Zérodeux

Translation Emilie Friedlander

The dream of a unification of all knowledge in a single system runs through the history of humanity. This repertoire of knowledge has assumed numerous fantastical forms, like Borges’ Library of Babel or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, to name only a few. On a more prosaic level, it appears in the form of the archive. Attempting to probe its inner logic, Derrida locates the archive’s genesis in the Greek arkheion[1]: “Arkhè names at once the commencement and the commandment [...] there where things commence [...] but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised.”[2] The unification of knowledge can be measured only by the yardstick of the values of the individual who performs it. The moment in which classification occurs is the moment that holds the power to canalize knowledge through an act of consignation. “By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs [...] Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.”[3] According to this notion, the laws that govern the archive’s organization are far from being innocent, and the histories it produces arise out of a classificatory reason. Protocols judged exempt from all traces of subjectivity reveal their true nature as fables set forth by a masked narrator. As a result, the individualized mastery of the modalities of the archive’s organization resembles an attempt to extract the elements that it orders from a unilateral and definitive reading.

During a recent edition of the Table d’hôtes–one of the simplest exhibition structures in existence, a table for displaying artists’ projects–Pierre Leguillon exhibited his collection of museum postcards, each featuring a different type of object photographed against a colored background. Oddly, it is the color of these backgrounds, normally overlooked, that provides Leguillon’s criterion of classification. The quality determining each image’s positioning in the archive is not the object it represents, but the color that object has been allied with. We witness an inversion of planes, the object passing to a secondary role as it cedes its place to its background. The strictly didactic status of these photographs disappears, revealing their nature as constructed images. Because their descriptive potential is undermined by this configuration, they lose their documentary stature.

In the artist’s original vision for the project, cancelled due to a lack of space, the postcards were to be mounted on a wall, spelling out the first sentence of Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Here, the novelist narrates the story of a group of people who, surprised in the night, discover themselves in a castle, deprived of the ability to speak and constrained to recount their adventures with tarot cards. But as soon as the first sequence of cards is laid down on the table, it provides the plot of the story that follows. For each of the characters, the cards take on a different meaning. This principle, when applied to photographs of cultural objects, erases our scientific reading of the objects they represent and prompts us to doubt their true nature. Once their modality of classification has deprived them of their vocation in objectivity, their meaning is no longer a given, and remains open to formulation.

The tarot cards in the margins of Calvino’s text recall the art of memory, the mnemonic techniques used to remember the progression of a discourse. By mentally constructing the many rooms of a house and filling them with strong images, a person who employs this procedure is able to recall each of the arguments comprising a given discourse. In her book on this technique, Frances Yates demonstrates how in the Middle Ages, under the influence of hermeticism, the art of memory transforms into a system that indexes all existing things and orders their meaning.[4] To this end, Raymond Lulle, in the thirteenth century, invents a combinatory art based on the structure of nature, itself linked to divine structures. Following this development, different thinkers embark on an exploration of combinatory systems. Among them, Giulo Camillo, who constructs a memory theater at the end of the 16th century; standing at the center, the user discovers himself surrounded by semi-circular, terraced platforms, each bearing a different symbol. Their spatial organization allows the viewer to mentally circumscribe all existing things and thereby create a map of the human soul. This extraordinary wisdom clearly smacks of mystical belief; at the same time, Bertrand Schefer points out, it corresponds to an evolution of mnemonic procedures that, at the advent of the printing press, became a mechanical one, instead of disappearing.[5] Images, heretofore entirely mental, take on a new meaning; they become symbols, superior realities. They are no longer to be appreciated for what they represent, but for what they evoke; what is more, their evocative power evolves according to their organization and the individual reading of the person who controls them.

This view of the organization of images forms a central thread in Aurélien Froment’s work. Without reducing the artist to a descendent of hermeticism, it is possible to detect a parallel in his relationship to the image. The images he presents us with often appear to us as objects of transition; placed in situations of opposition and similarity, they carry the significations born out of these relationships.

In En abrégé, his exhibition at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in 2008, visitors listen to a discussion between the artist and the magician Benoît Rosement concerning the latter’s prodigious memory. In order to retain the twenty words provided to him by the public, the magician uses a modified version of the art of memory based on a mental picture composed of numbers and images. What the audience discovers over the course of the dialogue is that the individual significations of the images he employs as references are constantly shifting, transformed by the little stories he uses to recall the desired word. The image emerges as a site of modification, as though it were always waiting to encounter another, generating a third meaning.

