Zérodeux

Oscar Tuazon

Bend It Until It Breaks

Par François Aubart

The title of this show, Plie-le jusqu’à ce qu’il casse/Bend It Til It Breaks, is also the title of one of the works on view. It is a monumental construction made of long wooden beams, which could be the frame of a rectangular dwelling. Fitted inside it is another slightly unaligned parallelepiped, with one of its vertical sides filled in with concrete. From this wall emerge two beams made of the same material which, because they are not parallel to the main structure, are not supported by the wooden frame’s vertical beams but are, at their extremities, held in place by a chain fixed to the frame. The two materials used for this sculpture thus have a relation of dependence. Put more precisely, the wood holds and supports the concrete.

The title of this work also comes across as the statement of its action, because the chains have been slowly loosened to the ultimate point where the concrete breaks, unable any longer to bear the weight of its own span. The movement, which is suspended just before the break splits the beam in two, is stopped, and offers nothing other than the demonstration of its purpose, which is to bend until breaking point is reached. So if we are indeed dealing here with a process, it is desperately pragmatic. And if we are dealing with the encounter between two materials, it takes place in functional territories:  beams form a structure, and it could be that the concrete bends, and then breaks. In this sculptural praxis, the relations imagined with the materials proceed by way of their use, for what they are. This is also the case with an untitled work, a simple piece of scaffolding, several yards high, likewise made of wooden beams, at the top of which is fixed a battery of spotlights producing  a bright light. Installed in the lighthouse built by Aldo Rossi in front of the art centre’s entrance, this sculpture lights up the rough concrete surface of the architecture accommodating it. The work straightforwardly reveals to us the surface of the building surrounding it, simply erected by an accumulation of material. This purely factual and practical relationship to materials shows Oscar Tuazon’s interest in alternative architecture and its accompanying lifestyle.  One of his projects has thus involved re-publishing a book written by a libertarian American community called VONU, an acronym of Voluntary Non Vulnerable. In rejecting  contemporary governmental and commercial society, the Vonus sidestep it by way of invisibility and disappearance. In laying claim to a community-based and self-sufficient way of life, their book is a survival guide advocating an individual and independent lifestyle. In this mixture of DIY and hippie culture, we can identify a rejection of present-day society and a desire to live in harmony with the environment, as well as a thrust towards an autonomous and chosen existence. Fuelled by this line of thought, which is the very opposite of capitalist rationalization, the artist has a relationship to sculpture which proceeds by way of a direct link to his environment. He compromises with whatever this latter puts at his disposal, with no desire to disguise or embellish its appearance. In addition, this refusal to mythologize his material is aimed, in an ongoing way, towards a desire to construct. So Rester vivant/Staying Alive is a tree trunk that came down during a storm, and which Oscar Tuazon has restored to the vertical position. In it, obviously enough, we can read a desire to fight in order to remain upright and straight, despite restrictions, and a continual need to keep one’s position, regardless of the circumstances. This much is asserted without any attempt at grandiloquence; the trunk is stabilized on the ground by a rough wooden beam which passes through it, and its top is held by another beam and a metal bar. The light henceforth diffused by this trunk has, for its part, nothing glorified about it either; it comes from a fluorescent tube screwed to the top and connected to the nearest socket. Here again, the architecture of the exhibition venue is treated like a practical instrument. Nothing is done to offer the work any form of autonomy whatsoever. It is constructed and works in un unveiled way.

This approach to construction based on what the artist has to hand is removed from any transcendental  quest, because of  his approach to materials. For the materials are only present here for what they are and above all for what they permit. They do not seem to have been endowed with any symbolism. Actually, it seems as if we are moving away from the « tinkering » (bricolage) theorized by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind¹.  The anthropologist observed that mythical thinking does not turn its back on reality. On the contrary, it imagines, classifies and organizes the elements composing it based on precise and systematized relations, thus lending it a perceptible scope. It comes about from a protest against the nonsense of the world, contrasting it with mythical thinking’s desire to put it in order, and give it a configuration that means it can be grasped. What Lévi-Strauss called « the mytho-poetic character of tinkering » is nothing else than the arrangement of already existing materials so as to get them to bear a symbolic load.² Otherwise put, it is matter of ordering the world, and giving it a meaning. If this line of thinking is indeed constructed upon a material found as such in order to arrange it in accordance with some understanding of it, it does so in order to formulate a relation to its environment. Oscar Tuazon, for his part, with his impassive sculpture and his autonomist thinking, does not seem to be borne along by a desire to cast another spell on the world; quite to the contrary, he seems to repudiate it. In denying its rules as much as its restrictions, the constructions that the artist makes are erected on the edge of our societies and their codes. And if, on many an occasion, he has expressed the desire to build his house himself, we should perhaps not seek in this assertion any attempt to link back up with the conception of a timeless and universal dwelling. This goal does indeed seem to stem from a sole desire for autonomy. A desire that was applied by some, at whose head we might put Henry David Thoreau who, in 1854, in Walden or: Life in the Woods, theorized about resistance to the American government by seeking a genuine life outside society³. A desire which, in a more intuitive way, lots of children have had occasion to feel by building tree huts. As a retreat from the world by being raised above it, and by seeing it solely in relation to the qualities and the technical restrictions which it may procure, the shelter thus plays a crucial role. It offers an immersion in a world, the world of games, which no longer knows the rules of the world. Based on reality, it nevertheless makes it possible to construct another one, whose organization is dictated, in the end, by the person making it. We think if such children’s games when we look at Oscar Tuazon’s work in one of the trees on the island at Vassivières. Niki Quester is a sheet of marble lodged in the branches of an oak. The stone is only lodged there by the force of its own weight. Its splendidly showy appearance amplifies the symbol of power to which the use of marble refers. It is a material frequently used to glorify buildings which need to ensure their authority and their elegance, which here glorifies nothing other than a desire for a hut. What this work celebrates is a form of construction fashioned by a movement of withdrawal, having found the courage to do the opposite and get away from the contingencies of the world facing it. We might thus see each one of Oscar Tuazon’s sculptural gestures as guided by a single desire, to simply have access to a form of autonomy in relation to our world’s normative rules and regulations.

Oscar Tuazon, Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivières, From 15 November 2009 to 7 February 2010

Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1966.

2 Ibid, op.cit., p. 30

3 Henry David Thoreau, Walden or: Life in the Woods, originally published in 1854.

Tags: Centre international d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivières, Oscar Tuazon