WRAPPED IN SKY SKIN
Vital Experience
We have long reckoned that lived experience must respectfully bow to the tutelary figures of knowledge and morality. We have also long pretended to believe that the cracks in morality's wall do not affect the mighty edifice of knowledge, and vice versa. We duly saw things experienced and lived slowly dissolving, shedding the factor of vitality contained therein, and this, needless to say, was all in the name of the alleged almighty objectivity of facts. Our gestures quite simply became facts, and the authors of gestures which could not become facts were either irresponsible or guilty.
Robert Musil was probably one of the rare figures, at least in the first half of the 20th century, along with Hermann Broch, to have shown up the absurdity and, above all, the danger of this division, which is as vague as it is vain. For example, by taking the individual as a being who can be defined by his/her albeit complex psychology was an attempt to fit his/her doings into pre-established schedules. It goes without saying that considerable chunks of our patterns of behaviour seem capable of responding to these orders, and capable of finding their place within these patterns held out to them by rationality, like so many decoys or easily wearable masks. But these schedules simply leave aside the nevertheless more essential issues that were then described, for want of anything more precise or better, as hailing from the soul. These issues, which psychology saw fit not to address, form the arena of vital experiences. Musil called this realm the realm of "soul themes" (1), and it just so happens that it has to do with everything which science seems bound to exclude. It is the realm of "the individual's reactions to the world and to other people, the realm of values and evaluations, ethical and aesthetic relations, the realm of the idea"(2).
Over these past few decades, the major change occurring in the realm of individual life is the fact that the pseudo-rationality associated with the law of commodities has imposed its order on all gestures of existence. Everyone is either bound to obey the injunctions of a morality which is shown across the board to be no longer the expression of a shared or divided reality, but used, to the contrary, to veil innumerable acts of violence, or they are bound to try to recognize themselves in the image transmitted to them by the snapshots which haunt the world. Any person trying to elude this twofold trap ends up being at once the trustee of vital issues and also forced to invent new patterns of behaviour, whereby it is possible to cope with this situation of dispossession.
A vital experience is an aesthetic experience, in the sense that it involves having managed to develop a stout taste for certain things in life.
In the speech given by Joseph Brodsky when he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1987, the Russian poet observed that "any new aesthetic reality helps man to specify his own ethical reality .../... an aesthetic choice is invariably individual, aesthetic suffering is invariably personal suffering. Any new aesthetic reality turns the person it has affected into an even more private person, and this private character, which at times takes on the form of literary or other taste, may per se, be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection against enslavement"(3). So vital experiences are those which consider both that there is no need to respect the fictitious distance introduced between experience and object, between what is lived and what is thought, and between oneself and others, by means of the laws of pseudo-sciences which are at the beck and call of the mercantile order, and that, quite to the contrary, such distinctions should be done away with.
Spinning tops
In recent years, Basserode has worked a great deal on that odd object, the spinning top. He has made tops of different sizes and of very diverse materials, such as plaster, wood and metal. Words are usually written on these tops. Words not chosen at random, but words which conjure up the same object--time. So in different languages we can read the three words: present, past and future, on the broadest part of the top, appearing as an irrevocable shortcut, which we might call the essence of our conception of time, except for the fact that their presence on an object such as a spinning top shows that the deal has changed, and radically to boot. The at times muddled feeling that "time has become unhinged"(4) may often grip each one of us, but it is nevertheless harder to accept that we acknowledge that this kind of situation no longer defines, hallmark-like, a specific moment in history, but that it has in a way become the norm. What these spinning tops tell us is not only that time has changed--meaning at once our perception of time and time itself--but also how it has changed. Instead of indicating the order of succession and flow to which time is subject, and which it thereby subjects us to, the three temporal ecstasies, as they are sometimes called, are put on the same plane. Expressed more accurately, what the top indicates in relation to this symbolic transformation of the three temporal ecstasies is that their succession is no longer set in stone. The past no longer comes before the present, which itself no longer opens the way to the future; the past has lost its absolute value which is higher than the value of the other two, in so much as it defines them. The top even demonstrates that, henceforth, chance and haphazardness, or, if you prefer, games now depend on their succession, otherwise put, on the hand that makes it spin.
