I get the intuitive feeling that there’s something going on in Delphine Coindet’s sculpture, even though, truth to tell, nothing much goes on in her sculpture; and it’s also true that these two statements are twin slopes of the same Ozone Peak. Tired (this moment of astonishment), when you come within a hairsbreadth of slightly intoxicating asphyxia, and when “formally” (as it’s said in the diplomated tongue that serves as the urban dweller’s vernacular) things continue to follow their course.
In a text that’s as exploratory as it is jubilatory (and so far unpublished; though not, I hope, for much longer), Elisabeth Wetterwald – it’s her again – puts forward the idea (all relations, however aesthetic, being undone) that the present age is opening itself up to a principle of vacancy (regarding which one quickly begins to wonder if it isn’t the only accessible and positively sought-after outlet for Pierre Huyghe’s “liberated times”). At this world-juncture, which in principle imposes no sense, the work might be seen as – in a charming expression that one could swear came from a song by Mylène Farmer (and don’t read any irony into it, any more than you would into a Delphinic utterance) – “a witness to nothing, an orphan of everything”. With the further addition: “No more in refusal than acceptance, because fundamentally heterological”.
Eccentric, then, though situated at the extreme centre – this void, with its accents of revenge into which is projected (as Michel Gauthier – it’s him again – says in his neighbouring text) an image of the “three-dimensionalisation of an abstraction”: “Coindet’s sculpture is an image that has fallen into the three dimensions of reality in an appearance that could well have been very different.”
And Gauthier is quite right, once again, when he talks about the “end of the indicial era” (whose boundaries were recently extended to embrace the now-familiar world of non-representation), and – observing the triumph of the computer-generated image and the propagation of morphing, ushered in by the technological Counter-Reformation – predicts the ghostly return of the icon, concluding: “Thus excised from the existent, representation obviously recognises affinities with abstraction.”
Yes, but there it is: the resemblance to nothing (when, filled with admiration, in the rediscovered euphoria of a simple conversation with my neighbour, I dare to suggest: “It looks like nothing”) has nothing to do with the icon, and when the time is right, taking one ghost with another, as a faithful disciple of Stirner (The Ego and Its Own) it prefers to invent itself, all on its own, out of elsewheres.
But enough of the scholarly readymade – which still chooses to burden itself with such referencing (anything but free), confronted with works by Coindet, Marcel, Mercier – let’s make way for the kind of emancipation that would give rise to the very non-use (and I insist on the term “non-use”) of a “coefficient of art”; the same one that Duchamp, in a 1957 text (The Creative Act), talked about with such distinction: “In other words, the personal ‘coefficient of art’ is like an arithmetical relationship between ‘that which is unexpressed, but was projected’ and ‘that which is expressed unintentionally’.”
So it’s time to make room for a “precondition” to withdrawal (preferring, now, the decisive choice of “Don’t do it!” to the sometimes convoluted justifications of a certain “Do it!” – and here I’m alluding to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s remarkable enterprise, regarding which one might wonder where/when its insatiable appetite for utopias ceases to be happily “irresponsible” and starts becoming dangerously “responsible”). Divergence before engagement, so to speak. But already the Parade Float of Delay is trundling forth: “Beauty emerges from this delay in becoming aware of the implacability of the game that has been set out. It is measured against the delay in understanding a setup one knows to be possible, though one has not seen its subtle movement.”
Thanks, then, are due to Marc Décimo, the author of the preceding lines (which are positively to be read, what’s more, in a total disconnection from their context of appearance), who, in a book that’s as absorbing as it is liberating, Marcel Duchamp mis à nu. A propos du processus créatif (from which the quotation’s drawn), very rightly replaces the question “What is it?” by a more fundamentally disturbing question: “But why?”
With Duchamp absent, Warholian Popism gone straight, and verticality buried (Fountain – with a capital “f” – and urinal, or again High and Low Culture), let’s bet on the “legitimacy” of art in a raw state, and the complexity of invention, for a new vision of new works of art; which Gauthier formulates in a slogan of subtly devastating language for these times of “overflowing intelligence” (in other words, a shift from intelligence to connivance with the enemy): “art, thanks to the computer (which is now the cardinal instrument of our reality) and the images it generates, has regained the desire, and the ability, to assert its difference from reality” (my emphasis) – a way of extending Philippe Parreno’s No More Reality that is unexpected, to say the least (and in which, and with which, precisely, we should invest and cooperate).
Furthermore, it is just because the effects of computing and planetary tourism, in their very massiveness and hyper-individualisation, are equivalent to smashed plates, or initial industrial waste products (to put it succinctly), that I would call for an artistic debate on what might be termed – in a primal concern with antagonism – the “horizontal situations” (in the sense of an ontological laying-out on the operating table just as much as an egalitarian revival) of a Nouvel Art Brut, namely an art in which a creative claim would necessarily be expressed by a social renegotiation.
And here I’m awkwardly wagering that the insight which impels me to “see” the work of Delphine Coindet (among other artists, as part of a plethoric galaxy) has a great deal to do with that which at present animates me personally, and profoundly.
Xavier Douroux
(quickly said, hastily done, on a certain 26th of 2006)
Catalogue Delphine Coïndet, 2006.
Les Presses du Réel – Collection la Salle de Bains
