , because the drama tells of the revolt of an individual, part of the national movement of the German nobility that eventually dies because of good will, and ignored the peasant movement . Forgetting the “real to the ideal ,” the general movement with respect to each individual . In the words of Marx , he had to leave Schiller for Shakespeare, he had to ” shakespeareggiare more ” (Marx , letter to Lassalle ) . And Lidl now shakespeareggia(x) . 10 years ago the Lidl was, in any form, advertised for the little cost of its stores . To be the least expensive. The appearance confirmed , and reassure the buyer about being in a kitsch store : loud was the appearance of rotten vegetables in boxes ( they were not even good) , the beautiful Baroque Austrian firstfruits , extraordinary offers for totally useless objects . That time it was just us and immigrant groups to look at the dreamy shower to 9.99. Then some Italian , individually , in secret , began to come. The crisis in the market pushes there many families that can not afford the best shops , the normal ones . Begin to come to us at Lidl, but they are ashamed . Do you want my neighbors see me go to those places ? So we decorated it . In Lidl near our house suddenly has created a flowerbed on parking . It is enclosed in wood and everything has become more beautiful. The masterpiece, however, is the line integral of the biological and Lidl . Today, the advertising tells you that you can find fine food in its stores , the shelves have changed. Reassured wife flock to the side of fresh bread ( heated from the freezer ) and we are all happier. From the Schiller’s drama of homeless who takes cheap wine at the party Shakespearean sad cassintegrate families that maintain dignity. Lidl is the language that any references to the old can’t confirm (Benjamin) . Lidl is the essence of every family neurosis , between what was and what is , romantic unhappiness of those who do not agree .
But this unhappiness becomes violent . The family today is such a place of oppression and violence. Most violence against women, as the bishops of the triveneto says: mothers and daughters, takes place in the fence. Peppa Pig is a children’s cartoon . The most famous . They all have symbols of modernity : mobile phones, cars, etc. . But the family structure back to a reassuring past that most families no longer live . Nor do we see other families . Our horoscope for today on the Italian sportive Journal says: ” you have two Zebedee meloniformi . And that has pig ‘s flavor. ” Where is this representation ? Daddy Pig still reads the newspaper sports , like any good householder. Paolo Poli says he does not love feelings . He Enjoy , what a great gentleman , meetings Cossack , inside a doorway. For the origin of the ‘ Ndrangheta is referred to three Spanish knights , Bone, and Mastrosso Carcagnosso , that to avenge the honor of his sister kill a man. At the end of the detention they ripen the rules of honor and the code of silence that constitute “company” and will mark the future Italian mafia and criminal organizations are divided: Bone merge Cosa Nostra, Mastrosso the ‘ Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Naples Carcagnosso . All three are based on families. Why Grandpa Pig does not deal with tax evasion ? And Daddy pig like beating her mother? George , brother of Peppa , masturbating ?
At the end of Woody Allen, who married a daughter and the other accused of having raped her , says going to bed in a film with a very young girl : ” Unless police raids I think will beat a couple of records. “
The enjoyment , pleasure , satisfaction is now a duty not only sexual . The formal subsumption of labor to capital is when the market uses archaic forms of labor to progress . The real subsumption is when the change is made . Typically the first is represented by textile artisans who gather in a shed to help the trade of their work. The second is when they become workers of a master. The juxtaposition family / desire today is the first stage. We look forward and hope the second
slightly contemporary
“My working method more often is a subtraction of weight; I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of the narrative and language, “said Calvino in American lessons . And so there comes to mind after reading some texts of important curators, experts (scholars no longer exists, you know weight) of contemporary art.
But why when they do the same, perhaps by introducing a catalog of their shows become “heavy”, structured, and when they give their overview of the contemporary feel lighter?
And why our dear philosopher, Agamben, is convincing when as to what the contemporary is, but it turns out if writes about contemporary art?