One of the temporal ecstasies in particular has, however, become the most essential. This is the present, but a present in so much as it is the time-frame within which the stop is activated, i.e. the time-frame of the three ecstasies simultaneously. This present state, which is the present state of games, thus no longer tallies with the present which is the present of history.
If we now imagine ourselves in the process of getting the top to spin, then looking at it once its rotating motion has ceased, we can see that one of the three names is more visible than the others, and thus defines the predominant name, for as long as the top is not spinning but at a standstill. But all this remains purely formal, because, with the top at a standstill, it is in fact a down time that is being indicated.
So, with irrevocable precision, these tops present us with the new situation of time, or, if you prefer, the new temporal deal within which humankind has nowadays embarked. Back in 1974, in his preface to the French edition of his novel, Crash, J.G.Ballard wrote: "The paramount "fact" of the 20th century is the emergence of the notion of boundless possibility. This predicate, which is scientific and technological alike, summons up the vision of a past that has been abruptly put on hold--the past is no longer relevant, it is quite possibly dead--and visions of countless alternatives offered to the present"(5). The new deal comes across loud and clear by way of this decoupling with regard to the past. This does not mean that the past has disappeared, or been erased, as a set of data; what it does mean is that in the information age, it is no longer connected to the present by virtue of the fact that it comes before it on the time line. So the very first consequence of the takeover of reality by science and technology is the loss of the past as a "cause" of the present, as well as a loss of the temporal order as a succession. If this is not taken into account, we are doomed to a line of thinking, and to artworks, which are strictly speaking insignificant.
So these spinning tops raise the issue not only of the break-up of temporal landmarks, but also of the way in which the present puts itself across. The point, here represented by the pointed tip on which the top spins, the point dances upon itself, inflating as a result of the motion of its rotation, to the point of "dictating all time-frames and all worlds"(6), which means breaking them up, or dissolving them, until the energy is dispersed, and a new gesture sets the top back in motion. We can thus understand that what matters most is this dispersal of energy, as if it represented the only satisfactory way of being in the world.
We now and henceforth find ourselves confronting two time-frames, the game-based present during which the top spins, and the present during which we are not playing and the top is at a standstill. Between the two there exists this field of infinite possibilities of combinations with regard to the order of the appearance of the conquering word, a possibility that is also confined within repetition, or repetitiousness--that endless comeback of sameness that the game alone can offer.
Here, then, the spinning top appears like a kind of metaphor, not only of games, but also of the technical devices and apparatus that govern our lives, in so much as in it, or on its skin, are
traced, memory-like, or engrammed, basic data which are randomly redistributed by a movement which both activates and processes these basic data. In this sense, these tops show us players what is what with regard to our new and general relationship with time. Time is no longer something that passes; rather, it is what enables us to play, i.e. to set in motion the haphazardness of endless possibilities, and thus extend towards the new dimension that is crucial for us--the future--but no longer like a promise on the horizon, rather as the boundary of an action.
These upheavals in the conditions of temporalization border both on individuation, "that is to say, on the process whereby we, as individuals or groups, become what we are.../... [and] on ourselves in so much as we remain ever upcoming, in so much as we still--and always--have a future, in so much as we are essentially in future mode, and in so much as we devote the entirety of our energy and our concern to trying to anticipate what we are becoming, and even what the world will become after us (usually in vain, but not without effect)"(7).
In a world such as this, time comes across for us like a game figure, if we understand by "game" the general control of patterns of behaviour and lines of thinking by an abstract system of codes of random development, but development involving an endless return of luck and chance, and development activated by devices. So time is no longer "the subjective condition in which all manner of intuition and hunch"; alternatively "the form of inner intuition can find a foothold within us"(8), but far more what allows this disjointedness and this difference or hiatus to exist--introduced, as they are, by the game--between our manner of being in the world and the feeling we have about our belonging to and membership in the world.