In the same exhibition, Froment presents Hugo Hésitait Littéralement à Battre en Brêche Chacune de Nos Orientations Futures et Naïves (“Hugo litterally hesitated to beat the living daylights out of each of our future and naive orientations”), a memory game composed of 52 pairs of cards, face-down on a table, each sporting an image of one of the artist’s works. The title is a mnemonic acronym representing the first line of the Periodic Table of Elements. Beyond its innocent appearance, it presents a second signification, graspable only to those who use it. If you look hard enough for it, the juxtapositions created by the players as they overturn the cards reveal the play of resonances and relationships at the heart of Froment’s oeuvre. Each element is susceptible to modifications in its symbolic import, which in turn depends on the individual who reads it and his or her capacity to make the most out of the combinatory principles at play.

Ryan Gander has also become a master in this game of mise-en-relation according to subjective criteria. During Loose Associations, a conference, he projects slides of architectural elements and objects of diverse origin, each linked through a series of subjective ties. In her text on the conference, Emilie Renard analyzes the way in which the artist distances himself from the modalities of enunciation associated with rational thought.[6] She argues that the artist’s construction, based on association, yields a breed of non-authoritarian thought favoring individualized approaches over dialectical reasoning and the primacy of the logical conclusion. She concludes with a view of Loose Associations as a generator of “relations, taken in the solipsistic path of the one who utters them.”[7] Given the predominance of a logic unique to Gander, we would not we surprised to discover, in his exhibition It’s a right Heath Robinson affair (A stuttering exhibition in two parts) at the Kadist Art Foundation and the gb agency, a number of works that can be read only via the intermediary of the artist himself. In each of these works, the artist summons references whose creative handling reveals the modalities of linkage he has imposed upon them. Be it a pile of xylophone bars, arranged in the order in which they are played to reproduce the start-up jingle of Windows XP; or a charm bracelet representing François Piron, fashioned by Gander’s father following a discussion on the curator, a great number of these works have been subjected to the unique deductive reasoning of their author.

The principles of scientific validity are thereby abandoned, giving way to an internal logic judged solely in terms of its own, intrinsic qualities. Following this line of thinking, Raphaël Zarka embarks upon a search for formal genealogy that would transcend the boundaries of the traditional, stylistic and historical method. In several of his works, elements originating out of discrete temporal and typological zones intersect one another in heterogeneous costume. Developing his own genealogical method, he creates bundles of connective filaments, ranging from antique geometric forms to concrete breakwaters, or to the parallel between the relationship of skaters to the forms of the urban environment, and that of processual artists to the materials they manipulate. L’abbé Nollet, his recent exhibition at the Les églises de Chelles center of art, borrows its name from the 18th century physicist who developed a gadget made out of two cones that, placed atop two branches stretching down on a small slope, roll upwards. The artist links this ascent to a photograph of the skater Mike Barker traveling up the inclined plane of a Kowalski sculputure in La Défense (backside smith grind). Nollet’s cones are evoked by a work in cast iron inspired by a Roni Horn sculpture and entitled La déduction de Nollet, l’expérience de Ménard (“Nollet’s deduction, Ménard’s experience”)–Ménard being the Borgesian character who rewrites Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote word for word two centuries after the original, and somehow manages to produce a novel that is stylistically different.

The reasoning that presides over this chain of relationships establishes a bond with the manipulated elements that opposes all scientific determinations. In this way, one might legitimately interrogate Zarka’s vision of the original context from which these forms arise. Which is exactly what François Piron does in his interview with the artist; Zarka replies that this question is never a primordial one, and that it indicates “perhaps a natural tendency toward abstraction, to consider things as though they were the products of a dictionary or a book.”^[8]

This lack of consideration for the provenance of a work’s elements indicates a revised conception of the manipulation of signs. By privileging relationships established through rules unique to the creation of each work, we distance ourselves from the dialectic necessities that historically presided over every form of reuse. Since Pop Art, numerous artists attempted to analyze the framework circumscribing the formation of signs. Later, in the 1990s, those that Nicholas Bourriaud termed “Semionauts” explored the combinatory possibilities occasioned by a refusal to respect stylistic frameworks. But this reconsideration of the typology of cultural registers has always been conducted in a spirit of “negative sacredness”^[9]; if the foundations and the legitimacy of this taxonomic segmentation is cast into question by the artists who refuse to submit themselves to it, the existence of these institutions is nonetheless affirmed. And yet, it seems that for certain contemporary artists, it is the indexical rules that have changed.

The elements they manipulate, submitted to the internal logic of the systems into which they have been integrated, no longer function according to an allegoric principle. Rather than produce a reading of these forms that links them back to their sources, these artists exploit them through a protocol that is foreign to them, that divorces them them from their original meaning. Thanks to these studies, materializing out of individual subjectivity, these artists have perhaps found a way to shatter the shelves of what was once the library of total knowledge.

Tags: Aurélien Froment, Pierre Leguillon, Rapahaël Zarka, Ryan Gander