When he is Writing about a thinker valuable as Sismondi , Marx said , “He judges in a convincing way the contradictions of bourgeois production , but does not understand it .” The contemporary shows , if anything, can be assessed, but you don’t investigate it, not understand it . Not because it is incomprehensible , but because it is thrown forward in its objective reality , perhaps, is bound ( a quote does not refuse anyone) but you can not think.
Not only in art, but such policy . Those who do not have better things to do try, as did Alexander Leogrande ( the stranger ) and as we did , to compare two writings that compete with the same thinker nearly 30 years later : Matteo Renzi introduction Right and Left of Bobbio and Bettino Craxi in An Essay on Proudhon (1978). ” How it ended the parable craxiana is known to all . But if we were to remain on the only textual aspect …… well , the comparison is really pitiful . ” The difference is not between different levels of quality , but structure and speed , the heaviness and the lightness in the interpretation of decisionism .
Maybe things are deeper . As we are immersed in a joyous or melancholy superficiality, and depth , if anything , appears to be only an interlocking of surfaces. The poor Lukacs , in his bad article, helps us . It takes a learned of his time , Max Weber : economist , sociologist , historian , philosopher and politician. Expert in all , at ease in all fields of art and its history. ” And yet there isn’t in him, not even the shadow of a true universalism … because never realized a synthesis of this sociology with this economy and with this history , it was necessary that the separation of these specialist science remained intact even in his head ” . How come we are faced with this dissociation ? L. says that the social division of labor not only affects the exploited, but also harnessing . Conditions them , even if their lives are, of course , different .
99 posse says ” my head is a hotbed of subversion .” Outbreaks satisfied with uneven move into our brains sprayed from the Market. Could each of us , like say Sir Bradley Wiggins ( a cyclist who won the Tour ) : “I’ve Always Been a bit of all trades , master of none ” ?
Our divided brain also divides languages . Only a language that technically ever more specific , with focused haughtily who reduces its terms, as to become esoteric . Involuntarily arises as understandable to others who speak in the Babel of many microtechniques , incomprehensible to most people. But it ‘s interesting to be understandable to most people ? Depending on the market . If you want to talk to my equals, then use a language system , if you intend to sell another . From the purity Creole passage is short , millimeters of my brain. The mystery that veils the secret profane its truth , that is the simple life ( Magris ) .
There is some truth in the legend that says that sleeping next to a book, we take their content . We had already written these lines when we happened to read ” Heroes and anti-heroes in German art ” by Marco Minnini . We quote : ” We could say that Feldmann is a mannerist , while Kiefer is the muscular Michelangelo of our times. Medardo Rosso against Rodin. Monsieur Hulot against Schwarzenegger. And of course, an old story : … David and Goliath . ” A text that makes the slight Feldmann collide with the heavy Kiefer . As ever , though, when one of the highest density’s works of the heaviness of the hard Anselm , ” 7 celestial palaces ” , is photographed everything is being done to lighten it ? We thinking the same for a more raw performance that we have seen recently . the video of work could easily be a trailer for a movie with Brad Pitt.
But speaking of lightness , while under our office , a resurgence in the twentieth century offers in library a discussion on Baudelaire , secure heavy, and for us, not to be heavy , it is best to take advantage of today’s shining sun .sLight is the slight who does.
In memory of Catherine
version made with google translator. short the correct one
It is probably in the Song of Songs is born a woman running through the centuries . The ” I am black , but comely ” begins a story uninterrupted . “The sons of my mother were angry with me, they put me keeper of the vineyards ; My vineyard , my , I have not kept ” And is the mother of many other women . The Melusine , for example , a hybrid between a fairy and a water snake , happiness or destruction in a moment , when we try to understand their nature . Madame Bovary , certainly ( maybe) .
The woman who breaks the chain in the desire of which speaks Deleuze , because there is a multiplicity , a collective event . It is not, as he says D. desiring a set or a set of things to be concatenated. And ‘ the walk with a laugh , a sadness , a smile , a gesture on the margin between what we understand and what you want . Not both , one or the other. And if you jump off the edge you lose everything .Lady Brett Ashley Fiesta of Hemingway . The Linda ‘s Companion Pavese . And in a perfect way , and finally visually better , the Catherine of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962 ) .