In order to lend a specific consistency to this new conception of time, Basserode has made other different tops on which, for example, are written apparently meaningless numbers, such as 0.00,007 and 0,0002, as well as 0.00,001 and 00(1),00.2.
These numbers do not tally with anything, either in reality or in the reality of mathematics. They are constructed in a random way, based on a break with the rules governing the way numbers are formed. The commas, brackets and dots are slipped in between the figures, giving rise to intervals and discrepancies which nevertheless call to mind, in a metaphorical way, the world of fractals, and seem to be expressing the existence of intermediary dimensions between 0 and 1. Based on "phoney" principles, these inscriptions are an attempt to bring a sort of non-time into being. The symbols represented by the numbers embody forms of irregularity and malfunctioning likely to cause uncontrolled reactions. This game-playing with the universal order in number-based writing is actually a poetic evocation of the possibilities to which access is banned by code-governed games, whatever they may be. So these spinning tops refer us to the imaginary processes of living creation, in so much as they refer signs, if
you will, to the creative power which brought them about.
Distortions
Basserode's recent works--photographs depicting trees--are, for their part, essentially the outcome of computer-generated calculations based on complex programmes helping to alter the shape of an object, to the point of producing a radical distortion which, nevertheless, does not affect its basic structure, because we can easily recognize that what we are looking at is trees, even if what we see does not resemble a tree any longer, The basic material in each instance consists of a photograph of a tree, but based on this image the machine-made calculations make it possible to create a new image which now only remotely resembles the first one. The real challenge of these works, and what is actually at stake in them, is not their similarity or dissimilarity with the original image, which is the real challenge of these works, here. The challenge lies at another level.
These images present us with the world as we do not see it, or, if you will, as we should see it if we were simultaneously to perceive reality and the distortion affecting it. The fact is, quite simply, that this distortion, which is the outcome of the work of technical devices, is usually done away with by these selfsame devices in the presentation of the findings of their calculations to our manner of perception. These calculations must tally with the schemes inherited from the Renaissance, which actually stem from a perceptual habit supposed to comply with the laws of perspective.
So what we see in the images proposed by Basserode is precisely what a programme subjects the reality it grasps to, but without this programme being pitched in such a way that the results it proposes correspond to the usual norms of our perception.
Actually, all representation is a symbolic transcoding operation. The code that permitted the introduction of perspective has become so "natural" for us that we no longer perceive it as such, just like, incidentally, the programmes running devices contributing to the making of photographic images occupying our space for several decades in an ever more insistent way.
It is in the approach to landscape that the shift in our perception is most noticeable. This shift is made possible by the replacement of machines by devices.
"Devices were invented to simulate specific thought processes. It is only today (after the invention of computers) and, as it were, after the fact, that we are beginning to realize what type of thought processes are being simulated by devices. What is involved is thinking that is expressed in numbers. All devices (not just computers) are calculators, and, in this sense, they are examples of "artificial intelligence"--the camera too, even if its inventors did not realize as much. In all devices (and early on in the camera), thinking by numbers got the upper hand over linear, historical thinking .../... The camera (like all the devices coming in its wake) is calculating thinking that has ended up as hardware. Whence the quantum (calculative) structure of all the movements and all the functions peculiar to devices"(9).
The photographs of trees taken by Basserode are accordingly situated at the place where three questions intersect--the question of perception by way of the most pivotal example in art history, the landscape; the question of the function of devices as decisive factors in the ways we think; and lastly the question of the relationship between number and game.
These images show us trees, which we recognize without any difficulty, but these trees are as if worked by strange forces which twist and break them, but without totally affecting their structure, nonetheless. The images which haunt our daily lives like ghosts without masters actually pull us into a neverending game where recognition takes precedence over cognition, and resemblance over information. In most instances, these images serve to bolster us in our belief in their magic power, which, incidentally, is not so much their own power as the power of the programmes making them possible.
