One of the previous newsletters was quoting parts of the Koran. The idea was to ask whether quoting a text could mean making fun of it.
Let’s say your main interest is human rights but you can’t stand the declaration being quoted. Weird, init?
When I quoted the Koran, some very honourable and full of common sense artists told me they didn’t learn anything and that I was islamophobic…
So the answer is yes, quoting can be really nasty.

In fact, I think I must be missing an organ. 
One thing for sure, I miss the trendyness one. But you get used to it.
But brothers and sisters, in the Parisian art world I feel faaaaar. Very far away from what I see and mostly what I hear…
I must have something like a deficiency in the mind. Some connections maybe that don’t work too well for, I do feel slightly stupid, surprised when I read Benoît Maire: « I recently spent the afternoon in the Louvre taking photos of figures with a pointed finger. I’m trying to link these representations to Badiou’s concept of transcendental indexation» (1) 

Hey, I know that it is often distance that makes things interesting, the fact that it doesn’t really fit, Adorno’s non-resolution... I’m not that stupid… I don’t think Maire makes the easy etymological connection between index/finger and indexation. No, Maire is not working as iconographer at the French art magazine « The Eye ». It’s not only a play on words – and I’m talking about him, it’s much more complex. On the other hand I do like play on words a lot, but it needs rhythm, and of course no explanations- otherwise heaviness can become real heavy.
Fingers? Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m not that cool, maybe I’m a bit anal, uptight, not funny. Maybe I need help. I do understand the idea of taking photos of similar things, I have watched a lot of Richard Prince for example, I do understand repetition, end even difference, the idea of a collection. I understand the unity of a place like le Louvre, its symbolic. I understand the formal variety of representations, the strength of the gesture.
Well, I admit I have to google-ize transcendental indexation because I do now know what it means. And oups… I end up with Benoît Maire… that doesn’t help too much, does it? Then I find myself on a video game blog where I’m explained that indexation belongs to order theory.
The first order that one typically meets in primary school mathematical education is the order ≤ of natural numbers, where you have:
a ≤ a (reflexivity)
if a ≤ b and b ≤ a then a = b (antisymetry)
if a ≤ b and b ≤ c then a ≤ c (transitivity).
I don’t see no fingers nowhere. Do you?
As for the transcendental bit, I’ve never liked it too much. It means « what is beyond, what goes further, surpasses, is from another kind of order». I don’t know why, I hear something like « shut up, you can’t understand » in transcendental… Must be an old women thing. I also find it to be slightly cheesy… Do you want some Transcendental or some Emmental? I can also sound a bit like dentistry….
Anyway, you got the point: I don’t like it.

To say the truth, I find Benoît Maire very delicate. Delicate in the sense of cute. Nice. Yes, it’s nice like a shop window, and I swear, I’m not cynical I like shop windows, but not quite the way I like art though.
It’s him - himself- like Cameroonian say in French who on the Kadist foundation website speaks “about display, even if this term is very 90’s… not so much a display as a platform to show things (…) like merchandising, but a display as a becoming mental space, or a mental space in construction. »
-Why don’t we launch a fashion collection called « the differend »? Like a little fucked up pair of jeans with a little Chanel top?
-You’re Islamophobic.
-What? 
What’s more, I really love furniture. different(d) table legs, I understand it a lot – I mean I like it a lot.  But going as far as talking about “The aesthetics of differends”, it’s a little bit- funny init?