And ‘ the still image of the face of Catherine suspending the useless chatter of Jules and Jim . And today ? We are reminded of the Helen of Professor of desire to Roth , who also is 77 .
The story has changed continuously narrator . From the two lovers canticle to the story on the masculine woman ( but at least Flaubert could credibly say to be M.Bovary ) the description of the effect on men of a woman who gradually disappears .
Linda does not know much, only that Pablo , the main character , starts from Turin and goes to Rome because disappointed in his dreams of descent from the edge toward a normal life . But his own dreams , to be honest , were a sham. In Professor, finally, the story of a masculine man who in some ways trying to live on the edge takes Helen and subsequent wife, a decent woman , like the two sides of the ridge impossibility . Certainly we have lost of literature , maybe wrong , but it seems a descent interrupted . Why? Is that we have known women like that. There are. And maybe we are.
Why the Market hides ?
straight to the art
(It ‘a play on words based on the fact that straight and right are written the same way in Italian)
Vedi tu is a collective born in two thousand eleven with a variable composition. The first thing we did was write, and make known, the Manifesto for a commercial art. We thought the text like a provocation , having taken up and turned over everything we heard to say, and Which We ourselves have said, in the narrow world of the artists. We thought it like a provocation, having taken up and overturned everything we heard to say, and Which We ourselves have said, in the narrow world of the artists. So we have defined our joy of being in the market and our acceptance of its language and rules, recognizing the research as a favorite excuse of those in the market can not enter.
We thought, grinning, that we would have made someone angry or that, at most, we would be ignored. We never imagined that instead, our manifesto would become for many a source of liberation, of satisfaction, that would express something that was being thought but not said. At the end of our failed provocation we had a hundred of accessions, it has created an interesting debate and even an important gallery has proposed to us to collaborate.
From this surprise was born on our following path, because we thought that we had not understood much of the art world and maybe even of the world in general. We have produced some work, because at the time of the famous gallery we did not have anything to send, and wrote a little, trying to explore the market, the ways in which we are imbued, as it changes us. Explorations in the true sense of the term, having transformed our texts in travel stories, based on the writings as the traveler spellbound Leskov or the famous Tales of a pilgrim. All narratives because, as Benjamin writes in his essay on the novel, there it looks like the tale one of the most suitable ways to interpret the world and even ward off some of our fears.
Our contribution to the exhibition catalog is in this path, even if, for us, the end of the new has a positive value. We don’t have, in fact, nostalgia of the past century, we don’t pursue a new realism, we welcome favorably on his father’s sunset. The end of the new open to novelty, the other’s death recall the others, the end of history opens us to the stories.
The use of less heavy signs less signs, is a way to not remove naively the market that we live with the changes that brings in our life, in our body, in our desire, in the way in which we abandon the grand narratives for a frequent but fragile pleasure. In this market flow is perhaps the possibility for the “arriving” in the sense of Derrida, he who comes uninvited, without that it was awaited, it calls into question every yours pre construct and allows the destabilization, albeit traumatic, which we feel is the only way to a true and possibile cooperation, offered by the market.
Given the synthetic requirements, to provide better understanding of the issue refer to other texts, that you can find on our site.
But if this is our condition what are, if there are, our new rights? We resume a discussion born in France a few years ago, when a minister proposes to abolish the teaching of philosophy, because he didn’t thinking it had a specificity to distinguish it from the literature or from the story. Many wondered, with a Large Debate, if there was a right to philosophy. And us wonder: there is a right to the art?