The images offered to us by Basserode show us both the illusion in which the pseudo-magic of resemblance holds us, and the forces at work in the programmes creating the images; but, above all, they project us into another space. This space is different in that it presents us with another image of the world, that is to say, with what we might be able to perceive if we agreed to look at the world with the "eyes" that the devices offer us, without making them transcribe the findings of their calculations for one second into a code that is already known and adapted to our perceptive habits.
Such a space is symbolic in so much as it comes across through images which are themselves the result of a new translation of reality through programmes whose quantum and larksome dimension is not hidden. Game and number are thus assumed and displayed here as such. It just so happens that this transforms the image to the point of making it no longer resemble reality turned image, but other images of an inaccessible reality, which are not produced to take part in the social interplay of never-ending resemblance, but to open up perception to new landscapes--those of the cosmos.
By taking on the essential dimension of game and chance, the quantum dimension that lies at the heart of any programme, these images come to us less by way of their aesthetic aspect than by way of their informative aspect. Information is in effect presented by way of the aesthetic aspect, if what we mean by aesthetic aspect, in relation to these images, is the consideration of the fact that they do not correspond to the criteria of perception, as calculated in accordance with the supposed norms of perspective. Information--that "unlikely combination of elements", as Flusser defines it (10)--no longer has to do with a hidden dimension of the visible, but with the presentation of what is known through the prism of a programme adapted to the presentation of unknown aspects of the world. It is as if these trees were being seen not from Sirius, but rather as if each tree were Sirius, by which we mean a planet, a star, or, better still, a galaxy.
Void and Belly
Thought hurtles towards the unknown by following the chaotic paths traced by the interplay of metaphor through its leaps and recoils. This kind of forward-thrusting motion cannot exist without rebound effects. The transmitter, whereby signs are launched into space, sees signals coming back which must be deciphered. Except that decoding and encoding alike are at work in the devices, thus barring from the game the element which still believes in the future of prophecy--man. But it is impossible for man to renounce his beliefs every bit as much as his errors, and all the more so because a precise interpretation of his situation might afford him a glimpse of the absence of any exit in the labyrinth of his fears. These days, there is neither god nor man to show the way and follow it, but rather a sort of muddled vortex that is formed in that very moment when history submits and becomes distorted, coiling about itself like "a snake dancing/At the tip of a stick"(11).
It is probably important to express it differently. The world is not indecipherable, it has become unrepresentable, trapped as it is by writings which may attempt to explain the world, but seem, in that selfsame movement, to make it unrepresentable. It is in fact these writings that are unrepresentable. When it comes down to it, how is the theory of relativity, for example, to be represented through images? What is more, "since, in the final analysis, all concepts signify representations, the unrepresentable, scientific world is an "empty" world"(12).
This emptiness is not nothingness; rather, it tallies with a sort of crisis-of-thinking situation. It is the outcome of an impossibility which becomes a major factor at the moment when history turns in on itself, the fruit of an instant of human evolution. It is this void that is grasped by Basserode's work, it is this void that it faces up to, and this void that it confronts us with.
We could actually say about this kind of void that it is formed in the hollow of the fold of history-in-crisis. So, as the spinning tops already suggested to us, it is no longer from the linearity of time's passage that we must seek how to "enact" this situation, but rather through a kind of transhistorical exploration and interplay of associations between temporal layers without any apparent link. Only this kind of method can help us to understand this period which we might call post-history, following, in so doing, in the footsteps of Vilem Flusser.
What we mean by "void" here is something that approximates, as much as is conceivably possible, to a quantum approach to the void. "We can say about the void, in an emphatic way now, that it is the minimal state of being, the minimum energy state of the system of fields that forms the world .../... it is, as we have been endlessly hammering home, an ocean of virtual particles .../... Complete with its definition, the void has two virtues, relational and ontological (quantum and cosmological). The first makes it the admirable administrator of the microcosm, the second the enlarger of space..."(13). To this void, which beggars presentation, Basserode attempts to give not a form--which would be too contradictory--but rather the outline of an architecture; more accurately, he tries to show us that the unrepresentability of the scientific text can be overridden.