Please tell me I’m making a mistake. I like being wrong, because I can then learn something, and I like the feeling of it - very much so. Tell me he’s cynical, that a table with different legs cannot really illustrate the idea of Lyotard’s differend.
I had the impression that we were all in it anyway. Don’t take it all for you boy, it belongs to everybody, let’s share the cake all right? Why would his work be more related to Lytard’s differend than Gelatin for example - who do make very beautiful pieces of furniture? Why more than William Pope L, Tracey Emin, Paul McCartney, Thelonius Monk and me. And think about what’s left out…. the heavy stuff, you know what I mean?
« The “differend”, a concept borrowed from Jean-François Lyotard and his eponymous book, provides a way of approaching two underlying paradigms in post-conceptual art: relativism and linguistic form. » (2)

I have the impression that something is going to be said, and I love that sensation, and I end up in old trendy design…old news really.  I like design for sure, but sometimes in art, well, you know…. I like design in design.
Maybe art critics are in it with him. It’s a hoax… with the idea to show that it’s not that difficult to depoliticize things, to trick the viewer. It’s like Che Guevara on napkins in loud bars in Bastille…
To block questions, to kill thinking, just rearrange the furniture. And quote… but hey not the Koran, all right?
Benoît Maire’s aesthetic of the differend is a goody-goody one.

I tend to think that’s its nearly the opposite of what I understood from Lyotard…. but hey… of course I can be wrong.
It flattens its dangers, erases the dirt and the shit of life - I know sometimes it’s nice to clean the shit away… and let’s not speak about the pain and the horror of the differend.
It’s clean, neat. Nothing harmful about it.
It’s resolved. Reassuring interior decoration. It’s well done, not risky… As I said before: it’s nice.
Don’t be afraid like the good old pope used to say.  Or maybe it’s just cynical, maybe I missed something somewhere, maybe it’s slightly pretentious, maybe it’s a kind of humour I don’ t get, maybe Lyotard is not a thinker but a tool box for institutional projects.
It’s like his concept has been given to a marketing team… So what do people want to see in terms of differend?
I went to see Claude Dalle the other day; it’s next to Che Guevara’s mega-club. It’s differend but not in the same way.(Claude Dalle web site)

Doctor, you know that I like chairs though. When I was a little girl I nearly got my first artistic emotion with Kosuth’s one.
But pouffes in art, I’m not sure…
The gallery speaks about tension between production and exhibition, answers full of humour and poetry. The artist «unfolds questions on functionality and the corroborating notion of uselessness». (3)
You see Doctor, at that point, a sort of emptiness grows in my brain. And my problem is I don’t know how to make the synapses work again, I mean from the hypothesis, the questions, or the images I’m given. It’s one of the symptoms: I’m supposed to start wondering about the usefulness of things and I feel daft. Not far from retarded to tell you the truth.
I like furniture. Well, you know about that already, don’t you?

One last one - since we’re into interior decoration. I like Isabelle Cornaro. I find her work nice to look at. Even if I feel slightly embarrassed by her sort of cut outs with hair… not because of the hair itself but the discourse going with it…
She also makes pictures with jewellery on wood. A lot of women have done it done it - it’s a classic, I mean in real life on your table. Does she say it’s ok to play with your necklaces, the ones from your grand mothers and make African landscapes?  
OK that’s not the point. But she share Bob Ricard first prize with Benoît Maire for the year of the table! I’m myself a big amateur of flee-markets, so objects on stands I do understand. Yes sir, I do. I also like her installations with rolled carpets and vases. I have to admit I’m also very fond of old fashion antique shop windows.
Maybe her work operates as a sort of « guilt remover ». Bourgeois is ok, right?
But I must be wrong because what Isabelle Cornaro does is “question conceptual art inheritance, back in today’s agenda through revisiting the fetishist relationship with the aesthetic object.” (4)
Oups, I really don’t have the same approach…
A Ricard? How much water? Questions like that are too much for me. Inheritances pffff… Lawyer’s stuff.

 

And yes, they are nice, yes…. young people are nice nowadays in art, very nice. an quoting can be nasty... ok... but it can be nice too, very nice...
Seriously: how do you want new ideas - subversive of course- what else- to emerge in these conditions in the Parisian art scene?

God it must be so boring to be an art critic!

 

 

(sorry about all my English mistakes.....)

Read previous newsletters on the fundacion de la rebelion website
This project is made possible by the Mairie du 18ième, Paris.
The mini opera "fuck me" and the installation "poor people perfumes" soon at the studio.

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