It is not a problem that you can solve quickly. Asking again what is the art, would probably an futile effort if not harmful. That itself would leave the discreet approach that we Said necessary to understand the contemporary, and fall back on the temptation to put an uppercase at Art, returning to the times of heavy words. It is certain, however, that if we speak of a right we need to identify it, like any product. The rights, in general, for having some recognition, should be welcomed by the established conventions, perhaps endorsed by some institution. In history there are many episodes of this process. For example in 1855 the good Courbet was excluded from the Salon and thus he built a temporary structure near the official exhibition certified by the Academy. There he placed 44 paintings and then call it the Hall of realism. There were so many protests that Napoleon III instituted, in the farther space from the official salon, the salon of the rejected (1863). The rejected, at the end, revealed the academy’s nature and its limits, demystifying its authority. Therefore institutions that develop, are contested and replaced. Conventions that follow the same path.
What is a convention? To understand this here is a retro example: good manners. If we meet an acquaintance we say “Nice to see you, how are you today?” It ‘clear that we do not intend to ask seriously, in fact, if our counterpart had the suspicion that our interest is sincere probably he remains unpleasantly surprised, because it would be a too intimate question. Paraphrasing froid, with the good Slavoj Z, “why are you telling me that you’re happy to see me, when you’re really happy to see me?”. At the same time, however, we are not in a total hypocrisy, because just so we establish a pact between us, like many others. A Convention which makes us feel better, that regulates the decision on the car we buy, about the artist we host, about the movie we see. Also do the opposite is to recognize the agreement, but rebel against it. Accept the institution that legitimate and try to break free, in the Limits that benevolently the Market leave us.
But today who can limit which we are entitled? For example: today we are in a gallery, there is a curator. Is enough to know that we are surrounded by works of art? Or is it more interesting to know which of these works will be sold, will have a market? We know that if you asked at any one supporter of our manifesto, would say something interesting view of the fatigue that showed for the art circuits out of the market. The poor Ai Weiwei tells us that everything is art. And we agree with him. But how does a whole to be a right? Probably means a whole written in lower case, everything that passes from his hands, who undergoes the treatment of an artist. We should ask, then, if art is a whole mediated by the artist, who is an artist? How to recognize it as a legitimizing source? Even this question makes little sense , today. The good Cattelan claims that a work is art only if it lasts over time. Otherwise is only merchandising . Then we could take the time as a yardstick? It ‘a bit’ contradictory with the idea of contemporary. How much time? One year, a generation, a century? In 50 years, we will remember his golden vater or the soap that produced? Which of the two is art? Here too, we think, the implication is that the dear cattelan believes his own works, will be remembered, because he’s a true artist. And so we come back, circularly, to the starting point.
Our questions are not mawkish. Why then, if art is part of our rights, there are consequences. Although often not exigible, a right should be universal. So we would like to make a detournament of a small piece of text, always Derrida, replacing art to philosophy. “Who is entitled to the art today, in our society? What is art? Under what conditions? In which private or public space? What are the training establishments, those for research, for exhibition, reading, discussion? “. Also because, considering that the technical skills in many forms of art are to be put now into the background, the democratic nature of the artist is now fully realized.
So widespread and fragmented is the artistic practice that perhaps today, in the absence of great ideas, outdated, more than a history of art, rather than a curator who studied the matter, it would be appropriated an archive. No particular comment. Summing up, if the only cooperative way’s passes through the market, if everything is art, if we are all artists (since this is the immediate consequence) then the superstructures are over. File, juxtapose what is called art. On the other hand we pick up any book of a great curator. We’ll probably have a list of images and experiences, of insights and performance one after each other, no organization of stories (for example: Bonami, From the Parthenon to Panettone).
Such ambiguous law can be sustained? It makes sense to continue the teaching of art in school, it makes sense that public institutions continue to finance contemporary art exhibitions? It ‘a demand that brings us to the question of our manifesto. Because of undefinable boundaries, in this tale that changes characters and jumps from one story to another, the risk is to create strange bags who think they come out of the market. Strange places where work is not paid, it is pleased to be seen. Fences from which there is no escape, happy to be exposed, renouncing the possibility of entering the market, agreeing, however, to remain voiceless than the majority of people.
Is there a right to the art? If there is, it certainly can not be external to the market. If there isn’t, it certainly can not be external to the market.