Basserode's latest work, titled Hubble, is a stylized whale's skeleton. The challenge did not consist in reproducing a skeleton down to its tiniest details, but rather in highlighting an unusual presence. The whale is several million years older than man, and a skeleton like this can be taken to be an ante-historical structure, a kind of abode that is unthinkable and yet fantasized over, as exemplified by the biblical tale of Jonas (and the whale), for example.
Basserode's idea is not to produce a running commentary about the whale, but to use a particular form in order to reveal the actual impact of a line of thinking both from the viewpoint of its formal extensions and from that of its meaningful extensions in relation to what we have called "vital experience".
The whale thus stylized is therefore, and above all, an architecture or, more precisely, a kind of shelter, or even a sort of matrix or womb, that is, a structure conjuring up the future--and future developments--rather than anything fixed and static.
In an old work by Basserode, a real wild boar's skeleton, in which a sort of record of its movements made during its life as a wild animal was presented by way of an articulated structure, the challenge was fairly and squarely to connect the bodily form of the animal with its actual life. Basserode established a link between death and life, which tried to propose a forward-looking synthesis of the animal way of life.
With Hubble, what Basserode shows us stems from a quantum approach to the universe and life. The boar's skeleton was actually a genuine skeleton. The whale's skeleton is a stylized one, made of wood, but it is part and parcel of real space, like a metaphor of evolution, in its most hidden aspects. With this whale, Basserode does indeed invite us to look at what goes on in a belly, but in a belly which, before our very eyes, produces not lots of small whales, but new types of forms corresponding to virtual arrangements and designs. The challenge of this work is to try and get us to understand these new arrangements and designs over and above the forms which present them here.
Man as Jonas
Man is in a way absent or, more accurately, excluded from this kind of approach to the world, in the sense that, in a quantum vision of the world, he can no longer claim to occupy the central part of the edifice through which, hitherto, he has tried to get the world to hold up. He is no longer at the hub of the edifice of representation, nor, for that matter, is he the subject of any representation; rather, he is that being who, in order to carry on existing in a world which is showing itself to be quite simply indifferent to his existence, must transform the vision he has of the world, to the point of trying to imagine and picture it with the eyes of the cell or the super nova. What is more, it is not the world that we should be talking about, but the universe, or rather universes, plural. As far as this indifference is concerned, it is the indifference that governs the manner of existence of the various devices which man has nevertheless invented. There is no need to see anything dramatic here. We may recall the announcement of the death of man after that of the death of god. This death meant the loss of their respective prerogatives in the arena of thought, and thus the need to invent new ways of thinking, but in no event the end of thinking.
In its contemporary practices, art does not sidestep this kind of questioning. It may either be situated in the field of reflection, in the sense of mirrors, and refer its fears and fantasies and even its questions to a sick society, or it may be situated in the field of invention, and no longer propose new objects to this selfsame society, but new ways of seeing things, and above all new paradigms.
So it is by taking into account this twofold death of man and god, as conveyed by the acknowledgement of this indifference shown by the world for man, that it is possible to invent a new way of looking--a new eye. This kind of position, however, is not easy to hold on to, for this indifference shown by the world for man is a source of fear, which, true, usually remains unspoken, but still affects man's thinking, for all that. Pascal, more than others, was keenly aware of this situation when he wrote in his Thoughts: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me"(14). He also questioned man's place in the world, as is clear from these few sentences: "What is a man in infinity? .../... I wish to make him see within it a new abyss. I wish to paint for him not only the visible universe, but the immensity that it is possible to conceive of nature within the bounds of this atom in miniature, that he might see therein an infinity of universes, each one with its own firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as the visible world .../...Those who regard themselves in this way will be terrified of themselves..."(15).
What Pascal was referring to here--actually with regard to the infinitely small--can be applied today just as much to the infinitely large. In any event, it is in this kind of prospect that Basserode's work is situated. It is probably this primordial fear which, by confining thought within the already familiar, contrasts, by its dinosaur-like inertia, with the invention of new ways of thinking.
Two writings instantly spring to mind when talking of whales: Herman Melville's Moby Dick and the biblical story of Jonas. With Basserode's sculpture installation Hubble, we may be well removed from the world of Moby Dick, yet we are on the contrary all the nearer to the story of Jonas. This latter tale is actually underpinned by a powerful question in which the two protagonists, God and man, seem to both withdraw from the scene and leave it in a way empty, thus foreshadowing man's situation some 2,500 years later. But this narrative takes place before silence sets in, when there is still encounter and confrontation. The first is the voice that orders Jonas to bear his word to Nineveh. Following his refusal to accept his role as a prophet, God duly addresses Jonas by way of signs. The storm ensues, then the fates and the whale. This latter moment is a fine example of an ambiguous relationship, since, this time, it is Jonas, the human voice, who addresses God, capable no longer of fleeing from Him or turning a blind eye to His power.
The text reads thus: "From the womb of death I called and you heard my voice"(16). So the belly here is the womb of death, but is not just the womb of death, if we may so put, and not the actual place of death. And it is through this darkness, this infiniteness that beggars presentation, and this invisible cosmos which encloses and protects, that the link is made with God.
By electing not to cover the whole of the whale's skeleton, thus hiding it, but rather leaving it empty and open, while covering up the various parts forming it with images of the cosmos, and traces of the Big Bang, this clothing, which, for us, swathes the darkness of the world, is not only formally chosen by Basserode--the formal choice to show the architectonic momentum of an ante-historical form--but also represents a choice stemming from vital experience, akin to Jonas's. It tells us that the essence lies in this strange element which at once separates and joins, protects and saves, and opens onto the unknown and the inner world.
"And God said to Noah: The error of all flesh is before mine eyes .../... Make thee an ark of gopher trees. Thou shalt make the ark of cells and thou shalt cover it with kapper, an insulating cladding, within and without"(17). By choosing to no longer give the kapper the single black colour of pitch, but the black and luminous hue of a supernova, Basserode tries to attract our attention to this complex phenomenon which links us to what, nowadays, in a certain way, has taken the place of God in our minds--the cosmos. The cosmos is no longer the sub-lunar world of Aristotle, nor is it even the sky filled with Copernicus' geometric and mechanical perfections, but rather something that we do not see with the naked eye, revealed to us merely by interstellar probes like Hubble, and the most powerful of telescopes. This world is fascinating because it is filled with what, for us, look like monsters. By this artistic gesture, Basserode manages to bring us close to this unknown, not to show us solely its magic through the power of the imageries, but rather to help us understand its function. The sky is our pitch, the sky is our kapper, it is the skin which wraps us and at the same time separates us from ourselves. It refers us to our humanness and separates us from our present, but connects us to the "non-time" which is the time of the universe when we imagine it based on human measurements; and from now on it separates us from what we used to call god the great absent one in that quantum sky, and brings us close to ourselves, or that part of ourselves which remains as unknown to us as Pascal's mite.
This whale's skeleton, whose bones are transformed into sky avenues, thus acts as a revealer. It is actually both ark and house, a house whose structure hails from a non-human time, with the pitch represented here by these images of the cosmos affixed to its bones. It is not directly a shelter, but rather a kind of model, or structure, or matrix which, in its complexity, represents the possibility of another world. Here we are broaching the point at which the womb of death can be turned into a womb of life.
The game of bowls in space
A womb of life is what this whale's skeleton is, even in so far as it concentrates within it the forward-looking duality which makes it possible to associate, unite, and even unify what we have been too artificially separating for far too long--dwelling and sky. It is indeed the pitch used here that is the unifying factor, if we agree to see in these images of the cosmos stuck to the actual architecture of the ark the binding agent which prevents any arbitrary distinction among them, by plunging the structure into the most elusive and absolute matter.
What we have to realize is actually that this whale is a metaphor of our situation in the world. An empty form, like the one we are, and this form is perhaps the incarnation of our open-minded thinking about the unknown, yet it is swathed in this pitch, this darkness, this infinity. So what Hubble is telling us is not only that thought is relation, but in a much more forthright way that this relation is established not with an unknown being steering us, but on the basis of the actual relation between the unknown and the knowable, as if toing and froing.
This is why we see round shapes filling this quantum void, shapes which are like globes and which may just as well represent a planet, or a fragment of the cosmos, as an atom. On the artistic level, there is no distinction to be made between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The paradox raised by Pascal is in the process of being erased in favour of a conception whereby relation takes precedence over distinction. So these atoms are indeed to be understood as being representations, no matter how unrealistic this may be, of these virtual cells which occupy the quantum void. These balls, at times white, at others covered as well with cosmic images, form the bricks of future constructions. It is important here to take this to mean real constructions as well, constructions of the living as well as those which help us achieve the technology, as well as mental and intellectual constructions.
So what these globes conjure up is the vast game of bowls which represents what is alive--the quick--in which the random has the power of law, and where haphazard encounters may be far more constructed than any relation already set up, limited as it is both in what is expected of it and in its actual results. When we look at this whale, we are confronting that part of ourselves which we have too effectively learnt to neglect, in the name of order, productivity, respect for rules, and social conformity.
Art is that particular domain where such discrepancies of equilibrium can and should be implemented. It is possible to call them metaphorical and use this word with a pejorative and disdainful connotation. The fact still remains that the metaphor is the only way men have of venturing into space and unknown territory--a solution involving words and forms alike. This unknown remains the unknown of the dark grotto which shelters and frightens them. In earlier times it was the hole leading towards the earth's bowels. Nowadays it is this immense vault now peopled with those pitiless monsters that used to be called sky, and which we call cosmos.
So this work by Basserode is indeed a spaceship, metaphorically speaking. As the outcome of technology and biological matrix, the mixture which it incarnates is our future--the future, in any event, of humankind. With Hubble, Basserode invites us not to turn our backs on this power of metaphor, this momentum of invention, and this function of art which is the invention of forms; otherwise put, he invites us to make visible what hitherto remained unseen, and unperceived. He quite literally sends us packing, which means that he pushes us to project ourselves into the unthinkable, that arena to which pure thought is harnessed. He also opens up for us the gateway to the boundless future, the future without which life could never have been invented, the future which we have probably forgotten too much about, and whose existence, thanks to such works, we can no longer pretend to ignore--a void filled with virtual ghosts which are like the forthcoming forms of our most insistent dreams.
Jean Louis Poitevin
20 June 2005
Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods
Back to artist's statement
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Notes:
1- Robert MUSIL, Essais, Ed du Seuil, Paris 1978, p. 83.
2- Idem.
3- Joseph Brodsky, Discours Nobel 1987, in Loin de Byzance, Ed. Fayard, Paris 1988, p.435.
4- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, XXX
5- J.G. Ballard, Crash, Préface à l’édition française, ed. Denoël, Paris 2005, p.8.
6- Charles Baudelaire, Bénédiction, in Les Fleurs du Mal, Col. Poésie, Ed Gallimard, P.
7- Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher par accident, Ed. Galilée, Paris 2004, p. 73.
8- Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la raison pure, Ed PUF, Paris 1971, p.63.
9- Vilém Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie, Ed Circé, Belval, 1996, p. 33.
10- Op. cit., p 87.
11- Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Coll. Poésies, Ed Gallimard, Paris 1972, p.58.
12- Vilém Flusser, op.cit, p.13.
13- Michel Cassé, Du vide et de la création, Ed Odile Jacob, Paris 2001, p168/169
14- Pascal, Pensées, Œuvres complètes, col. L’intégrale, Ed du Seuil, Paris 1963,p. 528.
15- Op. cit., p.526.
16- Henri Meschonnic, in Jona et le signifiant errant, Jona, traduction du texte biblique, Coll. Le chemin, ed Gallimard, Paris 1981, p16.
17- La Bible, Genèse, 6-13-14, in Jonas traduction et notes de Jérôme Lindon, Ed de Minuit, Paris, 1955, p. 23.
18- Op. cit., p.61.
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